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The Obama administration’s Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission has been working with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer to make a computer game about managing the United States federal budget and deficit, USA Today reports.
President Obama appointed Erskine Bowles and Alan K. Simpson to lead an 18-person, bi-partisan commission to generate ideas for dealing with the nation’s rising deficit and other fiscal challenges. The game is just a footnote amid the commission’s broader objectives, of course, but it’s actually not a bad idea.
“Anyone with a computer” will be able to play, which likely means it will be a web-based game. Each player will be tasked with balancing the federal budget. The game obviously won’t be a completely realistic simulation of that task — if it was, no one would want to play — but it might give some citizens a sense of how difficult the task is.
The commission likely hopes that players will become more sympathetic to the difficult and controversial decisions it will have to make after the game demonstrates that there are no ideal options. Those decisions could include higher taxes and cuts to medicare, social security and other programs.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that the people most upset about the cuts would be aged 65 and older and that video game players are generally quite young, but at least one of those facts isn’t true — players of online games are older than you might think.
Gmail has a new feature for Firefox 3.6 and Google Chrome users: drag-and-drop file attachments. The feature is very straightforward — just drag files from your desktop onto your e-mail, and a green box will appear where you can drop your files.
Google promises it will “enable this for other browsers as soon as they support this feature.” Why the wait? Drag-and-drop functionality is an HTML5 feature. Currently only the Gecko layout engine — the engine that powers Firefox — fully supports HTML5 drag-and-drop. WebKit, which powers both Safari and Chrome, has only partial support for drag-and-drop.
Short answer: an infinitesimally small amount.
If you have any sympathy for musicians you’ll buy their CDs from their web sites or at their performances. That’s pretty much the conclusion you’ll draw from a great attempt at quantifying musicians’ pay rates in the online music business(es) by David McCandless of InformationIsBeautiful.net.
McCandless tried to determine how many songs or CDs a musician would need to sell in various ways to make the U.S. minimum wage ($1,600 per month). It was a tough project. He wrote: “As ever, this was incredibly difficult to research. Industry figures are hard to get hold of.”
The musician’s best deal: press and sell the CDs yourself (143 per month).
Second best deal: sell them on eBay (155 per month).
Worst deal: Spotify stream (4,540,020 per month).
Obviously Spotify makes the music available globally and selling CD’s from your own web site involves much less exposure. But four million a month?
McCandless acknowledges that his numbers are crude, but they are certainly an indication of what musicians face. It’s a good data point in the debate about piracy and the efforts of the Pirate Party to give creators less and consumers more.
Also, it’s another indication of why the successful working musician’s business model has always boiled down to: “work a lot of weddings and don’t quit the day job.”
McCandless blog here: “How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online?”
On Jimmy Kimmel Live 2 nights ago, Jimmy asked guest Alyssa Milano to explain Twitter and hashtags to him. In the video below, Alyssa explains that she tweets 12 to 22 times per day, that she likes to imagine Jimmy Kimmel naked when she’s nervous and that she uses a lot of hashtags — a big plus in my book.
A closer look at the actress’s Twitter stream reveals that she uses TweetDeck, an app she likes so much that she asks Twitter “not to kill TweetDeck.” The acquisition of Tweetie has made the future of other third party Twitter clients a little uncertain, but with support like this, the folks at TweetDeck have nothing to worry about.
Backdoor.Rohimafo is a Trojan that has several back door functions. It not only opens a back door and performs the usual functions but it also can perform some decidedly unusual functions.
It attempts to block users from connecting to remote servers; not only specific servers but also specific network segments by using PersistentRoutes in Windows. PersistentRoutes can be used to add a routing entry to a routing table persistently. The route.exe command can be used to add an entry like the following:
route.exe add -p [NETWORK ADDRESS] [NETMASK] [IP ADDRESS OF GATEWAY] [METRIC]
This Trojan can add routing entries using a network address instead of the IP address of the gateway. Therefore, all packets matching the network address and netmask that are specified by the command are included. Usually threats add entries to the hosts file to redirect IP addresses or hook network APIs and let the connecting API fail.
This Trojan also has functionality to steal passwords; it aims to inject malicious code into not only web browsers, such as Internet Explorer and Opera, but also Java applications and isclient.exe and intpro.exe, which are tools used to protect HTTP connections. So not only are major browsers targeted but web security tools as well.
This Trojan attempts to steal web passwords dynamically and statically. Dynamic stealing is to hook network APIs like 'send', and snoop network traffic to get passwords. It has special hooking codes for Java applications and Opera. It tries to hook PR_Write in nspr4.dll and it tries to hook OpStart in opera.dll for Opera. To steal passwords from IE, most threats, including this Trojan, use the PFXExportCertStore API. This Trojan also uses the PK11_CheckUserPassword API that is exported by nsr4.dll to steal passwords from FireFox. It attacks by using a predetermined list of passwords.
If you’re one of those people who scribbles your plans for a given week on the back of the junk mail in your purse (totally not me…), then you could probably benefit from MySpace’s new platform.
Today, MySpace continues on its quest to distinguish itself as a place for entertainment and socializing with the addition of what is essentially a calendar that combines your events, your friends’ events, concerts and shindigs put on by your favorite artists and even events from your Facebook account. You can also buy concert tix from band pages and pages of other entertainers.
While the service itself could be a source of revenue for the company — advertisers can now buy sponsored event space inside the calendar — we’re not sure how much utility it will add for users.
Although MySpace does have a wide selection of events — nearly one million listings for 2010 — and is, in my opinion, the best place to check out bands, a tricked-out calendar just seems like another addition to an already crowded site.
What do you think? Will you use this service to get your life in order? Or will you stick to scrawling stuff on junk mail?
