Computer & Internet

The Stupid Things You Do Online (and How to Fix Them)

2012-02-09T15:58:00.000-08:00

The internet can bring you a lot of joy, but it can also turn into a world of pain the moment you make one stupid mistake. Perhaps you've been feeding the trolls, using "password" as your password, or selling your soul for access to a "free" web app. Your dumb mistakes can come back to bite you in the ass if you aren't careful. Here's how you can save yourself from yourself online.

Title image remixed from an original by Konstantin Maslak (Shutterstock).

Stupid Thing #1: You Undervalue Your Personal Data

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Most of the web has the appearance of being free, but when you sign up for Google services or a Facebook account you're potentially handing over a much more valuable commodity: your personal information. Companies want this information because it can be used to target more relevant ads to you. The more relevant the ads, the more likely you're going to buy. Although advertisements aren't necessarily all bad, because it's often preferable to see ads for things we actually want, it can be a little disconcerting and embarrassing when you do a search for herpes treatments and see nothing but Valtrex ads for a week. You shouldn't stop using the services you love just because they have a hidden cost, but it's important to understand that free services aren't really free. You are paying with your right to privacy, and that can feel a little invasive.

Full report :

Facebook IPO: five key figures set to make billions

2012-02-01T03:28:00.000-08:00

As Facebook prepares to go public, five key figures, from Bono to LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, are set to make billions.

By Matt Warman, Consumer Technology Editor

8:30AM GMT 01 Feb 2012

Sean Parker

Facebook’s first President is widely credited with turning Mark Zuckerberg’s project from a dorm room operation to a global business. Veteran Silicon Valley investor Parker has previously put money into Spotify, Napster and online address book Plaxo. And if ‘The Social Network’ is to be believed, he’s also the man who got the name changed from ‘thefacebook’ to simply ‘Facebook’.

Sheryl Sandberg

Increasingly the public face of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg mixes media-savvy with real business experience. Currently Chief Operating Officer, Sandberg was previously a Vice President at Google and Chief of Staff and the US Treasury. She is widely credited with turning Facebook into a profitable operation that relies on advertising.

Mark Pincus

CityVille, FarmVille and Mafia Wars are just three of the hugely successful games that more than 200million users regularly play on Facebook, and they’re all owned by games company Zynga.

read full report here :

LONG-AWAITED FACEBOOK IPO, IMMINENT

2012-02-01T03:22:00.000-08:00

Uploaded by cctvnewschannel on 31 Jan 2012 - Social networking giant Facebook is planning to file its initial public offering this Wednesday. The widely anticipated IPO is expected to raise about 10 billion US dollars, valuing the company between 75 billion and 100 billion dollars, as reported by Wall Street Journal.

EU gets tough on internet data protection

2012-01-25T11:19:00.001-08:00

Published on 25 Jan 2012 by Euronews - The EU has unveiled tough new rules on protecting internet users personal data that have far-reaching implications for web giants such as Google and Facebook. The proposals would significantly boost regulators' data protection powers.

Companies could be fined up to one percent of their global revenues for violating the rules.

Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said: "Citizens will have to know how their data is processed. Second: a consent to use data will be necessary, to be given the explicit consent by the citizens."

An ACTA of war: Secret censor tool to shake up world wide web.

2012-01-24T11:54:00.000-08:00

A demonstrator with ACTA stickers on his mouth takes part in a protest against Poland's government plans to sign international copyright agreement ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), in front of the European Union office in Warsaw on January 24, 2012 (AFP Photo / JANEK SKARZYNSKI)

As cyberspace turns its attention to the SOPA and PIPA bills in the US, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, has been quietly signed or ratified by most of the developed world and is arguably the biggest threat to Internet freedom yet.

ACTA has – officially – been in the works since 2008, and was signed by the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea in 2011. All negotiations were held behind closed doors, and it is mostly thanks to Internet hacktivist groups like Anonymous that news of the potential damage ACTA could cause has spread.

Most recently, Anonymous turned their attention to Poland, where officials announced that they will sign the controversial treaty on January 26. A number of government website attacks has left them paralyzed for two days, and several Polish websites have since announced they will go dark in protest at the treaty, echoing recent unprecedented actions by Wikipedia, Redditt, BoingBoing and many others.

However, Polish officials have said they will sign the agreement as planned. Government minister Michal Boni said "The ACTA agreement in no way changes Polish laws or the rights of Internet users and Internet usage,” after a meeting with Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The irony of that statement is that ACTA will do exactly that. It will surpass the sovereign laws of participating nations, especially in the matter of ISP monitoring.

ACTA's reach is far more global, with countries like the US, Switzerland, Japan and all European Union members in its grasp. It is allegedly being introduced "to create new legal standards of intellectual property enforcement, as well as increased international cooperation, an example of which would be an increase in information sharing between signatory countries' law enforcement agencies." But in reality, the measures that have been worked on by behind-the-scenes politicians and media industry moguls are just shy of draconian.

RT 24 Jan 2012 | read full report

What Is ACTA ?

2012-01-24T10:31:00.001-08:00

Uploaded by 1TheRevolutionIsNow on Jan 18, 2012 - ACTA - 'The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement' is a proposed plurilateral agreement for the purpose of establishing international standards on intellectual property rights enforcement in Europe.

ACTA would establish a new international legal framework that would create its "own governing body outside existing international institutions" such as - the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or the United Nations.

An open letter signed by many organizations, including Consumers International, EDRi (27 European civil rights and privacy NGOs), the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), ASIC (French trade association for web 2.0 companies), and the Free Knowledge Institute (FKI), states that "the current draft of ACTA would profoundly restrict the fundamental rights and freedoms of European citizens, most notably the freedom of expression and communication privacy."

US Senate postpones anti-piracy law

2012-01-20T14:30:00.001-08:00

SOPA & PIPA : Anonymous - Don't Mess With Us

2012-01-20T02:14:00.000-08:00

Uploaded by bioniKAnon on 19 Jan 2012 - A New Era Has Come, Anonymous is no longer playing nice, and we do not intend to ever play nice.

We have seen you Corrupt our People, Corrupt our country and we will not sit and watch while you allow bills such as SOPA and PIPA to be passed.On January 19, 2012 a popular sharing website named Megaupload was taken down. We were not hesitant and reacted quickly. Remaining to our word, we took down their main sources (??), MIAA and FBI are down.

Our Power is too strong and soon they will have to listen to the people. This is a time of action. We as a nation must come together and fight the tyrants!

Do not sit and watch Do not sit and cheer! Use your powers.Artists be creative, Singers be lyrical, writers spread our word! We will not be silenced!

U.S. shuts Megaupload.com, hackers retaliate.

2012-01-20T00:51:00.000-08:00

By Jeremy Pelofsky and Jim Finkle

Fri Jan 20, 2012 12:42am EST

(Reuters) - The U.S. government shut down the Megaupload.com content sharing website, charging its founders and several employees with massive copyright infringement, the latest skirmish in a high-profile battle against piracy of movies and music.

The Department of Justice announced the indictment and arrests of four company executives in New Zealand on Friday as debate over online piracy reaches fever pitch in Washington where lawmakers are trying to craft tougher legislation.

The movie and music industries want Congress to crack down on Internet piracy and content theft, but major Internet companies like Google and Facebook have complained that current drafts of the legislation would lead to censorship.

A Justice Department official said the timing of the arrests was not related to the battle in Congress.

New Zealand police on Friday raided a mansion in Auckland and arrested Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, also known as Kim Schmitz, 37, a German national with New Zealand residency.

Full report from : reuters

US shuts down MegaUpload as founders are arrested.

2012-01-20T00:30:00.000-08:00

Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on 20 Jan 2012 - The US government has shut down one of the world's most popular file-sharing websites for allegedly violating piracy laws, as police arrested MegaUpload.com's co-founders and another staff member in New Zealand.

Working with US authorities, police in the New Zealand's city of Auckland detained co-founders Kim Dotcom, also known as Kim Shmitz, and Mathias Ortmann, as well as the website's chief marketing officer, Finn Batato, after a raid on a luxury mansion.

... about SOPA and PIPA.

2012-01-18T12:07:00.000-08:00

Boing Boing editor speaks to Al Jazeera

Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on 18 Jan 2012Numerous US-based websites, including Wikipedia, Boing Boing (Rob Beschizza, the managing editor speaking)and Reddit have gone offline as a protest against two US laws that they say limits important freedoms that the internet has brought people.

The two laws are called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the "Protect Intellectual Property Act" (PIPA).Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, eBay and AOL have all spoken out against the proposed legislation.

nano tech for more memory energy efficient computers.

