Archive for the ‘Da 'Net’ Category

A Google Inc. executive said Tuesday that the company is still considering its next step in China — seven weeks after it pledged to stop censoring search results there and threatened to pull out of the country altogether.

Why not do the right thing and just pull out? They never should have been in under those circumstances anyway.

Somebody was really bored.

The Internet has become the third most popular news platform for American adults, trailing only local and national television stations, according to a survey released on Monday.

Seventy-eight percent of the 2,259 adults surveyed for the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and the Project for Excellence in Journalism said that on a typical day they get news from a local TV station.

Statistic after statistic to tell us something we already knew. I bet the numbers are skewed though. I don’t know many people who trust mainstream media let alone watch it first everyday.

Has Facebook patented the news, or at least the news feed, in social-networking environments? On Tuesday, the United States Patent Office granted Facebook a patent for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network.” The patent is published and numbered 7,669,123.

Facebook’s patent, which was filed in 2006, describes a “method for displaying a news feed in a social-network environment,” including “generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social-network environment,” attaching an “informational link” to at least one of the news items, limiting access to the item to a “predetermined set of viewers,” ordering the news items, dynamically limiting the number of items, and displaying the news items.

So what would we call a “news feed” in something social other than Facebook? An ‘info feed’?

Google introduced a social networking tool called Google BuzzTuesday that allows sharing of status updates, images, and videos via a new Gmail tab called Google Buzz. The Google Buzz features will also be available on Android based phones as well as the iPhone (via a Web-based application) allowing for real-time updates to your Google Buzz feed that can show up on a new version of Google’s mobile maps.

Hmm. So now I have to update my Facebook, Twitter, and Buzz statuses? When will the madness end? This is going to make my hair turn even grayer than it already is. Heck, with all these social networks I am going to need hair loss treatment after trying to update all my statuses.

I have really mixed feeling about Google Books. I lost a lot of books a few years ago, I really should have picked some good long distance movers.

Changes that Google Inc and the Authors Guild made to an ambitious plan to create a massive online library were inadequate because they fail to address antitrust and copyright concerns, the U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday.

Google’s plan to put millions of books online has been praised for expanding access to books but has also been vociferously criticized on antitrust and copyright grounds.

The deal was amended last year after the Justice Department recommended that the original settlement be rejected but more changes were needed, a Justice Department official said on Thursday, on background.

On one hand I can understand the copyright issues, but on the other hand, there are many books that people would otherwise never know about, let alone read, that could benefit a lot of people. I’m still not sure how to feel about the whole thing.

I would help if I could drag myself away from my cockpit over here in the Alligator Pit, and if they bought me an xbox 360.

Internet search firm Google is finalizing a deal that would let the National Security Agency help it investigate a corporate espionage attack that may have originated in China, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

The aim of the investigation is to better defend Google, the world’s largest Internet search company, and its users from future attacks, the Post said, citing anonymous sources with knowledge of the arrangement.

Does this mean, if someone hacks into my servers, I can call on the NSA to help me figure out who is behind the attack as well? It’s only fair, isn’t it?

I don’t get it… Why would someone follow someone else if they had no idea who that person was in the first place?

Twitter pushed out a password reset Tuesday evening to accounts that were following suspicious users. The move comes in the wake of a revelation that phishers were attempting to steal usernames and passwords using fake BitTorrent sites.

This goes the same for ’spammers”. No one can spam you on Twitter if you don’t follow them. Even so, if they send you a message, you block them. Problem solved. If someone keeps running through the neighborhood ringing doorbells, that doesn’t mean anyone has to let them in!

Did China attack Google? It sure sounds like it. China censors everything from basic search results to every web directory known to man, why does it surprise anyone that they would attempt to hack into anyone’s business?

Microsoft said Thursday that a security vulnerability in its Internet Explorer browser was used in cyberattacks which prompted Google to threaten to shut down its operations in China.

Web security firm MaAfee Inc. said meanwhile that the attacks on Google and other companies showed a level of sophistication beyond that of cyber criminals and more typical of a nation-state.

Too bad you can’t get an insurance quote for server issues in foreign countries.

Recent cyber attacks on Google Inc and other businesses exploited a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft Corp’s Internet Explorer browser, according to security firm McAfee Inc.

McAfee’s report came as authorities struggle to crack one of the most sophisticated hacking cases in history.

Google said on Tuesday that in mid-December, it detected an attack on its corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of its intellectual property. It eventually found that more than 20 other companies had been infiltrated.

Rackspace experienced an outage yesterday–a recurring issue this year for the hosted data center provider–which took down a number of high profile sites including the popular blog site TechCrunch. No network is impervious to outages, but a company like Rackspace needs to provide consistent and reliable service.

The Official Rackspace Blog explains “On December 18, 2009 between 3:37 p.m. and 4:12 p.m. CST, Rackspace experienced network connectivity problems.” The timeline doesn’t jive with the fact that the timestamp on the TechCrunch report on the Washington Post site says 12:17pm. Assuming the TechCrunch timestamp is Pacific time, it would mean that the outage began more like 2pm Central time, or possibly even earlier.

It would be nice if we could get insurance quotes for site outages, you know to help compensate those sites that go down for extended periods. Everyone things about the money they lose during downtime, don’t they?