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Google today said it would introduce a new image format designed to compete directly with current JPEG standards. The format, named WebP and pronounced "weppy," promises to reduce file sizes by 40 percent compared to JPEGs, which could help websites load faster and reduce strain on networks.
WebP is still affected by the same compression drawbacks as JPEG, as image quality suffers as the file size is reduced. However, they shouldn't lose quality and should reduce the overhead on mobile devices.
The search giant is currently in discussions with browser developers to bolster support for the new standard. The company will bring WebP support to its own Chrome browser some time in the next few weeks, although it is unclear if other browsers will adopt the format.
In spite of being viewed as the "other guys" in some Mac users' minds, Microsoft has generally put out an excellent productivity suite for the Mac with Microsoft Office. Though the latest package is still not on par with the Windows version (you get only the four main programs--a big difference when you consider the Windows version has 10), Microsoft made a big leap with this latest version for the Mac in several other ways. Not only has it nearly reached feature parity (and cross compatibility) with the Mac counterparts to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but it has finally added Outlook, the e-mail and scheduling client Mac business fans have been clamoring for for years.
Once we dug deep into the feature set of Office 2011 for Mac, we saw there were several enhancements that made the whole suite better, and some of the niftier tweaks are even Mac-exclusive. Certainly many Mac users will look first at Apple's iWork for a productivity suite, and it is a great office suite in its own right. But if you work with primarily Windows users who use Office, it's tough to beat the automatic compatibility of using the same programs. Add the ease of compatibility with a strong feature set across the entire suite and you have a desktop office package that's almost a must-have in both large and small businesses, and even home productivity settings.
One of the major new changes to the suite (on the Windows side, too) is the ability to collaborate and share your work using Web apps. New Coauthoring requires that you use SharePoint Foundation 2010 for enterprise use, but for personal or small businesses, you can save and access files over SkyDrive (25GB of available online storage) on Windows Live with a free registration.
All of the new tweaks to the interface and each of the apps in the suite make Office 2011 for Mac a great option, but with the rise of cloud-based computing and online office suites like Google Docs, we wonder how long the big desktop apps like Office will remain on top. This latest Office client for Mac is definitely a solid offering, but how long can Microsoft hold on to its dominance?
Office for Mac 2011 is officially going on sale on October 26th, Microsoft has announced. The timing is in line with an earlier target of late October, and just a day prior to a rumored release date. The difference is moot for some businesses, as volume license distribution began roughly a week ago.
The 2011 suite will wrap in a number of changes from Windows versions of the software, such as a ribbon interface. The Entouragee-mail client is also being replaced with Outlook, and Mac owners will finally gain access to Messenger 8. The Home and Business edition is being priced at $200; Home and Student, which excludes Outlook, is $120. Pre-orders are currently underway.
Although it’s never been the dominant program in Microsoft’s Office suite, PowerPoint for Mac has enjoyed considerable success riding on the coattails of its Windows counterpart. But I was disappointed that PowerPoint 2008 (), the last major upgrade, missed opportunities to leapfrog Keynote (), Apple’s homegrown slideshow software.
PowerPoint for Mac 2011 remedies many of my complaints by combining compelling new features with a revamped interface that makes it easier than before to develop dazzling presentations quickly.
A better interface
Microsoft's Ribbon is a core user interface element in all of the Office programs. The Ribbon sits at the top of the document window and provides quick access to the most commonly used tools. Its toolset changes based on what you're working on in the document.
I haven’t been a fan of the Ribbon in any of the Office apps for Windows, so I was pleasantly surprised by its implementation in PowerPoint for Mac 2011—the Ribbon provides instant access to most of PowerPoint’s tools and functions without being too obtrusive. Unlike the Windows implementation of the Ribbon, which you can hide only by clicking an arrow at the top right, the Mac version disappears when you click on any active tab.
A handy new control lets you adjust the size of slides in the Normal and Slide Sorter views. That’s much more convenient than the toolbar’s magnification menu, which is still there. For users who prefer not to reach for the mouse, new keyboard shortcuts let you zoom in or out in 15 percent increments. With these changes, PowerPoint’s view options are considerably more flexible than Keynote’s.