2012-01-15T06:59:00.001-08:00

Researchers unveil new nano-data technology

Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on 14 Jan 2012 - Researchers at IBM have created the world's smallest magnetic digital-storage device, using just 12 atoms to hold a single data bit of information.

The discovery could lead to a new class of memory chips that would make smaller, more energy efficient computers.

Tablets at Annual Consumer Electronics Show.

2012-01-13T11:54:00.000-08:00

Published on 12 Jan 2012 by Euronews - The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is, say the organisers, gadget heaven. They expect around 150,000 people to visit the show for a first look at some of the new gadgets being shown by around 2,700 exhibitors.

Intel is hoping to corner a new market with their "Ultrabook." An ultraportable laptop, it's very small and light but boasts standard performance by using low-power Intel processors.

Web addresses up for sale

2012-01-12T03:41:00.000-08:00

Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on 12 Jan 2012 - Web addresses like dot com, dot org, or dot UK have shaped the way we navigate the web, but now that is about to change.Anyone can now apply for an address using pretty much anything in any language and script.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organisation which manages the addresses, says the changes will open the internet to the world.Applying for the suffix though is not cheap; you will have shell out a whopping $185,000 to buy an internet domain name ending in any word you like.Big corporate are expected to be first in line to register their brands.

What FACEBOOK and GOOGLE are Hiding from world.

2012-01-10T07:22:00.000-08:00

Uploaded by thoughtawakening on 14 Sep 2011 :-

How to disable facebook timeline 2012.

2012-01-06T23:25:00.000-08:00

Uploaded by YourFavourite Bobby on 2 Jan 2012:
Like this PAGE on facebook- http://www.facebook.com/pages/YourFavouriteBobby/125948130856309

This video tutorial is about how to remove/disable facebook timeline.A lot of People has been asking me to help them to remove timeline. so i made this video for them.

For Mozila firefox users:-STEPS-
1-First open your Firefox Browser and goto TOOLS then Go to Add-ons.
2-Now you will found Add-on settings and then search "User Agent Switcher" in top search bar.
3-install this Add-on(user agent switcher).
4-now restart your Firefox Browser then go to TOOLS..
5-Now click on Default User Agent Switcher Button and then select Internet Explorer 7.
6-Now Login to Facebook and you will see your old profile back.(if you again want your facebook timeline account simply goto TOOLS, click add-ons,set user agent switcher=disable.)

For GOOGLE CHROME users:-STEPS-
1-Before Opening the Chrome browser Right click on the chrome icon and choose Properties.
2-Now Look for the Target box and add the following code after 'chrome.exe'. (leave space after chrome.exe)--user-agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
3-Now click 'Apply' and then 'ok'.
4-Restart Chrome.
5-Now open your facebook and you will see your old Profile back.

(if you want your timeline account again then right click on chrome before opening - goto properties, look for the target box and remove the code after chrome.exe, click apply then ok.)

New Facebook worm threatens user security

2012-01-06T22:20:00.001-08:00

Published on 5 Jan 2012 by Euronews - More than 45,000 Facebook accounts - mostly in the UK and France - have been compromised.A computer worm - dubbed Ramnit - has stolen login credentials and sent malicious links to users' friends.Security experts recommend users run their anti-virus software to be sure their computer has not been infected.

2012 : coming up Technology.

2011-12-31T23:44:00.001-08:00

Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on 31 Dec 2011 - If it feels like you are forever playing catch-up in the digital world, it's probably because you are.Technology analysts say 2012 looks set to be another bumper year -- with a dizzying crop of innovations set to come to market.

Venture Capitalist Roger McNamee: 'Google Is Done'.

2011-12-30T21:48:00.000-08:00

Uploaded by ForaTv on 30 Dec 2011 : Roger McNamee notices a precipitous decline in Google's search business as a result of the iPhone and other mobile devices, which use apps to access the internet instead of the world wide web. "Because search is falling, I believe that we're being liberated," says McNamee.

Roger McNamee is a managing director and co-founder of Elevation Partners. Prior to Elevation, Roger was a co-founder of Silver Lake Partners, the leading private equity fund focused on technology and related growth industries. He was a member of Silver Lake's Investment Committee and was involved in all aspects of that partnership. Prior to Silver Lake, Roger was a co-founder of Integral Capital Partners. Integral is a leading technology investor in late-stage venture and public company investments. Founded in 1991 by Roger, John A. Powell, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Integral pioneered the crossover investment strategy, which seeks maximum capital appreciation by making investments in expansion-stage private companies and growth-stage public companies in the technology and life science industries.

Assisting to promote FF:

2011-12-29T13:32:00.000-08:00

Trouble viewing? Read this in your browser. From Mozilla, a non-profit organization and developer of Firefox

Hi there,

As 2011 comes to a close, we at Mozilla want to say thank you to all of our Firefox users, supporters and community members. Quite simply, we do what we do because of you.

Mozilla is the force behind Firefox, but we're also a whole lot more than that. And the more people I talk to, the clearer it becomes that not everyone knows what Mozilla is and how we're different. So today, I wanted to make sure you understand it because you're such an important part of our story.

Mozilla is a global non-profit fighting to keep the Internet safe, accessible and awesome. Our goal is to put the power of the Web in people's hands and to innovate for users everywhere. That means a better experience for you and a brighter future for the Web.

So what does that look like? We put together a short video that tells the story of what is possible when a small group of people – a community of idealists, innovators and collaborators – comes together to create, shape and build the future of the Web. Please take a moment to watch the video. If you like it, share it far and wide and consider making a tax-deductible gift to help support the work that we're doing together.

Mozilla is always developing new projects that allow people to dream, discover and create online. Whether it's Hackasaurus, our project that teaches kids to remix and shape the Web in a way that sets them up for a lifetime of creation, or Popcorn, which lets anyone bring the Web into video, we're building software and programs that will create the next generation of webmakers.

But as a non-profit, we can only do that if folks just like you support us.

As the year is almost over – and as part of our ongoing fundraising efforts – I'd like to ask you to make a gift of just $10 or more:

https://donate.mozilla.org/End-Of-Year

With your help, we can continue to innovate on your behalf without any pressure to compromise, and make the future of the Web brighter than ever. We invite you to be part of something bigger than the Web – something bigger than all of us.

Sincerely,

Mark
--
Mark Surman
Executive Director
Mozilla Foundation

Thanks for Reading!

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Mozilla Privacy Policy.

Facebook 'buys Gowalla to bolster location offering'

2011-12-05T07:50:00.001-08:00

The social network is understood to have struck a deal with the Texas-based location start-up.Facebook has declined to comment. However, Josh Williams, the founder and chief executive of Gowalla, did not deny the deal was going through in an email to AllThingsD, an American technology site.

He wrote: “The ink on the deal is not dry, so our holding pattern is that we do not comment on rumours and speculation. I have another email penned that was ready to send you today, assuming you would get this news before the story was officially released.“But now it is all over Twitter, so you have likely heard. A longer email will be sent soon.”

Gowalla, a mobile phone app, allows people to share the details of their location by checking-in to different venues. People can score points by checking-in multiple times to the same place and create a visual picture of their day using the service.

daily telegraph Dec 5,2011 | full news.

Computing With Light Is Now Closer To Reality.

2011-11-24T20:36:00.001-08:00

November 25, 2011 | There has been enormous progress in recent years toward the development of photonic chips — devices that use light beams instead of electrons to carry out their computational tasks. Now, researchers at MIT have filled in a crucial piece of the puzzle that could enable the creation of photonic chips on the standard silicon material that forms the basis for most of today’s electronics.

In many of today’s communication systems, data travels via light beams transmitted through optical fibers. Once the optical signal arrives at its destination, it is converted to electronic form, processed through electronic circuits and then converted back to light using a laser. The new device could eliminate those extra electronic-conversion steps, allowing the light signal to be processed directly.

The new component is a “diode for light,” says Caroline Ross, the Toyota Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, who is co-author of a paper reporting the new device that was published online Nov. 13 in the journal Nature Photonics. It is analogous to an electronic diode, a device that allows an electric current to flow in one direction but blocks it from going the other way; in this case, it creates a one-way street for light, rather than electricity.

read full news :

GOOGLE WAR CRIME COVERUP MUST STOP

2011-10-30T09:25:00.000-07:00

Uploaded by THElNFOWARRlOR on Oct 29, 2011 - Kurt Nimmo

Alex Jones reveals the hypocrisy of the transnational corporation Google and its popular video asset YouTube. Libya, Wikileads

World's cheapest computer

2011-10-29T00:39:00.000-07:00

Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on 5 Oct 2011 - At the low price of $45, the world's cheapest computer tablet, made in India, is targeted mostly at students.In a country where laptops range from anywhere between $400 and $1,000, and where the average income is much lower, the hope is that more people, particularly the country's youth, will have greater access to technology.In the next few months over 100,000 such computers will be available in select universities. If successful, India may even sell it commercially, but experts say the design still has a long way to go.

