Current date/time is Tue 09 Feb 2010, 9:21 am
Facebook says it has dumped Microsoft banner ads, but what the social network really needs are fewer sleazy advertisers, not less Microsoft.
For example, ads like to one that invites Facebook members to "test" an iPad, Kindle, or Mac that they then get to keep, "participation required."
Maybe you have seen career ads that mention an age, but suggest a job that makes no sense for someone in that age group. Become a cop between 50 and 65? Not likely.
These ads are a natural outgrowth of the pay-for-clicks business model combined witth an "anything...
A report this week laying out a strategy for social search has been getting a good deal of attention in tech circles. The paper, “Anatomy of a Large Scale Social Search Engine,” was written by Damon Horowitz and Sepandar Kamvar of Aardvark, one of several companies working on creating social search engines. As of October 2009, Aardvark had about 90,000 users.
Social search aims to connect people with questions to people who can answer those questions. By contrast, regular Web searches take questions, break them into keywords, and then find Web sites that have the most relevance to these...
Microsoft is expanding its search arrangement with Facebook but reining in its advertising deal with the social-networking site.
Bing already runs search on Facebook in the U.S. But on Friday, Microsoft said Bing would also provide search results for all of Facebook's 400 million users around the world.
Microsoft also said that it would offer Facebook users additional Bing features, although it did not describe which. "Our two companies will soon provide Facebook users with a more complete search experience by providing full access to great Bing features beyond a set...
The developers of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser are deep in discussions about the future of the program on Mac OS X Tiger. While the final nail has yet to be driven into the purest Carpathian wood of 10.4's coffin, the writing for the striped cat appears to be on the wall.
Support for Tiger was dropped from the development version of Mozilla's Gecko framework last September, but the required code for supporting 10.4 was left intact, in case that decision was changed. On Thursday, Mozilla developer Josh Aas laid out the case for dropping support for Tiger altogether, in order to take...
Mozilla confirmed late Thursday that it failed to detect malware in a pair of Firefox add-ons, which may have infected up to 4,600 users.
The add-ons have been removed from Firefox's official add-on download site.
According to an entry on the Mozilla Add-ons blog, Sothink Web Video Downloader 4.0 and all versions of Master Filer were infected with Trojan horses designed to hijack Windows PCs. Both add-ons were in the "experimental" area of Firefox's add-on download site, where newer extensions remain until they undergo a public review process. To install experimental...
Facebook is celebrating its sixth anniversary with another redesign of its homepage.
Employees at Facebook last night were celebrating the company's anniversary, passing the 400 million user mark and the launch of yet another home page makeover.
The redesign is the latest of several home page changes launched by the company in recent years -- many times to the consernation of its users. The latest makeover, according to Jing Chen, a Facebook engineer, is focused improving navigation to the many features on the site.
"We think sharing information about the applications...
Microsoft will patch 26 holes next week, including critical ones in Windows, one affecting the kernel of 32-bit versions, and several holes in Office, the company said Thursday in a preview of its Patch Tuesday.
Five of the 13 bulletins affect vulnerabilities that could lead to remote code execution and they are rated critical. The bulletins affect Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Windows 7, as well as Server 2003 and 2008, Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2004 for Mac, according to the advisory.
"The Office-related bulletins are both rated Important and would require user...
It is not uncommon for Microsoft to launch a "technology guarantee" program ahead of a new version of Office or Windows, offering buyers of a product late in one cycle an upgrade to the new version once it comes out. So it's not a shocker that Microsoft has one planned for Office 2010.
That said, Microsoft wasn't quite ready to tell the world about the program. nȯne, an employee briefly posted details of the planned upgrade offer on a blog. It was quickly pulled down, but the cat is out of the bag.
According to the now-removed posting, the program will kick...
On its sixth birthday, Facebook
launched a host of new features as it crossed the 400-million user mark.
The most interesting of them may be its revamped search. When you type in names, it auto-completes for people who are the closest to you by social promixity — e.g. the people that you have the most mutual friends with. Not only that, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that it indexes content two degrees out in your social graph.
