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Items of Note:

Today Mashable writer & movie buff Christina Warren joins us to talk tech, movies and to have some fun. You can find Christina’s writing on http://mashable.com/author/christina-warren. Be sure to follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/Film_Girl.

Gozer has the night off.

Next week we welcome Chelsea Sexton from the movie ‘Who Killed the Electric Car’. Chelsea was instrumental in the development and release of GM’s EV-1. She will be joining us to talk electric cars and green tech.

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Geek This Week:

Aaron:

Checked out Opera Mini on the iPhone. Tough to see if it’s really that much faster than Safari. They display pages in a different fashion and all traffic for Opera Mini go through their servers so privacy is a concern. In addition you can’t set Opera as your default browser, so any links you click in any other app would go into Safari. It’s nice to check out but I don’t think I see myself using this day-in day-out.

Christina:

Still loving the iPad.

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Tech and Gaming News:

Adobe scraps work to bring Flash apps to iPhone

What a difference two weeks and a few words of legalese can make to the future of a widely used programming technology.

In that span of time, Adobe Systems has gone from touting its technology for building Flash applications that run on the iPhone to canceling future development of that technology.

When Apple changed the terms of its iPhone 4.0 software developer kit license, it effectively blocked Adobe’s move. But in his Tuesday announcement that Adobe will cease future development of the Flash-apps-on-iPhone technology, Mike Chambers, Adobe’s principal product manager for the Flash platform, let loose a tirade that indicates the battle between the two companies isn’t over yet.

“As developers for the iPhone have learned, if you want to develop for the iPhone you have to be prepared for Apple to reject or restrict your development at any time, and for seemingly any reason,” Chambers said. “The primary goal of Flash has always been to enable cross browser, platform and device development. The cool Web game that you build can easily be targeted and deployed to multiple platforms and devices. However, this is the exact opposite of what Apple wants. They want to tie developers down to their platform, and restrict their options to make it difficult for developers to target other platforms.”

Adobe takes the matter seriously. It disclosed in a regulatory filing that its business could be harmed if the iPhone and iPad don’t support Adobe technology. And Adobe could be considering legal action against Apple, too, according to one report.

In a response, Apple indicated its preference for a variety of up-and-coming standards that collectively compete with what Flash can do.
“Someone has it backwards–it is HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and H.264 (all supported by the iPhone and iPad) that are open and standard, while Adobe’s Flash is closed and proprietary,” said spokeswoman Trudy Miller in a statement.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20003006-264.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1

Botched McAfee update shutting down corporate XP machines worldwide

We’re hearing from all over that a bad McAfee for Windows XP update is causing computers worldwide to shut down. Apparently DAT update 5958 deletes the svchost.exe file, which then triggers a false-positive in McAfee itself and sets off a chain of uncontrolled restarts and loss ofnetworking functionality. Yeah, wild — Twitter is basically going nuts, and McAfee’s support site appears to be down. There are some fixes floating around out there, but it may be too late — the final tally of borked PCs today may reach into the millions. We’ve already heard anecdotally that an Intel facility has been affected, as well as Dish Network call centers, and we’re sure there are going to be more reports as the day wears on.

Update: McAfee just sent us a statement — they’ve pulled the update from their corporate download servers, and consumers shouldn’t be affected.
McAfee is aware that a number of customers have incurred a false positive error due to incorrect malware alerts on Wednesday, April 21. The problem occurs with the 5958 virus definition file (DAT) that was released on April 21 at 2.00 PM GMT+1 (6am Pacific Time).

Our initial investigation indicates that the error can result in moderate to significant performance issues on systems running Windows XP Service Pack 3.

The faulty update has been removed from McAfee download servers for corporate users, preventing any further impact on those customers. We are not aware of significant impact on consumer customers and believe we have effectively limited such occurrence.

McAfee teams are working with the highest priority to support impacted customers and plan to provide an update virus definition file shortly. McAfee apologizes for any inconvenience to our customers
Ouch — that might be the understatement of the year. We’ve definitely hearing this affects SP2 as well, we’ll keep looking for more.