Another interface enhancement makes it easier to work with busy slides that contain multiple overlapping objects. In addition to conventional commands that let you move individual elements forward or backward, PowerPoint 2011 sports a clever new view that displays every object on the slide on a series of translucent sheets that appear to float on the screen. As you mouse over each one, it lights up and a number indicating its position appears in the corner. You drag the pane to move the object on it toward the front or back.
In addition to helping you keep track of objects on individual slides, PowerPoint 2011 helps you organize complex presentations by placing related slides in sections in the navigation pane. Although you can similarly arrange slides hierarchically in Keynote, only PowerPoint lets you name each group of slides.
UI redesign: A new graphical interface makes it easy to rearrange items on a slide.
Enhanced media
A new Media Browser conveniently consolidates access to photos, sounds, clip art, symbols, and shapes in one place, and PowerPoint offers a dizzying array of ways to manipulate the size and appearance of graphics that you import or generate within the program. Like Keynote’s Instant Alpha, which lets you make an image’s background transparent, PowerPoint 2011’s Remove Background tool lets you select which parts of a picture to retain and which to clear.
New options let you crop, color correct, rotate, and add other effects to movies, which are now imported into presentations by default instead of being linked to. You can even choose a picture file as the movie’s poster frame, and you can pause and scrub through movies during a slideshow, a feature that was missing from PowerPoint 2008. Annoyingly, though, you still can’t trim movies by adjusting their starting and ending points, nor can you add sounds that play across a specific set of slides.
Animation and transitions
As in PowerPoint 2008, you define the timing, duration, and order of animations by using the Custom Animation tab in the Toolbox. PowerPoint 2011 fills a huge gap in the previous version’s animation repertoire by adding motion paths, which let you move objects along tracks that are predefined or that you draw from scratch. PowerPoint’s path animation tools exceed Keynote’s in some respects (PowerPoint’s paths are much easier to define and edit) and bring PowerPoint 2011 closer to PowerPoint 2010 for Windows. But I was disappointed that, unlike PowerPoint 2010, the new Mac version doesn’t include an advanced timeline, which displays all the animations on a slide in a graphical timeline format. That’s an unfortunate omission; it’s much easier to choreograph multiple animations graphically than it is to drag them up and down in a list.
I was also frustrated to see that PowerPoint’s library of transitions, the special effects that morph one slide into the next during a presentation, still aren’t up to Keynote’s standard. PowerPoint’s dissolve transition is coarser than Keynote’s, and PowerPoint lacks equivalents to many of the stunning effects in Apple’s software. For example, Magic Move, a versatile Keynote transition that moves objects as one slide replaces another, is absent from PowerPoint. Although you can duplicate the effect with custom animations in PowerPoint, it takes considerably more effort.
For as long as I’ve been reviewing Microsoft Word, it has been difficult to see any kind of relationship between Word for Mac and Word for Windows, beyond the name and file format. They were essentially two completely different products designed for what, in Microsoft’s mind, were two completely different sets of users.
Word for Mac 2011 changes all that. The Intel-only Word 2011 is a significant and substantive update to Microsoft’s flagship Mac word processing and page-layout application. It is an update that unifies a user’s experience across platforms, and it’s also a release that contains many valuable new features and improvements—more than 30 in all.
The bottom line is this: Microsoft Word for Mac no longer feels like a second-string word processing program in the Microsoft Office suite. It is in fact a powerful tool for creating all your personal and business documents and for collaborating with others. More importantly, Word 2011 now makes it possible to insert a Mac into nearly any business environment and offer Mac users the same set of features found in Word for Windows, without compromise.
Given Oracle's recent decision to pull the plug on OpenSolaris, there has been considerable concern over the past few months about the future of the OpenOffice.org productivity software suite.
Both projects were inherited by Oracle when it acquired Sun early this year.
Tuesday brought good news for the legions of worried OpenOffice.org users, however, when the community of developers working on the project announced that they have formed an independent foundation, and will be using the name LibreOffice for their version--or "fork"--of the software, unless Oracle agrees to donate the OpenOffice.org brand.
Now known as The Document Foundation, the newly independent OpenOffice.org community aims to fulfill the promise of independence written in the original charter for the project. It has invited Oracle to become a member and to donate the OO.o brand, but I haven't heard back from the company yet with any indication of its intentions.
