Skype 1.4 Alpha for Linux has been released, with quality improvements:

• Audio quality improvements, on par with Windows 3.2 and Mac 2.6;
• More reliable code, thanks to a major rewrite building on Trolltech’s Qt 4.2;
• Better device detection;
• ALSA plugins support;
• UI improvements for file transfer and general layout.

Also there’re still some problems with this Alpha release:

• There are no contact list groups;
• You can’t create new accounts;
• There’s no alert message if your chat message is undelivered.

 So you can try it here, but if you to use Skype on Linux without any problems get the October 2006 gold build. (more…)

MySpace is acquiring Photobucket for $250 million in cash. TechCrunch is reporting that there is also an earn-out for up to an additional $50 million.

Photobucket has been looking for a buyer since March, when they hired Lehman Brothers to help sell the company. They were looking for $300 million or more, but may have had few bidders other than MySpace.

The companies have been in serious acquisition discussions for the last couple of weeks – A dispute that involved Photobucket videos being blocked on MySpace led to acquisition discussions, and the block was removed.

Photobucket generated $6.3 million in revenue last year and planned on hitting $25 million or more this year. They have 40 million registered users and add another 85,000 per day. (more…)

Yahoo Inc. is shutting down Yahoo Photos, its first-generation photo storage site, and asking users to move instead to Yahoo’s Web 2.0 photo sharing site, Flickr, a Yahoo official said on Thursday.

In June, tens of millions of registered users of Yahoo Photos will be notified of various options including upgrading to Yahoo’s Flickr service or various outside-photo storage sites, according to Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

Yahoo also will offer consumers the option of loading their photos on competing sites when users are notified next month.

These include PhotoBucket — the most popular online photo sharing service among users of social network sites like News Corp.’s MySpace — or more conventional photo printing and storage site such as Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly Inc. or Snapfish, he said. (more…)

Intelore, one of the key developers of password recovery solutions, launched OpenOffice Password Recovery 1.0.4 – a powerfull software tool designed to help absent-minded or careless PC users recover forgotten passwords for a suite of OpenOffice.org programs (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math etc.).OpenOffice Password Recovery 1.0.4 offers a suite of mechanisms and schemes to quickly and smoothly recover all types of passwords and discard formatting and editing restrictions (for example, locked cells protection and permissions).

OpenOffice Password Recovery features a variety of built-in attack profiles allowing you to efficiently recover passwords with a single key click. The sophisticated solution offers Unicode support and allows for recovery of multilanguage passwords(e.g. containing both Latin characters and hieroglyphs) regardless of their length or complexity.
By default, the recovery process is done in the background which enables the user to continue working with other programs. At the same time, OpenOffice Password Recovery allows the user to manually change the processing priority and make password recovery the foreground task.

OpenOffice Password Recovery can take into account the so-called “human factor” and recover a password containing typing errors! (more…)

Hackers have begun cashing in on the Virginia Tech university tragedy by spamming out malware-infected emails purporting to offer cameraphone footage of the attack which resulted in more than 30 deaths.

Email messages carry a photograph of gunman Cho Seung Hui and claim to link to a Brazilian movie website carrying footage of the campus shootings. But clicking on the link downloads a malicious screensaver file which installs a banking spyware Trojan. (more…)

Microsoft plans to offer a $3 stripped-down package of Windows, Office and other software to people in developing countries.

The Microsoft Unlimited Potential programme, due to be announced in Beijing today by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, is part of an ongoing global expansion by the software giant. Microsoft aims to double the number of PC users worldwide to two billion by 2015. (more…)

High-flying startup StumbleUpon has been rumored to be in acquisition discussions since at least last November. Recently we’ve heard that talks have heated up again, with Google, AOL and eBay as potential suitors. A source with knowledge of the deal now says the company has signed a term sheet with eBay to be acquired. The price is somewhere between $40 – $45 million.

StumbleUpon lets users rate websites via a browser toolbar. At any time a user can click “Stumble!” and will be taken to a website highly rated by other StumbleUpon users who tend to vote in a similar way as the person “stumbling.” More often than not, it’s something almost serendipitously interesting to the reader. The company expanded into video referrals in late 2006. (more…)

Adobe has released preview versions of After Effects CS3 and Premiere Pro CS3. So now we have something to play until the final release in middle of summer.

The Premiere Pro preview is available for Intel Macs and XP/Vista platforms. There’s no license restriction on this preview so anyone can give it a try (but Mac users (Mac OS 10.4.9) won’t be able to use DV Capture). The other catch with this one – this is a preview version so if you get yourself into troubles with it there won’t be any tech support available.

You will need to provide your AE7, Production Studio or Bundle serial number in order to get an After Effects CS3 preview serial number. If you don’t own any of the required products, you can keep the software for 2 days before it self destructs.

Need3Space is a comprehensive set of tools which helps you control and manage your disk space, while also gathering free space, for any drive. You can find duplicate files, temporary files, unneeded or junk files, empty files and folders – all you need to keep your PC neat and your hard drive clean. It features the Analyze tool which can help you to find out which folders and files are the largest on your drive with only a glance (you also can see how much space is used by each file type).

Other features like Uninstaller and Disk Information will help you to collect any possible information about system and applications installed on your computer, free and used disk space and other useful information. Recycle Bin Explorer allows viewing detailed information about files which were moved into Recycle Bin (you can restore, move, copy, remove files from the recycle bin, navigate through folders and subfolders and if you have administrator privileges you can look through all Recycle Bins of the other users on local computer). This tool has an optimized search engine, so it uses the small amount of your system’s resources while searching for files. Also, it can scan your system on viruses.

You can use trial version for 30 days. Then you’ll have to register or stop using this shareware.

ViPNet Office is an IP VPN and it provides secure client-to-client (client-to-office) encryption so that mobile workers, home workers, and remote offices can communicate securely over the Internet with a staff at work directly and central VPN gateway. It features build-in secure business applications: encrypted instant messaging (IM), encrypted file exchange, build-in personal firewall with IDS, tunnel securing Internet traffic between your offices, and online visibility of VPN users.

While other available VPN solutions provide only client-to-site or site-to-site connections (remote access to a corporate VPN), ViPNet VPN technology goes further and offers not only client-to-site connection, but also worldwide real client-to-client connectivity. ViPNet supports NAT-traversal and an advanced encryption AES, 3DES, and DES.