McAfee New Online Family Protection for Apple iPhone

According to data released by Admob in 2010, 65 percent of iPod touch users and 13 percent of iPhone users are below the age of 17. Furthermore, twice as many kids own an Internet-enabled mobile device versus a computer1.

Today McAfee also released results from its Secret Life of Teens survey which provides a detailed snapshot of online teen behavior. It reveals that 85 percent of teens go online somewhere other than at home and under the supervision of their parents, nearly a third (32 percent) of teens say they don’t tell their parents what they do while they are online, and 28 percent engage with strangers online.

McAfee® Family Protection iPhone, iPod touch and iPad Edition offers Web site and search filtering. The program will automatically block age-inappropriate sites, such as known pornography web sites. It also includes location tracking for Apple devices that are equipped with GPS. McAfee Family Protection iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad Edition is available for download now at the iTunes App Store and McAfee.com for $19.99.

New Google Earth to see World

Google is unleashing a new version of Google Earth, version 5.2. It’s the biggest update since Earth 5.0 added the oceans and Mars in February of 2009–and while it’s not that big, it’s got one major cool new feature and one modest-but-useful one. Google gave me a sneak peek of the new version last week.

The major cool new feature is aimed at folks who like to go adventuring and take a GPS navigation handheld along. If you tote a GPS unit such as the ones from Garmin and Magellan to track a hike, bike ride, sailing trip, or any other excursion, you can shift the data to Google Earth once you’re home. In the past, doing so engaged creating thousands of points of geographic information, but the new version of the software can create simpler plots of where you were at any given point in time. And it lets you view this data as birds-eye animations that track where you went, recreated with Earth’s wealth of geographic photography and 3D imagery. You can also share the reconstructions with other Google Earth users or publish them using the embeddable version of Earth.

For now, the feature only works with data captured by standalone GPS units supported by Google Earth–it’s compatible with hundreds of models–but the idea of it tying into Google smartphone apps like Latitude and the mobile version of Google Earth itself is intriguing.

You can dress up your reconstructions by importing a vehicle model such as a bike or boat from Google’s 3D Warehouse, but this requires massaging a text file by hand, and therefore isn’t for Google Earth newbies. It would be neat if a future version of Earth made it a point-and-click process.

Virus in Windows Mobile Games

Hackers have placed viruses in video games for Windows Mobile smartphones, automatically calling premium numbers to ring up charges.

The infected games, 3D Anti-Terrorist and PDA Poker Art, are embedded with malicious code that dials premium-rate services in Somalia, Italy and other countries, racking up hundreds of dollars in charges. Victims typically don't know they've been hit until they get their wireless bills and see the surprise fees.

Microsoft investigated the problem and advised users to visit their site for instructions on how to protect their device.

A quote said by spokesman "We encourage customers to follow all of the steps of the 'Protect Your Computer' guidance of enabling a firewall, applying all software updates and installing anti-virus and anti-spyware software".

Hackers have increasingly focused on smartphones amid the surging sales of high-end devices. Earlier this month, security firm Symantec, best known for its Norton antivirus software for personal computers, announced a new family of products to protect smartphones.