Gnome-Scan: Observing the Internet

High End Games Come to Mobile Devices thanks to Cloud Computing!

2011-12-10T05:36:00.000-08:00

We can shop on our phones and read magazines on our tablets. But playing high-end video games on a mobile device has been out of the question.

That might be about to change.

OnLive, a Silicon Valley start-up, on Thursday plans to release software that will let people play the richest, most graphically intense games on Apple’s iPhone and iPad, as well as on Amazon’s Kindle Fire and other devices based on Google’s Android software. In the past, these games have been far beyond the relatively anemic computing power of such devices, requiring the horsepower of a PC or a console. But OnLive runs all of the games on its service entirely on powerful server computers in its data centers and delivers them over the Internet, through so-called cloud computing.

Other companies are trying to do the same thing, including Gaikai, a start-up based in Los Angeles. If they succeed, a shift to cloud gaming could have big implications for the incumbent powers in the video game business, mainly the console makers Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. That is because running games in data centers means that consoles in the home can be far less powerful, relieving consumers of the need to buy a new generation of hardware in the future.

At the same time, moving gaming into the cloud could help push the boundaries of what cloud computing can do, even on relatively low-powered mobile devices.

Everything from FarmVille on Facebook to data backup services like Apple’s iCloud to Netflix’s streaming movie service are considered cloud applications. But playing high-end games in the cloud presents a much bigger technical challenge because of the importance of eliminating any lag between the moment a player takes an action in a game on his or her device, and when the game responds on the screen. Even split-second delays can turn serious gamers off.

OnLive says it has solved this problem by figuring out a method of efficiently packaging video images of a live game that it delivers over the Internet, and that allows for instantaneous response to actions by players as they control the movement of characters within a game.

In a recent demonstration in Seattle, Steve Perlman, the chief executive and founder of OnLive, showed a collection of well-known high-end games, including L.A. Noire and Unreal Tournament 3, on an iPad, Android phones and a Kindle Fire.

Although the games were running on computers in an OnLive data center in Northern California, they responded immediately when a player moved a character around. Some games on the service have been adapted to respond to fingers on a touch screen, but many work better with a $50 wireless controller sold by OnLive. That’s cheaper than buying a traditional game console, which starts at about $150.

“It’s amazing the performance he’s getting out of all these tablets,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering Group.

Mr. Perlman said OnLive would also soon introduce a service that let people run a full Windows desktop on iPads and other mobile devices, including Web browsers that can show Web sites with Flash, an Adobe graphics technology that is not otherwise available on iPads.

Last year, OnLive introduced an earlier iteration of its service, letting people play games first on PCs, Macs and television sets through a small $99 device it calls the MicroConsole.

Mr. Perlman predicted that the growing capabilities of the cloud, along with the high costs of introducing a new console, would lead to big changes in the business. Hardware makers can lose billions of dollars on new game systems before eventually recouping their investments through royalties from game sales.

“It’s our view that probably there won’t be another console and that this current generation is the last,” Mr. Perlman said. “The economics can’t support it anymore.”

However, even people who believe strongly that cloud gaming will become an important part of the market say they think that prediction is an overstatement. Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said cloud gaming was still too new for serious gamers to switch their habits. Internet connections in some areas are not fast and reliable enough for gamers to depend on a cloud gaming service all the time.

“Realistically, there’s one more” generation of consoles coming, Mr. Pachter said. “It will take a while for people to trust the cloud and adapt.”

Nintendo has already announced plans for a new machine, the Wii U, expected to be released next year. But Sony and Microsoft don’t appear to be in any rush to introduce new consoles. It has been five and six years, respectively, since the companies introduced the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and neither company is talking about plans for a new system. Console makers used to introduce new game systems every five to six years. “We’ve got a lot of life left in the current generation of PlayStation with PS3,” said Patrick Seybold, a spokesman for Sony’s United States games division.

Some cloud gaming proponents say they believe future consoles are likely to embrace the technology, rather than risk being replaced by it. “Anyone making consoles for the future would be crazy not to have cloud gaming support,” said David Perry, Gaikai’s C.E.O.

Support from game publishers can make or break OnLive and it isn’t clear how eager some of the more prominent ones are to join the service, which has a variety of payment plans for consumers, from a $10 monthly rental to an option for buying games for $2 to $50. The industry’s biggest blockbuster, the Call of Duty series from Activision Blizzard, isn’t available on the service, for example.

An executive of one publisher working with OnLive, Jason Kingsley, the chief executive of Rebellion, predicted that most game makers would warm to cloud gaming services over time.

“There will always be some people who say, ‘We don’t want to engage in this, it’s horrible,’ ” Mr. Kingsley said. “I can’t see why it shouldn’t be part of the mix.”

MIcrosoft Windowns 8 is Almost here

2011-12-10T05:31:00.000-08:00

Microsoft is set to unveil the next generation of Windows Tuesday. The new operating system, currently known as Windows 8, is the tech giant’s attempt to regain ground that it has lost to Apple, which surpassed Microsoft last year as the world’s most valuable company.

It isn’t the MacBook or Mac OS X Lion that has Microsoft executives worried, though. It’s the sheer dominance of the iPad.

The iPad hasn’t skipped a beat since its debut last year. Thanks to Apple’s ingenuity, a shockingly low starting price and a strong marketing campaign, the device has sold more than 25 million units in less than a year and a half. More importantly, it has defined a whole new category of consumer devices. And it dominates that category with an iron fist.

iPad competitors have come and gone, but none have been able to make a dent in the iPad’s rapid growth. HP has given up on the TouchPad, the RIM Playbook has underperformed and countless Android tablets have fallen by the wayside. Nothing has emerged as the alternative to the iPad.
Windows 8: One OS to Rule Them All

This presents a dangerous problem and an opportunity for Microsoft. The tech giant cannot let Apple monopolize the tablet market like Microsoft did with the desktop OS. That would seal its fate as a technology power destined to diminish into a shell of its former self.

There is a need for a legitimate alternative to the iPad, though, and the company that gets it right will emerge in a strong position to take a big piece of the fast-growing tablet market. Success in tablets would boost Microsoft’s profits, ease investor concerns about the shrinking PC market and set it up for future growth.

That’s where Windows 8 comes in. The next generation OS, which will be unveiled at the Microsoft Build conference on Tuesday, is not only designed for PCs, but it is also made to work on tablets as well. We got a taste of its touchscreen capabilities at the D9 conference earlier this year, but we expect Microsoft to unveil the first Windows 8 tablet during Tuesday’s keynote. Our sources tell us that the device will be manufactured by Samsung but has been designed meticulously by Microsoft in an attempt to create the iPad alternative.

Will Microsoft’s gamble work? Can the company create an OS that works seamlessly on both tablets and PCs? And most of all, will it be useful enough, different enough and cheap enough to give the iPad a run for its money?

We’ll be closer to knowing the answers to those questions Tuesday morning. The tablet wars are about to begin in earnest.

"I Just Wanna do Something Fresh" - Says Nintendo Game Creator

2011-12-10T05:27:00.000-08:00

Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of beloved Nintendo game franchises including "Super Mario," "Donkey Kong" and the "Legend of Zelda," wants to make something new.

"I am really keen to work on something really new, which eventually is going to be important for the future of Nintendo," he said, through a translator, in an interview here at Nintendo's offices on Thursday. "I would like to try to do something which might be able to expand the boundary or the definition of video games."

Miyamoto spoke with CNN the day after Wired reported that the game visionary would step down as a top Nintendo director and producer overseeing the development of games and products. CNN has a syndication agreement with Wired.

A Nintendo spokeswoman disputed the Wired report, which quotes Miyamoto telling colleagues that he is ready to retire. Miyamoto was being sarcastic, but that nuance was lost in translation, she said.

"Miyamoto's role at Nintendo is not changing," the company said in a statement. "He will continue to be a driving force in Nintendo's development efforts."

The 59-year-old video-game pioneer may spend less time working directly on blockbuster games in Nintendo's biggest franchises, he said. But he will have a senior role, which involves helping to determine the future direction of Nintendo's hardware and software.

"We've got to incorporate something new all the time," Miyamoto said. "Everything starts from something small whenever we are trying to find out something new."

Miyamoto suggested in the interview that he may be tiring of shepherding each new entry into the franchises he dreamed up decades ago. The three biggest games Nintendo launched in the last month are sequels.

As its name implies, "Mario Kart 7" for the 3DS hand-held system is the seventh in the go-cart racing series. There were more than a dozen "Zelda" games before the "Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword" for the Wii. And who can keep count of how many adventures Mario was in before "Super Mario 3D Land?"

Here's a telling number: Miyamoto said the word "new" more than a dozen times in the course of an interview that lasted just under an hour.

He suggested that with execs like Eiji Aonuma, who runs the "Zelda" series, Nintendo's most prized franchises are in good hands. Miyamoto said he's instilled in the teams a desire to make big changes often and constantly perfect their products.

Miyamoto declined to describe his new project in depth. He mentioned gyroscopes and wireless proximity communication, both of which are built into the Nintendo 3DS, as technologies he'd like to tap in the future. To demonstrate his wacky thinking, he said he had considered working on a digital globe with a map of the world that people could carry around with them.

Ideas for games often come from encounters in Miyamoto's own life, he said. As legend has it, the idea for Pikmin, a decade-old game in which an alien leads a race of plantlike creatures, sprang from Miyamoto's garden.

"I'm the person who thinks very differently," Miyamoto said. "I'm the guy who believes in the numerous possibilities of video games. Even by looking around and taking advantage of the existing video-game technologies, we can certainly make something brand new."

Netflix adds Kinect Control Support for Xbox 360 App

2011-12-08T02:41:00.000-08:00

Mentioned within an official blog post earlier today, Netflix announced a redesigned version of the Xbox 360 interface that now includes more extensive gesture and voice control in conjunction with the Kinect accessory. Subscribers of Netflix can put down the controller and search for content with voice commands as well as scroll through the box art with gestures. According to Netflix, the redesigned interface allows users to browse up to three times the amount of titles on a high definition screen compared to the previous layout of the application. Other improvements to the application includes interaction with ratings, subtitle settings and related title suggestions. The Netflix application is also tied into the universal search function for the Xbox 360, assuming the Xbox 360 owner is also subscribed to Xbox Live.

Also announced in the upgrade, the Netflix application supports adaptive video streaming to constantly adjust the quality of the picture based on changes in bandwidth. Videos play up to 720p resolution and also include Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound support. However, the application does not support 1080p streaming yet. This leaves the Xbox 360 at a disadvantage to the PlayStation 3 as well as set-top box devices like the Roku 2 XS. Streaming in 1080p resolution has been available on the PlayStation 3 since October 2010. The new version of the application also doesn’t support Dolby Digital Plus, a codec that’s often touted by Dolby as being more efficient in delivering data.

The Netflix application can be downloaded for free within the Xbox Live dashboard, but requires the standard $7.99 a month fee for access to streaming movies and television shows. If the Netflix application was already installed previous to the dashboard update, the new version will be automatically installed with the main update to the user interface. Netflix also announced that the application is now available to Xbox 360 owners in Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico since Xbox Live memberships have been extended to those countries.

Hackers Fetch Some Data from United Nations Servers!

2011-12-08T02:37:00.000-08:00

The United Nations on Wednesday said that hackers broke into an old server and swiped outdated account and password information.

UN data stolen by a hacker group calling itself "TeamPoison" remained on file sharing website Pastebin, along with a message criticizing the international organization.