BlackBerry users suffer blackout.

2011-10-11T02:00:00.000-07:00

Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on 10 Oct 2011 - With no emails, instant messaging, or social networking, BlackBerry users in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and India suffered a communication's blackout on Monday.The service disruption could not have come at worse time for Candian firm Research in Motion or RIM - the makers of the device - which faces stiff competition for corporate users as well as regular customers.

Last month, RIM had to deal with another disruption of its Messenger service in the Americas.Critics say there is growing concern that its servers are not secure enough.

Study: Texting while driving doubles danger risk.

2011-10-06T19:38:00.000-07:00

Published on 6 Oct 2011 by CBS - New research shows that texting while driving can more than double your reaction time, making it comparable to driving while drunk. Scott Pelley

Social Media Brings China New Challenges, Opportunities

2011-09-30T08:17:00.000-07:00

Uploaded by VOAvideo on 30 Sep 2011 - China has more people online than any other country in the world despite strict government controls on the the web. As China marks National Day, October 1, VOA's William Ide examines the growing pressures facing China and its leaders in the modern information age.

US military creates fake online personas

2011-09-28T06:33:00.001-07:00

The US military awarded a contract for software to create 500 fake personas on social networks in order to secretly influence online debate in its favour, it has been reported.

Facebook: The move has angered troops who regularly use networking sites to keep in touch with family and friends Photo: GETTY

By Christopher Williams, Technology Correspondent

4:54PM GMT 17 Mar 2011

The $2.76m contract was won by Ntrepid, a Californian firm, and called for an "online persona management service" that would enable 50 military spies to manage 10 fake identities each.

The personas should be "replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent", a US Central Command (Centcom) tender document said.

It added: "Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.

"Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms."

The project would be based at MacDill Air Force base in Florida, The Guardian reported. The contract was first revealed by The Raw Story, a US news website.

UK Telegraph | read full post

Face Book Privacy issue crop up again:

2011-09-26T08:04:00.000-07:00

CIA’s Facebook Knows Where You Go On the Web

Remember when Mark Zuckerberg said you need to get over the fact that there is no privacy on the internet?He meant it.Many of you have likely viewed the video below. It documents Facebook’s connection to the CIA.Many people, however, think the fun of posting on and the interaction of Facebook overshadows the downside, or they merely ignore the negative aspects.

Well, it turns out it is worse than we previously thought.Hacker and writer Nik Cubrilovic has a post on his blog today revealing some really scary and downright police state Stasi-like aspects of the popular “service” that doubles as a data-mining operation for the CIA.Cubrilovic writes that Facebook keeps track of every website destination you visit, even if YOU ARE LOGGED OUT OF FACEBOOK.

It does this through the cookies it routinely plants on your computer.This is somewhat of an overstatement. In fact, Facebook is only able to do this on pages that have its “Like” button on it, which is to say a lot of webpages, although hardly all.

Full report & video | Pakalert Press - 26 Sept 2011

Google launches latest tool in social networking

2011-09-23T13:59:00.000-07:00

Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on Sep 22, 2011 - A war is brewing in the cyber world. Google has launched a social networking tool called Google Plus. It is aimed at dethroning the field's crowned king - Facebook.

Julpan Acquired by Twitter

2011-09-21T12:22:00.000-07:00

I am very proud to announce that Julpan has been acquired by Twitter.

We founded Julpan more than a year ago. In that time we've created innovative, early-alpha-stage search technology that analyzes social activity across the Web to deliver fresh and relevant content to users.

Twitter houses an industry-leading engineering team that is tackling some of the Internet's most interesting opportunities. With more than 230 million Tweets per day on every subject imaginable, Twitter gives us a chance to make an even greater contribution toward instantly bringing people closer to what is most meaningful to them. We look forward to joining forces with Twitter's engineering team to explore how we can best integrate and optimize Julpan's innovations.

I'd like to personally thank the talented engineers, architects and designers of Julpan. I couldn't have asked for a better group of people with whom to invent some of the world's best social search technology.

Ori Allon, Director of Engineering, Twitter (former Founder & CEO of Julpan)

(Twitter Acquires Julpan, The Startup By The Guy Who Helped Perfect Google Search)

Everything You Need to Know About the Facebook Update

2011-09-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

You might have noticed that Facebook changed last night. Inline photos are a little bigger, the top bar a little blockier, and a news ticker now rests in the upper-righthand corner for real-time updates. Overwhelmed? We're here to help.

This latest flurry of updates caps off a steady flow of tweaks over the past few weeks. You now subscribe to your friends' updates as you would an RSS feeds. You can subscribe to people you're not even friends with. You can organize friend groups by type (in Google+ fashion), not just for chat purposes. And you also have more on-the-fly control over who does and doesn't see your wall posts. All of these features come together to make Facebook feel different, even if it's fundamentally unchanged at its core. Here's a look at the new Facebook.

Go to Original post :

Brazilians leading social media boom.

2011-09-20T09:46:00.000-07:00

Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on Sep 16, 2011 - Brazil is a country quickly becoming one of the most avid consumers of social media anywhere.

Blackberries - 4 new models.

2011-09-19T23:53:00.000-07:00

Published on Sep 19, 2011 by france24english : TECH 24 - The new technologies and their impact on our society. Blackberries, androids, iphone, ipads, smartphones & mobiles.

This Is the Internet.

2011-09-19T10:08:00.000-07:00

The Internet isn't only on your screen. Or behind your couch. Or in Google's data centers. It's also underwater, where fiber-optic cables stretch across oceans and loop around continents.

Satellites are like dial-up. Nobody uses them. Undersea cables make the Internet global, with the most sophisticated of them capable of transmitting nearly ten terabits of data per second, compressed through just a handful of fiber-optic strands. There are only hundreds of these cables in waters around the world. And they are all preposterously proportioned, as thin as a garden hose and as long as-actually, nothing. No human construction matches them. They are the longest tubes ever made, and, for the first time ever, there's a truly accurate interactive online map of them.

For a decade, Washington DC-based Telegeography has been publishing an undersea cable map. But it's always been on paper, delivered in a cardboard tube, and sold for $250. But starting today (right this second, actually) the company has put its map online, for free, and made it interactive. And rather than scraping data from Wikipedia, Telegeography's Internet cartographers get information the old fashioned way: They ask the cable owners, who happily share the location of their landing stations and the current bandwidth capacity of their systems.

Full report :

Window 8

2011-09-13T14:52:00.001-07:00

Windows 8, which was fully unveiled at the Windows Build Conference in Anaheim, California, is here, and it looks much, much different from Windows 7. Sure, it has the start-bar-and-icon "Desktop" look that Windows users are familiar with, but it also has a new, touchscreen-optimized interface called 'Metro,' which looks more like the Windows Phone operating system and which looks like the future of Microsoft Windows from here on out.

The touch-optimized interface was all Stephen Sinofsky, President of Windows, and Julie Larson-Green, Corporate Vice President of Windows, were talking about when they showed off Windows 8 to developers at the conference. (They did not, however, mention when the new OS would be available to users.) Here are some screenshots of the new Windows 8 from Sinofsky and Larson-Green's presentation, along with explanations of the newest features and interfaces that users can expect on their new tablets and PCs. Which of these features are you most excited for? Share your thoughts about Windows 8 in the comments.

read full post.

Firefox 6 ships, but we shouldn't really pay attention.

2011-08-17T13:29:00.000-07:00

By Peter Bright | Microsoft contributor (hence that explain the title)

The Mozilla organization has shipped Firefox 6, eight weeks after the release of Firefox 5. Just as with Firefox 5, not a lot has visibly changed. The domain name in the address bar is now highlighted, to make phishing more apparent—mimicing a similar feature already found in Internet Explorer—sites with "extended verification" certificates appear slightly differently in the address bar, and Mozilla is claiming that there's some speed improvement. And that's about the extent of it. More substantial improvements are in the pipeline for Firefox 7—most notably a JavaScript engine that uses much less memory—but nothing so substantial is evident in version 6.

This smaller release—bug fixes, behind-the-scenes improvements, but little user-visible difference—is likely to be the norm for future Firefox versions. Bigger features will still arrive from time to time, but for the most part, users will just experience a continuous improvement. Firefox updates should be automatic and essentially invisible. Even articles such as this one, which attach some significance to the new release, are probably not what Mozilla wants—press coverage should focus on features, not version numbers. Mozilla—as with Google—wants developers to cease targeting specific browser versions, and instead target standards; the regular releases are one step towards achieving that goal.