WASHINGTON — Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.
Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.
The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.
James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” — including its decentralized design.
“They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”
But law enforcement officials contend that imposing such a mandate is reasonable and necessary to prevent the erosion of their investigative powers.
“We’re talking about lawfully authorized intercepts,” said Valerie E. Caproni, general counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “We’re not talking expanding authority. We’re talking about preserving our ability to execute our existing authority in order to protect the public safety and national security.”
Investigators have been concerned for years that changing communications technology could damage their ability to conduct surveillance. In recent months, officials from the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the National Security Agency, the White House and other agencies have been meeting to develop a proposed solution.
There is not yet agreement on important elements, like how to word statutory language defining who counts as a communications service provider, according to several officials familiar with the deliberations.
But they want it to apply broadly, including to companies that operate from servers abroad, like Research in Motion, the Canadian maker of BlackBerry devices. In recent months, that company has come into conflict with the governments of Dubai and India over their inability to conduct surveillance of messages sent via its encrypted service.
In the United States, phone and broadband networks are already required to have interception capabilities, under a 1994 law called the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act. It aimed to ensure that government surveillance abilities would remain intact during the evolution from a copper-wire phone system to digital networks and cellphones.
On Friday Apple released iTunes 10.0.1, fixing a few bugs, but above all updating the Ping musical social network introduced in iTunes 10.
Apple lists the following change in its release notes:
Addresses an issue where the picture quality of a video changes depending on whether the on-screen controls are visible.
Resolves an issue where iTunes may unexpectedly quit while interacting with album artwork viewed in a separate window.
Fixes a problem that affects the performance of some third-party visualizers.
Addresses an issue where the iTunes library and playlists appear empty.
Resolves an issue that created an incompatibility with some third-party shared libraries.
But the biggest change in this update is the addition of a Ping sidebar in iTunes. Taking the place of the previous Genius sidebar, the Ping sidebar is designed to offer constant access to Ping information, with real-time updates.
To display this sidebar, click the little sidebar button at the bottom-right of the iTunes window, or choose View -> Show Ping Sidebar. This menu command has the same keyboard shortcut as the now defunct Genius sidebar: Command-Shift-G.
When you display the Ping sidebar, you’ll see recent activity from friends and artists you follow. If you select a song, you’ll see additional information: in some cases, the song or album will display at the top of the sidebar; in others you’ll see information about the artist and posts they have made.
You might remember that Apple’s Safari browser got hit by a nasty security bug involving its text AutoFill feature in late July. Apple squashed this bug with the Safari 5.0.1 update, but according to the researcher who discovered the AutoFill flaw in the first place, the bug is back.
According to Jeremiah Grossman, the founder of WhiteHat Security, this flaw is a slight variation on the original AutoFill flaw that allowed malicious Websites to harvest your personal information—such as your name, address, workplace, and e-mail address—without you knowing, even if you’ve never visited the site before.
The new version of this hack is less “automatic” than the initial one, according to Grossman, but a hacker just needs to perform a little social engineering to get a hapless Web user to give up their personal details.
As before, Grossman suggests that, if you use Safari, you should disable form auto-fill to avoid getting taken by this bug. To do so, select Preferences under the Safari menu, and click AutoFill in the toolbar; uncheck all three boxes.
Microsoft has added new capabilities to its online Microsoft Office companion service that allow users to embed PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets on their own websites.
Launched in June, Microsoft Office Web Apps has already been used, the company claims, by 20 million people, despite some negative reviews. The service offers the ability to make quick edits to Excel, Word, OneNote and PowerPoint documents.
Since the launch, the company has received more than 25,000 suggestions for how to improve the service, according to Microsoft senior product manager Evan Lew, in a video accompanying the blog announcement of the new features.
The timing of the upgrade is fortuitous for Microsoft insofar as Oracle announced at its Open World conference this week that its cloud-based Office productivity suite, based on Open Office, is nearing release as well.
With Microsoft Office Web Apps, users will now be able to embed PowerPoint presentations and Excel worksheets, tables and charts on an external website or blog page. With Excel, as the original document is updated, the embedded version will change as well.
Improvements have been made to the user's ability to edit files online as well. Spreadsheet users can now add lines, pies and bar charts to their worksheets directly from their browser. Microsoft has also opened up the Office.com image library so users can add images to their PowerPoint presentations.
