Doctor Web posted details on Wednesday that said 550,000 computers with Mac OSX have picked up the virus. An analyst at Doctor Web later sent a tweet noting that over 600,000 Mac computers have actually been infected and some — about 274 — are actually based in the same city as Apple’s headquarters, Cupertino,CA. About 57% of the infected Macs are said to be in the U.S.and 20% are based in Canada.

The Flashback virus is said to be able to do serious damage to the Mac operating system. Once installed, it can find personal information, such as usernames and passwords, that are stored on your computer.

Flashback was originally discovered in September 2011 and was designed to disguise itself as an Adobe Flash Player installer, using Flash player logos. After installing Flashback, the malware seeks out user names and passwords that are stored on your Mac.

There are no visible symptoms for this Mac virus, except for making sporadic connections to C and C servers that can be only seen in the Firewall logs or via network sniffer’s.

Mac users are advised to strictly follow Apple’s security updates. Don’t neglect them.

To protect your computer from contracting the virus now, download Apple’s latest software update. Click the Apple logo located in the top-left section of the desktop and select “Software Update”. Install all of the available updates as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, the number of infected computers is still increasing.

Apple has advised Mac users to install anti-virus software, even though many think it’s unnecessary to do so for Apple computers.

Apple has tried to position OS X as a more secure alternative to other computer makers. It just was just not worth the effort to write virus code that had such a small target machine to infect. As Mac’s popularity increases and numbers in the market place continue to grow it will catch the attention of virus authors and hackers as a decent audience to target.

Seagate has become the first hard drive maker to achieve a milestone storage density of 1 terabit (1 trillion bits)(1 thousand gigabytes) per square inch.

Seagate has produced a demonstration of the technology that promises to double the storage capacity of today’s hard drives upon its introduction later this decade and give rise to 3.5-inch hard drives with an extraordinary capacity of up to 60 terabytes over the 10 years that follow. The bits within a square inch of disk space, at the new milestone, far outnumber stars in the Milky Way, which astronomers put between 200 billion and 400 billion.

Seagate reached the landmark data density with heat-assisted magnetic recording(HAMR), the next- generation recording technology. The current hard drive technology, perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), is used to record the spectrum of digitized data—from music, photos, and video stored on home desktop and laptop PCs, to business information housed in sprawling data centers—on the spinning platters inside every hard drive.

PMR technology was introduced in 2006 to replace longitudinal recording, a method in place since the advent of hard drives for computer storage in 1956, and is expected to reach its capacity limit near 1 terabit per square inch in the next few years.

“The growth of social media, search engines, cloud computing, rich media and other data-hungry applications continues to stoke demand for ever greater storage capacity,” said Mark Re, SVP of Heads and Media Research and Development at Seagate. “Hard drive innovations like HAMR will be a key enabler of the development of even more data-intense applications in the future, extending the ways businesses and consumers worldwide use, manage and store digital content.”

Hard drive manufacturers increase areal density and capacity by shrinking a platter’s data bits to pack more within each square inch of disk space. They also tighten the data tracks, the concentric circles on the disk’s surface that anchor the bits. The key to areal-density gains is to do both without disruptions to the bits’ magnetization, a phenomenon that can garble data. Using HAMR technology, Seagate has achieved a linear bit density of about 2 million bits per inch, once thought impossible, resulting in a data density of just over 1 trillion bits, or 1 terabit per-square-inch. That’s 55 percent higher than today’s areal-density ceiling of 620 gigabits per square inch.

The maximum capacity of today’s 3.5-inch hard drives is 3 terabytes (TB), at about 620 gigabits per square inch, while 2.5-inch drives top out at 750GB, or roughly 500 gigabits per square inch. The first generation of HAMR drives, at just over 1 terabit per square inch, will likely more than double these capacities—up to 6TB for 3.5-inch drives and 2TB for 2.5-inch models. The technology offers a scale of capacity growth never before possible, with a theoretical areal-density limit ranging from 5-to-10 terabits per square inch—30TB-to-60TB for 3.5-inch drives and 10TB-to-20TB for 2.5-inch drives.

Seagate achieved the 1 terabit per-square-inch breakthroughs in materials science and near-field optics at its heads and media research and development centers in Bloomington, Minnesota, and Fremont, California.

Post by Michael Hall – Sr. Manager Corporate Communications at Seagate

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Many use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as electronic diaries of sorts, but they might want to think twice about what they post — colleges and the government are watching.

Some government job seekers and student-athletes have complained that the government agency or college in which they’re applying has asked for access to their Facebook pages among other social networking sites.

