Latest Posts from Download Squad

Recently, several thousand users began reporting a problem with their Hotmail inboxes. Messages -- and sometimes entire folders -- had vanished from their Inboxes. Microsoft managed to restore everything in five days, but what exactly went wrong? And what -- if anything -- were they doing to make sure something like this didn't happen again?

The Hotmail team has since posted an explanation. As part of their regular monitoring and maintenance, Hotmail runs certain automated test scripts -- one of which got a bit carried away. Normally the script manipulates a set of test accounts created by the Hotmail team. This time, however, it accidentally messed with the directory information of up to 17,000 users.

The blog post points out that no email messages or folders were ever actually deleted -- Hotmail simply couldn't associate those users with their inboxes. The problem was protracted because Hotmail's support ticketing system didn't place a high priority on initial reports since there were so few, and because this wasn't a previously-known problem.

To make sure this situation doesn't occur again, Microsoft has tweaked its scripts and the ticketing system. Now, when multiple users report data loss, their tickets will automatically be tagged as high priority and demand immediate attention. Microsoft has also pledged to update its feedback system in order to improve communication with users.

One of the most time consuming activities in graphic and Web design is the picking of fonts. It's basically a crap shoot: there's no way to see what text will look like until after you've selected a font -- and when you have a list of 200 fonts to get through, the process can be painstakingly tiresome. That's where Wordmark.it comes in; it's a Web app that scans your computer for installed fonts, and then shows you clearly what they look like.

It's delightfully simple: visit Wordmark.it, type your word or phrase into the text box at the top, and click "load fonts". Before you know it, a wall of beautiful fonts will appear, making the process of picking the right one so much easier. You can make the samples bigger or smaller, too, or even invert the text so that it's white-on-black.

Incidentally, if you use Word 2007 or 2010, the font selector actually applies the font to selected text as you scroll through the list. Photoshop, on the other hand, doesn't -- which is why tools like Wordmark.it exist!

With console-quality iPhone games coming at you left and right these days, it's easy to forget that games like Rolando were the stars of the show a couple of years ago. Now, in the same vein as Rolando, one of our favorite time wasters has made the jump to iOS -- introducing Ramps for iPhone.

The premise, like many other popular time waster-style iOS titles is simple: get the rolling smiley ball into the cup. As the name might suggest, you use ramps to guide the ball from the outlet at the top of the screen, past various crazy obstructions, into the cup at the bottom. The levels start off fairly easy, with obvious straightforward solutions. As you progress however, death traps come into play, obstacles block the easy path, and the cup becomes only just big enough to take the ball.

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Well that didn't take a long -- the Mac App Store DRM-system has been cracked literally hours into its fledgling release. It seems there are two weaknesses in the App Store anti-piracy system currently being exploited. One simply relies on sloppy coding by app developers that lets people literally copy the code signature and a few other files from a free app and paste it into a paid-for app to enable it to run. If developers had followed Apple's guidelines properly, a check would have been put in place that looks to see if the code signature ID matches that of the app's bundle ID, rather than simply looking to see if a signature is present.

The other DRM-stripping method on the horizon uses an application called 'Kickback,' which does for the Mac App Store what the Hackulous community did for the iOS App Store. Thankfully for developers the application is currently unavailable, with Dissident, a member of the Hackulous collective, stating that they'll hold off until "crap" appears in the Mac App Store.

It looks as if Apple may have a fight on its hands with piracy in the Mac App Store, but then Mac app piracy is nothing new. It's certain that developers will have to up their game and come into line with Apple's guidelines regarding anti-piracy measures at the very least.

[Download Squad condemns all forms of piracy, which in the long run, hurts both developers and consumers alike. -Ed]

Over the New Year celebrations, Japan broke a Twitter record just four seconds after midnight on the 1st of January 2011, with 6,939 tweets per second (TPS). That's more than double the previous record of 3,283TPS, also set by the Japanese nation in their defeat of Denmark in last year's World Cup. Japan a country of over 127 million people, the tenth largest population in the world, likes to share the love over the New Year with calls and messages to family and friends, often pushing their mobile networks to breaking point. It seems this year, Twitter took part of that strain.