And Excel worksheets now join Word and PowerPoint documents in their ability to be easily viewed from a mobile phone.
The company is also expanding the global availability of the Office apps to seven additional countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Russia and Switzerland.
In addition to adding muscle to Microsoft Office Web Apps, the company has also boosted capabilities of Windows companion online service, Windows Live.
Like other technology and communications companies, we regularly receive requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services, or provide information about users of our services and products. This map shows the number of requests that we received in six-month blocks with certain limitations.
We’re still learning the best way to collect and present this information. We’ll continue to improve this tool and fine-tune the types of data we display.
Canada, Mexico, France, Spain, South Korea and Japan are included in this list. I experienced this type of blocking when I lived in South Korea when I tried to look for at a North Korean site mentioned on the Rachel Maddow Show. Censorship is the first weapon that tyrants use.
There are plenty of good options for browsing the Web on a Mac, but if your main concern is speed, it's tough to beat Google Chrome. This speedy browser features a sleek minimalist look, thumbnails of your top sites so you can get back to favorite destinations quickly, and plenty of useful features to keep it competitive with other Mac browser mainstays.
Mozilla pushed out a patch to all versions of Firefox, including the beta Firefox 4, to repair issues that caused crashes.
Gregg Keizer
Sunday, September 19, 2010 05:00 AM PDT
Mozilla last week updated all versions of Firefox, including the beta of the upcoming Firefox 4, to fix stability problems that crashed the browser.
Artwork: Chip TaylorFirefox 3.6.10 and Firefox 3.5.13, which Mozilla launched late Wednesday, addressed what Mozilla said was "a single stability issue affecting a limited number of users."
A crash problem surfaced last week after Mozilla released Firefox 3.6.9 and Firefox 3.5.12 to patch 15 vulnerabilities . Users of all three editions -- Windows, Mac and Linux -- reported repeated crashes during browser startup after they'd updated to Firefox 3.6.9/3.5.12.
Mozilla halted updates while it investigated. The company has since restarted automatic update delivery.
Mozilla also upgraded Firefox 4's beta this week to deal with a stability bug on that preview.
"We've decided to issue a small beta update in order to fix a stability issue on Windows and some rendering and keyboard/mouse focus issues on OSX related to plug-ins," Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, said in a message posted to the "mozilla.dev.planning" mailing list.
Like the bug in Firefox 3.6.9/3.5.12, the one in Firefox 4 Beta 5 crashed the Windows browser on or shortly after startup. Mozilla's bug- and code change-tracking Bugzilla database offered more information on the crash bug, which quickly climbed to the top of the crash report chart.
Mozilla pushed the quick fix to users as Firefox 4 Beta 6 on Tuesday.
Because Mozilla had to issue the stability patch, the company also designated Beta 7 as the new feature-frozen version, the one that locks in what will be included and drops what won't. Beta 7 is slated to ship later this month.
"What was known as 'Firefox 4 Beta 6' will now be 'Firefox 4 Beta 7,'" said Beltzner. "We're not adding a beta to our cycle, we're just issuing some fixes for stability and usability to the beta audience, and our numbering system requires that we bump the version number."
Mozilla has already ditched a pair of anticipated features from Firefox 4 to make its deadlines: Account Manager, a beefed-up password manager built into the browser to simplify Web site sign-up; and Inspector, a tool aimed at Web designers and developers who want to drill down for more information on each element in an HTML page.
Grass-roots activists organizing boycotts against large corporations like Target stores and BP now find themselves directing some of their ire at another corporate monolith: Facebook.
The boycotters turned to the popular social media site to spread word about their pressure campaigns and keep participants up to date on the latest developments, but those efforts became much more difficult last week when Facebook disabled key features on the boycott pages.
As the number of Facebook members signed up for the “Boycott Target Until They Cease Funding Anti-Gay Politics” page neared 78,000 in recent days, Facebook personnel locked down portions of the page — banning new discussion threads, preventing members from posting videos and standard Web links to other sites and barring the page’s administrator from sending updates to those who signed up for the boycott.