Niels Provos of the Google Security Team has blogged about the rise of malicious web sites carrying rogue security products, which the Google team calls “Fake AV.” Google has been engaged in a constant battle against the sites because the operators who peddle them have been refining their techniques for poisoning Google search engine results in order to victimize Google users by drawing them to malicious download sites.
He wrote: “we conducted an in-depth analysis of the prevalence of Fake AV over the course of the last 13 months, and the research paper containing our findings, 'The Nocebo Effect on the Web: An Analysis of Fake AV distribution' is going to be presented at the Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET) in San Jose, CA on April 27th.”
He went on to say: “Our analysis of 240 million web pages over the 13 months of our study uncovered over 11,000 domains involved in Fake AV distribution — or, roughly 15% of the malware domains we detected on the web during that period.”
“Also, over the last year, the lifespan of domains distributing Fake AV attacks has decreased significantly.”
Provos advises Web users not to purchase the rogues when they pop up their persistent, screaming warnings and instead, remove the malicious code from their machines.
“In the meantime, we recommend only running antivirus and antispyware products from trusted companies. Be sure to use the latest versions of this software, and if the scan detects any suspicious programs or applications, remove them immediately,” he said.
Google Online Security Blog piece here.
UK security firm Context Information Security Ltd., is making available a browser-based tool that will demonstrate clickjacking techniques that were discussed at a Blackhat Europe 2010 presentation.
On the Context site, they said “Clickjacking is a term first introduced by Jeremiah Grossman and Robert Hansen in 2008 to describe a technique whereby an attacker tricks a user into performing certain actions on a website by hiding clickable elements inside an invisible iframe.
“Although it has been two years since the concept was first introduced, most websites still have not implemented effective protection against clickjacking. In part, this may be because of the difficulty of visualising how the technique works in practice.”
“The tool is currently in an early beta stage, and works best in Firefox 3.6. Full support for other browsers will follow shortly.”
Context Ltd. piece here.
We suspected that the iPhone 4.0 would be nothing special compared to previous versions, at least when it comes to jailbreaking the operating system. Now, a jailbreak tool has been released for iPhone 4.0 Beta, and the eternal game of cat and mouse between Apple and the hacking community continues.
Even if you’ve managed to install the iPhone 4.0 beta software on your iPhone, this jailbreak is not an easy one — just take a look at all of the warnings. In short, this jailbreak is aimed at app developers, not the general public. Nevertheless it’s here, meaning that a jailbreak for consumers will probably be ready and waiting when the 4.0 OS comes out of beta.
Thousands of travelers are stranded throughout Europe as ash continues to rain down from an erupting volcano in Iceland this week. Among them is Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg who, according to his press secretary, is “running the Norwegian government from the United States via his new iPad.”
CNN reports that the Norwegian prime minister was in New York this week for President Obama’s nuclear summit and has been left stranded on American soil thanks to the widespread closure of most of European airspace. The volcanic eruption sent a cloud of ash toward mainland Europe that could take up to 48 hours to dissipate, resulting in over 6,000 canceled flights across the E.U.
The people of Norway, however, can rest easy knowing all political affairs will be safely and soundly resolved via Apple’s latest gadget wunderkind. Meanwhile, Israel has apparently rejected the potential diplomatic utility of the iPad, considering the country has banned all imports of the device. Maybe Steve Jobs can hire Stoltenberg to do some outreach.
The obvious question here is: Should Obama get an iPad?
The lovable Evian Roller Babies, which broke the world record for the most viewed online advertisement in history last year, have made the leap from YouTube to your television.
Evian’s wildly successful viral campaign has surpassed 100 million total views. It was one of the first YouTube-exclusive campaigns by a major brand.
Now according to Social Times, the campaign has debuted on Los Angeles TV stations and will run in New York sometime this summer. The company will also air the commercials in other countries, including France and the UK.
The Evian Roller Babies showed advertisers that viral videos have tremendous reach. Hopefully we’ll see more advertisers take their ads to the YouTube masses first before pushing them out on the far more expensive TV airwaves.
This might not mean much if you’re not writing or editing a tech blog, but news that the AP – whose stylebook is still the standard for all things grammar and punctuation in the news world — is officially changing “Web site” to “website” was met with a warm reception in our newsroom (and likely quite a few others) this afternoon.
We’d actually gone rogue on the issue ourselves several months ago, thinking that “Web site” was a rather antiquated way for describing “a computer connected to the internet that maintains a series of web pages on the World Wide Web.”
According to a tweet from the AP Stylebook, the change is noted as of today on its web version, and will be included in the next print edition, due out next month. We’re pretty ecstatic about the change, and hold our collective breath for other possible updates, such as changing “e-mail” to “email.”
There has been widespread speculation about the release date of Apple’s next generation iPhone, including (yet another) report that the Verizon iPhone is finally coming this year. Now we have perhaps the most substantial evidence yet that a new version of the Apple smartphone is coming to AT&T in June.
Boy Genius Report confirms from multiple sources that AT&T has blocked its employees from taking vacations during the month of June. The only time the carrier has done this previously was for earlier iPhone launches. We know that the iPhone is due for a refresh and that it usually happens during the summer, but this is the strongest evidence to date that the new iPhone will arrive in consumers’ hands this June.
The new iPhone is rumoured to have a better camera and potentially a touch-sensitive case backing like the panel used in the Magic Mouse. Only time — and perhaps the rumor mill — will tell for sure in the coming months, so stay tuned.
What features do you want to see in the next version of the iPhone?
Business employees are visiting Facebook from the workplace more than any other internet site, including Google, Managed Security Services company Network Box discovered in a recent study.
The company looked at 13 billion URLs used by businesses in the first quarter of 2010 and found that 6.8% of all business Internet traffic goes to Facebook, which is double the amount of business traffic that goes to Google and nearly triple the amount that Yahoo gets.