Another key part is downplaying version numbers. Again, Chrome is the obvious example here; if you look at the Chrome download page, for example, there's no indication of which version of Chrome you're going to get. It's just "the latest."

However, Mozilla wants to take this a step further. A feature request entered into Mozilla's bug system (feature requests aren't bugs in any traditional sense, but Mozilla uses one system for managing everything) calls for the removal of the version number from Firefox's "About" dialog. Instead, the intent is to make the About box do two things; show the product name and links to legal information, as it already does, and show how long ago Firefox checked that it was up-to-date, with some kind of provision to check right now. There won't be a version number—just an indicator of whether the browser is up-to-date or not.

This was no mere trolling or attempt to start a discussion: the request was made by Asa Dotzler, Firefox's Product lead, and he says he filed the bug at the suggestion of Firefox's usability lead, Alex Limi. The desire to get rid of the version number is coming from the top.

The reaction, however, was almost universally negative. While many commenters agreed with the broader desire to downplay version numbers, they disagreed with the change, since the version number remains useful when diagnosing problems, and users expect to see it in the about dialog. Quotes were made from the Windows, Mac OS X, and GNOME user interface guidelines to bolster this point; in all three, the about dialog is meant to specify a version. Getting rid of the version number breaks this expectation. Version information would still be visible, but only through the little-known "about:support" page.

While we have agreed with Mozilla that the rapid release policy and downplaying of the version number is the best way forward for the Web itself, the virtue of making this change is harder to fathom. For most people, the only reason to even have an "About" dialog is to see which version you're running—the number of users who care about the legal mumbo jumbo, or Mozilla's mission-statement, is vanishingly few. Even having the update feature in the About box (as Chrome also does) runs contrary to expectations—checking which version you're currently running shouldn't change that version.

And for what gain? Even if the version number isn't very important, it's a piece of trivia that users expect to see there. Putting it there hurts nobody, and is consistent with their expectations. The biggest problem with browser version numbers is not browser users—it's Web developers, making decisions on the basis of the version string. If Mozilla were really serious about preventing people from depending on the version number, it's not the About dialog that would lose the version number—it's the version information sent to every Web server every single time the browser requests a page that should disappear. Leave the information accessible to users; just prevent developers from having access to it. That's where it really matters.

The argument is made that you don't know what version of, say, Twitter or Facebook you're using, so why should your Web browser be any different? One rather big, obvious difference is that Web sites aren't installed locally and don't have to be manually updated. Firefox at the moment still does. The browser still doesn't have a robust automatic update mechanism. It doesn't perform Chrome-like silent updates, so the user is made painfully aware that she is switching versions. If you're going to force the user to know about every update, it seems a little unfair to refuse to even tell her what version she's using.

In similar with the enterprise issue, it also seems that the entire problem could have been avoided if Mozilla had simply switched to a date-like version number. This would both end one of the enterprise gripes—that major version number bumps incur extra testing—and the About box could then say something equivalent to, "this version of Firefox was created on 2011-08-11. It is up-to-date," which would both tell users how stale their version was (if at all), and serve as a version identifier of sorts.

Dotzler's mind appears to be made up, however. Though he "relinquished" the bug report "to the mob", apparently due to the negative reception, he regards the entire discussion as crazy. So the change looks as if it's going to go ahead, user expectations be damned.

Original article | Photograph by Brooke Novak

Future of Facebook: Economy

2011-08-01T13:46:00.000-07:00

FutureOf Facebook on Jun 30, 2011 - the first in a six part series exploring the relationship between social networks and Society, Technology, Environment, Economy and Politics.

Google search goes personal!

2011-07-03T15:18:00.000-07:00

How the net traps us all in our own little bubbles

An invisible revolution has taken place is the way we use the net, but the increasing personalisation of information by search engines such as Google threatens to limit our access to information and enclose us in a self-reinforcing world view, writes Eli Pariser in an extract from The Filter Bubble

A slide from Eli Pariser's TED Talk presentation which discusses how major internet players are tailoring information to individuals. Illustration: Justin Kemerling and Eli Pariser

Few people noticed the post that appeared on Google's corporate blog on 4 December 2009. It didn't beg attention – no sweeping pronouncements, no Silicon Valley hype, just a few paragraphs sandwiched between a round-up of top search terms and an update on Google's finance software.

Not everyone missed it. Search-engine blogger Danny Sullivan pores over the items on Google's blog, looking for clues about where the monolith is headed next, and to him, the post was a big deal. In fact, he wrote later that day, it was "the biggest change that has ever happened in search engines". For Danny, the headline said it all: "Personalised search for everyone".

Starting that morning, Google would use 57 signals – everything from where you were logging in from to what browser you were using to what you had searched for before – to make guesses about who you were and what kinds of sites you'd like. Even if you were logged out, it would customise its results, showing you the pages it predicted you were most likely to click on.

Most of us assume that when we google a term, we all see the same results – the ones that the company's famous Page Rank algorithm suggests are the most authoritative based on other pages' links. But since December 2009, this is no longer true. Now you get the result that Google's algorithm suggests is best for you in particular – and someone else may see something entirely different. In other words, there is no standard Google any more.

It's not hard to see this difference in action. In the spring of 2010, while the remains of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig were spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, I asked two friends to search for the term "BP". They're pretty similar – educated white left-leaning women who live in the north-east. But the results they saw were quite different. One saw investment information about BP. The other saw news. For one, the first page of results contained links about the oil spill; for the other, there was nothing about it except for a promotional ad from BP. Even the number of results returned differed – 180 million for one friend and 139 million for the other. If the results were that different for these two progressive east-coast women, imagine how different they would be for my friends and, say, an elderly Republican in Texas (or, for that matter, a businessman in Japan).

With Google personalised for everyone, the query "stem cells" might produce diametrically opposed results for scientists who support stem-cell research and activists who oppose it. "Proof of climate change" might turn up different results for an environmental activist and an oil-company executive. A huge majority of us assume search engines are unbiased. But that may be just because they're increasingly biased to share our own views. More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click. Google's announcement marked the turning point of an important but nearly invisible revolution in how we consume information. You could say that on 4 December 2009 the era of personalisation began.

With little notice or fanfare, the digital world is fundamentally changing. What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone – where, in the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, nobody knows you're a dog – is now a tool for soliciting and analysing our personal data. According to one Wall Street Journal study, the top 50 internetsites, from CNN to Yahoo to MSN, install an average of 64 data-laden cookies and personal tracking beacons each. Search for a word like "depression" on Dictionary.com, and the site installs up to 223 tracking cookies and beacons on your computer so that other websites can target you with antidepressants. Open a page listing signs that your spouse may be cheating, and prepare to be haunted with DNA paternity-test ads. The new internet doesn't just know you're a dog: it knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium dog food.

The race to know as much as possible about you has become the central battle of the era for internet giants like Google, Facebook, Apple andMicrosoft. As Chris Palmer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explained to me: "You're getting a free service, and the cost is information about you. And Google and Facebook translate that pretty directly into money." While Gmail and Facebook may be helpful, free tools, they are also extremely effective and voracious extraction engines into which we pour the most intimate details of our lives. Your smooth new iPhone knows exactly where you go, whom you call, what you read; with its built-in microphone, gyroscope and GPS, it can tell whether you're walking or in a car or at a party.

While Google has (so far) promised to keep your personal data to itself, other popular websites and apps make no such guarantees. Behind the pages you visit, a massive new market for information about what you do online is growing, driven by low-profile but highly profitable personal data companies like BlueKai and Acxiom. Acxiom alone has accumulated an average of 1,500 pieces of data on each person on its database – which includes 96% of Americans – along with data about everything from their credit scores to whether they've bought medication for incontinence. And any website – not just the Googles and Facebooks of the world – can now participate in the fun. In the view of the "behaviour market" vendors, every "click signal" you create is a commodity, and every move of your mouse can be auctioned off within microseconds to the highest commercial bidder.

As a business strategy, the internet giants' formula is simple: the more personally relevant their information offerings are, the more ads they can sell, and the more likely you are to buy the products they're offering. And the formula works. Amazon sells billions of dollars in merchandise by predicting what each customer is interested in and putting it in the front of the virtual store. Up to 60% of US film download and DVD-by-mail site Netflix's rentals come from the guesses it can make about each customer's preferences.