Of course Japan wasn't the only country revealing in the New Year celebrations on Twitter. As the midnight hour passed in each timezone, Twitter saw a spike in tweets, with the East coast of the US alone accounting for more than 3,000TPS. Hit the break for Twitter's time-lapse video visualization of all the New Year tweeting action.

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On the upcoming Patch Tuesday, Microsoft will not be issuing a fix for a critical IE8 vulnerability discovered in December. If that wasn't bad enough, a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8 discovered by a Google security researcher will also go unaddressed.

The second bug was only discovered yesterday, so perhaps Microsoft simply hasn't had a chance to work out a fix yet -- but the first flaw has already been exploited, and seen in the wild! Microsoft even admits it has seen targeted attacks, yet no fix is forthcoming.

The Google security researcher, incidentally, is concerned that third parties in China might also know about his recently-discovered vulnerability. In a beautiful twist of irony, one of his fellow researchers uploaded some data that revealed the exploit -- and moments later, the GoogleBot indexed the data, allowing two IP addresses in China to simply search for it.

It's still not quite ready for beta testers to try out, but Real Networks was more than happy to give CES 2011 attendees a look at their upcoming Unifi service. Unifi will allow users to stream digital content stored on their desktop to computers to a variety of devices -- including your favorite smartphone. Unlike some desktop-to-mobile streaming apps, Unifi will also let you send content back to your desktop from your mobile devices -- as well as push content from your connected devices to the cloud. Unifi currently catalogs and shares music, playlists, photos, and videos -- though Real promises that support for documents and TV shows is coming later this year.

Unifi's "librarian" works with most popular desktop media apps, including iTunes. The Unifi app for Android has been available in the Market since December, but without access to the desktop software it won't do you any good just yet. An iOS app will also be available at launch, and Windows Phone 7 users should be able to get their hands on Unifi sometime in the second quarter of 2011. Pricing for the service hasn't been announced, but Real does say that Unifi will be a freemium product and that the basic paid plan will cost about the same as a couple fancy coffees per month.

You can toss your name into the beta tester hat over at findunifi.com, or take the jump to see Real Network's Unifi teaser video and a lengthy presentation from Dive Into Media from December 2010.

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If you've been waiting for an easier way to tether your webOS phone and share its mobile data connection, the webOS Internals team has some good news for you. FreeTether has gone into beta, and that's exactly what the app is designed to do.

Once installed, you simply fire up FreeTether, select which interface(s) you want to enable, and configure its options. After that, all you've got to worry about is keeping an eye on your data usage so you don't get dinged by your carrier.

PreCentral reports that the tethered connection feels a bit slow at this point, but this is just the first release. webOS Internals has developed plenty of other great apps for the platform, so expect to see FreeTether improve dramatically in coming updates.

FreeTether is homebrew, so you'll need to make yourself familiar with how to install non-Catalog apps on your device via PreWare. It's a simple process, and there's no risk of bricking your phone -- so head on over to PreCentral for step-by-step instructions. You'll also need to add the testing feed to PreWare.

Google has just snuck a rather slick feature into Docs which you might not have noticed. You could already play audio files you had uploaded to your Google Docs storage, but now you can play video files as well. Google's player supports a number of different formats, including its own WebM/VP8, MPEG4, 3GP, MOV, AVI, MPEG, FLV (Flash video), and WMV (Windows Media). The heavy lifting is performed by YouTube's video player, and it supports files up to 1GB in size.

Extra Docs storage is dirt cheap, so this could be a terrific way to enjoy your favorite videos (and music) from a private stash in the cloud. It also wouldn't be a surprise to see Google integrate some fancy playback options into Android and Chrome OS. All we need now is a good desktop-to-docs sync program from Mountain View...

After a lengthy stay in Skype's beta sandbox, group video calling has finally been given the green light. The new stable Windows version now includes this feature as part of Skype's $8.99/mo premium offering. You can also get a group video calling day pass for $4.99.

The official Skype blog post also mentions that the new build includes several improvements to video stability and quality. In short, if you're using Skype to make video calls on Windows -- and you probably are -- there's every reason to download and install the new version.

Download Skype 5.1.0.104 for Windows [Filehippo]