Network Box also found that Facebook consumes a significant portion of business bandwidth: 4.5% of all bandwidth. However, YouTube reigns supreme in that department, accounting for 10% of all business bandwidth used. An accompanying survey showed that 43% respondents are concerned about this seemingly excessive use of social media in the workplace.
Facebook certainly appears to dominate business users’ attention while at work. If previous findings that Facebook is the fourth largest destination site for news are accurate, then perhaps we can safely assume that in-office use of Facebook is for more than just social networking. We can only hope that the YouTube video viewing is as educational in nature.
Top five websites visited by businesses:
Top five business bandwidth sites:
A volcano in Iceland with probably the coolest and most formidable name ever, Eyjafjallajokull, erupted this Wednesday, April 14. As we wrote earlier, European travelers have since been stranded around the world — including the Norwegian prime minister, whose trusty iPad is thankfully keeping his country’s government afloat.
NASA’s Terra satellite captured the above image depicting the enormous ash cloud migrating from the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano into Northern Europe yesterday. It’s unknown how long it will take the hazardous cloud to disperse, but estimates start at 48 hours — leaving much of Europe grounded in the volcano’s wake.
For more imagery from the Icelandic eruption, check out this curated gallery on Flickr from photographers across Europe documenting the volcano’s impact.
BusinessWeek and Fortune have both released their annual rankings — the 50 Most Innovative Companies and the Fortune 500, respectively — and Apple has strong showings in both publications.
For the sixth consecutive year, Apple ranked number one in BusinessWeek’s 50 Most Innovative Companies report. When you consider that BusinessWeek only started this ranking system in 2005, that statistic becomes even more impressive. James Andrew, senior partner and head of global innovation at Boston Consulting Group (the company that provides the data to BusinessWeek) claims that every year Apple is the “hands down winner,” although Google remains a strong second. Furthermore, when those surveyed were asked what company would replace Apple as the most innovative over the next five years, the most common response was “no one.”
See the video from BusinessWeek below for more insight into the changes and trends among the most innovative companies of 2010.
In the annual Fortune 500 rankings, Apple is ranked 56, up 15 places from last year. That sort of move is impressive for any company, but Apple is also gaining major ground in its own industry.
In its designated industry, Computers, Office Equipment, Apple remains in third place behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell, but unlike every other company in its category, it saw an increase in revenues and profits between 2008 and 2009.
If you extrapolate that even further and compare Apple to the Top 10 companies in the Fortune 500, Apple outperformed every other company in terms of increases in revenues and profits — except J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America. Just remember that Apple didn’t get $45 billion in TARP money.
While Apple faces stiffer competition in the mobile sector, the company continues to not only meet but beat estimates every quarter and gains in revenue and profit margin.
We think that the Boston Consulting Group partner makes a good point in the BusinessWeek video: Innovation is more than just being something new, it’s being something that is successful. Apple is sometimes criticized for not being an inventive company, i.e. they don’t create completely new ideas or products. The iPad, for instance, builds off of not only Apple’s own history with touchscreen devices like the iPhone and the iPod touch, but also on tablet computing devices that go back literally decades. However, what makes a company like Apple (and Google) innovative is not that it creates something completely new every single time, but that it is able to iterate designs, devices and functionality so that products are popular with consumers and successful financially.
What do you think of the BusinessWeek and Fortune 500 rankings for 2010? Let us know in the comments.
Loic Le Meur, Seesmic founder and tech scene leader, was clearly bullish on the Twitter platform in this interview conducted yesterday at Chirp, the Twitter developer conference.
Le Meur, whose company is launching its own platform, is a big believer in the opportunities for those who develop Twitter apps. Innovative apps that add value and diversity will always find a place in the market, and Le Meur is confident about Seesmic’s current position.
Seesmic currently has a web client, Windows and AIR desktop apps, and mobile applications for the BlackBerry and Android operating systems. Twitter has or is soon releasing official versions of all of these except the desktop app, which the company told us it doesn’t plan to develop. However, this was the company’s original position on mobile apps, as well. Historically, we’ve learned that Twitter doesn’t plan to develop (or acquire) native apps — until it does develop (or acquire) them. Le Meur knows he might have to compete with Twitter in the desktop client category one day, but it’s not certain if or when that day will come.
In the meantime, Seesmic does many things that Twitter will likely never do. For one thing, it integrates multiple platforms including Facebook and LinkedIn. Its all-in-one dashboard solution is something that power users (and perhaps, one day, average end users) need and love, if it’s done correctly.
Le Meur’s confident position is one Seesmic needs right now. With a shaky ecosystem of third-party apps and an uncertain future for Twitter app developers, his be-awesome-or-get-out-of-the-way stance is refreshing, the flip side of the capitalistic coin that Twitter has tossed to developers as it grows from a startup into a profitable company.
Dr. Johannes Ullrich at SANS brought up a good point in his morning podcast (Stormcast 296 ) about widespread transportation shutdowns and disaster recovery planning.
The Eyjafjallajokull glacier volcano in Iceland, which has stopped all air travel in the UK, Western Europe and Scandinavia, of course is the case in point.
Those writing and updating disaster recovery plans should keep in mind the possibilities of just such widespread transportation shutdowns when they plan for personnel to operate remote (backup) network operations centers. If an enterprise’s plan calls for an IT crew to fly to a backup NOC and they can’t get there, what then?
Good observation.
The New York Times quotes Bill McGuire from Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre saying that the last Eyjafjallajokull eruption lasted more than a year. Aon is an insurance broker and risk management consultant.
It’s 4/16 and for fans of the social network application Foursquare, it’s cause for celebration. All across the world, Foursquare users are celebrating Foursquare Day by gathering in swarms and taking advantage of Foursquare deals offered by bars, restaurants and other venues. The big day could also potentially be the day Foursquare reaches one million members.