The information was looted during a cyber attack on the UN Development Program (UNDP) that dates back to 2007 and no active passwords were listed, according to UN deputy spokesman Eduardo del Buey.

"The current server of the United Nations Development Programme has not been compromised," del Buey said.

"UNDP found the compromised server and took it offline," he added.

"Host Gator" Wins the Web-Host of the Year 2011 Award

2011-12-08T02:34:00.000-08:00

HostGator wins the award for best hosting from WordPress Hosting Reviews. Each year WordPress Hosting Reviews reviews and ranks hosting companies based on customer reviews, technical support, hosting plans, pricing. HostGator was the clear winner for Best Host of the Year.

Atlanta, Ga (PRWEB) December 08, 2011
http://wphostingreviews.com announced that HostGator won Best Host of the Year for 2011. This award was earned based on editor and customer reviews, tech support quality, hosting plan choices and pricing. HostGator proved to be the best in all categories.

WordPress Hosting Reviews follows each of the top hosting companies and measures their quality against a set of criteria reviewed by the editors and customers.

Steven Johnson, one of the senior editors at WordPress Hosting Reviews went into more detail about HostGator, “Hostgator has been my primary choice for several years now. They have very competitive pricing and provide excellent quality services. I host several sites with them and enjoy all the features that come with cPanel, stability of their servers, compatibility with WordPress, and outstanding tech support.”

HostGator was awarded for high quality services which include stable and secure servers. Their hosting environment works great with WordPress. There are no issues getting WordPress up and running.

Additionally, HostGator was picked because of their great technical support. Their wait times are minuscule and the support staff is available twenty-four seven. Many have complemented HostGator because of their quick response tech support team. Also, they are known for resolving issues using social networks like Twitter for example.

HostGator have shared hosting plans while allowing anyone the opportunity to scale up their service should the need arise. HostGator’s starter plans (known as ‘Hatchling Plan’, ‘Baby Plan’, and ‘Business Plan’) as well as VPS and dedicated server plans. The features that come with each are plentiful says site editor, Steven Johnson, “They come with a wide variety of applications, tools, and features which are helpful to making a website successful.”

Some of the features provided by Hostgator include: unlimited disk space, transfer, ftp accounts, and MySQL databases. All of the servers run the latest versions of php, MySQL, Ruby On Rails, SSH, Perl, Chilisoft ASP, Python, and more.

WordPress Hosting Reviews pays for all hosting to maintain to help avoid any conflict of interest.

Babies Learn about Personal Trust at Early Age

2011-12-08T02:30:00.000-08:00

You can fool them once, but babies will not be fooled again if adults trick them, according to a new Canadian study.

Infants normally mimic sounds, facial expressions and actions they observe but researchers at Concordia University in Montreal found that if an adult tricks them, they will no longer follow along with that person.

The findings published in the journal Infant Behavior and Development bolster previous evidence that infants can differentiate between credible and un-credible sources, the study said.

"Like older children, infants keep track of an individual's history of being accurate or inaccurate and use this information to guide their subsequent learning," said researcher Diane Poulin-Dubois, a professor in Concordia's department of psychology.

"Specifically, infants choose not to learn from someone who they perceive as unreliable."

To demonstrate this, experimenters looked inside a container while expressing excitement and invited infants aged 13 to 16 months to discover whether the box actually contained a toy or was empty.

Then, the same experimenters used their forehead instead of their hands to turn on a push-on light, hoping the infant would follow suit.

Only 34 percent of infants paired with unreliable testers followed the task while 61 percent of infants whose testers were reliable imitated the behavior.

Mario for Nintendo 3DS Gets Positive Feedback in Japan

2011-12-08T02:27:00.000-08:00

Sales of Nintendo Co Ltd's 3DS games device will hit 3 million units in the Japanese market within days, but consumers in the U.S. and Europe seem to be delaying their holiday season shopping due to poor economic conditions, the company said.

Nintendo slashed the price of the 3DS by about 40 percent in August and announced a flood of new software, including titles in the much loved Mario series, in a bid to prop up sales of the gadget, which had slumped soon after its February launch.

As a result, the Kyoto-based firm expects to sell 4 million of the machines in Japan within the first year, compared with a worldwide target of 16 million units by March 2012.

"It has regained its momentum," President Satoru Iwata told the Nikkei business daily in an interview, the content of which was confirmed by a company spokesman.

But slashing the price was a painful step for the games giant, resulting in losses on each 3DS unit it sells.

"Even though the penetration rate will grow this year, they are bleeding money and therefore overall from an earnings perspective we are not too optimistic," said Nanako Imazu, an analyst at CLSA in Tokyo, who forecasts full-year sales of 15 million units, due to economic woes in North America and Europe.

BLACK FRIDAY

In the United States, Nintendo's largest single market, the year-end gift-buying rush appears to be starting about two weeks later than usual, Iwata said, but added that sales of new Mario software had started off stronger than in Japan.

Last week Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo America had told a Reuters Summit he was focusing on maintaining the momentum after a strong showing on Black Friday, which traditionally kicks off the holiday shopping season in the United States.

The Wii home console sold 500,000 units on Black Friday, Fils-Aime said, while Microsoft said it sold 960,000 Xbox consoles in the week of Black Friday, its best week of sales ever.

But a survey published this week showed 38 percent of U.S. consumers had already completed their holiday shopping by the first weekend of December, boding ill for consumer technology firms at what is normally their most lucrative time.

In the six months to September, Nintendo made about 34 percent of its sales in the Americas and 37 percent in Europe, meaning it was hit particularly hard by the yen's rise against both the dollar and euro.

That, along with the price cut, was one of the reasons why the company slashed its forecast to a 20 billion yen net loss for the year to March 2012. Nintendo has begun a small amount of euro-based procurement to try to offset foreign exchange losses, the spokesman said.

Shares in Nintendo rose 0.6 percent to 11,190 yen on Wednesday, compared with a 0.8 percent rise in the Nikkei average. The company has lost about half its market value since the beginning of the year.

RIM forced to change their OS's New Name!

2011-12-08T02:25:00.001-08:00

BAD NEWS: BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has been forced to change the name of its new operating system from BBX after the company lost a trademark ruling.

WHO COMPLAINED: Software company Basis International Ltd. filed a lawsuit in the U.S. It had registered and used the trademark for 26 years.

ABOUT THE PRODUCT: Now called BlackBerry 10, it is a new platform that analysts say holds the key to RIM's future. BlackBerrys that run on the new operating system are expected to be released in 2012 after a delay of several months.

Android is ahead of the iPhone - Says Eric Schmidt

2011-12-08T02:22:00.000-08:00

"Android is ahead of the iPhone now," Schmidt declared to an audience of techies and aspiring entrepreneurs at the LeWeb conference here.

He made his statement to a room bursting at the seams with iPhones, iPads, and Macs, and the audience met his words with a moment of silence that implied some skepticism. So Schmidt elaborated on how he was measuring: "unit volume, Ice Cream Sandwich, the price is lower, there are more vendors."

Android is indeed a success in the market. But one big weakness compared with iOS was very visible at the conference: becoming the top priority for programmers. Note-taking specialist Evernote today announced a new app called Hello for keeping track of people--for iPhone only so far. And when news reader Flipboard announced its expansion from the iPad to the iPhone, Chief Executive Mike McCue refused to even say whether the company was working on an Android version.

"We've been focused on iPhone," McCue said. And about Android, he said only, "We'll see."

Schmidt thinks the high volume of Android phone shipments will win out, though, aided by the release of Ice Cream Sandwich, aka Android 4.0.

"Ultimately, application vendors are driven by volume, and volume is favored by the open approach Google is taking. There are so many manufacturers working to deliver Android phones globally," Schmidt said. "Whether you like Android or not, you will support that platform, and maybe you'll even deliver it first."

One Android-toting audience member said he was frustrated to see iOS apps beating Android versions to market. But in part because of Ice Cream Sandwich, "my prediction is that six months from now you'll say the opposite," Schmidt said.

About 200 million Android phones have gone into use so far, with 550,000 new ones being activated daily, Schmidt said.

"iPhone, what is that!?, hmm let me Google it first" ;-)

One of the recurring Android criticisms is the idea that it's an iOS knockoff--an idea that incensed late Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Schmidt wouldn't comment on whether Android copied iOS features, but he did offer his stock refrain about the issue: "Android was founded before the iPhone was."

Success in Android is central to Google's plans. Although it gives the operating system away for free, it serves as a mechanism for the company to get its services into peoples' hands in the hot mobile-technology realm. Those services include not just search, but also Gmail, Google Apps, Google+ Google Music, and Google Maps.

"All the interesting new applications are going to be some combination of social, mobile, and local," Schmidt said. And it's not a fad, he said: "Social, local, mobile has been true for humans for at least 10,000 years, so I don't think it's going to go away any time soon."

Ice Cream Sandwich will help Google, in part because it's got deeply integrated features for sharing many services.

"We started off thinking phones were computers. We forgot that they were about communication," Schmidt said.

Ice Cream Sandwich has just started shipping on Samsung's Galaxy Nexus phone, which is not yet available in the United States and many other parts of the world.

Your Smart Phone Might be Spying on You! - Says Security Experts

2011-12-08T02:18:00.000-08:00

As a global outcry spotlights what smartphones may do without their user's knowledge renewed questions are being asked about computer hardware and software and the secrets that remain hidden from public view.

European and U.S. lawmakers initiated moves that are set to trigger a closer scrutiny of smartphone functions and if they violate a user's privacy or break the law in other ways. A series of long-drawn investigations are likely to be the first stop on a road to getting at the truth.

Claims and counterclaims, bureaucratic inadequacies and corporate obfuscation will all play roles as the controversy grows, analysts said.

At issue isn't just what a smartphone does for its user or for its manufacturer or service provider. A greater question concerns all hardware and software in use in governments, business and corporate institutions and the public at large worldwide.

Is this what we really pay for?

Last month a Connecticut software developer said embedded analytics company Carrier IQ's software, installed on millions of phones, allegedly tracks almost everything people do on their smartphones.

The Mountain View, Calif., company initially threatened to take legal action against Trevor Eckhart, 25, after he made the tracking claim. Later, CIQ apologized to Eckhart and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an anti-censorship group that came to Eckhart's support.

Carrier IQ explained the software was installed for quality control on Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones and doesn't record keystrokes, doesn't inspect contents of communications and doesn't sell the information to third parties.

Eckhart, however, posted a video on YouTube that appears to show the software logging keystrokes of text messages and encrypted Web searches, Wired.com said.

In a 17-minute video posted on YouTube, Eckhart showed how the Carrier IQ software logs every text message, Google search and phone number typed on a wide variety of smartphones and reports them to the mobile phone carrier.

Eckhart said he found the application also logs the URL of Web sites searched on the phone, even if the user intends to encrypt that data using a URL that begins with "https."

The software always runs when Android operating system is running and users are unable to stop it, Eckhart said in the video.

"Why is this not opt-in and why is it so hard to fully remove?" Eckhart wrote at the end of the video.

The Youtube.com page with Eckhart's video had more than 1.8 million views by Wednesday.

On his Web site Eckhart called the software a "rootkit," a security term for software that runs in the background without the user knowing it. Rootkit is also commonly used in malicious software.

Eckhart's claims about CIQ coincide with widespread activity within the Obama administration to track down spyware with potential links to foreign countries or governments.