“It slices the vocal cords,” complained Jeffrey Henson, who ran the Facebook page, calling for a boycott of Target over its $150,000 donation to a group supporting a candidate some view as hostile to the gay community, Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer. “The page is now outraged” over the website’s action, Henson added.
Participants in the boycotts complain Facebook’s actions have created an uneven playing field in which ad hoc citizens’ groups face hurdles to online organizing — obstacles that corporations using social media have little trouble surmounting.
“Facebook is interfering with the function of a page dedicated to individuals organizing in response to corporate action to which they object,” said Nicholas Lefevre, a promoter of the Target boycott. “With the limited avenues for such expression and organization and the importance of the Internet to that ability, anything that threatens that expression is dangerous.”
Another Facebook page “liked” by even more people — a boycott of petroleum giant BP that attracted more than 847,000 fans — was also hit by a similar clampdown last week. Those who use the BP page to communicate about the gulf spill reacted angrily.
“It all smells fishier than the gulf to me,” said one comment on the page from a member called “Triple Bottomline.”
Organizers of the Target and BP boycotts quickly started new pages, but their followers have been slow to locate and join the new pages. By Friday, only 1,450 members had signed up for the new page from BP boycott organizer Lee Perkins and 2,507 had signed up for a new Target boycott page.
In response to a query from POLITICO, Facebook said the earlier pages were restricted because they ran afoul of the social media site’s terms of service, limiting so-called pages to individuals and entities that have some real structure in the bricks-and-mortar world.
“Facebook Pages enable public figures, organizations, businesses, and brands to share information, interact with interested people, and maintain an engaging presence on Facebook,” said a Facebook spokesman, who asked not to be named. “They're … optimized for official entities’ needs to communicate, distribute content, engage people and capture new audiences. To protect people from spam and other unwanted content, we restrict Pages that represent ideas or positions — rather than discrete entities — from publishing stories to people's News Feeds.”
“This policy is designed to ensure Facebook remains a safe, secure and trusted environment for the people who use it,” the spokesman said.
The written guidance published on the Facebook site is somewhat vague about who can sponsor a page. The official policy says pages “may only be used to promote a business or other commercial, political, or charitable organization or endeavor (including nonprofit organizations, political campaigns, bands, and celebrities).”
Officials from Target and BP told POLITICO they made no requests to Facebook to act against the boycott pages.
Henson said he got a notice from Facebook about a month ago that he needed to “authenticate” his page. He said he tried to answer every question the site asked.
“I never heard back. Next thing I know: I’m locked out of the page,” Henson said. “I’m hoping they do the right thing and unlock it.”
The Nielsen Company reports that Microsoft's Bing has just barely exceeded Yahoo Search [1] in U.S. market share. Google continues as top dog, but Bing's showing some growth, while Yahoo's fading ever so slightly.
While Nielsen's numbers rate a short perusal, the drama unfolding behind the scenes shows a much larger shift than the numbers would have you believe. Here's the rest of the story.
Search engine market share numbers run all over the place, with different sites moving up and down a fraction of a percentage point every month. The terminology and methodology vary, but Nielsen pegs [1] Google's U.S. market share in August at 65.1 percent, comScore puts [5] Google's U.S. July market share at 65.8 percent, and Hitwise shows [5] Google's U.S. August share at 71.59 percent -- yes, to two decimal places.
Nielsen says that Yahoo lost a considerable amount of market share in a month, falling from 14.3 percent share in July to 13.1 percent in August. Conversely, MSN/Windows Live/Bing went from 13.6 percent in July to 13.9 percent in August. Thus, the headline that Bing has overtaken Yahoo.
No big deal. Why? Bing and Yahoo numbers don't matter. They're smoke 'n' mirrors, Tweedledee and Tweedledum. According to an agreement that took effect Aug. 24, Bing (with a few small exceptions) is now the search engine behind Yahoo. As Nielsen says, "If we combined Bing-powered search in August pro-forma, it would represent a 26 percent share of search."
The new feature, say Robinson and Tavares, "picks the best graphics API to use on each OS that Chromium supports: Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS and Linux."
Using Twitter is like being trapped in an elevator with someone who has a severe case of attention deficit disorder and just consumed three pots of truck-stopcoffee. It's a nonstop diet of sometimes useful, sometimes funny, but mostly semi-coherent and self-serving banalities, served up in 140-character spoonfuls.
