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That makes Amazon’s Kindle Fire like the King of Android tablet PCs in the U.S. While iPad continues to enjoy it’s position as the God of tablet PCs in US, Kindle Fire too has a made a reputation for itself in it’s own kind.

We all know that when it comes to tablets, it’s the iPad that’s been smashing sales records since the first generation came out in 2010. But if you only take Android tablets into account, then it’s the Amazon Kindle Fire that’s king. According to business analytics firm comScore, the Kindle Fire makes up 54.4% of all Android tablets in the United States as of February 2012.

There’s a large number of other Android tablets competing with the Kindle Fire for a their own piece of the pie. The Samsung Galaxy Tab family only makes up 15.4% of the market in spite of all the available versions for sale. The first Android Honeycomb tablet, the Motorola Xoom, has a measly 7% share; the precursor of the Transformer Prime Ice Cream Sandwich tablet, the Asus Transformer, makes up 6.3%; and Sony’s Tablet S has a measly 0.7% share.

The funny thing is that the best-selling Android tablet uses a heavily modified platform that bares little resemblance to the original Android operating system. And there was a time when you couldn’t surf Google Play on the Kindle Fire even if you were using a browser. While you can now access Google’s own app market from the Kindle Fire, the tablet’s default is still the Amazon App Store.

The firm didn’t analyze the reason behind those numbers, but it’s easy to see why the Kindle Fire has been selling so well: Amazon’s aggressive $199 pricing clearly continues to win over customers. And for those who want a tablet mainly for reading ebooks or for streaming Amazon Prime content, the Kindle Fire is the obvious choice. Of course, this may all change if and when Google releases an official tablet, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

ComScore via Electronista

This article was written by Mariella Moon and originally appeared on Tecca

While it was long believed and advertised that when you choose a Mac you can forget about your security being at risk. The founder of Kaspersky, one of the largest anti-virus firm has debunked this by proving Microsoft is more secure then Apple.

The founder and CEO of Kaspersky Labs spoke with Computer Business Review (CBR) about Apple’s slow progress in security at this week’s Infosecurity 2012 event in London.

“I think they are ten years behind Microsoft in terms of security,” Kaspersky told CBR. “For many years I’ve been saying that from a security point of view there is no big difference between Mac and Windows. It’s always been possible to develop Mac malware, but this one was a bit different. For example it was asking questions about being installed on the system and, using vulnerabilities, it was able to get to the user mode without any alarms.”

The malware about which Kaspersky speaks, the Flashback trojan, struck more than 600,000 Mac devices early this month and prompted Apple to release three separate Java updates to patch vulnerabilities in the software and prevent more security problems.

Unfortunately, Apple’s security updates may have come too little, too late. While just last week, Kaspersky Labs researchers had pegged the number of machines still plagued with the Flashback trojan at just 30,000, a recent report by Russian IT-security vendor Dr. Web shows the number of infected devices may be as high as 550,000, reports The Next Web. (Dr. Web researchers first discovered how widely the Flashback trojan had spread.)

While Apple has been slow to respond to new security concerns, CNET reports that Apple is making moves to boost the security on its devices. For example, XProtect, a built-in malware scanner, came with the last two major versions of Mac OS X. And security technology called Gatekeeper will be built into OS X Moutain Lion and will let the user to install only software designed by registered developers.

But with malware like the Flashback and Sabpab trojans still making their rounds, and wth recent studies showing just how vulnerable Apple devices are, Mac users might do well to heed Kaspersky’s words of warning. As he told CBR, more Macs (last quarter saw 4 million sold, a 7% increase from last year) will only mean more problems.

“Cyber criminals have now recognized that Mac is an interesting area,” Kaspersky said. “Now we have more, it’s not just Flashback or Flashfake. Welcome to Microsoft’s world, Mac. It’s full of malware.”

What do you think of what Kaspersky had to say? Do you agree or disagree? Let us know in the comments!

