Slashdot Mirror

billandad writes "Anyone would think the timing was deliberate; just as Microsoft is forced into giving users the option to switch from IE via the browser ballot screen, so Google introduces a new Chrome beta with enhanced privacy features to chisel away at Microsoft's market share. '... you can control how browser cookies, images, JavaScript, plug-ins, and pop-ups are handled on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can set up cookie rules to allow cookies specifically only for sites that you trust, and block cookies from untrusted sites.' The new beta also adds language detection, and will prompt the user to translate a page if it's written in a foreign tongue."

coomaria writes "OK, even allowing for the fact this comes from a newly published study (PDF) from a security company, that's still one heck of a statistic. The fact that it's Symantec, and so has access to perhaps more enterprises than most, makes it a double-heck with knobs on. Or how about this one for size: 'every enterprise, yes, 100 percent, experienced cyber losses in 2009.'"

coomaria writes "The HoneyGrid scans 40 million Web sites and 10 million emails, so it was bound to find something interesting. Among the things it found was that a staggering 95% of User Generated Content is either malicious in nature or spam." Here is the report's front door; to read the actual report you'll have to give up name, rank, and serial number.

rsmiller510 writes "A BusinessWeek report suggests that the Nexus One release marks the latest volley in an escalating war between Google and Apple, one that could force Apple into working more closely with Microsoft. 'When companies start to imitate one another, it's usually either an extreme case of flattery—or war. In the case of Google and Apple, it's both. Separated by a mere 10 miles in Silicon Valley, the two have been on famously good terms for almost a decade. ... Now the companies have entered a new, more adversarial phase. With Nexus One, Google, which had been content to power multiple phonemakers' devices with Android, enters the hardware game, becoming a direct threat to the iPhone. With its Quattro purchase, Apple aims to create completely new kinds of mobile ads, say three sources familiar with Apple's thinking. The goal isn't so much to compete with Google in search as to make search on mobile phones obsolete. ... Some analysts believe the Apple-Google battle is likely to get much rougher in the months ahead. Ovum's Yarmis thinks Apple may soon decide to dump Google as the default search engine on its devices, primarily to cut Google off from mobile data that could be used to improve its advertising and Android technology. Jobs might cut a deal with—gasp!—Microsoft to make Bing Apple's engine of choice, or even launch its own search engine, Yarmis says."

coomaria writes "Thought that 2009 was the year botnets died? Well, think again: compromised computers were responsible for distributing 83.4% of the 107 billion spam messages sent around the world every single day this year, and it's going to get worse if intelligent and autonomous botnets arrive in 2010 as predicted."

rsmiller510 writes "Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has a plan to kill Google by paying the top 1,000 sites a cool million each to leave the Google index and move to Microsoft. But could such a plan ever work, and would it be worth the risk to abandon Google?"

Now that the Kindle is being actively marketed in many countries outside the US, reader rsmiller510 sends in his piece up on DaniWeb about the skepticism in Germany about the whole e-book phenomenon. A major difference from the US book market is that in Germany, book prices are regulated in an effort to protect authors, publishers, and small booksellers. As a result, publishers don't issue electronic versions of their books until the paperback edition comes out, up to 2 years after the hardcover — and then they sell the e-book for the same price as the lowest-cost paperback. An article on e-books in Spiegel.de notes a survey taken recently for the Frankfurt Book Fair, which found that "only one in 12 Germans has a clear idea about what an e-book is, and seven out of 10 of them would prefer a printed version over a digital one." 65,000 e-books were sold in Germany in the first 6 months of 2009, vs. almost ten times that number bought per week in the US, in what is still a small niche of the overall book business.

bfire writes to tell us that marketing firm uSocial has decided to apply a new monetization scheme to the Twitter service by providing packages of followers for purchase. "According to the firm, a single Twitter follower could be worth $0.10 a month. It is selling followers in various packages, starting at 1,000 for $87, which is delivered in seven days, and going all the way up to 100,000 followers at a cost of $3,479, delivered over a year." This is just the latest in a number of different exploits and problems of the Twitter universe as individuals try to subvert a popular tool into a self-serving device.

bfire writes to tell us that marketing firm uSocial has decided to apply a new monetization scheme to the Twitter service by providing packages of followers for purchase. "According to the firm, a single Twitter follower could be worth $0.10 a month. It is selling followers in various packages, starting at 1,000 for $87, which is delivered in seven days, and going all the way up to 100,000 followers at a cost of $3,479, delivered over a year." This is just the latest in a number of different exploits and problems of the Twitter universe as individuals try to subvert a popular tool into a self-serving device.