The United States is invoking Cold War-era national security powers to force telecommunication companies including AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. to divulge confidential information about their networks in a hunt for Chinese cyber-spying, Bloomberg News reported.

A U.S. Commerce Department survey distributed in April asked thousands of companies for a detailed accounting of foreign-made hardware and software on their networks. It also asked about security-related incidents such as the discovery of "unauthorized electronic hardware" or suspicious equipment that can duplicate or redirect data.

It cited "very high-level" concern that China and other countries may be using their growing export sectors to develop built-in spying capabilities in U.S. networks.

"This is beyond vague suspicions," Richard Falkenrath, a senior fellow in the Council on Foreign Relations Cyberconflict and Cybersecurity Initiative said.

"Congress is now looking at this as well, and they're doing so based on very specific material provided them in a classified setting" by the National Security Agency, Bloomberg said.

In July, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said the department knew of instances of foreign-made components seeded with cyber-spying technology but offered no details.

Mark Zuckerberg's (Facebook Founder) Account's hacked!

2011-12-08T02:13:00.000-08:00

Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg has been left red-faced after photos from his account were hacked and put online.

Hackers used it to highlight a bug in the social networking site. They posted 14 pics with the message: "It's time to fix those security flaws Facebook."

They included shots of him cooking with his girlfriend, holding a chicken, and meeting US President Barack Obama.

Oh crap!

Facebook said the glitch had been fixed.

The social networking site said in a statement: "Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system, and will only return functionality once we can confirm the bug has been fixed."

The bug related to tools allowing users to report inappropriate images.

How to Use Driver Verifier in Windows 7 for Driver Relate Diagnosis

2011-12-07T04:42:00.000-08:00

There is a tool called Driver Verifier Manager that you can use as a troubleshooting aid when you suspect that your problems may be rooted in a faulty device driver that's built into the MS Windows 7 operating system.

For instance, if you occasionally encounter unpredictable errors, lockups, or BSODs, there’s a good chance that your system is suffering from the effects of a faulty third-party driver. The device drivers that come with Windows 7 have a Microsoft digital signature that indicates that the driver has met a certain level of testing and that it has not been altered. Any hardware that carries a Certified for Windows 7 logo will come with drivers that have a digital signature from Microsoft, which indicates that the product was tested for compatibility with Windows 7.

However, not all third-party hardware manufacturers are willing to take the time and effort to submit their products to Microsoft for certified testing, and as such they aren’t really interested in having a digital signature from Microsoft assigned to their drivers. And, unfortunately, uncertified drivers can be a source of problems.

In this edition of the Windows Desktop Report, I’ll show you how to use the built-in Driver Verifier Manager to troubleshoot driver problems in Windows 7.

An overview

Windows 7 comes with two versions of the Driver Verifier Manager — a command-line version and a GUI version. I’ll cover the GUI version in this article. (If you want to learn more about the command-line version, check out this article on Microsoft’s MSDN site. You can also download a whitepaper.)

Once enabled, the Driver Verifier Manager will go to work in the background and will essentially perform a series of extreme stress tests on the selected driver(s) in an attempt to cause the driver(s) to fail. Keep in mind that the tests that Driver Verifier Manager performs will occur as you use your system over time under normal circumstances. As such, it may take some time to identify a problem, if there is one at all. In other words, this utility will not yield immediate results.

If the driver does fail, it will cause a BSOD and a Stop Error message that will contain information that you can use to determine and eliminate the problematic driver. If, after a few days, the driver doesn’t fail and cause a BSOD, then the driver may not be the cause of the problem. Either way, you will have to disable the Driver Verifier Manager once you are done troubleshooting.

Remember, that once you enable it, the Driver Verifier Manager will remain active in the background until you disable it. I’ll show you how to disable Driver Verifier Manager in a moment.
Launching the Driver Verifier Manager

To launch the Driver Verifier Manager, click the Start button, type Verifier in the Start Search box, and press [Enter]. When you do, you may encounter a UAC and will need to respond accordingly. You’ll momentarily see a Command Prompt window, and then the Driver Verifier Manager will launch and display a wizard-based user interface, as shown in Figure A.

As you can see, the Create Standard Settings option is selected by default, and in most cases this option is the best way to start. When you use this option, the Driver Verifier Manager selects a standard set of driver verification options.

If you later decide that you want to perform more specific tests, you can select the Create Custom Settings option. When you do, the Driver Verifier Manager will display all the available driver verification options and allow you to select the ones that you want to employ. This option is really designed for developers.

As I mentioned, you will have to disable the Driver Verifier Manager once you are done troubleshooting. To do so, you’ll use the Delete Existing Settings option.

As its name implies, selecting the Display Existing Settings option will show the driver verification options that have been activated and will list the drivers being tested.

Once you enable it, the Driver Verifier Manager remains active and performs its stress tests in the background. If you select the Display Information about the Currently-Verified Drivers option, the Driver Verifier Manager will display statistics on the utility’s current actions.
Using the Create Standard Settings option

Since the Create Standard Settings option is the most common way that you’ll use the Driver Verifier Manager, I’ll cover this option. When you click next, you’ll be prompted to select the drivers that you want to test, as shown in Figure B.

Since unsigned drivers are the most likely culprit, the Automatically Select Unsigned Drivers option is selected by default. If you select this option and click Next, you’ll see only those drivers installed on your system that are not digitally signed by Microsoft. If there aren’t any unsigned drivers, an error message will appear.

If you suspect that signed drivers designed for a previous version of Windows may be installed on your system and causing problems, select the Automatically Select Drivers Built for Older Versions of Windows option. If you select this option and click Next, you’ll see a list of drivers that are digitally signed by Microsoft but are designed for previous version of Windows — most likely Windows XP. If there aren’t any signed drivers for older version, an error message will appear.

While not really a very sensible option when it comes to standard troubleshooting practice, you can select the Automatically Select All Drivers Installed on This Computer option. If you select this option, the Next button will change to Finish and you’ll be prompted to reboot your system. (As a general rule of thumb, it is better to troubleshoot a single or a small set of possible problem drivers as it will be easier to determine the cause.)

If you want to see all the drivers installed on the system and be able to pick and choose which ones to test, choose the Select Driver Names from a List option.

On my test system, I selected the default option, Automatically Select Unsigned Drivers, and clicked Next. I then saw a small list of the drivers installed on my system that were not digitally signed by Microsoft, as shown in Figure C. To initiate the testing, I clicked Finish and was prompted to restart my system.

Although it might take few days (which depends on the "gravity" of the issue) to get a response. So try to be a little patient ;-).

How to Shop Securely in Holiday Season

2011-12-07T04:35:00.000-08:00

Holiday shopping is upon us and more and more of it is done online, making it the perfect time for cybercriminals to try to get their cut. Remind your users (plus friends and family members) to use caution by sharing this infographic of holiday shopping security tips, courtesy of ZoneAlarm. It also includes some fun facts about online shopping trends and average spending.

Click for a larger view

Massive Asteroid is Found! - NASA

2011-12-07T02:15:00.000-08:00

New views of the massive asteroid Vesta reveal it is more like a planet than an asteroid, scientists said Monday.

Since slipping into orbit around Vesta in July, NASA's Dawn spacecraft has beamed back stunning images of the second largest object residing in the asteroid belt.

Vesta's rugged surface is unique compared to the solar system's much smaller and lightweight asteroids. Impact craters dot Vesta's surface along with grooves, troughs and a variety of minerals.

"Vesta is unlike any other asteroid," said mission co-scientist Vishnu Reddy of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany. The new findings were presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Most asteroids resemble potatoes, but Vesta is more like an avocado with its iron core, Reddy said.

Asteroids are remnants from the birth of the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago around the same time as the formation of the rocky planets including Earth. Studying asteroids can offer clues about how our planetary system began.

Instead of returning to the moon, NASA has decided to land astronauts on a yet-to-be determined asteroid as a stepping stone to Mars.

David Williams of Arizona State University considers Vesta a "transitional body" between rocky planets and the thousands of asteroids floating between Mars and Jupiter.

The mission has yielded a mystery. Before Dawn arrived at Vesta, scientists predicted that the surface would harbor a volcano. There's a hill on Vesta, but researchers said there's no evidence of lava flow or volcanic deposits.

Williams said it's possible the volcanic materials are buried, so the team will keep looking.

Powered by ion propulsion instead of conventional rocket fuel, Dawn will study Vesta for several more months before cruising to an even bigger asteroid, Ceres, where it will arrive in 2015.

Amazon's Kindle Fire "Glows" on Children

2011-12-07T01:15:00.000-08:00

Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet, one of the hottest gadgets this holiday season because of its low price, has some parents bristling over the simplicity at which children can order from the retail giant and the inability to stop them without crippling the device.

Another concern is over theft or losing the device, which can be then easily be accessed for purchases unless a user sets a password to lock the screen when it's not in use.

What happens is that when you order a Kindle Fire - which differs from the Kindle reader by allowing users to browse the web, play games, video and music - it comes with your Amazon account information preloaded, along with "1-Click" ordering. That means anyone who is holding that device can place an order, whether it's their account or not. No prompts come up to confirm the purchase or ask for a password.

So that means that the itchy fingers of toddlers can click way, including the 3-year-old daughter of Scenic Labs founder Jason Rosenfeld. He says his daughter was using the device and clicked on an image of a children's product that appeared on the screen because it was in his shopping history -- he had browsed the item while holiday shopping on his PC.

"She picked it up and got it running," Rosenfeld says. After seeing the order confirmation in his email, he was able to quickly cancel the purchase.

While the $199 Kindle Fire device has been embraced as a cheaper version of Apple's iPad ($499 and up), it's designed to streamline ordering an extensive array of goods sold by Amazon.com. So, the process is simplified. Competitor Barnes and Noble, which released its Nook Tablet ($249) without the same fanfare, requires users to confirm their purchases before they go through.

In an email in response to questions from Reuters about Kindle Fire, Amazon did not address concerns about the "1-Click" ordering, but says it has provided the ability for parents to limit what their kids buy when using applications downloaded for the devices.

"We do provide customers with parental controls for purchasing in-app items," Amazon's statement says. "We're also working on adding additional parental controls."

The company also says there's no issue with shipping the devices preregistered, even though there have been reports that devices have been removed from the clearly marked boxes and used to make purchases by unauthorized users.

"Customers tell us they love that Kindle Fire arrives registered to their account and ready to go," Amazon's statement says. "Those who prefer to have their Kindle Fire arrive unregistered can select 'gift' during the checkout."

An industry analyst says he doesn't expect the concerns to hurt sales, which are projected by research firm IHS iSuppli to be close to 4 million units by year's end (less than a quarter of Apple's tablet sales, but triple Barnes and Noble's).

Because Kindle Fire is one of the hottest products this holiday season, R. J. Hottovy, director of Global Consumer Equity Research for Morningstar, says he expects that consumers will look past the security issue.

"It will probably triumph over any concerns on that end," he says.

If complaints continue, Hottovy says, it shouldn't be difficult for Amazon to add the extra purchasing step you see on most devices.

"I would expect that Amazon will add that sort of functionality to the software over time, if it becomes a bigger issue," he says.

For now, though, the single-click purchasing requirement to make the Kindle Fire fully-functional remains. And that has some parents who either bought the tablets as holiday presents or already have them in their homes angry.

St. Louis area software engineer Lance Durham says he decided to get a couple of Kindle Fires to give as presents to his children. He was loading some games before wrapping them and realized he couldn't turn off the single-click ordering, which charges his credit card.