Update 2: The anecdotal numbers keep rolling in, and they’re not small — 30,000 machines are knocked out here, 60,000 there. Given that the only fixes right now involve techs spending time with each affected machine individually, things could get seriously messy.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/21/mcafee-update–shutting-down-xp-machines/

Pandora Partners with Facebook for Social Music

Music discovery engine Pandora is receiving some deep social integration with Facebook, Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today at the F8 Developer Conference.

Made possible by Facebook’s new Open Graph protocol, Pandora will be able to stream music directly on Facebook.com from bands you’ve “liked” across the web. You’ll be able to see which of your friends likes similar music and check out what other music they like and have in their collections.

The combination of Open Graph and the new, wide-reaching “Facebook Like” button around the web means that “liking” a band on a third-party site will register with your Facebook profile, which can in turn inform your Pandora profile even while you’re discovering music at other points around the web. It also tightly hooks your Pandora profile with your “real” social graph of friends on Facebook.

In the words of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, all of this allows the social networking juggernaut to build “instantly social and personalized experiences” thanks to this underlying level of social graph integration.

http://mashable.com/2010/04/21/f8-pandora-facebook-integration/

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Test a Geek: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast

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How To:Use an Ubuntu Live CD to Securely Wipe Your PC’s Hard Drive

Have you ever given or sold a PC to somebody else, but really wanted to completely wipe the hard drive first? Today we’ll show you how to use an Ubuntu Live CD to get your personal information off your PC.

When you delete a file in Windows, Ubuntu, or any other operating system, it doesn’t actually destroy the data stored on your hard drive, it just marks that data as “deleted.” If you overwrite it later, then that data is generally unrecoverable, but if the operating system don’t happen to overwrite it, then your data is still stored on your hard drive, recoverable by anyone who has the right software.

By securely deleting files or entire hard drives, your data will be gone for good.

Note: Modern hard drives are extremely sophisticated, as are the experts who recover data for a living. There is no guarantee that the methods covered in this article will make your data completely unrecoverable; however, they will make your data unrecoverable to the majority of recovery methods, and all methods that are readily available to the general public.

Wipe entire hard drives

If you’re disposing of an old hard drive, or giving it to someone else, then you might instead want to wipe your entire hard drive. shred can be invoked on hard drives, but on modern file systems, the shred process may be reversible. We’ll use the program wipe to securely delete all of the data on a hard drive.

Wipe is not included in Ubuntu by default, so we have to install it. Open up the Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on System in the top-left corner of the screen, then expanding the Administration folder and clicking on Synaptic Package Manager.

Wipe is part of the Universe repository, which is not enabled by default. We’ll enable it by clicking on Settings > Repositories in the Synaptic Package Manager window.

Check the checkbox next to “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)”. Click Close.

You’ll need to reload Synaptic’s package list. Click on the Reload button in the main Synaptic Package Manager window.

Once the package list has been reloaded, the text over the search field will change to “Rebuilding search index”.

Wait until it reads “Quick search,” and then type “wipe” into the search field. The wipepackage should come up, along with some other packages that perform similar functions.

Click on the checkbox to the left of the label “wipe” and select “Mark for Installation”.

Click on the Apply button to start the installation process. Click the Apply button on the Summary window that pops up.

Once the installation is done, click the Close button and close the Synaptic Package Manager window.

Open a terminal window by clicking on Applications in the top-left of the screen, then Accessories > Terminal.

You need to figure our the correct hard drive to wipe. If you wipe the wrong hard drive, that data will not be recoverable, so exercise caution!

In the terminal window, type in:

sudo fdisk -l

A list of your hard drives will show up. A few factors will help you identify the right hard drive. One is the file system, found in the System column of the list – Windows hard drives are usually formatted as NTFS (which shows up as HPFS/NTFS). Another good identifier is the size of the hard drive, which appears after its identifier.

The wipe developers recommend wiping each partition separately.

To start the wiping process, type the following into the terminal:

sudo wipe

Again, exercise caution – this is the point of no return!

Your hard drive will be completely wiped. It may take some time to complete, depending on the size of the drive you’re wiping.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/15037/use-an-ubuntu-live-cd-to-securely-wipe-your-pcs-hard-drive/

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Ask A Geek: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast

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Open Source Software: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast

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Hack: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast

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The Geek’s View: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast

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