In the next three to five years, says Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, the idea of a website that isn't customised to a particular user will seem quaint. Yahoo vice president Tapan Bhat agrees: "The future of the web is about personalisation… now the web is about 'me'. It's about weaving the web together in a way that is smart and personalised for the user." Google CEO Eric Schmidt enthuses that the "product I've always wanted to build" is Google code that will "guess what I'm trying to type". Google Instant, which guesses what you're searching for as you type, and was rolled out in the autumn of 2010, is just the start – Schmidt believes that what customers want is for Google to "tell them what they should be doing next".

It would be one thing if all this customisation was just about targeted advertising. But personalisation isn't just shaping what we buy. For a quickly rising percentage of us, personalised news feeds like Facebook are becoming a primary news source – 36% of Americans aged under 30 get their news through social-networking sites. And Facebook's popularity is skyrocketing worldwide, with nearly a million more people joining each day. As founder Mark Zuckerberg likes to brag, Facebook may be the biggest source of news in the world (at least for some definitions of "news"). And personalisation is shaping how information flows far beyond Facebook, as websites from Yahoo News to the New York Times-funded startup News.me cater their headlines to our particular interests and desires. It's influencing what videos we watch on YouTube and what blog posts we see. It's affecting whose emails we get, which potential mates we run into on OkCupid, and which restaurants are recommended to us on Yelp – which means that personalisation could easily have a hand not only in who goes on a date with whom but in where they go and what they talk about. The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives.

The basic code at the heart of the new internet is pretty simple. The new generation of internet filters looks at the things you seem to like – the actual things you've done, or the things people like you like – and tries to extrapolate. They are prediction engines, constantly creating and refining a theory of who you are and what you'll do and want next. Together, these engines create a unique universe of information for each of us – what I've come to call a filter bubble – which fundamentally alters the way we encounter ideas and information. Of course, to some extent we've always consumed media that appealed to our interests and avocations and ignored much of the rest. But the filter bubble introduces three dynamics we've never dealt with before.

First, you're alone in it. A cable channel that caters to a narrow interest (say, golf) has other viewers with whom you share a frame of reference. But you're the only person in your bubble. In an age when shared information is the bedrock of shared experience, the filter bubble is a centrifugal force, pulling us apart.

Second, the filter bubble is invisible. Most viewers of conservative or liberal news sources know that they're going to a station curated to serve a particular political viewpoint. But Google's agenda is opaque. Google doesn't tell you who it thinks you are or why it's showing you the results you're seeing. You don't know if its assumptions about you are right or wrong – and you might not even know it's making assumptions about you in the first place. My friend who got more investment-oriented information about BP still has no idea why that was the case – she's not a stockbroker. Because you haven't chosen the criteria by which sites filter information in and out, it's easy to imagine that the information that comes through a filter bubble is unbiased, objective, true. But it's not. In fact, from within the bubble, it's nearly impossible to see how biased it is.

Finally, you don't choose to enter the bubble. When you turn on Fox News or read The New Statesman, you're making a decision about what kind of filter to use to make sense of the world. It's an active process, and like putting on a pair of tinted glasses, you can guess how the editors' leaning shapes your perception. You don't make the same kind of choice with personalised filters. They come to you – and because they drive up profits for the websites that use them, they'll become harder and harder to avoid.

Personalisation is based on a bargain. In exchange for the service of filtering, you hand large companies an enormous amount of data about your daily life – much of which you might not trust friends with. These companies are getting better at drawing on this data to make decisions every day. But the trust we place in them to handle it with care is not always warranted, and when decisions are made on the basis of this data that affect you negatively, they're usually not revealed.

Ultimately, the filter bubble can affect your ability to choose how you want to live. To be the author of your life, professor Yochai Benkler argues, you have to be aware of a diverse array of options and lifestyles. When you enter a filter bubble, you're letting the companies that construct it choose which options you're aware of. You may think you're the captain of your own destiny, but personalisation can lead you down a road to a kind of informational determinism in which what you've clicked on in the past determines what you see next – a web history you're doomed to repeat. You can get stuck in a static, ever- narrowing version of yourself – an endless you-loop.

And there are broader consequences. In Bowling Alone, his book on the decline of civic life in America, Robert Putnam looked at the problem of the major decrease in "social capital" – the bonds of trust and allegiance that encourage people to do each other favours, work together to solve common problems, and collaborate. Putnam identified two kinds of social capital: there's the in-group-oriented "bonding" capital created when you attend a meeting of your college alumni, and then there's "bridging" capital, which is created at an event like a town meeting when people from lots of different backgrounds come together to meet each other. Bridging capital is potent: build more of it, and you're more likely to be able to find that next job or an investor for your small business, because it allows you to tap into lots of different networks for help.

Everybody expected the internet to be a huge source of bridging capital. Writing at the height of the dotcom bubble, Tom Friedman declared that the internet would "make us all next-door neighbours". In fact, this idea was the core of his thesis in The Lexus and the Olive Tree: "The internet is going to be like a huge vice that takes the globalisation system … and keeps tightening and tightening that system around everyone, in ways that will only make the world smaller and smaller and faster and faster with each passing day."

Friedman seemed to have in mind a kind of global village in which kids in Africa and executives in New York would build a community together. But that's not what's happening: our virtual neighbours look more and more like our real-world neighbours, and our real-world neighbours look more and more like us. We're getting a lot of bonding but very little bridging. And this is important because it's bridging that creates our sense of the "public" – the space where we address the problems that transcend our narrow self-interests.

We are predisposed to respond to a pretty narrow set of stimuli – if a piece of news is about sex, power, gossip, violence, celebrity or humour, we are likely to read it first. This is the content that most easily makes it into the filter bubble. It's easy to push "Like" and increase the visibility of a friend's post about finishing a marathon or an instructional article about how to make onion soup. It's harder to push the "Like" button on an article titled "Darfur sees bloodiest month in two years". In a personalised world, important but complex or unpleasant issues – the rising prison population, for example, or homelessness – are less likely to come to our attention at all.

As a consumer, it's hard to argue with blotting out the irrelevant and unlikable. But what is good for consumers is not necessarily good for citizens. What I seem to like may not be what I actually want, let alone what I need to know to be an informed member of my community or country. "It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest," technology journalist Clive Thompson told me. Cultural critic Lee Siegel puts it a different way: "Customers are always right, but people aren't."

The era of personalisation is here, and it's upending many of our predictions about what the internet would do. The creators of the internet envisioned something bigger and more important than a global system for sharing pictures of pets. The manifesto that helped launch the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the early 1990s championed a "civilisation of Mind in cyberspace" – a kind of worldwide metabrain. But personalised filters sever the synapses in that brain. Without knowing it, we may be giving ourselves a kind of global lobotomy instead.

Early internet enthusiasts like web creator Tim Berners-Lee hoped it would be a new platform for tackling global problems. I believe it still can be, but first we need to pull back the curtain – to understand the forces that are taking the internet in its current direction. We need to lay bare the bugs in the code – and the coders – that brought personalisation to us.

If "code is law", as Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig declared, it's important to understand what the new lawmakers are trying to do. We need to understand what the programmers at Google and Facebook believe in. We need to understand the economic and social forces that are driving personalisation, some of which are inevitable and some of which are not. And we need to understand what all this means for our politics, our culture and our future.

Adapted from The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser.

Name your dot & pay the money, anything goes.

2011-06-20T15:41:00.001-07:00

AlJazeeraEnglish on 20 Jun 2011 - The regulatory body that oversees internet domain names, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has voted to revamp the naming system for websites, allowing them to end with words like "apple" and "orange".It will accept applications for new suffixes from January 12 next year at $185,000 per domain.

Today, just 22 gTLDs exist -- .com, .org and .info are a few examples -- plus about 250 country-level domains like .uk or .cn. After the change, several hundred new gTLDs are expected to come into existence.

Al Jazeera speaks to Larry Magid,a Los Angeles-based technology journalist for more.

The Google hacker!

2011-06-20T15:32:00.001-07:00

Chinese cooking school named

AlJazeeraEnglish on 13 Jun 2011 - Google recently accused hackers in China of breaking into the personal accounts of U-S officials. They say the attack originated from a cooking school in the city of Jinan.Beijing has denied any state involvement, despite admitting the existence of an elite cyber wing of the People's Liberation Army.

Melissa Chan reports from Jinjan, China.

Cyberlocker: What Is a Cyberlocker?

2011-06-18T10:06:00.000-07:00

Why Are They Considered Music Pirate Tools?

Question: Cyberlocker: What Is a Cyberlocker? Why Are They Considered Music Pirate Tools?

MegaUpload, DropBox, HotFile, RapidShare, MediaFire, MegaVideo: these are just some of the cyberlocker services today. But what exactly do they do? And why are cyberlockers a threat to music and movie copyright?