According to Co-Founder Dennis Crowley, who joined me on NBC San Diego earlier this morning (see video below), the company had nothing to do with the day except the creation of a special badge — it was devised 100% by fans of the service.
It all started in Tampa, where optometrist Nate Bonilla-Warford decided that since four squared equals 16, 4/16 should be known as Foursquare Day. With just a few weeks of lead time, Foursquare’s passionate user base has managed to turn the day into a global social media festival that will be celebrated at more than 150 swarms (a.k.a parties).
Foursquare’s having its own official party in New York City at The Hotel on Rivington, but you can check out the hundreds of other parties and events scheduled — it’s not too late to add your own — on the Foursquare Day website.
Crowley also noted that Foursquare is fast approaching one million members; last time we checked it had about 725,000 users and 22 million checkins. In a follow up conversation, Crowley said that Foursquare is about 80,000 shy of the one million mark and that it normally adds 10,000 to 20,000 new members a day. We have a feeling that today will be a landmark day for the startup, but is it enough to get them to one million on Foursquare Day? We can only wait and see.
It’s no secret that Sony Ericsson has been struggling for the last couple of years. It hasn’t reported a profitable quarter since 2008 and 2009 has been especially tough for the company, which ended Q1 with a 293 million euro ($397 million) net income loss.
This morning, however, Sony Ericsson posted a 21 million euro ($28 million) profit for Q1 2010. On the downside, it also shipped 10.5 million handsets — 4 million fewer than the number shipped in Q1 2009 and 4.1 million fewer than the number shipped in Q4 2009.
Yes, fixing the business side of things helps. However, for the last two years, smartphones have been the most important part of the mobile market and Sony Ericsson has been steadily losing market share in that area. A return to profitability will surely make shareholders happy, but Sony Ericsson’s new smartphone strategy — with Android-based Xperia X10 and Symbian-based Vivaz at the forefront — has yet to produce results.
Just in time for Earth Day, Oceanhouse Media has released two special iPhone and iPad apps based around Dr. Seuss’s classic book, The Lorax. First published in 1971, The Lorax was written by Dr. Seuss to teach children about the value of caring about the environment.
Like the other Dr. Seuss apps for the iPhone and iPad, the spirit of the characters and story are recreated for touch devices. And just like the other Dr. Seuss eBooks, the book can either be read aloud at a set pace, put in auto-play or readers can read and interact with the book on their own. The eBook costs $3.99.
Lorax Garden for the iPhone is $2.99 and while it will work with the iPad, it was designed for the iPhone. Lorax Garden is a game for young users that picks up where “The Lorax” ends and asks kids to replant Truffula Forest using the one remaining seed.
You “plant” the trees by watering potted plants and growing flowers to earn extra “care” hearts that can make the trees grow faster. After repopulating the forest, e-mail postcards of the revitalized place can be sent from the app. The game is cute, but the replay value is pretty limited, so our vote is for The Lorax eBook if you’re looking to expand your Dr. Seuss digital collection.
Despite being written in an era that was far different from the world we live in now, The Lorax remains a valuable and entertaining story and is a great way to bring the concept of “Going Green” to younger kids.
The first volume licensing arrangements for Microsoft Office 2010 will be made through company partners on May 1, almost two weeks earlier than expected. This news today from the company's Office Engineering team, which released the final build of all versions of the company's principal applications suite today.
"Since the start of our public beta in November 2009, we've had more than 7.5 million people download the beta version -- that's more than 3 times the number of 2007 beta downloads!" reads this afternoon's post by the Engineering team. "The feedback that we've received from all these programs has shaped the set of products we're excited about, and that I'm sure will delight our customers."
Pre-orders for individual US customers have already started from Microsoft's online store. There, customers will find the Home and Student package (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) available for $149.99. This time, it's Outlook that's the premium component in the bundle; the Home and Business Package, which adds only Outlook to the Home and Student arrangement, sells for $279.99. The Professional bundle, which adds Publisher and Access, sells online for $499.99. Although SharePoint, Visio, and Project 2010 share the marketing umbrella with the other Office components, they are sold separately.
The delivery date for consumer Office bundles has not yet been set. However, the official Office launch date (any more, software is almost never launched once only) is May 12, when Microsoft officials including Business Division President Stephen Elop will lead a gala press presentation from the NBC Studios in New York City.
Though Microsoft unofficially absorbed a truckload of user-crafted suggestions from the MakeOfficeBetter.com Web site launched by two company employees (and recently shut down), it's the beta program where company engineers did the most listening to tester suggestions. From personal experience in that program, I can happily report that engineers were very receptive to input.
A study of web traffic from enterprises in the first quarter of this year has shown that YouTube videos used 10 percent of bandwidth – more than any other site. Facebook traffic used 4.5 percent, Windows update 3.3, Yahoo!’s image server Yimg 2.7 and Google searches 2.5 percent.
The study, by the Hong Kong-based security firm Network Box, analyzed traffic to and from 13 billion URLs.
The study also analyzed the number of hits:
Simon Heron, a Network Box internet security analyst said: "The figures show that IT managers are right to be concerned about the amount of social network use at work. There are two real concerns here: firstly that employees will be downloading applications from social networks and putting security at risk; and secondly the amount of corporate bandwidth that appears to be being used for non-corporate activity."
Network Box release here: “Business internet traffic increases to Facebook and YouTube”
The assumption here is that all this traffic is personal browsing and not work-related. That actually might be a more complicated issue than a first glance indicates. Certainly people use Google for work. I look things up a dozen times a day.
Twelve of my 26 Facebook friends are professional contacts. Keeping up with such professional contacts for possible recruiting is certainly a business function.