BabyDuckHat writes "Cnet's Dennis O'Reilly caught 'Windows Search Helper' trying to change his default Firefox search from Google to Bing. This isn't the first time the software company has been caught quietly changing user's preferences to benefit its own products."

rsmiller510 writes "For those of you who think Google Wave is all that and a bag of chips, I put on the brakes and give you a few questions to ponder."

rsmiller510 writes "The EE Times reports this week that Dell has released a hybrid laptop running both Linux and Windows clearly aimed at business travelers. Linux for quick tasks and Windows for more intensive ones, but will such a machine really fly in the business world?"

rsmiller510 writes "In a wide-ranging interview with Tech Crunch's Michael Arrington on Wednesday at Le Web in Paris, Google's Marissa Mayer talked about all things Google, but what I found most interesting was when the conversation turned toward the future of search. Mayer said the key to the future of search lies in personalization. ... Mayer said in the future, Google (and presumably other search tools) will understand more about the user and be able to deliver more relevant information based on that knowledge. 'We think that when you look at the winning search engine in 2020 and what traits it's likely to have, we think the one thing that will be true is that it will understand more about you the user.'" Video of the interview with Mayer is available at Tech Crunch. The personalization of search content focuses mainly on SearchWiki, which we discussed when it went live last month. The Register has a more cynical take on the discussion, seizing on comments by Mayer which indicated Google employees may evaluate SearchWiki's user ratings and use them to make "obvious changes" to search results for everyone.

rsmiller510 writes "At the recent Web 2.0 Summit, Dave Girouard, who is president of Google's enterprise division, stated that his company's long-term goal is to open up the Google development stack to outside developers. If this is true, then it could have some serious long-term implications for developers who could use Google services in new and interesting ways."

rsmiller510 writes "Last week Adobe surprised a few people with the announcement that it was including Alfresco content management services as part of its LiveCycle Enterprise Suite Update 1 package. The surprise was two-fold: that Adobe felt it was necessary to add content management services at all, and that it chose open source vendor Alfresco as its content management partner. I spoke to Alfresco CEO John Powell to get his perspective on the pact and how it can help push open source into the enterprise mainstream. Powell is understandably excited by this arrangement, and one of the main reasons, he says, is because the Adobe partnership gives his company credibility with companies that might otherwise not even sniff at an open source vendor."

harryjohnston alerts us to a story picked up by a few bloggers in the security space. A Russian security research company, Gleg, has discovered a zero-day in the latest version of RealPlayer 11. But they won't reveal details to Real, or to CERT, despite repeated requests. Details are available only to their clients who pay a lot of money for early access to such knowledge. To describe Gleg's business model Daniweb rather cautiously puts forward the word "blackmail." The story was first exposed in Ryan Nariane's Securitywach blog.

An anonymous reader writes " The kind of turf war seen in the real world by drug gangs is being replicated by the criminal gangs behind spamming botnets, and things are turning nasty."

jenwren1010 writes to mention that IBM has just announced the new open beta version of their virtual Linux environment that allows users to run x86 Linux programs on POWER processor-based IBM System p servers. "Designed to reduce power, cooling and space by consolidating x86 Linux workloads on System p servers, it will eventually be released as the [rolls-off-the-tongue] 'IBM System p Application Virtual Environment (System p AVE).' With a 31.5% global revenue share during 2006, IBM hopes to build on System p UNIX success and extend firmly into the Linux marketplace. Considering there are almost 2,800 applications that already run natively on Linux on System p servers, the chances are good that it will succeed."

mattb0611 writes "Just as it seemed that Linux users (especially 64-bit users) would finally be able to enjoy streaming content with a minimum of hassle, Microsoft's new Silverlight software promises to throw a monkey wrench in the works — as they have yet to suggest any sort of Linux platform support."

miserableles writes "TomTom has admitted to a UK security journalist that a number of GO 910 satellite navigation units shipped with two Trojans installed on the hard drive. But still no sign of an official warning on the TomTom website."

Bill Andad writes to point out a surprise trend emerging from the Virus Bulletin Conference 2006 in Montreal this week. From the article on Daniweb: "It is the smallest of Trojan attacks that are causing the biggest headache in the world of corporate security right now. By targeting individuals within individual companies with individually constructed infected messages, the new-age industrial spy is slipping under the security radar." News.com has more in-depth coverage.