Answer: Cyberlockers are 3rd-party file-sharing services. Cyberlockers are also known as 'file hosting' services. Driven by advertising and subscriptions, these cyberlockers provide password-protected hard drive space online. You have the option of sharing the cyberlocker password information with friends, who can privately download whatever contents you put in those folders. The cyberlockers range in size from a couple hundred megabytes for their free services, all the way up to 2 or more gigabytes for their paid subscriptions. These storage sizes will increase as hardware becomes cheaper and bandwidth becomes more efficient over the months ahead.

Tools for work and personal life: Much more convenient than sending file attachements, these cyberlockers are very useful for transferring documents and photos between friends. Perhaps you are collaborating on a PowerPoint show for a wedding, or you want to show your cousins your vacation photos from New Zealand. Instead of the annoying email blizzard of sending 46 photos through Gmail, you can simply drop them into your cyberlocker window through your browser. Your friends will access the content without worrying about a clogged inbox, and they can return the favor by sharing files with you.

Tools for music piracy: This is the concern for copyright authorities - because cyberlockers are so convenient and sophisticated enough to house large movie and music files, it is a common practice for people to share copies of .avi movies and .mp3 songs through their cyberlockers. And unlike bittorrent file-sharing which is traceable, cyberlockers are very hard to monitor, as they employ one-to-one connectivity which is essentially invisible to surveillance tools. Because of this convenience and anonymity, cyberlockers are an ideal tool for trading pirate movie and music files.

What are the good cyberlocker services?

There are several cyberlocker services. They each offer varying size limits for either free subscriptions (i.e. blinking advertising), or paid subscriptions (larger size limits, no advertising). Some of the more popular cyberlocker services include:

About.com | by Paul Gil

Apple - Introducing OS X Lion.

2011-06-07T12:55:00.000-07:00

6 Jun 2011 - Get a closer look at OS X Lion, the world's most advanced desktop operating system. With features like Mission Control, Launchpad, full-screen apps, and new gestures, OS X Lion takes Mac further than ever.

Apple unveils iCloud to cover device storage.

2011-06-07T09:20:00.000-07:00

7 Jun 2011 - First came the iPod followed by the iPhone and then the iPad - now, the umbrella tool to service them all... the iCloud. Apple's CEO Steve Jobs briefly returned to work from medical leave to unveil his newest baby: a remote online data storage and sharing service for the Apple platform. But its a convenience that's also raising some eyebrows over security concerns. - Al Jazeera's Gerald Tan reports.

Microsoft Agrees to Buy Skype for $8.5B

2011-05-10T08:54:00.000-07:00

AssociatedPress on May 10, 2011 - Microsoft has agreed to buy the popular Internet telephone service Skype. The $8.5 billion deal is the biggest in the software maker's 36-year history. (May 10)

Assange: Facebook, Google, Yahoo spying tools for US intelligence.

2011-05-03T06:12:00.000-07:00

May 2, 2011 - The man behind WikiLeaks says his website's revelations are just the tip of the iceberg. In an exclusive interview with RT, Julian Assange said it is only a matter of time before more damaging information becomes known.

Google acquisition of ITA Software approved, with conditions

2011-04-08T12:13:00.000-07:00

FinancialNewsOnline on Apr 8, 2011 - The Department of Justice said it had approved Google's (GOOG) acquisition of travel software maker ITA Software with a number of conditions. The department will require Google to develop and license travel software, to establish internal firewall procedures and to continue software research and development. The department said that Google will also be required to provide mandatory arbitration under certain circumstances and provide for a formal reporting mechanism for complainants if Google acts in an unfair manner.

Google could be target of Anti-Trust Probe.

2011-04-05T12:22:00.000-07:00

FinancialNewsOnline on Apr 5, 2011 - Google (GOOG) is down 2.2% to $574.58 on news the company could be a target of a U.S. Federal Trade Commission anti-trust probe.

The FTC is considering a broad antitrust investigation into the company's dominance in the Internet-search industry, Bloomberg reports.

The commission is awaiting the Justice Department's decision on whether it will challenge Google's planned M&A of ITA Software Inc.

The big business of little apps.

2011-03-12T15:27:00.000-08:00

france24english on Mar 11, 2011 - TECH 24 - This week on Tech 24 hosts Rebecca Bowring and Eric Olander explore how those little apps on your mobile phone are now a very big business. Also, a sneak peek at the highly anticipated Nintendo 3DS portable game player.

Technology at the forefront - Quake: internet and social networks in Japan

2011-03-12T15:00:00.000-08:00

VDownloader - How to download YouTube videos for free

2011-03-09T11:09:00.000-08:00

DownloadOnlineVideos on May 30, 2010 - This YouTube Downloader is vailable for free at http://vdownloader.com

VDownloader is the highest rated YouTube downloader on the market today.Would you like to watch your favorite videos from YouTube, Facebook, Blip.tv, MegaVideo, Veoh, Vimeo, Metacafe, DailyMotion, Google Video, Yahoo Video,

Android hit by rogue app viruses

2011-03-03T08:28:00.000-08:00

Android is becoming a popular target

for writers of mobile malware

More than 50 applications available via the official Android Marketplace have been found to contain a virus.

Analysis suggests that the booby-trapped apps may have been downloaded up to 200,000 times.

The malicious apps were copies of existing applications, such as games, that had been repackaged to include the virus code.

All the apps found to contain the malicious code have now been removed from the Android Marketplace.

Remove and recall

The virus-laden apps were discovered by a Reddit user called Lompolo who realised that one program was listed under the name of a publisher he knew had not written it.

He found that the app, which let people play guitar on their handset, was the same as the original but for a name change and some virus code buried within it.

BBC News | 3 Mar 2011 - Read full report

Chrome & Privacy - Browsers, Privacy

2011-02-23T05:06:00.000-08:00

Faster - Google Chrome 10 beta, try it?

2011-02-19T12:06:00.000-08:00

ZDnet - Google has just released Chrome 10 beta (10.0.648.82 for all you perfectionists) and it brings with it a whole slew of new things to play with.

First off, there’s a significant JavaScript performance boost thanks to the updated V8 engine. According toGoogle, this version of the V8 engine offers a 66% performance advantage over the current stable release. That alone is pretty impressive.

This beta also adds GPU acceleration for video. For those running video in full-screen mode this can mean a decrease in CPU usage of as much as 80%. A good thing for those living off battery.

Another new feature is that the browser setting page now opens in a tab of its own rather than in a separate window. A small change but one that makes a lot of sense. There’s also a handy search box to allow you to find the specific setting you are looking for. Might not be needed by geeks, but dead handy for everyone else (Hey, Microsoft! Here’s a setting that would be really handy for IE users … fire up those photocopiers!).

By Adrian Kingsley-Hughes | February 18, 2011 - read full post
To download the beta

'Significant' cyber attack on Canada linked to China

2011-02-18T09:24:00.000-08:00

AlJazeeraEnglish | February 17, 2011 - The Canadian government has confirmed that its computer systems have fallen victim to what they call "significant" cyber attacks. Hackers using China-based servers reportedly broke into computer systems at key Canadian ministries last month.And now authorities say more protection measures are needed.

Al Jazeera's Imtiaz Tyab reports.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 web browser goes live.

2011-02-13T06:30:00.000-08:00

Microsoft has said the latest version of its internet explorer web browser puts it ahead of competitors like Google and Firefox.

The software giant, which is losing market share, made the bold claim as it unveiled what is known as the release candidate of IE9.

This is the final test drive for the new browser - a chance to catch any last-minute bugs before its debut.

Privacy and speed set IE9 apart, Microsoft said

Bill Gross Just Acquired TweetDeck!

2011-02-11T19:29:00.000-08:00

UberMedia, Indeed. Bill Gross’ Twitter Ecosystem Empire Just Acquired TweetDeck

The number of companies in the Twitter ecosystem keeps contracting. But not for a necessarily bad reason, but because they keep getting purchased. And what’s crazy is that it’s largely one person who has been buying them up:Bill Gross. We’ve just learned that his company, now calledUberMedia, has just acquired TweetDeck.

We’re hearing that the deal, which happened recently, was in the $25 – $30 million range. And this is clearly the largest deal they’ve done yet as TweetDeck is the largest Twitter client outside of Twitter’s own properties.

This deal follows Gross’ company scooping up UberTwitter last month — a popular Twitter client for both BlackBerry and iPhone devices. And prior to that, earlier in January, they bought EchoFon, another popular Twitter client. But again, TweetDeck instantly becomes the crown jewel of the empire. And it means that UberMedia now owns a significant part of the overall ecosystem.