Yahoo is my backup email on those rare occasions that there are problems with the company email server. There are also business reasons to use an email account that is not linked to your company (at least in research activities in the AV industry it’s pretty common.)
YouTube? There are news- and business-related videos there too in addition to the Roomba-riding cats and “Sunbelt Software Research goes Bowling.”
No, seriously, there are legitimate business reasons for using social media. Really! Have you seen the “Standing Cat is Watching you” YouTube video?
The CEO of Apple is certainly no stranger to the stage, being known for giving keynotes that typically have the effect of rendering tech geeks into little piles of goo after the announcement of a new product. But now Mr. Jobs — or at least, the story of his career — will be gracing a new stage: an Off Broadway theatre.
Playwright Mike Daisey wasn’t scheduled to perform his new monologue about the Apple head honcho until next year, but popular demand from New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre has pushed up the premiere of Notes Toward the Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs to a one-night-only run on April 22. The venue’s artistic director was reportedly so excited about the work that he commissioned a one evening run even though the play is officially a “work in progress and not ready for review.”
Surely the success of the iPad, whose upwards of 500,000 units sold in the first week was enough to throttle the supply chain and push back the international launch of the device by one month, has everything to do with the extreme demand for the Jobs stage treatment. Daisey counts himself among the many Apple faithful, but contends the show will also look critically at labor issues reported by Apple’s suppliers in China — among much else in Jobs’ life and career.
Notes Toward the Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs will start its official run next January at California’s Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Are you interested to see the life of Apple’s CEO given the stage treatment? Let us know in the comments.
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin [iTunes link] has his own iPhone app, and it’s packed full of information, news, images and videos related to space exploration. It’s currently the one of the most popular apps in the Apple App Store’s Education category.
“Buzz Aldrin Portal to Science and Space Exploration” is divided into five sections: Space Buzz, News, Interactive, Buzz Life, and More. We’ve pictured most of them below.
The Space Buzz section serves up a variety of content (mission data, videos, photos, “buzz’s takes” and more) on nine subjects in space exploration, including Deep Space Exploration, Mysteries & Myths, Mars Exploration, Space Tourism & Private Ventures, Hubble & Other Telescopes, Moon Exploration, International Space Station and International Space Race.
The news section is simply a series of links to space-related websites like Spacedaily.com, SpacePolitics.com and NASA. The “interactive” tab is a misnomer; there aren’t any games or anything like that, but it does link you to Buzz’s tweets and some interesting articles.
Buzz Life documents Buzz Aldrin’s life and appearances. You’ll find information about Apollo 11, Gemini 12 and his Dancing With the Stars appearance there, along with links to his Twitter and YouTube pages and a calendar of his upcoming public appearances.
The app is available now for $1.99. It works on the iPad and iPod touch as well.
Taken from Google Official Blog:
Last year, in our quest to minimize our carbon footprint (and keep people on their toes), we turned to an unlikely solution for mowing an overgrown field: goats. More than 200 goats from California Grazing have once again arrived at our Mountain View headquarters where they’ll stay for over a week chomping away on grassy goodness. The cost of bringing in the goats is comparable to hiring lawn mowers for the same job and the green benefits are clear: the goats eliminate mower emissions, reduce noise pollution, restore plant species and fertilize while grazing.
Don’t worry, we’re not going to be in the business of chèvre anytime soon, but in the meantime we’re having a lot of fun watching our new colleagues.
Whenever you want to print out a document, you rely on your local operating system, which must have drivers installed for each printer you intend to use. Most of the time, it’s not an issue: at home, you probably have one printer, and all your PCs have the required drivers.
Things get a bit more complicated when you want to print something from a mobile device, like an iPad. Or a laptop based on Google’s Chrome OS, which relies entirely on web apps and services. This is why Google is working on Google Cloud Print, a service that enables “any application (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer.”
It’s an amazing idea. If print jobs are handled in the cloud, you don’t need drivers, and most of the problems users have with printing from all these new types of devices such as smartphones and tablets will be solved.
Google Cloud Print is still in early days of development, but Google made the code and documentation public as part of the Chromium and Chromium OS projects.
Earlier today, a staging site for the HTC Incredible was found on Verizon’s servers with information about its release date and new name. According to the site — which is now password-protected — the Droid Incredible by HTC will launch on April 29.
As we mentioned yesterday, the specs behind HTC’s latest device are pretty drool-worthy: a Snapdragon CPU, an 8-megapixel camera with autofocus and video, a 480×800 OLED screen — it pretty much looks like the next great Android device.
Given the similarities between the Incredible and the Google Nexus One, jkOnTheRun questions the viability of both phones ending up on the Verizon network. Because the HTC Incredible will carry Verizon’s Droid branding (and clearly features the Sense UI), it isn’t likely that the phone will be sold directly through Google, a la the Nexus One. So does that mean that the Nexus One is still coming to Verizon?
The Nexus One is now available for AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint subscribers in the United States, making Verizon the only major carrier that doesn’t support the phone. Google’s Nexus One page still says “Coming Spring 2010,” and while that technically means it may still appear in late June, it will be interesting to see whether or not the Droid Incredible changes the scenario.
For consumers, it ultimately may not matter if the Nexus One officially arrives on Verizon or not, especially since the Droid Incredible will offer the same features plus a better camera. Verizon or Android users: Are you interested in getting the Droid Incredible? Let us know.
The Telegraph, one of the biggest newspapers in the UK, hasn’t had a good time of it lately where their website is concerned. There were vulnerabilities found in relation to the site back in March involving database access, and it seems a hacking group has gone in and defaced two subdomains.
