A new spam campaign is using PDFs to spread a vicious virus. The virus, called Sality, has been around since 2003 but this is a new, highly complex and highly dangerous variant. The spam tries to trick the recipient into opening a PDF attachment claiming to be a copy of a friend’s phone bill. If more »

So if you have purchased a good PDF reader for your iPad, or if your a developer who has been profiting on PDF reading apps, your out of luck. Today, at WWDC 2010, Mr. Steve Jobs announced that iBooks will begin to support PDF files as well as ePub. Now, if your someone like me more »

Danish security researchers have discovered that Adobe is offering a badly outdated and bug ridden version of their popular Reader software on their website. The version, Reader 9.1, was released in early March and has 14 security vulnerabilities that have been patched in two subsequent versions. By offering the outdated version to users who visit more »

The big hang up on the new Amazon Kindle DX is the incredibly high price ($489). The large e-ink display certainly is easy on the eyes, but hard on the wallet. Some people even speculate that the DX was introduced, in part, to make the Kindle 2 seem less pricey.

Here’s the real killer application for the large screen DX — make it a virtual printer available on your network. Imagine a printer that never runs out of ink or paper. Never. Think about why you print things. You want a portable and easy to read version of whatever you were looking at on your screen.

Microsoft has released its second service pack today for Office 2007. The service pack will provide a slew of minor updates that will improve functionality for the Office program. Most of the new features will allow for performance enhancements as well as support for more file formats. You can download the service pack through the more »

Raise your hand if you remember the Spore SecuROM fiasco. The community backlash, and the resulting huge amount of pirated copies of the game that became available. You’d think that somebody would try to create a form of copy protection that both copyright holders and consumers can be okay with. Apparently the people at CD Digital Card didn’t get that message.

CD Digital Card is trying to bring 2 Geeks In A Lab’s Global Garde copy protection to mass market. Apparently the code is small (only about 250 to 500 KB), takes only five minutes to install, and is supposed to be invisible to consumers. According to the press release it’s currently hailed as “the holy grail of anti-piracy and copy protection.” In other words: the bane of those who simply want to access the content that they paid for, or those who want to pirate it.

Google has announced a new technology that allows its popular search engine to index scanned documents. It uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert a document saved as a PDF from an image to words. Previously the images of text were quite difficult to find via a search because the engine saw the document as an image and couldn’t recognize it properly.

“In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn’t be sure of their content,” Evin Levey, a Google product manager, said in a Google blog post. “We had occasional clues from references to the document– so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes,” Levey added. “We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe’s PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found. This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making the entire world’s information accessible and useful.”

Continued after the break.

When Google started its Google Book Search Service a few years ago, it annoyed a number of people. Those people included “the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and a handful of authors and publishers.” On Tuesday the groups involved reached an agreement, and have submitted it to the court.

The agreement would see Google paying $125 million, but allow them to add millions of books both in- and out-of-print. Of course, most people won’t be able to read entire copyrighted texts before actually buying them, but they will be able to see a few pages of the book. Plenty more information after the break.

Gadgetell Quick Review: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

What is it?

Lightroom 2 is a program for Windows and Mac OS X designed to help organize, streamline, and develop your photos. It costs $99 for the upgrade from Lightroom 1 or $299 for first time buyers.

Pros:

Easy to use thanks to clean and organized interface.Imports all of your files using your preexisting directory structure.Works with a wide variety of file formats.

Cons:

Does not allow pixel editing. Requires another program for that task.Initial use can be frustrating and can cause loss of work.

Does it hit the mark?

Yes. Lightroom 2 definitely lived up to all of my expectations. It’s easy to see that this program would be extremely popular with anyone working in the art or ad industry, or someone who does batch work with photos. The program allows for very controlled editing and is remarkably easy to use.

For the full review, click “More.”