UberMedia has actually changed its name a few times now, partially due to these acquisitions. In April 2010, they launched as TweetUp, then they became PostUp, and then, following the UberTwitter deal, they became UberMedia. The company also own the popular Android Twitter client Twidroyd and Popurls (both of which they bought in July of last year), as well as the ad product, FollowMe. Overall, they fall under Gross’ Idealab.

The UK-based TweetDeck had raised a little over $5 million in funding.

TechCrunch | 1hr ago - read all

Stop the presses: Facebook CTO says news next in social revolution

2011-02-10T07:53:00.000-08:00

Each week we ask chief technology officers and other high-profile tech decision-makers three questions.

This week, Bret Taylor (pic), chief technology officer at Facebook and co-founder and former chief executive of FriendFeed, which was acquired by Facebook in August 2009, is providing the answers.

Founded in February 2004, Facebook is a social network utility and website, with over 600 million active users. The company is privately held, so does not publish results, but says it is cash positive as of 2009. Facebook employs over 2,000 people and has offices in 12 countries.

What's your biggest technology problem right now?

Probably the biggest technology problem we have is delivering Facebook to all the people who use it, in the places they want to use it. The past couple of years has seen a rise in really advanced mobile devices.

BBC News | 10 Feb 2011 - read Full report

Luv this ChromeTweetDeck?

2011-02-10T06:35:00.000-08:00

Utube : Introducing Chrome TweetDeck

TweetDeck | December 07, 2010 |An introduction to Chrome TweetDeck ("ChromeDeck"), presented by Richard Barley (@richardbarley) TweetDeck Community Manager.

TweetDeck is available in the Google Web Store now. Get it here http://bit.ly/chromedeck

'Twitter messages not private' rules PCC

2011-02-08T10:42:00.000-08:00

The PCC said it was increasingly being asked to make judgements about the use of social media

Material that is published on Twitter should be considered public and can be published, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has ruled.

The decision follows a complaint by a Department of Transport official that the use of her tweets by newspapers constituted an invasion of privacy.

Sarah Baskerville complained to the PCC about articles in the Daily Mail and Independent on Sunday.

The messages included remarks about being hungover at work.

She complained that this information was private and was only meant to be seen by her 700 followers.

Ms Baskerville said she had a clear disclaimer that the views expressed by her on Twitter were personal and not representative of her employer.

The disclaimer currently reads: "Scottish & Sober-ish.. Civil Servant. This is my personal account, personal views. Nothing to do with my employers. What I retweet I may or may not agree with."

Ms Baskerville complained to the press regulator, arguing that she could have a

"reasonable expectation" of privacy and that the reporting was misleading.

BBC News | 8 Feb 2011 - read full report

Social Media as a Tool for Protest

2011-02-03T17:07:00.000-08:00

By Marko Papic and Sean Noonan | 3 February 2011

Internet services were reportedly restored in Egypt on Feb. 2 after being completely shut down for two days. Egyptian authorities unplugged the last Internet service provider (ISP) still operating Jan. 31 amidst ongoing protests across the country. The other four providers in Egypt — Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr — were shut down as the crisis boiled over on Jan. 27. Commentators immediately assumed this was a response to the organizational capabilities of social media websites that Cairo could not completely block from public access.

The role of social media in protests and revolutions has garnered considerable media attention in recent years. Current conventional wisdom has it that social networks have made regime change easier to organize and execute. An underlying assumption is that social media is making it more difficult to sustain an authoritarian regime — even for hardened autocracies like Iran and Myanmar — which could usher in a new wave of democratization around the globe. In a Jan. 27 YouTube interview, U.S. President Barack Obama went as far as to compare social networking to universal liberties such as freedom of speech.

Social Media as a Tool for Protest is republished with permission of STRATFOR Global Intelligence.

"rendering the Geneva and Hague conventions in cyberspace" : Proposal for cyber war rules of engagement

2011-02-03T12:37:00.000-08:00

John Bumgarner from US Cyber Consequences Unit on current threats

The world needs cyber war "Rules of Engagement" to cope with potentially devastating cyber weapons, Russian and US experts will tell world leaders at a security conference on Friday.

The cyber proposal, seen exclusively by Newsnight, comes from the influential EastWest Institute in New York.

It describes "rendering the Geneva and Hague conventions in cyberspace".

Cyber security is on the agenda at the annual Munich Security Conference for the first time this year.

Those attending the conference include UK Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

LEARN MORE

Watch Susan Watts' full report on Thursday 3 February 2011 at 10.30pm on BBC Two, and then afterwards on the BBC iPlayerand Newsnight website.

The logic behind the move is that in the intermingled world of cyberspace, we may need to protect zones that run facilities such as hospitals or schools.

The draft document also calls for a fresh definition of "nation state", with new "territories" and players in cyberspace beyond government - such as multinationals, NGOs and citizens.

The proposal also says that ambiguity about what constitutes cyber conflict is delaying international policy to deal with it, and that perhaps the idea of "peace" or "war" is too simple in the internet age when the world could find itself in a third, "other than war", mode.

Pinpointing attackers

The US-Russian team point out that discriminating between military and civilian targets is more difficult in cyberspace, and may require protected, marked, domain names.

They say cyber weapons have attributes not previously seen with traditional weapons, nor considered during the development of the current Laws of War: "Cyber weapons can deliver, in the blink of an eye, wild viral behaviours that are easily reproduced and transferred, while lacking target discrimination."

Well-placed British government sources say they do not see a need for new international "treaties" for cyberspace, but do concede that there are areas that need discussion, especially on attribution.

How strongly should a state respond to an attack when you do not know who did it, where they did it from or what the intention was? In conventional military terms these questions are easier to answer - not so in the cyber world.

- EastWest Institute report "

The nature of cyber space, with its ease of anonymity and use of proxies, makes the attribution of any attack very difficult. This raises the question of proportionality:

"How strongly should a state respond to an attack when you do not know who did it, where they did it from or what the intention was? In conventional military terms these questions are easier to answer - not so in the cyber world," these sources pointed out to Newsnight.

John Bumgarner, research director for security technology at the US Cyber Consequences Unit, spoke to Newsnight about the kind of threats which exist:

"There's things out there that right now that exist that the general public really doesn't know about - stealthy type technologies that can be embedded into systems that can run that you'll never see. Those things already exist."

He said that capabilities which currently exist include turning off power grids, disrupting water supplies and manufacturing systems.

Business agenda

Others, however, say that talk of all out cyber "war" is hype, though useful to defence companies looking for new ways to make money.

About 80% of UK critical national infrastructure is privately run

Nevertheless, there are almost daily reports now of cyber incidents, most recently that Stock Exchanges in Britain and the US were seeking help from the security services after discovering they were victims of attempted cyber attacks.

"There's quite a lot in it, but they're also extensively hyped," according to Professor Peter Sommer of the London School of Economics, who wrote a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report on cyber security.

"In terms of the involvement of the big military companies, you have to realise that they are finding it extremely difficult to sell big, heavy equipment of the sort they are used to because the type of wars that we're involved in tend to be against insurgents.

"And so they are desperately looking for new product areas - and the obvious product area, they think, is cyber warfare - I'm not so sure about that."

And yet, "utterly dependent" is how one well-placed government source describes our relationship with cyberspace.

The message is blunt. Ensuring security in cyberspace is vital to our national security, our well being and our prosperity: "Without it we can't have the economy we aspire to."

And if that is not enough, the UK government also believes it is vital to maintaining our values as a democracy.

Real-time attack data

The government is therefore embarking on an ambitious project to forge what it calls a new "dialogue" between the state and commercial companies, for mutual benefit.

GCHQ is working on the development of an attack early-warning system

After all, some 80% of our critical national infrastructure is owned and run by the private sector, and that is before you take account of the tangle of undersea fibre-optic cables that carry over 90% of our internet traffic, with all the physical vulnerabilities to terrorist attack that implies.

At the new Cyber Security Operations Centre at GCHQ, the UK's electronic intelligence agency in Cheltenham, the eventual aim is for real-time, open exchange of data from companies about how and when they are suffering attacks on their IT systems from cyberspace.

This should give the government early-warning of cyber attacks that could bring down critical national infrastructure. In return, the commercial sector can expect expertise on-tap.

This builds on existing trusted relationships with energy and water companies, but will extend to other sectors, such as food distribution, finance and transport.

The idea was mooted by Iain Lobban, director of GCHQ, in a rare speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (ISS) last October.

A substantial chunk of the £650m allocated to cyber security in the subsequent Strategic Defence and Security Review is now heading in that direction.

Watch Susan Watts' full report on the threat posed by cyber warfare on Newsnight on Thursday 3 February 2011 at 10.30pm on BBC Two, then afterwards on the BBC iPlayer and Newsnight website.