These are the two subdomains in question:
shortbreaks(dot)telegraph.co.uk
wine-and-dine(dot)telegraph.co.uk/site/index.php
They appear to have been compromised by “R.N.S. – Romanian National Security”. Here’s a screenshot, both defacements are identical:
Both pages play some music – “The Lonely Shepard”, from a .ru domain (you'll also notice a rather bizarre link to a Top Gear: Romania clip hosted on Youtube). I put the text into Google Translate and (of course) it isn’t perfect, but you’ll get the gist of it:
“We tried to see how some "garbage" as you try to mock his country.
Let us create a completely different picture from the real one, and calling us "Romanian Gypsies" disseminating gender issues still
If you had the nerve to angry an entire country, know that we will not stop here! Romania
Guess What, Gypsies aren't Romanians, morons.”
We’ve notified The Telegraph, and hopefully the pages will be back to normal soon.
The fact that Opera Mini was admitted to the App Store was a huge surprise, but judging from the popularity of the app, it was the right move, at least from the users’ point of view.
At one point, Opera Mini was the most popular free app in all regional App Stores, as you can see in the screenshot below. Right now, the situation has changed slightly, but Opera Mini is still on top everywhere except in Australia, where it holds the second place.
So yes, the iPhone’s Safari is a great mobile browser, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t interested in alternatives. Check out yesterday’s screenshot below.
Microsoft's debut of the KIN yesterday has tech pundits talking about Microsoft's mobile strategy, about the future of Windows Phone, and about the state of the "dumbphone" in general. It's a compelling product. And because KIN comes from Sharp and Danger's parent company Microsoft, the KIN drew a lot of comparisons to the Sidekick straight away. Yesterday, I called KIN the "Sidekick of the 2010s," Ars Technica called it "Sidekick's next of KIN," and Wired said Microsoft wants to "update the Sidekick's M.O. for a new decade."
But does this mean the T-Mobile Sidekick is finished?
Since KIN is coming to Verizon, T-Mobile today said it is looking toward future devices that will keep the loyal Sidekick user base happy.
"Since its launch in 2002, the T-Mobile Sidekick has been one of our most popular and successful family of devices in T-Mobile history. This success is largely due to its loyal base of Sidekick fans for which we will continue to innovate and deliver an exceptional experience," reads a statement from T-Mobile today. "As Sidekick evolves, we are planning for moves toward new hardware and software platforms, which we expect will provide customers with a fresh, exciting user experience while maintaining the important features that contribute to a great messaging device."
T-Mobile says it will continue to support all the legacy Sidekicks, but it is working toward the next iteration of the experience. That could mean the KIN is coming to T-Mobile, or it could mean something completely different could replace the carrier's popular messaging phone.
Google’s adding an intriguing new feature to its Twitter search options –- the ability to “replay” a moment in time to see what people were tweeting about a given topic at any point between the present and the advent of the microblogging tool.
In a blog post, Google explains that this could be used to “explore any topic that people have discussed on Twitter. Want to know how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens’ retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run?”
The feature will be accessible from Google’s advanced search options under “Updates,” where users can then zoom in on a specific date or date range on a timeline to pull up tweets about their query. Initially, tweets will go back only to this February. However, Google plans to offer up tweets going all the way back to the very first one, which took place on March 21, 2006.
This feature marks a big addition to Google’s existing real-time search features, which pull in tweets (and Facebook and MySpace updates) for queries breaking news topics. It’s also exactly what’s made possible through the data partnerships that Twitter has formed with Google, Microsoft and, more recently, a number of startups. It’ll go live for English users within the next few days, but you can already test it here.
Avid readers of the Microsoft Support Lifecycle Blog (and really, how can you not be?) know that yesterday, April 13th, marked the end of support for Windows Vista RTM, also known as Windows Vista SP0.
We'd like to say that we'll miss Vista RTM. We'd like to say that… but, well…
On a related note, Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) will reach its end of support this summer on July 13th. There are more positive memories of XP SP2, largely because of its emphasis on security.
However, that emphasis did come at a cost. Development resources at Microsoft were diverted from Vista and were given to XP SP2. Ironic? In any case, if you have Vista RTM or XP SP2 you should visit the Microsoft Download Center and update to the latest Service Pack sooner than later.
Just in case you were wondering, Windows 7 will be supported until January 13th, 2015.
Disney’s ABC television network was the first in the industry to market on the iPad with their impressive app. Downloaders can stream TV episodes free of charge and early data is showing that they’re doing so in droves.
According to data shared with the Wall Street Journal, the ABC iPad app has been downloaded 205,000 times and users have already streamed 650,000 television episodes. Those streams have translated into several million ad impressions for the network’s iPad advertisers, including AT&T, Sears and Target.
Given that as of last week more than 450,000 iPads have been sold, it appears as if nearly one in every two iPad owners has downloaded the app and is actively using it. Disney also reports — unsurprisingly — that the episode most in demand is the Modern Family episode pertaining to iPad launch day.
Disney hopes to uncover an additional revenue stream with the ABC iPad app and is attempting to do so with 30-second ads and in-video links to buy episodes in iTunes. Figures suggest that the ABC app is a huge hit for viewers and the company alike.
The report also indicates that ABC was not gifted with any special favors during the app creation process. The app was built by “twelve in-house ABC software engineers” in five weeks, and despite the Disney-Jobs relationship, “the network didn’t receive a prototype to work with in designing the app.”
We can only hope that ABC’s success will encourage more networks to bring their content to the iPad as well.
In an excellent blog, the people from Apache did a very good job analyzing and documenting how a security breach happened–going through all the stages of the attack and drawing conclusions. Should you ever become the unfortunate victim of an attack, this blog offers an example of how to document it!
