It’s the oldest trick in the book when it comes to scamming: Play on people’s greed.

Take a look at a current one involving free iPads for beta testing :

The difficulty lies in telling whether a freebie giveaway is a scam sometimes. Some are scams, and some are supposedly real contests giving out free iPads, like the one here at freeipadgear.

When in doubt, it’s probably wise to reconsider: If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

The anti-virus (AV) market is increasingly getting to be a difficult business for market incumbents.

The top players in this space — notably Symantec’s Norton and McAffee, followed by Trend Micro — have seen their market shares taken on by a slew of smaller competitors in the market, including Kaspersky Labs, ESET, Panda, AVAST and AVG, amongst others.

What’s more interesting is that some of these AV solutions from these smaller firms are good, and might even be better than the incumbents, if you can believe the latest anti-virus comparisons released by Anti-Malware Test Labs just about a week ago. Anti-Malware Test Labs is a Russian independent security research firm that is not affiliated to any software vendor, and has shared AV comparison tests with the public since 2007.

According to them, both DrWeb and Kaspersky, both Russia-based AV solutions, topped the list of the 17 AV software vendors. More than half the vendors flunked the comparison test as they didn’t defend against enough virus attacks in the testing.

What’s an anti-virus security software company like Trend Micro got to do with clouds?

Well, they believe that the next big IT disruption will be cloud computing. Moving into security for clouds is thus a necessary evolution path for the 21-year old software security company.

After their Asia Pacific media day conference in Macau today this point was made really clear. Let me explain.

Customers rightly expect the software they’ve bought to just work. Security should be baked into the product rather than bolted on as an additional cost. The good news is that we’re moving towards this trend, e.g. operating systems bundled with anti-virus and firewalls, etc.

First it was Dawn Of War 2, and now it is Empire Total War. War is out in the open, but the battle it seems is against piracy.

ETW is the second game I have reviewed this month that also needs a Steam log-in, and therefore Internet access, to activate and play the game, even if you are just up against the computer AI.

This is a big problem for users who do not have regular broadband access as it can take several hours just to update the first round of patches, and that’s on my 100 Mbps line. After you activate the game for the first time via Steam, you can choose to run the game in “offline” mode which then lets you run the game without Net access but you will still need to have the game updated to the latest patch for this to run. In other words, you cannot quite play a Steam-enabled game without Net access.

The good thing about Steam is that it handles all your game patches automatically so your game is always updated to the latest patches. Steam is also a form of anti-piracy tool since you always have to log-in before you start the game. The really cool thing about Steam however is that you all the games you have purchased, whether as a direct download or from retail shops, can be downloaded into any other PC although you can only play on one at a time.                

There has been some discussion lately about Dawn Of War 2 and how it is sucky becoz we have to install Steam to play the single player campaigns even. Here’s something I wrote recently on this issue.
IT JUST does not make sense that a single-player PC game, which you play on your own, would require you to have an Internet connection for you to play against the computer.

However, that is exactly the case with the just-released Dawn Of War 2 (DOW2).

As I was tearing the shrinkwrap off the box of this THQ-published title, I was surprised to see these words in red: Internet Connection Required.

Yes. you heard it right. Even if you are playing a single player campaign or a 1vs1 skirmish against the computer. You need to first launch Steam and log in to Steam for the game to even launch. And this is not just for initial activation, but for subsequent plays. So when I tried to run the game without logging into Steam, nothing happens at all. The game doesn’t even launch. I log into Steam and the game loads.

It’s quite obvious what these guys are trying to do – they are trying to fight piracy. But they end up alienating the users. I have played RTS since the first Dune 2, and I have never had to go online to fight against the computer. In fact, I have never played a PC game that requires me to do this, unless it is an MMOG like World Of Warcraft.

I understand that piracy is really killing the PC business, but in an environment where console games are outselling PC games (revenues for console games are about 8x more than PC games worldwide) and beating the shit out of them, you don’t want to make you legitimate PC gamers angry.

And what about selling to the countries without much of a Net penetration? Or have they given up on these countries altogether?

Update: Some forumers are asking if this will work if Steam is running in offline mode. I will try that tonight. Another issue is whether you need to have a Windows Live account logged-in to play. Will also test that tonight. But having played this game for about 6 hours, I do like it a lot.

You’ve probably seen those Apple ads that proclaim that there are no/few viruses for Macs.

Well, it doesn’t matter that virus writers don’t bother with Macs because they only take up less than 5 per cent of the world’s personal computer market.

But guess what, now that Apple’s iPhone is hyped up to be the best thing that happened, security holes are appearing. According to a report in Computerworld, there are vulnerabilities in the software that can lead to users being “phished”.

It’s CommunicAsia week this week, and the tech reporters here at the newsroom are running around Singapore Expo (where the exhibitions are) and Suntec City (where the conferences are).

At the opening of the yearly trade show today, the Singapore Government said it was looking into stronger, two-factor authentication for gov’t e-services, as part of what it calls the National Authentication Framework.

This means all those far-from-secure transactions that you have been performing on government websites will be a thing of the past. With the security provided by two-factor authentication, like what you use on online banking now, the Government intends to put in more “sensitive” apps in future.

In future, you’d likely have to not just key in a password, but also to key in a second password shown on a cellphone SMS or perhaps on a security token. Maybe, who knows, a fingerprint scan might not be out of order if prices for these scanners drop in future.

In any case, the IDA is to call for tenders in the next six months. But right now, the details are a little sketchy.

The date is not set for rolling out yet. Plus, what transactions can you do on it, for example (IDA said at a press conference today that perhaps you can even transfer CPF funds to pay for your flat – but will CPF allow it!)?

But who knows, when this more secure method for logging in is up, you might just not be feeling that scary feeling when logging in with that SingPass (which someone can sniff or easily guess) any more.