UPDATE: Digsby gave a complete review on their blog here. Go there for a more in depth review.

Back in May I wrote a review on Digsby, recently I have heard talk about it being spyware and stealing your information. I decided to do some research on it and see if there was any truth to these claims. I started out going to the Digsby blog and seeing if they had addressed anything on their blog. I found nothing so I went to the forums in hope of clarification. Here’s what I found out, the “spam” that is included is some tool bar offers that are from freeze.com. Typical things that are included in a lot of free programs, something that is very common now a days so nothing to bad. The company needs to generate revenue in someway to keep it free. The other problem people were having was when you go to download the program it redirects you to download.freeze.com so that can cause some people to worry that it sets of malware and spyware warnings, however you can download Digsby from their own servers right here.

The other issue is that there is a Java program running that’s associated with Digsby. That interested me because I don’t like things running on my computer that I don’t know what they are. This program takes advantage of your processer while your computer is idle to do research for mathematics and medical research. This can easily be turned of by going to:

Help Menu -> Support Digsby -> Next To "Help Digsby conduct research" click "Disable"

Now when this is running Digsby gets some money for helping with the research. The thing that bothered me the most about this is that the developers didn’t make it widely known that they were including this in an update and it was enabled by default. I have no problem letting it run since I’ve let it run since it was pushed in an update and have seen no performance decreases on my computer or any problems. I just wish that it had been told that this was included when updated and asked whether or not I wanted it enabled.

Overall I still think that Digsby is still the best IM client out there and I don’t think that these above issues are “spam” or “they are stealing your information.” I think that like every company Digsby needs revenue to keep going and they are trying to do it in the least visually intrusive way. I do hope however that the developers are more upfront about what is included in the updates. I would still recommend Digsby because nothing total negative is happening and you don’t have to install anything that you don’t want to.

(You can read the forums and response here and here.)

Today Microsoft released a update to the Zune to bring it to 3.1 included in this update is software fixes, better social support and three new games along with an update to Texas Hold’Em. The three new games are Checkers, Sudoku and Space Battle. They are pretty explanatory except for Space Battle. In Space Battle you fly around and shoot other enemies out of the sky. You can get upgrades like better shields, more ammo, and weapon upgrade along with more spaceship parts to customize your spaceship. On my first playing it the game seems more in-depth then I was expecting, which is a good thing. For Texas Hold’Em they added multi-player over WiFi. Some screen caps grabbed from Zune Insider.

Today was the release of the Zune 3.0 software and they finally added a clock. That whole update was worth it just for the clock. But 3.0 also brings a lot of nice features and improvements. After the release of Apples Genius feature where it picks songs that match your taste, the new Zune software comes with Mixview which is:

Dynamic representations of your collection, as well as artist and song recommendations based on what you and other members of the Social are listening to.

Its quite interesting to play around with, Jesus Diaz gives a good review over at Gizmodo. Some of the other more notable features added are games (Hexic and Texas Hold’Em), browse Zune marketplace by WiFi, buy from FM, which when your listening to a song on the radio you can add it to your cart and buy the song next time you sync it with your computer. Another notable feature is Zune Channels, which if you have a Zune Pass you can subscribe to the channel and it will add songs to a play list based on your listening habits. You can get a complete rundown of what’s new here.

Overall I think this new software is a step in the right direction for Microsoft and for the Zune team. I am glad that when I had the chance I chose the Zune over the iPod. Hit the jump for a couple of screen shots of the new software. I also scored a free episode of The Office off of the Zune Marketplace!!! So that along with the clock addition made it worth it.

Its been two weeks since Firefox 3 has come out and I’m just getting around to posting a “full” review of it. Overall I’m impressed with it, its a big step up from Firefox 2. There have been some visual changes as well as software and memory changes. Now I don’t know much about programing so I have no idea what they did but all I know is that its faster then 2 and that it uses a lot less memory then 2 did. One of the changes that I love that they did is when you enter your user name and password into a site a bar drops down from the top to ask if you want to save the password or not. In the older versions and was a pop up window that asked you which was extremely annoying if you entered the wrong password you wouldn’t know until after you selected if you wanted to save it or not.

Hit the jump too see some of the other changes…

Today was the official release of the ever popular Firefox 3. Today was the official day to download to try and set the Guinness book of world records record.