virtualization

Security researchers have discovered a single piece of malware that is capable of spreading to four different platform environments, including Windows, Mac OSX, VMware virtual machines, and Windows Mobile devices.

First uncovered last month by security company Integro, Crisis was originally described as a Mac Trojan capable of intercepting e-mails and instant messages and tracking Web sites visited. Additional scrutiny by Symantec has found that the malware targets both OSX and Windows users with executable files for both operating systems.

Crisis is distributed using social engineering techniques designed to trick users into installing a JAR, or Java archive, file masquerading … Read more

If you've been following the Curiosity rover's progress even a little, you've probably seen the cool 360-degree Mars panorama that hit the Web a couple days ago.

As CNET's Amanda Kooser pointed out, it's "about as close as you'll get to being there."

Now you can get even closer, virtually speaking. It turns out that the panorama works with gyroscopes, meaning that if you view it on your iPhone or iPad, you'll get a much more interactive experience.

Stop listening to me describe it and go do it:

Yesterday was your last chance to get in on the Kickstarter fundraising for Boxer8's Ouya. After 30 days and more than 63,000 backers, the Android-powered home gaming console pulled in a total of $8,596,475 ($99 of those from your correspondent).

As my colleague Michelle Starr reports from Australia, you can now visit the Ouya Web site to place a preorder for the console. The price is now $109, and it's due to ship in March 2013.

Regardless of your thoughts on Ouya's merits, the little console that seems like it maybe could has captured … Read more

Imagine being able to navigate our own biological tissue much in the way Google Earth allows us to zoom in on our own backyards. Only instead of mailboxes and fences, you could spot, say, rogue cancer cells.

Researchers out of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands may be making such a future possible by stitching together molecular- and cellular-level images of biological tissues into truly gigantic composite images.

One such landscape -- of a zebrafish embryo -- consists of 26,000 images, is 281 gigapixels, and boasts a resolution of 16 million pixels per inch.

The researchers explain their … Read more

You'd think this were the turn of the 1990s. The "Total Recall" remake just opened today in theaters, and a virtual-reality headset ended up being up the hottest thing in the gaming world this week.

The Oculus Rift works like a conventional head-mounted display, but packs a few features that make it ideal for gaming. For example, the Rift offers impressive head-tracking capabilities; stereoscopic 3D rendering; a wide field of view (110 degrees -- most headsets only offer around 40 degrees); and several inputs (DVI/HDMI and USB). When wearing the Oculus, each eye gets close and personal with a 640x800 LCD screen for a total resolution of 1,280x800 (720p). … Read more

Apple's Siri has been known to get some queries wrong. But it might have flubbed an advertising opportunity as well.

In a July issue of The Economist, Apple reportedly took out an ad for Siri. In it, users are shown a forest behind a hand holding the iPhone, and a question at the top, saying, "What does poison oak look like?" On the iPhone, Siri provides an answer, but appears to display poison ivy and not poison oak.

According to the Associated Press, which was first to report on the news, Lena Struwe, an associate professor of … Read more

Infiltrating the Borg or having dinner with Deanna Troi are just a few of things that could soon become a (virtual) reality with some help from a team based at the University of Southern California.

Project Holodeck is exactly what it sounds like -- a very serious effort to make the iconic virtual-reality room from "Star Trek" an actual reality.… Read more

It's no secret we're big fans of backups. Frequent and thorough, data and system, partial and full; we just can't get enough of them (is that possible?) but our enthusiasm is based on hard-won experience. NCH's FileFort Backup Software is a free backup utility that creates full and incremental backups. It doesn't create a system image, so it's not a substitute for a full backup solution that can completely restore your system to a new disk, if necessary. It protects your critical data from damage or loss on a regularly scheduled basis, quickly and … Read more

More than a year after leaving Apple to pursue scientific endeavors, Apple's former Mac software chief Bertrand Serlet has joined the board of software company Parallels.

Parallels is perhaps best known among Mac users for its Desktop virtualization software, which lets Mac users run Microsoft's Windows operating system, and thus Windows applications without rebooting (like Apple's own Boot Camp solution requires).

"Bertrand is the rare combination of a software visionary and master of execution," Birger Steen, Parallels' chief executive said in a statement. "We're thrilled to be bringing his world-class experience and expertise … Read more