"There was no password or pin, nor any kind of confirmation - the purchase immediately went through," he says.

So Durham called Amazon and says he was told the ordering from Amazon could not be disabled, and the company suggested he "deregister" the device after every purchase. That, he says, caused the downloaded apps to stop working.

He returned the tablets.

Others suggest turning off the wireless, which would allow only the use of previously downloaded items, such as books and games. Some forums on Amazon are filled with user after user trying to come up with ways to beat the system with limited success, including turning off the "1-Click" option.

San Francisco-area software developer Subrata Majumder says he turned off "1-Click" and that did nothing.

"Kids can tap the '1-Click' button out of curiosity and contents are purchased immediately. My son taped the '1-Click button' a few times," he says.

As it did for Majumder, customers say Amazon has been refunding these errant purchases. But the inability to control his preschooler from making purchases, prompted him to return the device. "Can my 3 1/2 year old son take my credit card to a retail store and purchase goods?"

Gary Davis, director of consumer product marketing for web safety and protection firm McAfee, also warns parents they won't be able to use parental controls to restrict browsing as they can on other computers.

"Any device that has an unfiltered connection to the Internet is an unsafe environment for children," he says. "Parents need to be aware that the Fire is more than a standard e-reader, and take appropriate precautions when allowing children access to the device."

Kurt Roemer, chief security strategist for Citrix Systems, says parents and other users should understand what the Kindle Fire is and how it works before letting anyone use one.

"My advice is if you can't trust someone with a device that can place orders in a click and may have access to age-inappropriate content - don't hand it to them," he says.

Google Announcing an Android App Sale!

2011-12-07T01:12:00.000-08:00

The Android Market just notched its ten-billionth app download, and to celebrate, Google is offering up to 100 of its most popular apps for ten cents each for the next ten days. Ten new apps will be added each day, from now until December 16.

The apps that are on sale for ten cents on the first day of the promotion, with links to each, are:

Great Little War Game, a 3D turn-based military strategy game
SketchBook Mobile, a paint and drawing application
Paper Camera, a set of camera filters including a unique "paper" filter
SoundHound Infinity, which can identify songs by listening to them
Asphalt 6, a racing game with Ferraris and Lambourghuinis.
Fieldrunners HD, a fast-paced Tower Defense game
SwiftKey X, a multi-language Android keyboard with improved corrections
Minecraft - Pocket Edition, which allows you to create Minecraft worlds on your phone
Endomondo Sports Tracker Pro, a fitness app and GPS tracker for exercise
Color and Draw for Kids, a fun drawing and coloring app for children

Each of these apps will be available in the Android Market for ten cents (or 0.10 pounds, or 10 cents Canadian) until December 16.

Google announced the ten billion app milestone on its Android Developers blogspot page while also dropping the bomb that Android users are now downloading one billion apps per month. A graph provided by Google's dev team shows the exponential growth of Android app downloads since the platform launched in 2008.

Android app downloads aren't the only things that have exploded lately: Mobilewalla recently announced that the number of available apps across ALL platforms will soon pass one million; an estimated 320,000 of those are in the Android Market (Google has not yet released an official count), and almost 600,000 in iTunes. BlackBerry and Windows Phone make up a little less than 100,000 apps combined.

However, Android's malware problem is also an exploding one. As the platform has grown, the amount of malicious software invading the platform has risen, too. In fact, the research division of Juniper Networks recently called Android's problem a "malware epidemic," a study by Bit9 found that nearly all of the year's most vulnerable smartphones were running Google's Android software.

Android's huge app market, for the time being, is in celebration mode, and the Android team's blog post ends with a reminder that 90 more paid apps will become available for ten cents over the next ten days. Those deals will be announced on the Android Market homepage, so if you have one of the 200 million Android devices out there, you might want to keep the Android Market in your mind as Google rolls out more sales.

Intel Gathering More Companies to Build Ultrabooks

2011-12-07T01:08:00.000-08:00

With the goal of getting smaller PC makers to supply branded ultrabooks, Intel will hold a meeting Wednesday in Taipei as a "matchmaker" between large device manufacturers--so-called ODMs or original design manufacturers--like Foxconn, Pegatron, Compal, and Quanta and smaller brands, according to an industry source familiar with Intel's plans.

The list of prospective ultrabook brands will include companies like Epson, Onkyo, Viewsonic, Mustek, Motion Computing, WiPro, and Positivo, according to the source. While some brands, like WiPro and Positivo, are not well known, they are big players in regional markets.

Smaller brands don't necessarily have the wherewithal to build ultrabooks, according to the source. The biggest brands, like Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Acer, Asus, and Toshiba, are already supplying or readying ultrabooks and are not the focus in this case.

Those larger companies are now preparing for the next phase of ultrabooks based on Intel's Ivy Bridge chip. Models are due by late spring or early summer 2012.

Intel has become intimately involved in ultrabooks on many levels. It has already established a $300 million Ultrabook Fund for the development of features critical to the laptops such as battery, storage, touch interface, and chassis technologies.

The latter two--chassis materials and touch--are turning out to be areas of intense focus with the goal of lowering costs. For example, more traditional ultraslim designs from Apple, Samsung, and Asus use metal for the chassis but that is proving to be too costly for less-expensive ultrabooks priced under $900. And Intel CEO Paul Otellini said last month that in order to hit $699 and $799 price points, the chipmaker has to accelerate the reduction in the cost of touch.

Few Social Apps to Find Your Friends Easily

2011-12-06T04:54:00.000-08:00

Facebook will help you keep tabs on your friends' children, careers and concerts, but it won't tell you when your freshman year college roommate is at the cafe just around the corner, and it can't let you know that that stranger at a cocktail party is actually your sister's best friend.

That's news you can use, and a growing number of social discovery apps are here to help.

These apps marry your online social networks and information about your location to add an additional layer of data to the world around you. Services like Foursquare, Crowded Room, Ban.jo and Sonar are meant to spark serendipitous social connections between you and the people around you, or help you more easily get together with people you know.

Take a look at seven social apps that can help you make friends and the find the ones you already have:

Foursquare

Social discovery apps are only as useful as their users are plentiful, and unfortunately many well-intentioned services lack the critical mass necessary to do what they promise. With Foursquare, you won't find yourself logging on by your lonesome. The service has nearly 15 million users, processes over 3 million check-ins a day and says 50 percent of its daily activity comes from users outside the U.S.

Foursquare's free app allows users to claim discounts and broadcast their locations by "checking in" to places, whether it's a park or a panini joint. The app lets users track their friends' locales (so you can see when Jason checks in at bar just a few blocks over), allows users to save merchants they want to check out on "to-do lists," and creates recommendations for restaurants, museums and more, based on users' own behaviors and their friends' activities. Foursquare users can also redeem rewards for check ins and purchases.

Forecast

Forecast is for what you plan to do, not what you're doing.

Like Crowded Room, but with more limited features, Forecast, still in private beta, provides a quick-and-easy way to tell your friends when and where you plan on going. Thinking about a trip to the museum tomorrow afternoon, but loathe to go alone? Forecast it, then share your plans via Facebook and Twitter. Your Forecast friends will be notified when you've made a future "appointment" on the app, and can comment on the Forecast with tips, reactions and more. The app also syncs with Foursquare to make checking in a breeze.

Sonar

We've all been there: That guy standing in line for coffee looks familiar, and you'd like to say hi, but you can't quite place him. Or maybe you're at a cocktail party at a conference, and even though you know you must know someone there, you're not sure whom to approach.

Sonar promises it can help. The app brings together data from Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as your current location, to help you discover who's nearby and how you know them. Because the app is built on top of existing social networking services, it can more easily bypasses the critical mass conundrum. So long as people keep using Foursquare, Facebook and the like, Sonar should serve you well.

"Sonar is taking the thousands of connections you miss every day and putting them in your pocket," says Sonar CEO Brett Martin. "In the same way that it's easier to talk to someone at a bar than it is on the street and easier to talk to someone at a house party than at a bar, what Sonar helps you realize is that the person on the street is actually the person at the house party with you last night. It uses technology to draw connections."

Find My Friends

The free Find My Friends app, released in October and available only to users with iCloud and iOS 5-compatible devices, marks Apple's latest venture into social networking. It follows in the footsteps of another one of the Cupertino company's failed social media experiments: Ping, a music sharing service that didn't exactly top the charts.

Apple pitches Find My Friends as "the easy way to see where your friends and family are." It offers a way for users to continuously or temporarily share their exact locations on a map with approved users. The app also provides seamless ways for users to message each other, get directions to one another's location and initiate video calls with one another.

Be forewarned that the app is not nearly as polished as Apple's iDevices. Users must log in to the app using their Apple ID, which could cause problems for family members who share a single Apple ID across several devices. The app does not sync with any other social networking sites, which means you have to build out your list of "friends" to find from scratch, a tedious process.

Voyager 1 Craft Enters Our Solar System's Edge!

2011-12-06T03:49:00.000-08:00

More than three decades after launching, NASA's workhorse spacecraft is inching closer to leaving the solar system behind.

Currently 11 billion miles away from the sun, Voyager 1 has been exploring the fringes of the solar system since 2004. Scientists said Monday the spacecraft has entered a new region in the solar system that they have dubbed the "stagnation zone."

Voyager 1 still has a little way to go before it completely exits the solar system and becomes the first manmade probe to cross into interstellar space, or the vast space between stars.

The spacecraft has enough battery power to last until 2020, but scientists think it will reach interstellar space before that – in a matter of several months to years.

Chief scientist Ed Stone of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory said the timing is unclear because no spacecraft has ever ventured this far.

"The journey continues," Stone told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

For the past year, Voyager 1 used its instruments to explore the new region. It appeared to be the cosmic doldrums where solar winds streaming out from the sun at 1 million mph have dramatically eased and high-energy particles from outside are seeping in – a sign that Voyager 1 is at the doorstep of interstellar space.

Scientists expect to see several telltale signs when Voyager 1 finally crosses the boundary including a change in the magnetic field direction and the type of wind. Interstellar wind is slower, colder and denser than solar wind.

Even with certain expectations, Stone warned that the milestone won't be cut-and-dried.

"We will be confused when it first happens," Stone said.

Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched in 1977 to tour the outer planets including Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. After their main mission ended, both headed toward interstellar space in opposite directions. Voyager 2 is traveling slower than Voyager 1 and is currently 9 billion away miles from the sun.

Facebook Acquires Gowalla! (Location based Social Network)

2011-12-06T03:45:00.000-08:00

Facebook has acquired location-based social service Gowalla for an undisclosed sum.

Both companies announced the deal on December 5.

"We're excited to confirm that Gowalla co-founders Josh Williams and Scott Raymond, along with other members of the Gowalla team, are moving to Facebook in January to join our design and engineering teams," a Facebook rep said in a statement emailed to The Huffington Post.

According to a post on the Gowalla Blog, at least part of the startup's staff will relocate from Austin, Texas, to Palo Alto, California. Gowalla services will be shuttered in January 2012.

Facebook won't acquire any of Gowalla's technology or user data, and the Gowalla Blog explains that the service will give its two million users a chance to extract their data before the service shuts its doors for good.

CNN Money published an unconfirmed report on December 2 that Facebook would buy Gowalla. According to CNN's sources, Gowalla talent will join Facebook's Timeline development team, which is currently finalizing Facebook's new profile design that debuted at the company's recent f8 conference and is expected to begin rolling out to users soon.