Last year, current employees and applicants to the Maryland Department of Corrections were asked to surrender their emails and passwords in order for employers to access their Facebook pages. This resulted in a complaint from corrections officer Robert Collins, who went to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU argued that this was an invasion of privacy. The Department of Corrections has since stopped this practice, but found a loophole — they just ask the applicant to log onto their Facebook accounts right in front of them, giving employers the freedom to browse photos, comments and Walls right in front of the applicant.

“My fellow officers and I should not have to allow the government to view our personal Facebook posts and those of our friends just to keep our jobs,” said Collins.

The Maryland Department of Corrections defended its practices by saying this type of screen was necessary in order to weed out the bad eggs. For instance, the agency reviewed 2,689 applicants for guard positions and ended up disregarding seven of them due to inappropriate Facebook pictures. According to the agency, the guard applicants were holding up gang symbols using their hands in the pictures.

The Maryland Department of Corrections isn’t the only establishment searching social networks for clues as to who they’re accepting. The University of North Carolina recently revised its handbook to make it so student-athletes must add a coach or administrator to their friends list on their social networks.

“Each team must identify with at least one coach or administrator who is responsible for having access to and regularly monitoring the content of team members’ social networking sites and postings,” said the handbook revision. “The athletics department also reserves the right to have other staff members monitor athletes’ posts.”

Bradley Shear, a lawyer from Washington D.C., said that these rules violate the First Amendment, and could also prove to be a liability for schools when watching students’ posts.

“I can’t believe some people think it’s OK to do this,” said Shear. “Maybe it’s OK if you live in a totalitarian regime, but we still have a Constitution to protect us. It’s not a far leap from reading people’s Facebook posts to reading their email…As a society, where are we going to draw the line? What if the University of Virginia had been monitoring accounts in the Yeardley Love case and missed signals that something was going to happen? What about the liability the school might have?”

Social networking site Facebook is notorious for compromising user privacy. For instance, Facebook made changes to its privacy settings back in 2009 without telling users, and also introduced invasive features like facial recognition for tagging photos. While Facebook has been working on increasing the transparency of its privacy controls and making them easier to use, ACLU is outraged that other entities are stepping in to strip that privacy away once again. In fact, ACLU argued that social media monitoring is against Facebook’s privacy policy, saying “You will not share your password…let anyone else access your account or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.”

“This is an invasion of privacy,” said Melissa Goemann, the Maryland ACLU legislative director. “People have so much personal information on their pages now. A person can treat it almost like a diary. And [interviewers and schools] are also invading other people’s privacy. They get access to that individual’s posts and all their friends. There is a lot of private information there.”

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Amidst the introduction of so many tablets recently, one thing has been clear: There's room for a viable competitor to Apple. Android tablets are still not crashing Apple's iPad party, as evidenced by Apple's runaway sales.

Samsung is one of the top sellers of Android tablets so far, yet even so, an executive at Mobile World Congress admitted the company hadn't been very successful. But where Android tablets have struggled to gain traction, Windows 8 tablets are generating a lot of interest among manufacturers, consumers, and business users alike.

The Wednesday release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview may serve to strengthen the case for Windows 8 tablets. But as with everything about the upcoming OS, the success of Windows 8 tablets is predicated on the idea that users buy-in to the dramatic Windows redesign.

Windows 8 Tablets: The Great Unifier?

Windows 8 tablets have the potential to provide a uniform experience across devices. It's for this reason that even mobile-centric manufacturers like ZTE are considering Windows tablets as potentially changing the balance of power in the tablet market.

Sinofsky shows off Windows 8.“I do believe a similar thing will happen in tablet world as in smartphone world," says Notes Lixin Cheng, CEO of ZTE USA. "I think iPad's dominance will gradually decrease, and other OS tablets will grow.” Windows 8, he adds, “has high expectations for those looking for a unified experience across PC, tablet, and smartphone.”

As Microsoft demonstrated in Barcelona at its Consumer Preview launch event, Windows 8 works seamlessly across laptops, desktops, and both x86 and ARM-based tablets. Microsoft even started the event by showing how Windows 8 was optimized for finger-friendly navigation on a tablet--punctuating the company's commitment to mobile.

While theres no official word on Microsoft syncing up its current Windows Phone 7 platform to Windows 8, rumors already abound. Logic dictates that Windows Phone 8 will further extend the Windows 8 experience to your handset.

The idea that your tablet could fundamentally look and function the same way as your laptop or desktop is very appealing; even better is the prospect that you could buy software that scales across all platforms, meaning you're not locked into one device for using the software you want, however you want to use it.

