Bitdefender 2012

Bitdefender has updated its suites for the coming year, and it says it has done it in part by adopting a bit of Romanian lore. Although, to be honest, it may also sound familiar to fans of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones series. Available exclusively today from CNET Download.com, Bitdefender Total Security 2012 (download), Bitdefender Internet Security 2012 (download), and Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2012 (download)were improved in part by taking on the "philosophy based on mythical wolf-dragon from Romania," said Matt Hicks, the company's global public relations manager. The wolf-dragon, he said, is supposed to represent security and alertness.

Mozilla building mobile OS to battle Chrome

Mozilla revealed preliminary plans today to take the Gecko engine that drives its Firefox browser and turn it into an open-source operating system that will eventually work on phones and tablets.

Called Boot to Gecko, it is known that the source code will be released to the public "in real-time," wrote Andreas Gal, a Mozilla researcher. Gecko is the rendering engine that powers Firefox and the e-mail client Thunderbird. By contrast, while Google's Androidmobile operating system is open source, the main development work on it does not become available until after Google has green-lit its publication--sometimes not until months afterward.