Since launching in 2009, Gowalla had faced steep competition from check-in service Foursquare and daily deals giant Groupon, as well as a host of other location-based check-in and rewards services. In September, Gowalla announced that it had redesigned its mobile app and planned to shift focus away from check-ins and toward user-generated reviews of local places. Those plans are now kaput.

Facebook also found itself struggling to keep up in the local mobile space. The social network's location-based deals feature, Places, which launched in August 2010, failed to take off. Almost exactly a year later, Facebook said it would shutter the project.

Using Bacteria to Produce "Bio-Light"

2011-12-05T23:31:00.000-08:00

This bizarre-looking concoction of glass, liquid and tubes could one day bring a whole new meaning to the idea of natural lighting.

The new "bio-light" concept designed by Dutch electronics company Philips creates light in the same way that bioluminescent living organisms like fireflies and glow worms do.

The phenomenon of bioluminescence is created by a chemical reaction where an enzyme called luciferase interacts with a light-emitting molecule called luciferin.

In the bio-light a collection of hand-blown jars -- held in place by a steel frame -- contain a measure of bioluminescent bacteria which glow green when fed methane gas -- in this case through individual silicon tubes routed through a household waste digester.

Harnessing these biological techniques could help redefine how we consume energy in the home, says Philips.

"Designers have an obligation to explore solutions which are by nature less energy-consuming and non-polluting," says Clive van Heerden, senior director of design-led innovation at Philips Design.

"We need to push ourselves to rethink domestic appliances entirely, how homes consume energy and how entire communities can pool their resources," van Heerden said in a statement.

Jim Haseloff, a plant biologist from the UK's University of Cambridge says the bio-light is a very provocative idea.

"It's appealing because it brings two things together which you wouldn't normally associate," Haseloff said.

"I don't think you want to imagine that everyone's going to start putting bacterial cultures into their own home for lighting but as a way of exploring the idea it's quite interesting," he added.

It part of a wider swing to sustainable technologies, Haseloff says, but he doesn't see bioluminescent lights competing with LED and other low-energy lights in the future.

"When you move out of the normal (lighting) area -- illuminated walkways and things like that -- where things could essentially be growing and delivering light for free, that's where you're going to have applications."

Philips envisages similar applications, perhaps using glowing plants to illuminate road verges or as warning strips on flights of stairs.

It also says these same bioluminescence techniques could be used as a diagnostic indicator of pollution levels or even as a biosensor for monitoring diseases like diabetes.

Philips says the bio-light would be more suited to providing mood lighting than "functional illumination."

It forms part of a wider Philips Design's Microbial Home project which imagines an "integrated cyclical ecosystem" in the home where traditional waste is recycled to address sustainability issues.

Few, new Massive Black Holes are Found, Says Astronomers

2011-12-05T23:28:00.000-08:00

Astronomers are reporting that they have taken the measure of the biggest, baddest black holes yet found in the universe, abyssal yawns 10 times the size of our solar system into which billions of Suns have vanished like a guilty thought.

Such holes, they say, might be the gravitational cornerstones of galaxies and clues to the fates of violent quasars, the almost supernaturally powerful explosions in the hearts of young galaxies that dominated the early years of the universe.

One of these newly surveyed monsters, which weighs as much as 21 billion Suns, is in an egg-shaped swirl of stars known as NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in a sprawling cloud of thousands of galaxies about 336 million light-years away in the Coma constellation.

The other black hole, a graveyard for the equivalent of 9.7 billion Suns, more or less, lurks in the center of NGC 3842, a galaxy that anchors another cluster known as Abell 1367, about 331 million light-years away in Leo.

Size of a 10 billion suns!

“These are the most massive reliably measured black holes ever,” Nicholas J. McConnell, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an e-mail, referring to the new observations.

These results are more than just cool and record-setting. Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope over the years have shown that such monster black holes seem to inhabit the centers of all galaxies — the bigger the galaxy, the bigger the black hole. Researchers said the new work could shed light on the role these black holes play in the formation and evolution of galaxies.

The previous record-holder was in the galaxy M87, a member of the Virgo cluster some 54 million light-years from here, where a black hole weighed in at a mere 6.3 billion solar masses. The new black holes, however, were even larger than astronomers had predicted based on the earlier measurements, suggesting that there is something special about how the most massive galaxies are built.

“Measurements of these massive black holes will help us understand how their host galaxies were assembled, and how the holes achieved such monstrous mass,” Mr. McConnell said.

Mr. McConnell and his thesis adviser, Chung-Pei Ma, led a team of astronomers who used telescopes in Hawaii, Texas and outer space to weigh the black holes in the centers of galaxies by clocking the speeds of stars zooming around them; the faster the stars are going, the more gravity — and thus mass — is needed to keep the stars from flying away. They report their work in the journal Nature, which will be published online on Wednesday.

Martin Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge University, called the new work “an incremental step,” noting that the study of these monsters has been a part of his life for a long time. “It’s good to learn about even bigger ones,” he said.

Black holes, regions of space where gravity is so intense that not even light can escape from it, are among the weirdest of the predictions of Albert Einstein’s curved-space theory of gravity, general relativity — so weird that Einstein himself did not believe it. He once wrote to a friend that there ought to be a law of nature forbidding such a thing.

But he was wrong. And some of his successors, like Dr. Rees and a colleague at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking, have spent their careers studying the implications for physics of objects that can wrap spacetime around themselves like a magician’s cloak and disappear.

Such is the fate, astronomers agree, of some massive stars once they run out of fuel and collapse upon themselves. Indeed the galaxy is littered with stellar-mass black holes detectable by the X-rays spit by doomed matter swirling around them like water in a drain. And there seem to be giant ones in the heart of every galaxy.

One question astronomers would like answered is how these black holes got so big, billions of times bigger than a typical dead star. Dr. Ma described it as a kind of nature-versus-nurture argument, explaining that black holes could grow by merging with other black holes as galaxies merge to get bigger — “nature” — or by swallowing gas around them — “nurture.”

“It’s a bit like asking: Are taller children produced by taller parents or by eating a lot of spinach?” Dr. Ma wrote in an e-mail. “For black holes we are not sure.”

Astronomers also think the supermassive black holes in galaxies could be the missing link between the early universe and today. In the early days of the universe, quasars, thought to be powered by giant black holes in cataclysmic feeding frenzies, were fountaining energy into space.

Where are those quasars now? The new work supports a growing suspicion that those formerly boisterous black holes are among us now, but, having stopped their boisterous growth, are sleeping.

Mr. McConnell said, “Our discovery of extremely massive black holes in the largest present-day galaxies suggests that these galaxies could be the ancient remains of voracious ancestors.”

Let’s try not to awaken them.

"Google & Facebook, Screen User Content!" - Says India

2011-12-05T23:11:00.000-08:00

The Indian government has asked Internet companies and social media sites like Facebook to prescreen user content from India and to remove disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content before it goes online, three executives in the information technology industry say.

Top officials from the Indian units of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook are meeting with Kapil Sibal, India’s acting telecommunications minister, on Monday afternoon to discuss the issue, say two executives of Internet companies. The executives asked not to be identified because they are not authorized to speak to the media on the issue.

Mr. Sibal’s office confirmed that he would meet with Internet service providers Monday but did not provide more information about the content of the meeting.

About six weeks ago, Mr. Sibal called legal representatives from the top Internet service providers and Facebook into his New Delhi office, said one of the executives who was briefed on the meeting.

"Ahh, get of of me you!" ...

At the meeting, Mr. Sibal showed attendees a Facebook page that maligned the Congress Party’s president, Sonia Gandhi. “This is unacceptable,” he told attendees, the executive said, and he asked them to find a way to monitor what is posted on their sites.

In the second meeting with the same executives in late November, Mr. Sibal told them that he expected them to use human beings to screen content, not technology, the executive said.

The three executives said Mr. Sibal has told these companies that he expects them to set up a proactive prescreening system, with staffers looking for objectionable content and deleting it before it is posted.

The executives said representatives from these companies will tell Mr. Sibal at the meeting on Monday that his demand is impossible, given the volume of user-generated content coming from India, and that they cannot be responsible for determining what is and isn’t defamatory or disparaging.

“If there’s a law and there’s a court order, we can follow up on it,” said an executive from one of the companies attending the meeting. But these companies can’t be in the business of deciding what is and isn’t legal to post, he said.

Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft did not respond immediately to calls for comment, and a Google spokeswoman said the company had no comment on the issue. Facebook said earlier this year it has more than 25 million users in India. Google has over 100 million Internet users in India.

The demand is the Indian government’s latest attempt to monitor and control electronic information. In April, the ministry issued rules demanding Internet service providers delete information posted on Web sites that officials or private citizens deemed disparaging or harassing. Last year, the government battled with Blackberry’s manufacturer, Research In Motion, threatening to shut the company’s service off in India if it did not allow government officials greater access to users’ messages.

The Indian government also plans to set up its own unit to monitor information posted on Web sites and social media sites, executives said, which will report to Gulshan Rai, the director general of India’s cyber-security monitor.

A man who answered the phone in Mr. Rai’s office said he did not talk to the press and hung up when a reporter asked for a press contact.

Some Indian cities like Mumbai have already set up special units to monitor Internet sites like Facebook and Orkut, the social networking site operated by Google, for content considered disparaging or obscene. India has made nearly 70 requests to Google to remove content between January and June of this year, one of the highest request rates of any country though less than the United States’s 92 and Brazil’s 224, according to Google’s transparency report.

BlackBerry Playbook, still Hanging in there with QNX

2011-12-05T23:04:00.000-08:00

Research In Motion, facing analyst stock price target downgrades after its steep profit warning on Friday, is willing to absorb huge losses on its unloved PlayBook because the success or failure of the tablet are key to RIM's hopes of revitalizing its BlackBerry.

PlayBook is RIM's poor-selling entry into the tablet market created by Apple's iPad, and is crucial to RIM's efforts to move to a new operating system that will power BlackBerry smartphones from early next year.

Since PlayBook is the first device to feature the QNX system - soon to be renamed BBX - the company can't abandon the tablet, analysts say.

"QNX is important not because the tablet itself is important but because they have to attract developers to this platform because it's the pathway to BBX and obviously BBX is crucially important to the company's future," Morgan Keegan analyst Tavis McCourt said in a telephone interview.

"This is their last shot, their only real shot to revive the business."

The need to stick with the PlayBook while it makes QNX/BBX work has forced RIM to offer heavy discounts on unsold PlayBooks. On Friday it announced a $485 million pre-tax writedown on the inventory and said full-year profit would not meet earlier forecasts.

Getting QNX right has been no simple task, and analysts worry RIM's evident struggle to make the software work with legacy systems to handle email or run Android apps bodes ill for the next round of BlackBerries.

"Investors may be underestimating what it will take to transition to BBX - that's still a big unknown," Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu said in a phone interview.

On Friday, RIM said it had sold just 150,000 PlayBooks - one for every 74 iPads sold by Apple in its last quarter.

RIM also needs to get the BBX-powered BlackBerry up and running as soon as possible. Last week it said it expects to ship fewer BlackBerry smartphones in the three months to early March than in the previous quarter, implying weak demand for the latest phones powered by its legacy operating system.

"BlackBerry 7 is just not selling like it should," Morgan Keegan's McCourt said, referring to that latest line. "The fundamentals will be tough until BBX launches."

The once-dominant Canadian smartphone company's share price and U.S. market share have shriveled as consumers flock to Apple devices and others using Google's Android software.