UFO hunters have spotted a curious object near the sun in a new NASA image. It is, in the words of a blogger for the website Gather, “what looks like a metallic, jointed spaceship with a gigantic extension, perhaps a boom arm, anchored off its lower end.” The YouTube video drawing attention to the object has quickly made its way to discussion forums and the tabloid press, and many seasoned UFO believers are calling it a definite “spot.”

But does this image, which was taken by a camera on board NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) on Tuesday (April 24), really show a spaceship dropping by the sun to harvest some solar energy, as one YouTube commenter suggested? Or is this object something much more mundane? We asked scientists in the solar physics branch at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) — the group that analyzes data from Lasco 2, the telescopic camera that snapped the picture.

According to Nathan Rich, lead ground systems engineer in the NRL’s solar physics branch, the “spaceship” is merely a collection of streaks left by cosmic rays, charged particles from space, which whizzed through the camera’s sensor, or CCD, as the image was taken. [See footage]

“The streaks in question are consistent with energetic particle (proton) impacts on the CCD, something which is apparent in just about every image,” Rich told Life’s Little Mysteries.

“Notably,” he added, “these artifacts do not persist from image to image,” — proving they are momentary blips in the camera sensor rather than an actual object in the field of view. Some images taken by the Lasco 2 camera are swarming with artifacts, caused by particles zipping across the CCD in every direction.

As a cosmic ray passes through a camera’s image sensor, it deposits a large amount of its electric charge in the pixels that it penetrates. If the particle passes through at a shallow angle to the plane of the camera, it affects several pixels along its path. The result is a bright streak on the image.

In the image in question, a burst of cosmic rays happen to hit the camera lens at just the right angles to create the form of a hinged spaceship. The “boom arm,” angled at a slant across the rows and columns of pixels, was formed by a cosmic ray streaking through the camera sensor diagonally and at a shallow angle, depositing charge in several pixels along a diagonal line.

Cameras on Earth are less susceptible to interference by charged particles from space, because the Earth’s protective magnetosphere blocks them from hitting the planet’s surface, Alfred McEwen, director of the Planetary Imaging Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona, explained last year, when another artifact was mistaken for an alien base on Mars. “But with space images that are taken outside our magnetosphere, such as those taken by orbiting telescopes, it’s very common to see these cosmic ray hits,” he said.

Huawei Technologies Co Ltd HWT.UL, the world’s No.6 mobile phone maker, said on Wednesday that it expects to ship more than 100 million mobile phones this year including 60 million smartphones as it aims to increase its global market share.

“We plan to target China, the United States, western Europe and Japan as key markets,” said Shao Yang, chief marketing officer of Huawei Device, a division that makes and sells consumer electronics including dongles, mobile phones and tablet PCs.

Mobile phone sales last year totaled 55 million handsets.

Shao also said Huawei expected consumer device sales to reach $30 billion in five years, from $7 billion now, becoming as big a revenue driver as its flagship telecommunications equipment business.

“This means that by that time, the revenue will be comparable to our telecom equipment business. We feel the room for growth for devices is much bigger than the telecom carrier sector,” Shao told Reuters in an interview at the company’s Shenzhen headquarters.

This year, Huawei aims to sell 60 million smartphones, such as its Ascend and Honor models, up from 20 million last year, executives said earlier.

Last year, Huawei recorded sales of 44.62 billion yuan ($7 billion) for consumer devices, a rise of 44.3 percent.

The company aims to sell higher-end smartphones to boost margins in the highly competitive handset market that has eroded margins of some handset makers.

The company’s gross profit margin dropped 6.5 percentage points to 37.5 percent last year.

Huawei, founded by Chief Executive Ren Zhengfei in 1987, has diversified into consumer devices, such as its Vision smartphones and MediaPad tablets, and enterprise networking equipment as its core telecoms gear market has stalled.

Hundreds of thousands of Internet users may be in for a shock in July as they will be isolated from the internet. The FBI has warned that a virus has infected thousands of computers that will cause you to lose your internet connection in July.

International hackers have been working hard of this and have managed to run an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world.