Though I use Twitter on a semi-daily basis, I rarely spend more than five minutes on Twitter.com at any one time. More than that and my brain starts to melt.
Last night, Twitter unveiled a new design it hopes will entice people to stay on the site until their gray matter turns into guacamole.
Want to see the new Twitter in action? Good luck. As I write this, one of the biggest trending topics on Twitter is "Where the heck is the new Twitter?" The Twit-heads say they will be rolling the new version out over the next month.
In iTunes 10, the icons in the sidebar have gone from colorful to drab light-gray; to some eyes, that change makes the icons harder to distinguish. If you're one of them, you might be interested in a tip from an anonymous Mac OS X Hints reader that implements an alternative color scheme:
If you are struggling with the new low-contrast icons in iTunes 10, here is a hint to change their appearance. After quitting iTunes, open Terminal and enter:
When you restart iTunes, you'll have a high-contrast sidebar and list pane. To undo it, repeat the command but change the TRUE to FALSE.
By "high-contrast," this tipster means, "stark black and white." Many users who have tried this tip say they like the results less than the new all-gray and so undo it. It doesn't look great in the new default Album List view (View -> As Album List or Option-Command-4); it looks better (relatively speaking) in plain List View (View -> As List or Option-Command-3).
Microsoft made the right decision to stop helping Russian authorities use claims of software piracy to harass and silence dissenters. On Monday, it announced that it is barring its lawyers from taking part in such cases and will provide a blanket software license to advocacy groups and news media outlets in Russia, undercutting the Kremlin’s tactic.
Still, Microsoft’s willingness to lend itself to politically motivated investigations — it changed course only after an article by Clifford Levy in The Times on Sunday — suggests a shocking failure of corporate responsibility. The Times said lawyers for Microsoft bolstered state police in politically tinged cases across Russia. They made statements suggesting the company was a victim and called for criminal charges. After police seized a dozen computers from a Siberian environmental group, the group said all its software was legally licensed and asked Microsoft to confirm this. Microsoft would not. The police used information from the computers to track down and interrogate some of the group’s supporters.
Before changing policy on Monday, Microsoft executives said the company was required under Russian law to take part in such inquiries.
Unfortunately, Microsoft is not the only American company that has failed to stand up for the rights of its customers in undemocratic countries.
In China, all search engines have helped the state control access to the Internet. In 2004, Yahoo helped Beijing’s state police uncover the Internet identities of two Chinese journalists, who were then sentenced to 10 years in prison for disseminating pro-democracy writings online. Skype’s Chinese partner, Tom Online, scanned text messages for politically sensitive words and stored them alongside user information on servers that could be accessed easily by the Chinese government.
The one company that has stood up to China is Google. In March, after five years of complicity with Beijing’s censors, it began redirecting searches to its unfiltered engine in Hong Kong. By contrast, Microsoft’s founder and chairman, Bill Gates, defended the company’s continued collaboration with China’s censors. “You’ve got to decide: Do you want to obey the laws of the countries you’re in, or not?” he said during Beijing’s fight with Google. “If not, you may not end up doing business there.”
SAN FRANCISCO--Twitter on Tuesday unveiled a major redesign of its home page, one its executives say will give users a better, easier, and faster experience.
Though site redesigns are often underwhelming, the new Twitter.com is tantamount to a fundamental relaunch of the popular microblogging service's Web-based interface, mainly because it introduces a new interface build around a second viewing pane in which users will be able to see all kinds of content--from photos and videos to user profiles to geolocation information and more.
Twitter CEO Evan Williams said that the new version of the site (see video below) is available to some users immediately, while others will see it implemented in the coming weeks.
David Barksdale lost his job at Google after parents complained that the 27-year-old Site Reliability Engineer violated the online privacy of at least four minors, reports Gawker. According to the story, Barksdale used his elite position to tap into Google voice phone logs, accessed Google contact lists and chat transcripts, and in at least one incident, unblocked himself from a Google Talkbuddy list after the teen account owner blocked him.
It's not clear whether Google was aware of Barksdale's activities before receiving complaints from parents of the minors. Gawker reports that several complaints were received and acknowledged by the company before Barksdale's July 2010 firing.