I quote:”If you are a user of the Apache-hosted JIRA, Bugzilla, or Confluence, a hashed copy of your password has been compromised.” So if you are a user, please act accordingly after reading this blog ;-)
But let’s take a look at the early stages of the attack; I feel there are some important conclusions missing:
Apache reports two simultaneous attacks that were launched. A brute-force attack against the JIRA login and an attempt to exploit a (previously unknown) cross-site scripting attack. They later say that just one of the attacks was successful, but not which one. From their blog:
The attackers via a compromised Slicehost server opened a new issue, INFRA-2591. This issue contained the following text:
ive got this error while browsing some projects in jira http://tinyurl.com/XXXXXXXXX [obscured]
Tinyurl is a URL redirection and shortening tool. This specific URL redirected back to the Apache instance of JIRA, at a special URL containing a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack. The attack was crafted to steal the session cookie from the user logged-in to JIRA. When this issue was opened against the Infrastructure team, several of our administrators clicked on the link. This compromised their sessions, including their JIRA administrator rights.
So administrators–knowledgeable and security-minded users–with elevated privileges opened an unverified link that was supplied by an external (anonymous?) source. And worse: The link was clearly obfuscated. This is where all technical security measures fail. Users worldwide are told again and again to be very careful with links in email and social networks, especially when they come from an untrusted source. Well, the fact that Koobface is alive and spreading makes it obvious that users still are too happy to click on any link they get. That experienced administrators fall for this makes the future look gloomy indeed. :-(
And another word about the URL obfuscators: A link shortened with tinyurl is one of very few that I would open, simply because it has got a preview feature you can enable, showing you the actual link before it takes you there. If at least one of the targeted users in this incident would have enabled that feature, the XSS attack would have become obvious and would have been discovered immediately.
So folks, please enable such functionality before you fall victim to an attack through obfuscated links, and stay clear of unknown URL shorteners or those without a preview feature.
Today the Library of Congress is announcing that it’s doing its part to digitally preserve each and every public tweet since the beginning of time … err Twitter. It fittingly broke the news on Twitter earlier today.
As a federal cultural institution, the Library of Congress exists for research purposes, preserving every form of written word imaginable — and now that includes our tweets.
The institution deems tweets important and hopes to use the archives “to learn about ourselves and the world around us.”
Twitter further explains the news in its own announcement. Biz Stone writes that after a six-month delay, “Tweets will be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.”
The news is quite significant and reinforces the importance of the information we share in 140 characters or less. In many ways history can be relived through tweets, and now the Library of Congress can ensure that not a single character is lost in the sea of real-time information.
Metadata has long been part of Twitter applications. Viewing conversation threads or learning about a user’s location has changed how users interact with content and have provided third party app developers with great opportunities to innovate on Twitter’s platform.
Ryan Sarver, Twitter’s director of platform, announced today at Chirp, the Twitter developer conference, that annotations can now be added to tweets. In other words, any kind of metadata can be added to any tweet; it’s up to developers to decide what kinds of apps they build to showcase what kinds of metadata.
Sarver said he wants to see what kinds of emergent behavior and apps appear rather than trying to predict or force user behaviors by narrowing the spectrum of metadata available with tweets. Leaving that decision up to developers and users was the best path, he told the audience at today’s show.
However, some developers are wary of working on more Twitter-related projects as Twitter expands their features and acquires some applications. There is uncertainty in this ecosystem as to whether developing for Twitter is still a viable startup plan. One developer, who had been in acquisition talks but noted that Twitter’s interest had cooled, said anonymously, “I wish they would tell us what they plan to develop and what they plan to acquire so we can get out of the way.” No one wants to build an application — let alone get funding for a new business — that will become suddenly obsolete once Twitter makes an official feature from a third party application.
What do you think: Will the Twitter ecosystem continue to grow as a vibrant part of the startup community? Or will it become a network of unfunded, unsupported side projects? What kinds of metadata would you like to see attached to tweets, and what kinds of applications or functionality could that data be used to create?
Developers can check out dev.twitter.com for more information on metadata for tweets and other projects, such as the all-new User Stream API, starting later today.
Twitter has just announced a new feature and API for desktop applications: users streams. The revelation was made by Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver at the Chirp conference.
The new API is focused around pushing out data to desktop applications in real time. There will no longer be rate-limits for data on desktops — tweets, retweets and all other updates will be streamed directly to the desktop.
In a demo on stage, Sarver pinged content from Twitter.com onto TweetDeck in real time. The API will be available for developers to test out in the next two days, although it will not be launching until later in the year.
We’ll get more information as soon as it becomes available.
Earlier this year we predicted that Twitter would use geotagging to identify physical places via Twitter, and today Evan Williams announced at the Chirp conference that the company is doing just that with its new Points of Interest feature.
The feature doesn’t appear to be live yet, but soon users will have the ability to click on a place name — included in geotagged tweets — to view the particular place on a map. Next to the map, Twitter users will see a stream of nearby tweets, giving them a real-time view of what’s happening in a particular place at a particular time.
Evan Williams asserts that Points of Interest is not meant to “duplicate the functionality of Foursquare or Gowalla,” but instead to “make those services work better with Twitter … What we really care about is the content happening at that place.”
So while Twitter has no plans to get into the checkin business per se, Points of Interest will make it easier for third-party applications to support that type of functionality and it will enable Twitter to aggregate location-specific tweets.
“Faceparty is a UK based social networking site allowing users to create online profiles and interact with each other using forums and messaging facilities similar to email” – Wikipedia
Faceparty does things a little differently to other social networking sites, however. Unlike most places where you register a username and password then start telling people how your farm is doing, to join Faceparty you need to send a text message to the tune of £25 / $38(!) and then enter your one time use password onto this page (warning: quite a few swearwords, because the site is indeed down with the kids).
