What's 20 megabytes, has awful graphics, awful sound, and is vaguely reminiscent of Super Mario Brothers 3?

Why it's RunMan: Race Around The World of course! The website, you assume, is trying to be ironic. 'The game can't actually look like this, surely...' But... well... it does.

The game's visuals look like they were created in MS Paint. In fact, they probably were.

So it looks bad, and the sound effects are pretty awful. But the gameplay is actually quite good. You play as a little star-thing who runs around. Your job is just to make it to the other end of the level at the highest speed possible. The faster you go, the higher the score multiplier. You lose points for falling in holes and hitting enemies, just like in real life.

I make no bones about the fact that I'm a fan of Malwarebytes. It's easily the best free malware removal app in my toolkit, and it's the first program I turn to when cleaning up an infected system. The Malwarebytes team has worked incredibly hard since their application burst onto the scene, and countless technicians and PC users appreciate the phenomenal work they've done.

Now, for the past few weeks I've been reading numerous blog posts about how IOBit is giving away their security software for free. The offer was timed to coincide with the launch of Windows 7, and has popped up in my Google Reader several times since.

How do the two relate?

A few weeks ago, Malwarebytes staffers came across an interesting post on the IOBit forums. The post detailed a keygen for Malwarebytes and reported it using the same name MBAM reports. The crew dug further and found more evidence of copycat detections.

To confirm their suspicions, a fake signature implanted in the Malwarebytes database.

"The final confirmation of IOBit's theft occurred when we added fake definitions to our database for a fake rogue application we called Rogue.AVCleanSweepPro. This "malware" does not actually exist: we made it up. We even manufactured fake files to match the fake definitions. Within two weeks IOBit was detecting these fake files under almost exactly these fake names."

If this is proven to be true, I certainly hope that Malwarebytes is successful in prosecuting IOBit. For another company to use a tactic as underhanded as this - let's face it, it's outright theft - to build a product and label it as their own is appalling.

IOBit are, of course, defending themselves in their forums. They respond:

"We have never used the database of any other companies. And hope Malwarebytes stop spreading malicious rumors for hyping itself[...]A legal letter will be released later, which will prove that there is no problem with Intellectual Property Rights.

For the sake of avoiding dispute and possible problems, we have deleted all disputed items in our database temporarily, and have updated IObit Security 360's database."

Nevertheless, IOBit's reputation is taking a beating now on WebOfTrust - Malwarebytes supporters have been all too happy to head over and vote down IOBit's trust, privacy, and vendor reliability ratings.

Programs like XP Quick Fix Plus. The tiny, portable application launches a dashboard with one-click fixes for 40 common Windows XP problems. Quick Fix makes short work of irksome situations like a disabled task manager, missing Device Manager tab, and the infamous CD/DVD missing/not reading bug.

The program is essentially a collection of registry fixes, since that's where most of these problems originate. You might want to create a system restore point prior to running Quick Fix (or backing up your registry) just in case.

XP Quick Fix is a free, portable download and - not surprisingly - runs on Windows XP systems.

Clicky is a new web analytics package that is looking to give the current king of web analytics, Google Analytics, a run for its money. Like any site tracking service, you create an account, insert some code into your pages (or if you are using one of the popular blogging platforms, simply install the relevant plugin), and watch as Clicky gathers statistics for your site in real-time.

The service sets itself apart by being very well designed and easy to read, but also by including extra related features, like the ability to include your FeedBurner statistics, tracking Twitter statistics, and providing an integrated link shortening service based on its related domain name clicky.me.

The free version of Clicky is ad-supported, but a Pro version is also available.

A few of Clicky's more obscure features need a Pro account to use. For example, with a pro account you can set up Twitter searches for your brand name or URL, and then see how many mentions you are getting.

The story of how NewsGator attempted to corner the market on consumer RSS has taken another strange turn. In an interview with Steven Hodson published on Hodson's Shooting at Bubbles site, Bradbury admits that he is no longer employed by NewsGator, but has retained the full rights to his popular FeedDemon RSS reader. NewsGator continues to offer FeedDemon, and the application is still NewsGator-branded, but the clear implication here is that NewsGator no longer owns the rights to the most popular native Windows RSS feed reader.

It's no secret that NewsGator almost single-minded focus on capturing the lucrative enterprise market allowed its efforts in the consumer space to falter, ultimately leading to NewsGator shutting down their once-popular NewsGator Online feed reader, having conceded the online feed reader battle to Google's upstart Google Reader, which has iterated faster, and performing better than NewsGator's online reader for a few years.

It's unfortunate that NewsGator has given up on this market. While it's certainly true that Google has a powerful and successful product on its hands, there is certainly room in the RSS space for more than one dedicated company. What this means for FeedDemon's Mac equivalent, NetNewsWire remains to be seen, but since NewsGator's current push for more enterprise business relies on the talents of Brent Simmons, NetNewsWire will likely remain a NewsGator property for the foreseeable future.

Whether that is good news or not is anyone's guess.