Adrian Chen of Gawker writes that the site "obtained an e-mail exchange between one person who complained about Barksdale to Google and Eric Grosse, an Engineer Director in Google's security group at the company's Mountain View, Calif. headquarters. Grosse quickly responded to the complaint with a curt e-mail: 'Thank you very much for reporting; we'll investigate quietly and get back to you if we need anything more.' "
Barksdale, a self-described "hacker," reportedly met the minors through a Seattletechnology group — one from which he was barred after evidence of his abuses emerged.
YouTube is to begin a two-day trial of live video streaming in the US.
The Google-owned video-sharing site is working with four broadcasters in the U.S.—Howcast, Next New Networks, Rocketboom and Young Hollywood—to allow Web users to watch videos on the site as they are broadcast live and even comment on them with other users.
“This new platform integrates live streaming directly into YouTube channels,” said Joshua Siegel and Christopher Hamilton in a blog.
“Included in the test is a ‘Live Comments’ module which lets you engage with the broadcaster and the broader YouTube community. Based on the results of this initial test, we’ll evaluate rolling out the platform more broadly to our partners worldwide.”
This isn’t the first time YouTube has streamed live broadcasts. Last year the video-sharing site offered U2 fans the chance to watch the group perform live from LA.
Microsoft announced Monday new measures aimed at protecting non-governmental organizations from government harassment. In January, Russian police raided the offices of an environmental group, claiming it was using pirated Microsoft software. The group denies the charge. Clifford Levy, the Moscow Bureau Chief for the New York Times, talks with NPR's David Greene about his article on the raid, how this tactic is not new, and Microsoft's response.
I was VERY HAPPY to see the iOS 4.1 update hit the streets last week. Although I had already had my iPhone 4 replaced for the yellow photo white balance issue, I was still having annoying proximity sensor issues and sometimes people would complain that my voice was very garbled while talking on my bluetooth headset. iOS 4.1 really hit the spot in a big way. First off, for most people it corrected the "taking an indoor shot coming out all yellow problem". I did some tests with another iPhone 4 here at my house that hand't been replaced and I took a shot while it was running iOS 4.0.2 and then took the same shot after applying the iOS 4.1 update and well, see for yourself:
A hacker who claims he was behind a fast-spreading e-mail worm that crippled corporate networks last week said that the worm was designed, in part, as a propaganda tool.
The hacker, known as Iraq Resistance, responded to inquiries sent to an e-mail address associated with the "Here you have" worm, which during a brief period early Thursday accounted for about 10 percent of the spam on the Internet. He (or she) revealed no details about his identity, but said, "The creation of this is just a tool to reach my voice to people maybe... or maybe other things."
He said he had not expected the worm to spread as broadly as it had, and noted that he could have done much more damage to victims. "I could smash all those infected but I wouldn't," said the hacker. "I hope all people understand that I am not negative person!" In other parts of the message, he was critical of the U.S. war in Iraq.
On Sunday, Iraq Resistance posted a video echoing these sentiments and complaining, through a computer-generated voice, that his actions were not as bad as those of Terry Jones. Jones is the pastor at a small Florida church who received worldwide attention this week for threatening to burn copies of the Koran.
Security experts agree that the worm could have caused more damage. However, it did include some very malicious components, such as password logging software and a backdoor program that could have been used to allow its creator to control infected machines. But because the software was not terribly sophisticated, it was quickly shut down as Web servers that it used to infect machines and issue new commands were taken offline last week.
The exploit for a critical unpatched bug in Adobe Reader that's now circulating is "clever" and "impressive," security researchers said this week.
First uncovered last week by Washington-based researcher Mila Parkour, attackers are using rigged PDF documents that include code to exploit a zero-day vulnerability in the widely used Reader PDF viewer as well as in Acrobat, Adobe's PDF creation software.
The sophisticated exploit bypasses two important defenses that Microsoft erected to protect Windows, ASLR (address space layout randomization) and DEP (date execution prevention), researchers have confirmed.
"It's pretty clever," said Chet Wisniewski, a senior security adviser with software security firm Sophos. "It circumvents protections like ASLR and DEP. "Its techniques are certainly out of the ordinary and a lot more sophisticated than the garden variety [PDF] exploit."