The BlackBerry sales data is "further underscoring (RIM's) current lack of competitive edge and its urgent need to accelerate the migration to QNX-derived BBX," Exane BNP Paribas analyst Alexander Peterc wrote in a note to clients.

But McCourt says RIM needs to make sure the BBX-equipped BlackBerry is ready before launching the product. "If BBX fails it's clearly over, so why would you rush that," he said.

UNSOLD STOCK

Nomura says RIM likely has a stockpile of at least 1 million unsold PlayBooks. The 7-inch device has no in-built email, lacks other standard functions and has a dearth of the kind of third-party applications that help sell rival devices.

RIM had hoped to get some Android apps to run on the PlayBook by the North American summer, but it has delayed that until a February software upgrade that will link the device to RIM's private network, which suffered a massive failure in October.

"The company seems to be mis-executing in hardware, software and service - the entire operation," wrote Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff wrote.

At least four brokerages cut their price targets on RIM's U.S.-listed stock on Monday.

CIBC slashed its price target $25 from $55, while Nomura cut its target to $18.90 from $26. "This is the highest price we think any financial bidder is likely to offer in a take-over bid," it said. Speculation has been rife that RIM could be the target of a strategic buyout.

"An indefinite period of decline has now begun," analyst Matthew Robison at Wunderlich Securities said, cutting his price target on RIM's stock to $16 from $24.

After a plunge of almost 10 percent on Friday, RIM's Nasdaq-listed shares closed 1.5 percent higher at $17.02 on Monday. Its Toronto-listed stock gained 1.3 percent to C$17.30. The stock has lost more than 70 percent of its value this year. ($1 = 1.0131 Canadian dollars)

Will Mozilla Drop Google as the Search Provider ?

2011-12-05T19:57:00.000-08:00

Perhaps not by choice from Mozilla's prospective but...

Google has been the default search engine on Mozilla's Firefox browser for several years, a deal that results in some nice royalty payments for Mozilla. The deal, however, expired in November, so what does that mean for the future of Firefox?

Mozilla and Google are still negotiating a search deal, but Mozilla is touting its product, and soliciting donations, with a new video titled, "The Mozilla Story".

A Mozilla spokeswoman confirmed that the two sides "are in active negotiations [but] have nothing further to announce at this time."

"Our search relationship with Google remains positive for both of us," she continued. "We have every confidence that search partnerships will continue to be a strong and growing generator of revenue for the foreseeable future."

In an official statement, a Google spokeswoman said that the company doesn't generally "disclose specific terms of business agreements." Google "can confirm that we still have an agreement with Mozilla, but have nothing new to share at this time," she continued.

In its October State of Mozilla report, the company said that its largest search contract is with Google. Specifically, the search giant makes up 84 percent of Mozilla's royalty revenues.

"The majority of Mozilla's revenue is generated from search functionality included in our Firefox product through all major search partners including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, Ebay and others," Mozilla said at the time. "Mozilla's reported revenues also include very important individual and corporate donations and grants as well as other forms of income from our investable assets."

Can Mozilla make Google money via donations? Not likely, but the company is still soliciting contributions online. The aforementioned video is intended to show "how a small group of people dedicated to making the Web a safe, open and accessible tool for communication, collaboration and community came together to create Mozilla—and how that work continues today," Mozilla said.

The news comes several days after StatCounter said that Chrome surpassed Firefox's global market share for the first time last month. Net Applications, however, said its data showed that Chrome still has a little catching up to do.

With the release of Firefox 4, Mozilla added the option to make Yahoo or Bing the browser's official search engine, though Google remained the default choice.

Google Chrome Just Surpassed Firefox!

2011-12-05T19:09:00.000-08:00

Chrome moved past Firefox, an offering by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation that Google has helped support, according to the website analytics company StatCounter.

Google's success with Chrome, aided by the product's speed, underscores the shake-up in the browser market—once considered all but locked up by Microsoft, which includes Internet Explorer with its Windows operating system. It also has added to the company's clout because as a browser maker it can help define the kinds of new graphical features that can be used by sites across the Web as well as helping Google funnel Web surfers to its dominant Internet-search engine, the top driver of Google's revenue.

"People have discovered there is a difference in browsers," said Brad Mitchell Smith, an analyst at research firm Gartner Inc.

"Get off of me, you!"

Browsers have become more important as more software development shifts to the Web and away from applications anchored to personal computers and their operating systems, like Windows. Google has used Chrome to push new Web technologies such as HTML5 that help websites have richer graphics, in hopes of spurring greater usage of the Web—as well as Google's own websites and online software.

Google CEO Larry Page said earlier this year that while it might not be clear how Google can make money from Chrome, "emerging high-usage products can generate huge new businesses for Google in the long run, just like search."

Google's effort to build a new browser, which started in 2006, was partly born out of concerns existing browsers would fail to support its Web services or steer users away from its search engine. Today, for instance, Microsoft uses Internet Explorer to channel people to its Bing search engine.

Chrome has gotten a boost from a rare advertising push by Google—on everything from its search-engine home page to billboards to TV commercials in recent years.

Lily Lin, a Google spokeswoman, said in a statement on Thursday that "we built Chrome to help spur more innovation on the Web and we're excited that over 200 million people around the world are using it. We continue to remain focused on building a much better browsing experience and giving people even greater access to the Web."

Firefox, first launched in 2004, was the first to loosen the hold over the market that Internet Explorer attained in the late 1990s after eclipsing Netscape Communications Corp.'s browser. Google helped fund Mozilla and signed a deal to have the Google search engine built into Firefox, a deal that is still in place today, the Google spokeswoman said.

"Firefox is holding its own in the face of increased competition, with hundreds of millions of users worldwide choosing a web browser that answers only to them," a Mozilla spokeswoman said in a statement.

Microsoft recently introduced a revamp of Internet Explorer but has continued to lose some share. The company's browser had just over 40% of the global market in November, down from 56.6% two years earlier, according to StatCounter. A Microsoft spokeswoman said it had no comment on StatCounter's findings, but the company in a blog post said it is excited about other data showing rapid growth in usage for its newest browser, Internet Explorer 9.

In November, Chrome had a nearly 25.7% share of the global market, up from 4.7% two years earlier, according to StatCounter. Firefox had a 25.2% share in November, down from 32.2% two years earlier.

Other research firms such as NetApplications show that Firefox still has a slight edge over the surging Chrome, and StatCounter data show Firefox is still No. 2 in the U.S.

Through Chrome, people can access an online applications market called the Chrome Web store. Some of the Chrome apps are free while others are available for a fee, similar to the app markets for Apple Inc. and Google's Android mobile devices.

Google also developed a new operating system called Chrome OS that is derived from its browser technology and designed to run only Web-based software. Chrome OS laptop computers, built by hardware partners, are currently on sale. Google hopes to sell subscriptions to the computers, dubbed Chromebooks, to corporate customers and educational institutions or governments.

Dell Pulls out Their 7-inch Streak Android tablet

2011-12-05T18:56:00.000-08:00

Dell has taken its 7-inch Streak Android tablet out of commission, according to its website. While some retail sites still have stock, the company no longer offers the Streak for sale from its own website and will no longer produce it. The Dell Android tablet species is officially extinct in the US.

The fadeout of the 7-inch Streak follows the disappearance of the 5-inch Streak in August, when it failed to corner (read: create) the 5-inch tablet market. The 7-inch Streak went on sale in January and was priced at $200 with a T-Mobile contract, but has failed to generate any significant interest in the last year. The only Dell tablet still in production is the 10-inch Streak, sold in China.

Ouch! :)

From here, Dell will move on to making Windows 8 tablets when the operating system launches next year. Speaking at the Dell World 2011 conference, Michael Dell, the company's CEO, said that "the Android market has not developed the expectations [Dell] would have had."

In the meantime, there are similarly priced devices like the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet that offer many of the same features at roughly similar prices, without contracts. Dell will need to rethink its tablet game, particularly the use of contracts with mobile carriers, to stay competitive. Still, we hope to see a Windows 8 device that is more well-rounded and tablet-like than the super-e-readers above when CES rolls around in January.

Microsoft Releases few updates to Exchange Server 2010

2011-12-05T18:49:00.000-08:00

Microsoft released its update to Exchange Server 2010 Monday, according to an official Microsoft Exchange team blog post.

The Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2, which is ready to download, includes features such as:

A mini version of Outlook Web App -- a lightweight browser-based client offering access to services including email and calendar, and designed to work on mobile operating systems.

A Hybrid Configuration Wizard that provides an easier way for businesses to support email systems that are partially on-premises and partially on Microsoft's Office 365 cloud.

More than 84 percent of in-house email systems in U.S. businesses of all sizes run on Exchange Server, according to Microsoft.

Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet Slowly Gaining Momentum

2011-12-05T07:52:00.000-08:00

In its first quarter of selling its own tablet computers, Amazon.com Inc. has become the second-biggest seller of the increasingly popular mobile devices by stealing market share from the still-dominant leader, Apple Inc., according to projections. This however doesn't really mean that it's a great product, just because its numbers.

Because as the saying goes, "perception is everything". In simple terms, even if you have a weak product, still the brand recognition or how much people put their trust on you are what matters most of the time. This however is not to say that Kindle is bad product by any means though. After all, all those user ratings and reviews must count for something, right?

Buy directly from Amazon! :)

Anyway, Amazon will ship 3.9 million Kindle Fire tablets, right, in the fourth quarter, according to analysis firm IHS, giving it 13.8 percent of the global tablet business. Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple, which sells the popular iPad tablet, still controls 65.6 percent of the market, but that is down from 69.7 percent in the third quarter.

Amazon sells the Kindle Fire, a full-color tablet version of its popular Kindle e-reader, for $199 — much lower than the iPad, which starts at $499.

Microsoft Trying to Survive the Wave of "Openness", Again!

2011-12-05T05:50:00.000-08:00

You know the stereotype: Microsoft is the sworn enemy of openness, unwilling to open its code or hardware to others. It's a monopolist bent on world domination, willing to use its lawyers and market strength to ensure that Windows and Office don't face any serious competition.

In years past, that stereotype had some truth to it. Microsoft certainly used its monopoly power to quash competition. (And that's making news again. Bill Gates will be testifying in a lawsuit in which Novell charges that Microsoft used monopolistic practices to try to kill the once-popular WordPerfect word processing software.)

And even when Microsoft made overtures to open source, its proponents called those gestures halfhearted. When Microsoft signed a cross-licensing deal involving Novell's SUSE Linux software in November 2006, the open-source community eyed the pact with suspicion. Then, in May 2007, Microsoft claimed that open-source software violated 235 Microsoft patents.

Neither "Black" nor "White", what is it then!? (errrr)

In recent months, Microsoft has launched a raft of lawsuits against Android hardware companies, charging that Android violates a variety of Microsoft patents. Many Android device manufacturers have settled, to the tune of $444 million.

All of that certainly sounds like the practices of a company that is not friendly to openness and eager to use lawsuits to achieve what its engineers can't.

Despite this impression, over the past few years, Microsoft has quietly discovered the virtues of openness. A recent example concerns a "jailbreaking" app for Windows Phone 7 devices. Normally, Windows Phone 7 devices can run only apps available through Microsoft's official app store, the Windows Phone Marketplace. Microsoft, though, recently allowed the developer ChevronWP7 Labs to sell a jailbreaking app through the Windows Phone Marketplace, after initially banning it a year ago.