By Susan Watts
BBC Newsnight Science editor -

Google accuses Bing of 'copying' its search results

2011-02-02T08:29:00.000-08:00

Google created fake results for nonsense words such as 'hiybbprqag'

Google has accused Microsoft of cheating, following an investigation known as the 'Bing Sting'.

Google engineers created 100 nonsensical queries such as "hiybbprqag" and inserted a fake result for each.Google has accused Microsoft of cheating, following an investigation known as the 'Bing Sting'.

Within weeks, the same results began to appear on its rival Microsoft's Bing search engine.

Microsoft denies copying Google and accused Google of conducting "spy-novelesque stunts".

Harry Shum, vice president of Bing, said: "We do not copy google's search results. We use multiple signals and approaches in ranking search results," he added.

"Opt-in programs like the toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites," he added.

Cheap imitation

Bing returned the same result for 'hiybbprqug'

But Google's Amit Singhal told industry blog SearchEngineLand.com that it was "plain and simply cheating" and he detailed the sting operation in a long blog post.

He said Google decided to conduct its experiment after mis-spelt words and results were replicated on Bing.

"A search for 'hiybbprqug' on Bing returned a page about seating at a theatre in Los Angeles. As far as we know the only connection between the query and result is Google's result page," he said.

BBC News | 2 February 2011 - read full report

Goldman Sachs' Facebook Fraud:

2011-01-31T13:12:00.000-08:00

Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, talk about Goldman Sachs' Facebook deal

Background story:
Facebook investment 'values firm at $50bn'?

Facebook's billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg has denied there are plans for a flotation

Facebook has reportedly raised funds from Goldman Sachs and a Russian investor in a deal valuing the social networking site at $50bn (£32.3bn).

The New York Times said that Goldman was investing $450m in Facebook, and Digital Sky Technologies another $50m.

The paper, citing unnamed sources, said the terms of the deal implied a value for Facebook of just over $50bn.

Goldman's involvement could also raise speculation that Facebook might float on the stock market.

The Financial Times also reported that Goldman was investing $375m in Facebook, with Digital Sky putting in $75m.

Cashing in

A Facebook spokeswoman told the BBC that the company was not commenting on the New York Times story. Goldman also declined to comment.

If valued at $50bn, Facebook is worth more than eBay and Time Warner.

BBC News | 3 January 2011 - read full report

Google Plans New York Expansion: Buys $1.8 Billion Building ,

2010-12-24T05:32:00.000-08:00

In a sign that Google (GOOG) is gearing up to hire more people in the largest U.S. city, the company on Wednesday announced it has bought a 15-story building in New York. Google paid more than $1.8 billion for the building, which formerly housed the Port Authority headquarters, according to The New York Times.

The company has been leasing space in the Chelsea building since 2006 and almost 10% of its employees work there. With 2.9 million square feet spread over a city block, the building -- at 111 Eighth Ave. -- is larger than the Empire State Building.

See full article from DailyFinance: 23 Dec 2010

Microsoft warns on IE browser bug

2010-12-24T05:15:00.000-08:00

Microsoft's workaround for the IE bug will not protect all users of its web browser.

Microsoft has issued a warning about a serious vulnerability in all versions of its Internet Explorer (IE) browser.

If exploited by a booby-trapped webpage the bug would allow attackers to take control of an unprotected computer.

Code to exploit the bug has already been published though Microsoft said it had no evidence it was currently being used by hi-tech criminals.

A workaround for the bug has been produced while Microsoft works on a permanent fix.

Code injection

The bug revolves around the way that IE manages a computer's memory when processing Cascading Style Sheets - a widely used technology that defines the look and feel of pages on a website.

BBC News | 23 Dec 2010

Facebook launches facial recognition software

2010-12-16T12:11:00.000-08:00

Thursday 16 DEcember 2010 :

No longer will Facebook users have to tag their friends in pictures. Facebook is rolling out a new facial recognition feature to identify which of your friends are in your pictures.

"Facebook will offer a tag suggestion feature that uses facial recognition software to figure out which of your friends are your pictures.

If you want to opt out you can always just wear your Richard Nixon mask everywhere you go."

Google listing of world's top search queries for 2010

2010-12-11T06:18:00.000-08:00

AlJazeeraEnglish | December 11, 2010 - As 2010 draws to an end, internet search engines have begun releasing their lists of top search queries.

Google Inc, the world's largest internet search engine, has released "Zeitgeist 2010: How the world searched", an aggregation of billions of search queries the company says "captures the spirit of 2010".

In a nutshell, 2010 has been a year of global struggles ranging from the debt crisis, soaring unemployment, political turmoil to achievements in the medical and scientific fields, and catastrophic tragedies caused by both man and nature.

So what did most people search for?

Kevin Anderson, a freelance journalist specialising in digital strategy, tells Al Jazeera what dominated search queries in 2010

EU launches antitrust probe into alleged Google abuses.

2010-12-11T02:24:00.000-08:00

The European Commission has launched an investigation into Google after other search engines complained that the firm had abused its dominant position.

The EC will examine whether the world's largest search engine penalised competing services in its results.

The probe follows complaints by firms including price comparison site Foundem and legal search engine ejustice.fr.

Google denies the allegations but said it would work with the Commission to "address any concerns".

Earlier this year the attorney general of Texas launched a similar investigation following complaints from firms including Foundem.

The objections in both cases are from competitors which allege that Google manipulates its search results.

BBC News : 30 November 2010

Police seek powers to shut websites.

2010-12-10T22:26:00.000-08:00

The police are seeking powers to shut down websites deemed to be engaged in "criminal" activity.

The Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has tabled a plan for Nominet, which oversees .uk web addresses, to be given the domain closing power.

Nominet said the idea was only a proposal and invited people to join the debate on the form of the final policy.

IT lawyers said the proposal would be "worrying" if it led to websites going offline without judicial oversight.

"It's not policy at this stage," said Eleanor Bradley, director of operations at Nominet.

She said SOCA's proposal emerged from changes made to Nominet's policy development process earlier in 2010, as well as experiences with closing down a series of criminal sites in the last 12 months.

BBC News | 26 November 2010 - read full post.

Pro-Wikileaks hacker group’s DDoS tool downloads top 40,000.

2010-12-10T07:05:00.000-08:00

Imperva, the web security specialist, has reported that the tool released by the Anonymous Hacker Group for would-be Wikileaks protesters has been downloaded over 40,000 times, with the majority of downloads occurring in the US.

The company said there were three versions of the denial of service tool that members have been able to use:

Manual
Server controlled
Javascript version with no download

Friday 10 December 2010 ComputerWeekly.com - Read full post :

WikiLeaks vigilante war spills onto Web

2010-12-09T10:25:00.000-08:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The hackers who say they are sticking up for Wikileaks and Julian Assange continued to flex their digital muscles on Thursday, extending outages at Mastercard.com and Visa.com to a second day. And even as the group claiming responsibility for the attacks openly discussed big new targets like Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook, Twitter took unsuccessful steps to disperse the virtual mob.

Wednesday, December 8 2010 :: read full report :

: Facebook alternative Diaspora goes live :

2010-12-01T00:14:00.000-08:00

An open source alternative to Facebook - called Diaspora - has gone live.

The "privacy-aware" social network was founded earlier this year during a period when Facebook came under fire for its privacy settings.

The community-funded project is currently only open to a small number of invited people.

Analysts have questioned whether the network can ever challenge more established sites such as Facebook, which now boasts nearly 600m members.

Diaspora (screen shot -pic) says it hopes to begin adding more people in the coming weeks.

"By taking these baby steps, we'll be able to quickly identify performance problems and iterate on features as quickly as possible," the four US students behind the service wrote in a blog post.

The team say they will continue to refine the site in response to feedback.

"Our number one goal has been releasing something that works. Sometimes that means making a bit of a mess

BBC News : 24 Nov 2010

Facebook news feeds beset with malware.

2010-11-26T05:41:00.000-08:00

Malware writers are targeting social networks because of their enormous user base

One fifth of Facebook users are exposed to malware contained in their news feeds, claim security researchers.

Security firm BitDefender said it had detected infections contained in the news feeds of around 20% of Facebook users.

By clicking on infected links in a news feed, users risk having viruses installed on their computer.

Facebook said it already had steps in place to identify and remove malware-containing links.

BitDefender arrived at its figures by analysing data from 14,000 Facebook users that had installed a security app, called safego, it makes for the social network site.

In the month since safego launched, it has analysed 17 million Facebook posts, said BitDefender.

BBC News - 24 Nov 2010 :