UPDATE: The previous headline of this post turned out to be incorrect, as Nick Bradbury points out in the comments. The relationship between FeedDemon, NewsGator and Bradbury is a bit confusing, but what he said in the interview was this: "I'm no longer employed by NewsGator. FeedDemon remains a NewsGator-branded product, but I'm 100% in charge of it now, and I'm once again an indie developer. FeedDemon is my sole focus – and my sole source of income." So, NewsGator owns FeedDemon, Bradbury works on FeedDemon, but Bradbury does not work FOR NewsGator any longer.

Bradbury also pointed us to a post by NewsGator's Greg Reinacker, explaining more about where things stand.

In AV Comparative's most recent report on malware removal, MSE was the only free antivirus rated Advanced+. That ranking placed it alongside big names like Norton, Kaspersky, and F-Secure. Security Essentials also beat out technician favorite ESET, which managed only an Advanced rating.

It's also worth noting that only three antivirus apps - Norton 2010, eScan, and Security Essentials - scored marks of good or better in removal of malware and removal of leftovers. So not only has MSE beaten free competitors like AVG (version 8.5 tested, not 9.0), Avira, and Avast, it also posted test scores equal to or better than a dozen antivirus programs you'd have to pay for.

Well done, Microsoft!

[via Ars Technica]

Microsoft is killing off its small business accounting product, Office Accounting. The company will no longer distribute Office Accounting Professional or the free version, Office Accounting Express after November 16, 2009.

According to Microsoft's FAQ, the company as determined that free templates that work with Excel are a better option for small businesses than the Office Accounting application. That's kind of true, in that you can customize Excel templates any way you like. But Office Accounting provided a full featured suite of accounting tools that would be pretty difficult to replicate by building or tweaking your own spreadsheets. Really, Microsoft has determined that it's not worth continue developing this product for one reason or another, and I suspect more people will switch to using QuickBooks or another competing package of accounting software than will choose to use Excel.

Microsoft will continue to offer 5 years of support for Office Accounting, and users will still be able to bill customers using PayPal, although eBay and credit profile information from Equifax won't be available after December 15, 2009.

The move comes less than half a year after Microsoft discontinued its personal finance application, Microsoft Money.

[via ZDNet]

A lot of people overlook Microsoft's SkyDrive for free, web-based file storage and sharing. Still, it's tough to argue with 25gb of free space for your digital goodies that you can access from anywhere. SkyDrive Explorer is a free shell enhancement for Windows that makes it even better.

Once you install SkyDrive Explorer, you'll see a new icon in My Computer (under "Other"). Double click it to open your drive, and a Live login window will appear. Sign in and you've got full-on access to SkyDrive right from Windows Explorer. Add files and folders, move things around, delete old junk - all as if they were stored on your local hard drive.

I'd like to see the app allow access to SkyDrive from open and save dialogs, but it's a great addition to Windows even without that functionality.

SkyDrive Explorer runs on both 32 and 64-bit Windows.

[via gHacks]

There are dozens of great programs for converting media files from one format to another. Some of our favorites are Super, MediaCoder, and WinLAME, and VirtualDub.But if you're looking for a fast and simple solution, you probably won't find many programs that are as simple to use as Oxelon Media Converter.

Oxelon adds two shortcuts to your Windows context menu: one for transcoding audio files, the other for transcoding video. All you have to do is right-click on any media file in Windows Explorer and select the file format you want to convert it to. Oxelon will open a new window and ask you where you'd like to save the file. You can also change audio and video codecs, framerate, bitrate, and video dimensions as well as other settings. But all you really have to do at that point is hit the "Conversion" button to start converting your file.

The free program does have a few quirks. The most annoying one is that every time you close the program, Oxelon Media Converter will open its homepage in your default web browser. The other is that I had trouble converting some of the video files I had shot with my digital camera. The only way I could get them to encode was by selecting the "no audio" option, although it's possible that if I had spent more time fiddling I could have found another option that would have worked. Admittedly, my digital camera records audio at an odd sampling rate.

Oxelon recommends downloading and installing a plugin file to add support for a wide variety of audio and video formats. You can find a picture of the settings screen after the break.

[via Instant Fundas]

I'm not the biggest Twitter fan, but let's face it: people sometimes share really useful information in their 140-character updates.

Scott Hanselman (@shanselman), for example, tipped users about a slick addition to your Windows 7 taskbar that you'll find over at Codeplex called Taskbar Meters.

Download developer Jeff Key's .zip file and extract the contents to a folder on your hard drive. Inside you'll find two executables - one for CPU and one for memory. Launch them, and the result is what you see in the screenshot.

The meters make use of the Windows 7 taskbar's progress indicator kung fu. Using the sliders in the ultra-simple options screens you can choose the update frequency and set at what percentage of utilization your indicators switch from green to yellow and then to red. Pin 'em to your taskbar and you've got a simple, Win7-friendly heads up display of your PC's vitals.

They're jumplist enabled as well, though right-clicking only gives you access to task manager (which you've always had by right-clicking the taskbar anyway) and the Windows Resource Monitor.

Each meter uses about 18Mb of ram and worked for me under both 32 and 64-bit builds of Windows 7.