That's not the first time Microsoft has done such a thing -- and not even the most dramatic instance of it. In November 2010, Microsoft aligned itself with the do-it-yourself movement when it decided to let anyone hack into the guts of its Kinect controller-free gaming system for any purpose. At first, when hackers began doing this to the Kinect, Microsoft issued a veiled threat against them. But not long after that, the company saw the benefits of such hacking and welcomed anyone to get involved; it even announced plans to work with universities to promote such activity. Alex Kipman, director of incubation for Xbox Live, told National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" that Microsoft designed the Kinect with an open USB port so that PCs would be able to access the device's sensors. And he said that Microsoft would also increase its partnerships with universities for research using the Kinect.

Why has Microsoft now become a friend of openness? Because, like other companies, it has found that it's good for business. For example, when iRobot saw that its Roomba robotic vacuum was proving popular with hackers, the company started selling the iRobot Create, a programmable robot with the guts of a Roomba but no ability to vacuum.

By opening up the Kinect, Microsoft helps fuel a new market for the device, as well as plenty of marketing buzz. As for Windows Phone 7, it's struggling to gain market share, so allowing jailbreaking can only help with sales.

By slowly embracing openness, Microsoft isn't forgoing the idea of profits. Rather, it recognizes that being open is a way to increase profits.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OEM Device Upgrade Availability

2011-12-05T05:41:00.000-08:00

HE LATEST VERSION of Google's Android mobile operating system (OS), Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), is available on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone, but here's a round-up of mobile phone makers' roll out plans for ICS on other devices.

As with any new version of Android the question on everyone's lips is 'when will I get an upgrade?' Here's what we've heard from each manufacturer about their roll out plans.

Samsung

The firm has been one of the quietest and somewhat secretive about its plans, but one snippet we do have is that the Galaxy S II will get an upgrade. The Korean firm has not revealed when this will come or any details about any of its other devices.

HTC

Taiwanese phone maker HTC has confirmed that it will upgrade a number of its phones to ICS in early 2012. Handsets that HTC has listed so far are the Sensation, Sensation XL, Sensation XE and the Evo 3D. It has named some US handsets, too - the Rezound, Evo Design 4G and Amaze 4G.

Sony Ericsson

It's a similar story when it comes to Sony Ericsson, which has given no timeframe for the upgrade. It has at least verified that a lot of its devices will get ICS, including the Xperia Arc, Arc S, Play, Neo, Neo V, Mini, Mini Pro, Active and Ray.

LG

Once again, the firm has quoted no schedule, but it has named a few devices for the update. The Optimus 2X, Optimus Black, Optimus 3D and the Optimus LTE will all get ICS. LG said an announcement will be made this month detailing when the rollout will occur.

Motorola

It sounds like a broken record, but Motorola hasn't stated when its products will get the latest Android version either. However, it has announced plans to upgrade the Razr, Droid Razr, Xoom and Droid Bionic so far.

Google

The developer of Android has started to roll out ICS to the Samsung Nexus S handset, but it's just an early release for employees at the moment.

Nokia and Apple

Not too strangely, we've heard not a peep from either Nokia or Apple about when they will upgrade any of their devices to the Android 4.0 OS release.

This is what we know at the moment and, of course, plans can change. We won't be surprised if upgrades get delayed. This is probably half the reason the vendors are reluctant to give out any dates yet. We'll be sure to keep you informed as soon as we learn of further developments

Source: The Inquirer

Facebook, "No More Misrepresent!" Says Federal Trade Commission

2011-12-05T05:31:00.000-08:00

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ought to consider adding members of the Federal Trade Commission to his holiday gift list. They wouldn't be allowed to accept his gratuities, but he certainly owes them a great big thank-you for the settlement announced last week that will, among other things, require Facebook to "not misrepresent itself" when it comes to what information it collects and how it uses it.

The agreement also requires Facebook to obtain user consent before it makes any changes that override existing privacy preferences and to prevent anyone from accessing user content within 30 days if a user cancels his or her account.

The reason Zuckerberg ought to be thankful is the final part of the agreement, which requires Facebook to obtain "independent, third-party audits" that its privacy program "meets or exceeds the requirements of the FTC order," and to "ensure that the privacy of consumers' information is protected."

Is it, Really?...

Those privacy auditors might very well wind up on Zuckerberg's best-friends list because, assuming Facebook lives up to its agreements, the audits will serve as government verification that it's being honest about how it treats user information. It's almost as if the FTC is putting its stamp of approval on Facebook's future privacy policies.

I'm sure Zuckerberg wasn't thrilled by the FTC complaint, which accuses the company and its executives of misleading statements. For example, the company is accused
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of sharing user information with app developers even though the user had restricted that information to "Only Friends" or "Friends of Friends." The FTC claimed that Facebook apps installed by members were able to gather information on their Facebook friends, even though those friends never gave permission to share their information.

One of the biggest indictments in the complaint is the allegation that Facebook disclosed user information to advertisers despite consistent claims that it never did so. Facebook's strategy is to deliver targeted ads directly to consumers. If an advertiser wishes to reach 35-year-old married women in Silicon Valley, Facebook will happily display their ad to that demographic, but says it won't actually turn over the names of those members to the advertisers. Ethics aside, that business model makes sense because Facebook can make a lot more money in the long run by selling ads over and over again than it could be selling names just once.

The FTC points out that Facebook's stated privacy policy was (and remains): "We don't share information with advertisers without your consent." The FTC quoted Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg as saying, "We never share your personal information with advertisers. We never sell your personal information to anyone."

Yet, according to the agency, "In many instances, Facebook has shared information about users with Platform Advertisers by identifying to them the users who clicked on their ads and to whom those ads were targeted."

My first reaction to that accusation was anger toward Facebook. In some of my columns, I quoted Facebook's claims that it didn't sell user information and -- at first glance -- I felt that I had been used and mislead. But I read further and realized that the FTC's claim was just a restatement of previously published news accounts about how Facebook, MySpace and numerous other websites had accidentally disclosed data to advertisers as a result of a flaw (or feature) in the Internet's plumbing called a "referrer."

As the FTC put it, "from at least September 2008 until May 26, 2010, Facebook designed and operated its website such that, in many instances, the User ID for a user who clicked on a Platform Ad was shared with the Platform Advertiser." What the complaint didn't say was that the reason the ID was being passed on was because browsers automatically pass on that information unless you engineer the service to avoid it.

According to OCLC.org (a nonprofit computer library service), "When the browser requests the new page, it sends along the URL of the previous page." And when the user ID is part of that URL it gets passed on too, unless the website operator takes steps to avoid it.

In May 2010 Facebook engineer Matt Jones blogged that the company fixed this "unintentional oversight" and designed a redirector that removes the referrer. He also said that, "We have no reason to believe that any advertisers were exploiting this, and doing so would have been a violation of our terms. To our knowledge, none did."

Going forward, Facebook, along with Google and Twitter, are under federal scrutiny for the next 20 years. That doesn't mean that users don't have to worry about privacy -- there are still ways that personal information could be passed on to others, and there are privacy and security risks with any platform that supports third-party apps. Plus, there is always the possibility that a government or law enforcement agency could subpoena personal information stored on Facebook's servers, which is why I recommend that you never post anything online that you would get you in trouble if it were made public, regardless of privacy settings.

A Major Update for Xbox 360 Console is Coming! - Says Microsoft

2011-12-05T05:26:00.000-08:00

The BBC iPlayer will be added to the Xbox in 2012 as Microsoft tries to centre its console on entertainment rather than just games.The big update to support this change will start hitting Xbox 360 consoles around the world on 6 December. Microsoft has signed up 40 media firms to provide both live and on-demand movie and TV services for the console.

The update also lets people control their TVs by talking into the Kinect motion-spotting gadgets. Mainstream media. The most noticeable change made by the update will be to swap the Xbox's familiar tabbed interface for the so-called Metro look that is based around "tiles".

This uses square and oblong tiles that sit under different menu headings which lump together media and content relevant to that category. For instance, tiles under the "social" menu give access to Twitter, Facebook and Kinect video calls. Nokia Lumia The blocky "tiled" look from Windows Phone 7 will be reflected on the Xbox interface.

The Metro interface is also expected to be the default for Windows 8 when that debuts in late 2012.

Microsoft's Bing search engine is also being rolled out to the Xbox and it will be able to search for anything available on any of the tiles. Kinect owners will be able to use their voice to make queries.

As well as live TV programmes, other on-demand services will be made available via tiles under the "Apps" menu. Only Gold members of Xbox Live will be able to access them. About 35 million of the 57 million Xbox consoles around the world are connected to Xbox Live. From 6 December in the UK, Amazon's movie streaming service Lovefilm will be available through the Xbox.

Later in the month it will be joined by other on-demand services including 4OD, Blinkbox and Sony's Crackle. The iPlayer will be available via an Xbox Live app from early 2012. Sky TV services are already available on the console. Microsoft does not mention ITV in its press release.
Competition

Gold Members of Xbox Live will also get access to a cloud-based service that mirrors their profile and logs which games they own. This means they will be able to use any Xbox 360 via their gamertag.

"This is now the benchmark against which all other living room initiatives should be compared,"

Said James McQuivey of Forrester Research.

Mr McQuivey said the Kinect should help Microsoft differentiate the Xbox from rivals such as cable TV firms, Google, Apple and others who piped content through set-top boxes. Talking to a TV would build a "new bridge" between people and what they wanted to watch, he said. It should make it easier for people to get at novel content and services in the future, he added.

Pandigital SCN02 Photolink One-Touch Scanner

2011-10-05T01:46:00.000-07:00

With one-touch scanning and no PC required, the PhotoLink personal photo scanner/converter from Pandigital makes it easy to enjoy digital copies of all your favorite printed photos. Designed for ease of use. The Pandigital Personal Photo Scanner/Converter saves scanned images directly to SD card for quick and simple transfer to your Digital Photo Frame or PC with ease.

Main hardware specifications...

*. Scan up to 4 x 6 photos (directly into your PC or Memory Card as stated above).

*. Supports the JPEG image compression format at resolutions up to 1800 x 1200 or 300 dpi for high quality scanned images.

*. A 5-in-1 card reader that supports SD, MS, MS-Pro, MMC, and xD storage standards.

Buy directly from Amazon!

*. Comes with a 512MB of Memory card.

*. Extremely portable. Weights about 8 oz and only 1.5 inches deep!.

*. Also look for the following if you're buying it: Callibration Card, Roller Cleaning Sheet, Sensor Cleaning Swab, Power Adapter, USB Cable.

Although the free 512MB memory card sounds intriguing :D but since you get a 1.5 mega pixel jpeg for 3x5 and a 2 mega pixel jpeg for 4x6's. This is fine for displaying on a digital frame ... this is hardly high enough resolution to do any real editing to or print enlargements. So most of the time you'd need somewhat bigger memory card.

The first thing you need to do is calibrate the scanner with the supplied card and it may take more than once. If you're having a somewhat a bit unclear images after scanned... then again you might wanna use the sleeves now and then. Anyhow, this is one of the older models that Pandigital offers yet it is a really easy to use scanner that scans about 3 pictures per minute. As a result you can easily scan hundreds of pictures extremely fast. Although it certainly ain't the fastest... yet for its portability and size, it's quite impressive!