With the new privacy settings and more public content,...
Did you know that Google's ChomeOS is taking the form of a Tablet? I covered a previous report on the matter, but now we are starting to get images of prototype OS shots. And they look very tablet- y.
On Google's ChomeOS User Experience page, you'll find many prototype OS screenshots and mock-ups of Chrome running on 5-10 inch tablets.
Obviously the soft keyboard bears a striking resemblance to the iPad's which was launched last week. Google's approach on the OS appears to be more of...
Ties record with 13 security updates, plans to fix 26 bugs in Windows, Office. Microsoft today said it will deliver a record-tying 13 security updates on Tuesday to patch more than two dozen vulnerabilities in Windows and Office.
The company will ship a total of 13 updates next week, five of them pegged "critical," the highest threat ranking in its four-step scoring system. The 13 updates will tie the record from October 2009, when Microsoft issued the same number of bulletins, but fixed a total of 34 vulnerabilities. According to Jerry Bryant, a senior manager with the Microsoft...
Google will suspend Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) support for its Gmail and Calendar services later this year, the company said today. The move will come at some point after March 1, when Google will start scaling back IE6 support for Google Docs and Google Sites. Google announced that decision on Friday, two weeks after the company admitted that hackers had breached its network and stolen information.
"We plan to stop supporting older browsers for the rest of the Google Apps suite, including Gmail, later in 2010," a Google spokesman confirmed today. On Google's no-support list...
Microsoft is investigating reported issues with Windows 7 and notebook battery life. The issue seems sporadic, but fairly widespread. It is unclear whether affected systems are simply misreporting the battery life, or if the battery capacity is actually being permanently affected.
Long before Windows 7 was released for general availability in October of 2009, users were reporting suspicious behavior with battery life, or at least reported battery life, when running the Windows 7 RC (release candidate) version. The Microsoft TechNet Forums thread on the matter dates back to June of 2009.
Lest you think we're all-iPad all-the-time here, allow us to bring you news about Apple's last revolutionary device. On Tuesday, the company released iPhone OS 3.1.3, which includes a few minor improvements, security patches, and bug fixes for the iPhone and iPod touch. The update is available via iTunes when you plug in your device.
Among the embarrassment of riches that iPhone OS 3.1.3 brings is better accuracy for the battery level on the iPhone 3GS, a problem where third-party programs would sometimes not launch, and a bug that could cause an application to crash when using the Japanese...
Twitter reset passwords for an unknown number of users on Tuesday whose accounts appeared to have been compromised via phishing.
"As part of Twitter's ongoing security efforts, we reset passwords for a small number of accounts that we believe may have been compromised offsite," the company said in a statement.
Some Twitter users apparently "used their Twitter username and password to sign up for an untrusted third-party application which then posted Tweets to their account," a spokeswoman said.
"While we're still investigating and ensuring...
Who could resist the months of hype that paved the way for Apple's iPad debut last week? Apparently not Google, which has shown its interest in tablet computing with its browser-based Chrome OS.
On Monday, Glen Murphy, a user interface designer for Google's Chrome browser and the Chrome operating system based on it, pointed to image and video concepts of a Chrome OS-based tablet that went live two days before the iPad launch. Apparently nobody noticed initially, because only now did Murphy tweet, "Apparently our tablet mocks have been unearthed."
The site also shows...
If you're one of Facebook's 350-million-plus members, you've probably noticed a handful of people on your friends list changing their profile photos to pictures of celebrities, cartoon characters, Muppets, and other notable figures recently.
That's because an unofficial viral craze called "Doppelganger Week" has arisen on the social network. To participate, you change your profile picture to a celebrity or otherwise notable figure whom you resemble (or like to think you resemble).
Nobody's really sure where Doppelganger Week came from or who started it. It's particularly...
Unless you speak lawyerese as a second language, a Web site's privacy policy can seem as incomprehensible as the loudspeakers on New York City subways.
