COD: MW2 Map pack and it's not even out yet

Information about the first of Modern Warfare 2's planned post-launch map packs were made public yesterday after select gaming press outlets received complimentary packs of Monster energy drinks prominently branded with promotional materials for the game.

GameSpot posted the first images yesterday confirming the first maps are expected to go on sale in spring of 2010, hot on the heels of Modern Warfare 2's winter release this year. Activision has not commented on whether or not the additional maps are the first DLC players can expect after purchase, nor have they announced a price range for post-release downloadable content.

What we do know is that 5,000 lucky consumers of Monster Assault (an ungodly cola/energy drink combo) will score a free code to grab the new maps when the promo cans hit store shelves. Eager players also have a chance to win a copy of Modern Warfare 2, a custom dashboard theme or a free can of Monster.

Google vs. Bing fight for the market

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Microsoft's Bing has lost market share to Google over the past month, prompting some to start digging the decision engine's grave. But with Bing just a few months into real competition with Google, that evaluation might be a bit premature.

The drop in Bing's search engine market share doesn't mean that Microsoft should close up shop and throw in the towel, of course. Google, after all, didn't become the ubiquitous entity that it has become in just a few short months. Microsoft, somewhat ironically, is in as good a position as anyone to understand this.

Microsoft Internet Explorer has been the dominant Web browser since driving out Netscape over 10 years ago. But for several years now, Internet Explorer has been competing against Mozilla's Firefox Web browser.

Firefox currently has the second biggest share of the Web browser market with about 22 percent, according to September numbers from Net Applications' Market Share report. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, claims slightly more than 60 percent of the Web browser market.

Version 1.0 of the Firefox Web browser was rolled out in November 2004 and has been competing against Internet Explorer for almost five years. The fact that the open-source browser has even 22 percent of the market is seen as somewhat of a victory.

Spyware gets past facebooks safe guard

Hackers have found a way to create automated Facebook pages and are using them to spread spyware to unsuspecting users, says antivirus and Internet security firm AVG Technologies.

In a blog entry posted last week, Research Chief Roger Thompson said that AVG's LinkScanner users had started detecting some "rogue spyware attacks" that were coming from Facebook pages. When AVG started looking at the pages, it noticed that the Facebook profiles featured pictures of the same woman and merely had different names to differentiate them. Each page had a link to a supposed video that would infect user computers with spyware if clicked.

Thompson says that there are likely untold numbers of such rogue Facebook profiles on the Web right now, meaning that the hackers have somehow found a way to bypass Facebook's CAPTCHA system that requires users to retype a series of letters to activate an account. Thompson said that while Facebook will certainly delete any rogue accounts it finds, the accounts "can't be an easy thing for them to find" and will thus be difficult to eliminate.

Android NDK 1.6 RELEASE

Today Android 1.6 NDK, release 1 is available for download from the Android developer site.

To recap, the NDK is a companion to the SDK that provides tools to generate and embed native ARM machine code within your application packages. This native code has the same restrictions as the VM code, but can execute certain operations much more rapidly. This is useful if you're doing heavy computations, digital processing, or even porting existing code bases written in C or C++.

If you already use the Android 1.5 NDK, upgrading to this release is highly recommended. It provides the following improvements:

• The ability to use OpenGL ES 1.1 headers and libraries If your application targets Android 1.6, your native code can now directly call OpenGL ES 1.1 functions to perform graphics rendering. This will help those programs that need to send large amounts of vertex data to the GPU. Note, however, that activity lifecycle and surface creation must still be performed from the VM. This NDK contains a new sample ("san-angeles") that shows exactly how to do that with a GLSurfaceView object.
• The ability to target either Android 1.5 or 1.6 devices The NDK parses your project's properties to know which platform release it is targeting. It will then automatically use the proper headers and libraries to generate your native code. Any application that targets 1.5 will run on Android 1.5, Android 1.6 and any future official system release. Targeting 1.6 should, thus, only be done if your application requires new 1.6 features / APIs, like the ability to call OpenGL ES 1.x headers from native code.
• The ability to put your native sources under your application's project tree You can now conveniently place all your sources (C, C++ and Java) under the same tree, for editing or version control purposes.
• Many fixes to the NDK's build scripts The changes to the build scripts fix some annoying bugs and also increase host system compatibility