Filed under: World wide web, Web services

Has this ever happened to you? You run out of ink, paper, good books to read, or something else, so you go on the web to order replacement as soon as humanly possible. You find what you need for a good price, add it to your cart, and then when you hit the checkout button the shipping charges hit you like a 2 ton heavy thing. The truth is while many sites like Amazon promise free shipping on orders over a certain price, it’s not always easy to tell if an item qualifies for free shipping.

Free Shipping On is a new service that makes it easier to find free shipping deals. First, the site has a huge database of deals and coupon codes you can use to get free shipping from stores like Newegg, Circuit City, Staples, Wal-Mart, Ideal Purchase, and Apple. The site is sort of like CouponMountain, Techbargains, or xpBargains, except it focuses specifically on free shipping deals.

But you can also use the service to search Amazon and eBay only for items that can be shipped for free. No more surprises in the checkout aisle… or cart.

[via AppScout]

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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software

Twhirl 0.7.1 was released this week and the desktop Twitter client has some major new features. First, the new version runs on Adobe AIR 1.0, so you don’t need to have the old beta version of AIR installed to run it. But we’re much more excited about the other new features including the ability to cross-post to Pownce and Jaiku.

If you provide your Pownce and Jaiku login information in the settings tab, any time you send a message to Twitter, the message will automatically go to your other micro-blogging services as well. You won’t see replies from your Pownce or Jaiku contacts in Twhirl, but as far as baby steps go, this one’s a doozy.

Twhirl 0.7.1 also includes additional color schemes, the ability to select your URL shortening service (either Snurl or is.gd) and the ability to mark messages as read.

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Jackson writes “Adam Boileau, a security consultant based in New Zealand has released a tool that can unlock Windows computers in seconds without the need for a password. By connecting a Linux machine to a Firewire port on the target machine, the tool can then modify Windows’ password protection code and render it ineffective. Boileau stated he did not release the tool publicly in 2006 because ‘Microsoft was a tiny cagey about exactly whether Firewire memory access was a real security issue or not and we didn’t want to cause any real trouble’. But now that a couple of years have passed and the issue has not resolved, Boileau decided to release the tool on his website.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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sspringer writes to let us know about Sun’s continuing push to support scripting languages other than Java on its Java virtual machine. Sun just hired two key Python developers: Ted Leung, a long-time Python developer at the Open Source Applications Foundation, and Frank Wierzbicki, who is lead implementer of the Jython project. They will both work on Jython, which enables Python to run on the JVM. Last month Sun’s CEO stated the company wants to “take the J off the JVM and just make it a VM.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hugh Pickens writes “Consumers, regulators, and businesses lack objective tools to compare the incidence of identity theft across financial institutions and without such tools, consumers cannot ‘vote with their feet’ and choose safer institutions. Now a study by Chris Hoofnagle has analyzed 88,000 complaints submitted by victims to the FTC over a three month period in 2006 and found that Bank of America ranked highest of all firms in the study, with an average of 1,117 incidents over a three-month period. AT&T had 763 incidents, followed by Sprint Nextel, JP Morgan, Chase and its Chase and Bank One, and Capital One. When the estimated events are divided by the total deposits, the data show that HSBC, Washington Mutual, and Bank of America have the highest rates of identity theft. Hoofnagle said lending institutions should publicly report information about identity theft events such as the rate of identity theft; the form of identity theft attempted; whether it was a mortgage loan or credit card; and the amount of loss suffered as a result. would help consumers choose safer financial institutions. The full study(PDF) is available from the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.”

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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “F-Secure has a writeup on a highly obfuscated, advanced new rootkit they recently discovered which uses a number of old techniques like MBR modification in new ways. It modifies the MBR, starts up its downloader with an ntoskrnl.exe hook set to nt!Phase1Initialization (which conveniently removes it from memory afterwards), and hooks IRP_MJ_READ and IRP_MJ_WRITE in disk.sys to hide itself in empty sectors. It also bypasses software firewalls by calling the NDIS API directly, using a ‘code pullout’ technique to load just the parts of ndis.sys that it needs. F-Secure believes it was written by professionals who are after financial information.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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