The organization behind Firefox, the world's second most popular Web browser, has embarked on an ambitious project to change this. Instead of forcing people concerned about privacy to scroll through pages of "notwithstanding anything to the contrary," the Mozilla Foundation is designing a standard set of colored icons to reveal how data-protective--or how intrusive--Web sites are.
It does seem a bit odd that, in the...
Google has been focusing development on the netbook and tablet markets for some time now, using Android OS as a stepping stone into the sub-laptop operating system market. The first tablets featuring the Android OS have already arrived, with more on the way for 2010, which that begs the question: What of Google's other mobile software project, Chrome OS? Will it make its way onto tablets too?
Recently, TechRadar asked Google if the forthcoming mobile operating system would support touch input, implying that it would be featured on tablet or slate-like devices, to which Google's Anders...
Have you ever wished that iTunes wouldn’t constantly forget your iTunes Store password? There’s a patch for that.
Paramount in Monday’s iTunes 9.0.3 update is the fact that “iTunes no longer ignores your Remember Password For Purchases setting”. Apart from curing password amnesia, the minor update also addresses syncing issues with iPods for some smart playlists and podcasts. It also resolves a problem in which iTunes occasionally can’t recognize when an iPod is connected. Last but not least, like almost every other patch Apple has released since the dawn of time, this update addresses...
Last year's free preview of Windows 7 will start nagging users to pay for the operating system in two weeks, and begin automatically shutting down PCs in one month, Microsoft reminded customers today.
Microsoft unveiled the schedule for Windows 7 Release Candidate's retirement in May 2009, when it issued the early look to the public.
At the time, it said Windows 7 RC would expire June 1, 2010. Before that date, however, users are to receive warnings of the impending end. Starting on Feb. 15, Windows 7 RC will display notices every few hours that the machine will periodically...
You might call BioShock 2 'BioShock with the top down'. You'll discover this early in the game, when its lid, sides, and bottom suddenly disengage and you're thrust beyond the safety of purpose-made geometry. In BioShock, Rapture was a nightmare metropolis beneath the sea, an abyssal macro-terrarium circumscribed by an ocean unwittingly intruded upon, but for all the rifting city's dribbling cracks and spitting leaks, the ocean never came to you.
In BioShock 2, Rapture's reinforced glass and metal edges are only a measure of protection, a measure the design team seems fond of occasionally...
Starting with version 1.1, users will be able to write their own plugins for VLC, codenamed Extensions. The difference with other VLC modules consists in the language used to write these Extensions: Lua, a simple a lightweight scripting language, embbeded inside VLC media player.
Why extensions?
The success of Firefox over the past few years can be explained quite easily when you have a look at its main features. The major differences between Firefox and IE reside in the Open Source model, and the possibility for community users to write their own plugins. Some of these plugins,...
A new phishing scam is trying to fool people into thinking it comes from Adobe, announcing a new version of PDF Reader/Writer. The message is making its way into e-mail boxes now, and the real Adobe urged any recipients to simply delete it.
The phishing scam has a subject line "download and upgrade Adobe PDF Reader – Writer for Windows," includes a fake version of Adobe's logo and provides links that would lead to malicious code or other trouble if a victim clicked on them. The e-mail appears to come from Adobe
newsletter@pdf-adobe.org,...
Google will phase out support for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 Web browser starting in March, the company said Friday.
"Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We're also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites," Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager, wrote in a blog post Friday.
The announcement comes more than two weeks after Google reported that its servers had been the target of attacks...
Want to run Windows 7 on the new Apple iPad? Citrix says it will soon be possible--at least virtually--using a new version of its Citrix Receiver software.
Promised to be ready when the tablet computer ships in March, Citrix says the new software, based on the current iPhone version, is a response to questions about how the iPad might find a home in the enterprise.
"If your company has XenDesktop or XenApp you will be happy to know you will be able to use your iPad for real work as well," wrote Citrix Vice President Chris Fleck in a company blog.
"It...
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