The potential for all of this synergy is tremendous, albeit qualified by a fair number of variables: If Microsoft gets critical mass on app development; if Microsoft provides the tools for businesses to perform necessary tasks and device management; if Windows tablets can compete head-on with Apple's iPad behemoth in price. All of these "ifs" are unknowns until closer to the Windows 8 launch--and even that remains unknown. Educated yet unconfirmed guesses peg Windows 8 as launching in time for the 2012 holiday season.

What is confirmed: the smooth transitions between devices—at least as demoed by Microsoft--and the potential for interoperability among devices. This pipe-dream appeal keeps Windows 8 tablets on our radar.

The Wild Card: Windows on ARM

One of the hot subjects for Windows 8 is how it will work on ARM processors. ARM processors--already used in Android tablets and phones--are expected to have better power efficiencies than Intel's own platform for running Windows 8. The cost of an ARM processor may be lower, too.

Michael Angiulo, corporate vice president of Windows Planning, joined Microsoft's president of Windows Steven Sinofsky on-stage to demonstrate how Windows 8 worked on an Nvidia Tegra 3 tablet. We first saw the Tegra 3 tablet during Nvidia's press conference at CES 2012, but this time, we got a little more context about how Windows 8 will work. In Barcelona, Angiulo showed off a more comparative perspective on how Windows 8 works on a tablet running an ARM system-on-chip (SOC) processor. We saw Office apps working on Metro; only apps created for Metro will work on ARM chips.

The catch about Windows on ARM? You won't be able to run x86-based apps, only the newer Windows Metro-style apps. Small businesses and corporate installations that have hundreds or thousands of x86 apps and browser plug-ins to support will be left in the dark. They will be relegated to looking at Intel- or AMD-based tablets, where the desktop mode will at least give you a chance to try and run the apps you need.

At its launch event, Microsoft this week showed Windows 8 tablet types running Nvidia's Tegra 3, Texas Instruments' OMAP, Qualcomm's Snapdragon, and Intel's Clover Trail. Tablets based on these chips will be able to use the connected standby power management features of Windows 8.

“The reason they can do this is they have the same code," noted Sinofsky. "We wanted to use the same kernel and same OS software across all of the ARM platforms.”

And by having power management, these tablets will be better able to stand up to the all-day computing demands of mobile users.

Qualcomm and Nvidia are each working with Microsoft to help to seed developers with Windows 8 tablet units, so the software-creation process can continue in parallel with the final preparations for the OS.

In the meantime, for now we're left salivating for more details. While Windows 8 tablets have the potential to make a big impact, they're not here yet. Nor have we heard anything about how Microsoft's Windows 8 strategy will fit in with Windows Phone and Xbox.

It's logical to take the macro view that Microsoft would extend Windows 8 to its other platforms in a grand unification of interface as well as of media and app stores, but that's not something Microsoft is talking about. If this were to happen, though, users could be the big beneficiaries of a well-implemented strategy, and Microsoft could rapidly gain ground in both the phone and tablet markets.

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Tablet computing has really exploded in the last couple years and show no indication of stopping. Join us as we unbox one of Samsung’s tablet offerings. We share our thoughts and impressions, both good and bad. If you been considering adding a tablet to your technology line up, watch and learn.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Because Outlook uses a single, very large data file for the vast majority of your content, archiving can be an indispensable way improving stability and performance of your Outlook experience. If you are a heavy Outlook user this tutorial can save you the agony of a corrupted Outlook database and make Outlook run “like new” again.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Because Outlook uses a single, very large data file for the vast majority of your content, archiving can be an indispensable way improving stability and performance of your Outlook experience. If you are a heavy Outlook user this tutorial can save you the agony of a corrupted Outlook database and make Outlook run “like new” again.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Energy saving features like Auto-Away™ andEnergy History will become available as Nest learns.

Auto-Away turns heating and cooling down automatically when no one is home, saving energy when you don’t need it. Energy History shows you how much energy you’ve used daily.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Microsoft Office Suite app for iPad has been completed by a design team and will soon be sent to Apple for approval.

The Microsoft Office Suite app will feature Word, PowerPoint and Excel, where files can be “created and edited locally and online.”

 A prototype of the software showed that the interface resembles both the OneNote app and a bit of Metro, which is the new design for Windows Phone and the upcoming Windows 8 operating system.

There currently is no Microsoft Office Suite app being created for Google’s Android mobile operating system, but Apple iOS owners can look forward to the app as soon as the coming weeks.

Apple fans also have other new releases to look forward to in 2012, such as the iPad 3′s debut during the first week of March, the launch of OS X Mountain Lion, and iTunes/App Storeredesigns.