In a surprise and unusual move from the FBI, it has set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected computers. But FBI is going to shut it down.

The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, http://www.dcwg.org , that will inform them whether they’re infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won’t be able to connect to the Internet.

Most victims don’t even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.

Last November, the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive network of infected computers.

“We started to realize that we might have a little bit of a problem on our hands because … if we just pulled the plug on their criminal infrastructure and threw everybody in jail, the victims of this were going to be without Internet service,” said Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent. “The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get ‘page not found’ and think the Internet is broken.”

Hackers infected a network of probably more than 570,000 computers worldwide. They took advantage of vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system to install malicious software on the victim computers. This turned off antivirus updates and changed the way the computers reconcile website addresses behind the scenes on the Internet’s domain name system.

The DNS system is a network of servers that translates a web address — such as www.ap.org — into the numerical addresses that computers use. Victim computers were reprogrammed to use rogue DNS servers owned by the attackers. This allowed the attackers to redirect computers to fraudulent versions of any website.

The hackers earned profits from advertisements that appeared on websites that victims were tricked into visiting. The scam netted the hackers at least $14 million, according to the FBI. It also made thousands of computers reliant on the rogue servers for their Internet browsing.

In an on-going assault against Iran’s various ministries and departments over the internet, hackers (US & Israel ?) has launched a attack on Iranian oil ministry’s computer network. Iran has unplugged it from the internet to save it from further damage.

Mehr said the Sunday cyberattack affected some data, but the ministry had backed it up. It said oil operations were otherwise unaffected.

But the Kharg Island oil terminal, the ministry headquarters, and other facilities were all taken offline, the agency quoted Hamdollah Mohammadnejad, deputy oil minister in charge of civil defense, as saying. Some 80 percent of Iran’s daily 2.2 million barrels of crude export goes through the Kharg facility, located off its southern coast.

The Islamic Republic says that it is involved in a long-running technological war with the United States and Israel.

Iran periodically reports cyberattacks to its nuclear and industrial sectors, almost always saying that little damage was caused. In 2010, Iran reported that a nuclear plant had been targeted by the Stuxnet virus. It denied reports that uranium centrifuge operations had been disrupted, saying that damage was confined to nuclear plant personnel’s laptops.

Iran has reported other cyberattacks since, including an infection in April 2011 dubbed “Stars” and a spy virus about which little is known but its name, “Doku.”

Earlier this year, head of Iran’s civil defense agency Gholam Reza Jalali said the energy sector of the country has been a main target of cyberattacks over the past two years.

Iran has recently announced a series of cyberdefense measures spearheaded by the Revolutionary Guards — a unit which already runs every key military program in Iran and many industries.

In March, the Guard set up what it claims is a hack-proof communications network for its high-level commanders.

This is something you must enjoy with your family. The Lyrid meteor shower will hit it’s peak tonight and it will be a spectacular show! So grab your sleeping bags and hit the roof. This is something you don’t wanna miss.

Looks like celebration for Earth day

NASA scientists predict the annual Lyrid meteor shower, which peaks overnight tonight (April 21) and before dawn Sunday, will offer an impressive sky show to observers with clear weather, largely due to the absent moon.

Meteor shower expert Bill Cooke of NASA told SPACE.com that the moon is currently in its new phase, when the side facing Earth is not illuminated by the sun. That means that unlike last year, when bright moonlight washed out April’s annual “shooting stars” display, the 2012 Lyrid meteor shower could be a stand-out event.

“The Lyrids are really unpredictable,” Cooke said. “I’m expecting 15 to 20 Lyrid meteors an hour. Back in 1982, they outburst to nearly 100 per hour. You really can’t predict with this.”

One thing that’s certain, though, is that with a bright moon out of the picture, meteor aficionados graced with clear, dark skies could be in for a weekend skywatching treat. Dark skies well away from city lights are essential for the best meteor shower observing conditions.

So it will be better if you plan to watch somewhere far from the city lights.