As you can imagine, obtaining these passwords has become a bit of an obsession for some people. Scroll down on that link, and you’ll see the following:
“facepartypassword(dot)com, got mine free today woohoo!” posted by “Chelsea Davies”, who somewhat suspiciously lists their own URL as the very same domain.
Shall we take a look?
Yes, despite the passwords costing £25, this random website will “create a profile 100% free” – and all you have to do is fill in the desired username, password and email address.
This is what you see next:
Yes, it all goes wrong very quickly. You have to click your way through no less than five advert banners, each of which will take you to websites sporting people who seem to have forgotten to put some clothes on. Remember – “If you don’t click all the banners, you WILL NOT be sent the password!”
I don’t know about you, but I’m not entirely convinced here. Once you hit the Next button (just out of shot), this appears:
As you can see, they really want you to keep clicking that Fling banner advert. And wait, only a page earlier they were saying you didn’t have to join – now you do?
Someone is probably raking in a fortune in affiliate signups / clickthroughs here. Can you guess what happens when you hit the “Get Faceparty Password” button?
Sure you can. It doesn’t involve passwords, I can tell you that much – instead, you’re redirected to a specific profile on a site called Adultwork(dot)com, which advertises the services of more people who like to take their clothes off.
A few days later, and (amazingly enough) the email address I used to jump through hoops on the Facepartypassword(dot)com site still hasn’t had a password sent through to it. When I revisited today a new page was appearing at the start of the “signup process”, too:
Yes, a £3.00 / $4.60 text message will get you your “Keycode”, or you can join Fling.
Again.
The thing that particularly caught my eye was that for a split second when visiting the site, a page will flash up before you’re taken to the first form to fill in. If we get all technical (and by technical, I mean reload the page then hit the Stop button on your browser as fast as you can) you’ll see this graphic, with two links at the bottom of the page that will send email to the site owners:
“Share the password”? “Sell your profile”?
Oh boy.
In kicking off Twitter’s Chirp developer conference, the company finally revealed its long mysterious registered user number, and it’s surprisingly large (based on some prior outside estimates): 105 million, or to be exact, 105,779,710, according to a slide showing behind Co-founder Biz Stone during his opening remarks.
The growth’s not over either — Twitter says its still adding 300,000 users per day. Moreover, as many have speculated, most of Twitter’s traffic — 75% of it in fact — comes from third-party clients and applications.
Twitter also says that it’s seeing 600 million search queries per day, which gives us a sense of the reach of the company’s new “Promoted Tweets” platform.
While those numbers still put the company’s user count significantly behind that of Facebook (which recently passed 400 million users) the gap is narrower than many probably perceived.
More to come …
On April 9th, Tavis Ormandy published a proof of concept about how to use the latest version of Java to compromise a pc. You can read about it here. He notified Sun, but they weren't concerned enough to break their patch cycle, so he published the code.
The problem is that when Sun released Java 6, update 10 in April 2008, they introduced a new feature (it's not a bug, it's a feature folks) called Java Web Start. In order to make it easier for developers to install software, they created a method to execute a program from a website.
Duh
Now, hindsight is always 20-20, but it doesn't take a massive gift of insight to imagine the Bad Guys thinking that was a good idea for them too.
Because they designed it as a feature, it works, of course, with both IE and Firefox.
The code involved is really simple, and that makes it easy to copy, so it's not surprising that just five days later, we're detecting that code at an attack server in Russia.
The main lure so far seems to be a song lyrics publishing site, with Rihanna, Usher, Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus being used, among others. Who'd have thought that Miley could be dangerous??? As soon as we figure out what's wrong with the lyrics site, we'll let them know so they can fix it.
Of course, this'll soon likely be everywhere, so Sun will need to issue an out of band patch.
In the mean time, to stay safe, you can either follow the mitigation strategies outlined by Tavis, or install a Site Advisor.
So far, it's not in any of the exploit kits, as far as we can see, but it's a given that it soon will be. Tick.. tick.. tick...
Last week we received a mass mailing that at first glance appeared no different from the usual mailbox clutter. The messages were in German and advertised an online casino. Nothing out of the ordinary there – after all, gambling-themed spam is one of the most popular in the German-speaking realms of cyberspace.
But after a closer inspection, these messages turned out to be of much more interest - all the links in the messages led to pages created on legitimate sites that had been compromised. The links looked like this: *******.com/news_.php or *******.com/1500.php.
Of course, there’s nothing new in hacking a site and using it to host pages that advertise Viagra or fake designer goods. Spammers have been using this approach to bypass spam filters for quite some time now.
The method may not be new, but it’s also not that common, mainly because hacking a site is a real hassle. It is much easier for spammers to create doppelganger sites with unpronounceable names on second-level domains they have purchased or to use the services of short URLs.
The messages were also of interest simply because they are aimed at German-speaking users. This method of bypassing spam filters by German spammers was, until now, practically unheard-of. And then suddenly this burst of mass mailing using a large number of legitimate sites. And the types of sites being used vary. Most of them are part of the .com, .org and .net domains. About half the compromised sites are in Spanish and Portuguese. One of them was also infected by a Trojan program.
The pages created on the hacked sites automatically redirected users to two sites: *****casinos.com from the news_.php pages, and *****play.biz from the 1500.php pages.
In recent months German-speaking spammers have started making much greater use of a variety of methods to bypass spam filters. Less than a year ago ‘noisy’ text in German spam was very rare; now it is being used more and more. It seems that German-speaking spammers have now decided to try out the effectiveness of compromised sites.
It remains to be seen which of the many techniques applied by Russian and US spammers will be next.
A universe filled with kaleidoscopic colors blazes across your desktop in this theme for Windows 7, revealed by the infrared imaging of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Discover more about Spitzer's unique view of stars, nebulae, and galaxies on the Spitzer Space Telescope website.
Download: NASA Hidden Universe Theme Download