Most of the time you won't have any trouble with the photo being damaged in any way. If an edge is curled, the feeder just won't accept it so it won't damage it. You can turn the photo in any direction to scan and then when it is converted , you can use the rotation tool in your photo software to turn in right side up. The photos on the card can either be moved to your computer to reuse the card , or you can just copy them to computer and leave on card as a backup.

Although not something major which should be able to fixed via something like a firmware upgrade... when you change the card or reuse it, the scanner starts naming the photos from 001 again, making them appear duplicated on your computer unless you name each photo that is in a folder on your computer.

Other than that I have no complaints, its is about 7 inches long and 2 inches wide and 2 inches high, making it totally portable. Although it is limited to photos no larger than will physically fit in the slot but larger ones can be done on a flatbed scanner. This just makes quick work, feed them through and done. So if you're looking for a portable scanner that lets you easily store your scanned images to something like a memory card or PC directly that comes with an extremely competitive price tag... then Pandigital SCN02 Photolink is one heck of a Scanner! :D.

If interested, click here to check prices at Amazon!.

Scansnap S1500 Scanner, Overview

2011-09-18T04:39:00.000-07:00

The ScanSnap S1500 provides Windows® users an effective way to greatly reduce paper clutter, storage space, and security risk associated with unmanaged paperwork at home or office. If you're someone who's interested in digitizing and archiving all your paper receipts and financial and legal documents--or just about anything you have on paper--there are a handful of consumer sheet-fed scanners to choose from, including Fujitsu's ScanSnap S1500.

The good news first, starting with the most superficial: The S1500 looks good. It can nicely complement an executive office decor, with its silver and black color scheme and a design that's as close to being sleek as any document scanner. According to Fujitsu, the S1500 can scan at a rate of 20 pages per minute which is really close when compared its performance under actual situations (350 page within 17 minutes which is certainly excellent).

Buy directly from Amazon!

Setup is standard fare. Install the software, plug in the power cord and a USB cable, let Windows recognize the scanner, and you're ready for your first scan. I installed the ScanSnap on a Windows Vista system, but according to Fujitsu the disc includes a full set of software for Windows 2000 and XP as well as a Mac version of the scan utility

The included OCR software is very easy to use, OCRs and coverts the PDFs in the background. The resulting PDFs are images of the original page with real text underneath, permitting searches and cut'n'paste. The output tray is one of the few weaknesses of the hardware. Sheets emerging from the scanner tend to catch previous pages and push them, sometimes completely off the tray, but almost always into a fairly unruly pile. It's worse if the documents are of mixed sizes.

The S1500 can also serve as a first-rate business-card scanner, running cards through its ADF at high speed, recognizing text reasonably well, and sending the results to a variety of programs. It can also send directly to Outlook Express, Goldmine, and ACT, as well as save the data in a comma-separated variable file, which Excel and most database programs can read.

But on the negative side, according Fujistu themselves, scanning paperwork that has straight lines, a box, etc on it you'll notice that when scanned, there will be some slight waves in the lines. This minor detail by no means takes away from how awesome this scanner is but be aware of it.

For those looking for something even smaller and more portable, Fujitsu also makes the S300M, which costs about $250. However, the S300M is geared toward receipts and short documents.
For about $400 online, the S1500 isn't cheap, but it's reasonably priced for what it does and how well it performs. The fact is, if you're looking to get out from under all the paper that's overwhelming you--or just taking up space--the Fujitsu S1500 is a small but powerful organizational weapon which makes it one of the best in the business!.

If interested in buying: Click here to check prices at Amazon.

Portable Document Scanner: Canon imageFormula P-150 Scan-tini

2011-09-17T06:29:00.000-07:00

The Canon imageFormula P-150 Scan-tini ($295 direct) isn't the smallest scanner out there when comparing with some others, but it's small and light enough to earn its designation as a portable. More important, it may be the smallest scanner possible that offers both portability and the conveniences you'd expect in a desktop scanner.

The imageFORMULA P-150 (scan-tini) personal document scanner's compact size, simple use, and advanced feature-set liberates document capture by taking it beyond the walls of the office to the convenience of any user location. The P-150 scanner combines practicality, productivity, and value in a sleek, mobile design.

The P-150 is Canon's first entry into the Personal scanner market, as well as the first USB powered professional grade document scanner capable of operating using a single USB cable connected to a PC, and Windows users can just "Plug-and-Scan" due to the embedded Canon CaptureOnTouch Lite for Windows software as well.

Buy directly from Amazon!

Canon has managed to shoehorn a 20-page automatic document feeder (ADF) into the P-150, along with duplexing (scanning both sides of a page at the same time) capabilities. Although it may not be the most fastest one out there but the 15 pages per minutes is certainly pretty darn good nonetheless.

Main hardware details...

USB Cable Powered
15 ppm B&W/10ppm Color
20 Sheet ADF
ISIS and Twain compatible
Lightweight (2.1 lbs) and Extremely Portable
Compact size, Practical
Liberates document capture by taking it beyond the walls of the office to the convenience of any user location`
compact size
practical

The P-150 has actually received a lot of positive feedback + has won a lot of awards from respectable sources such as 2010 BERTL's Best Mobile Document Management Scanners and several BLI product of the year are just a few to mention.

Another thing is that it stores a simple scan utility in memory thus when you plug-in for the first time you'll be asked to install it. According to Canon, it also comes with a full set of drivers and software for Windows 7, 2000, and XP. In addition, you can download the Mac version of CaptureOnTouch and the Mac Twain driver for Mac OS X version 10.3 through 10.6 from Canon's Web site.

Actual performance...

The P-150's optical resolution is 600 pixels per inch (ppi), but its default setting is 200 ppi, which is usually sufficient for text documents. In the default scan mode, at 200 ppi and color, the speed would reach about 10 ppm and 20 ipm ratings, at 10.3 ppm for scanning a 25-sheet document to image PDF format in simplex mode, and 19.2 ipm for scanning the same document in duplex mode.

Although while handling multiple cards the P-150 did really well but there are few others that perhaps have the ability to outperform the P-150 when it comes to cards. But that being said, if you're searching for a balanced performance, easy to use software suite, extremely portability + a decent price-tag, then the Canon's P-150 is certainly one of the top portable document scanners out there without a doubt.

If interested, you can get prices from this Amazon link. Good luck.

Best Document Scanner: Kodak P461

2011-09-16T20:56:00.000-07:00

The KODAK P461 Personal Photo Scanner makes it easy to scan your printed photos, from wallet size to 4 × 6 in., and save them instantly to the included memory card or your computer. You can also scan your 35 mm negatives and mounted slides.

The scanner can scan prints from wallet size up to 4 by 6 inches at a resolution of 600 dpi. It can also turn 35-millimeter negatives and mounted slides into crisp, clear digital images with a resolution of 1200 dpi. This scanner works with or without a computer, saving scanned files either to an included 2 GB MICROSD card or to a computer via USB 2.0.

It is a very compact scanner which will take photos from wallet size to 4x6 inches, 35mm negatives and mounted slides. So if you have a lot of slides + need something portable... then the Kodak P461 is one of the most highest rated products in 2011, on Amazon's listings as well.

Buy directly from Amazon!

Let's have a look at the hardware details...

Photo size	up to 4 × 6 in.
Negative size	35 mm
Slide type	mounted, positive slide
Resolution	300–600 dpi 35 mm negatives and mounted slides up to 1200 dpi
Memory card reader	5-in-1
Supported memory card formats	SD/SDHC, MICROSD with SD adapter, XD, MS/MS Pro, MMC
Output format	JPEG
Interface	USB 2.0
Feed system	Twin roller
Power	AC adapter (included) or (4) AAA batteries (not included)
Product certifications	FCC, CE, UL
Environmental compliance	RoHS, WEEE, CARB
AC adapter certifications	UL, CEC, CE
Weight	1.6 lbs

As you can see, it's just about 1.6 lbs of weight thus a highly portable document scanner. Furthermore, at 2 by 10.6 by 2.8 inches (HWD), the P461 is about the size of a three-hole punch. It offers two manual-feed slots in the front, with a four-inch-wide slot for prints on the left and a small slot for slides and film on the right. Both offer straight-through paths, with the exit in the back. Also on the back is a memory card slot. A power connector and USB port are on the left side.

Aside from having to manually feed the original, the entire scan process is automatic. The only setting you can control is resolution, and you can control it only for prints, switching between 300 pixels per inch (ppi) and 600ppi. Even that control is almost pointless, since 300ppi is all you need for prints unless you plan to enlarge them.

Film always scans at 1,200ppi, the P461's maximum optical resolution—and another reason the scanner is most appropriate for casual photographers. The 1200ppi is a reasonable resolution for enlarging the images to print at 4 by 6 inches, but a little low for larger print sizes.

What about the speed?

Well, the "time" depends on the actual physical size and the colors, etc of your slides but let's just say that you have a slide about 4-by-6 prints at 300ppi... Kodak P461 can do it in about 23-25 seconds which is not the fastest scanner but for its reasonable price (which is one of the reasons for its popularity), P461 is certainly beyond the average.

So, if you're looking for a very portable, light weight and budget friendly (ooh, I got you excited didn't I ;-)) scanner from Kodak but can cope with the fact that it may not be the best of its kind for professional high quality work but just fits nicely with everyday document scanning work... then the Kodak P461 is certainly on of the best without a doubt.

You can purchase it via this Amazon Link if you like. Good luck.

Micromax Mobile Q3 (Ezpad) Full Phone Specifications

2011-08-12T00:08:00.000-07:00

Micromax mobile Ezpad Q3 is a simple, classic looking mobile phone that comes with a larger keypad, Dual-SIM feature, thin depth which makes it looks sexy (kinda ;-) ), moderately large TFT screen... and most importantly, it may not have a long list of latest features but for simple web browsing (including Facebook, etc) and making calls, etc it comes with a very reasonable price (around RS 4300-4500) + has built in 3G support nonetheless!.

Unlike with some of their "especial" models such as the Q55 which is a ladie's phone, but when having a glance at the Q3 model, I think it's obvious that the targeted users are those who are, say the business type perhaps :).

Anyhow let's take a look at the full phone specifications.

*. 2.2 Inch display screen with 176 x 220 pixel resolution.

*. 10MB of internal memory.

*. Color quality of 262K.

*. 1.3 MPX camera (very low quality but as mentioned above... for the target audience, this might be just enough).

*. FM radio.

*. MicroSD slot for future memory upgrades (max up to 2GB).

*. QWERTY keyboard with 5-way navigation key.

*. Dimensions 111.2 x 61.2 x 13mm.

May not be the world's most thinnest phone but ...

*. SMS/MMS and E-mail support (G-mail, Yahoo mail, Skype, MSN Live messenger, etc).

*. Phone book with 1000 entries.

*. Mobile web browser with WAP, HTML, XHTML support.

*. EGPRS, EDGE and Bluetooth support.

*. 3G.

*. Music player with MP3 / AMR / MIDI / WAV file type support.

*. Battery has a stand by time of 160 hours and talk time of 4 hours.

So if you're looking for a mobile phone that's small enough to fit in your shirt's pockets and a thinner depths + that also lets you browse web, chat with your friends at Facebook or use IM clients, etc... then the Micromax Mobile Q3 looks really promising. And heck it's just about Rs 4200-4300, seriously that's an impressive price for its features, don't you think?.

Micromax Mobile Q55

2011-08-11T01:31:00.000-07:00

Micromax mobile's Q55 without a doubt is a "girly" phone :). Although everyone may not love the Swivel phone's physical attributes such as the almost Square shape, etc but it comes with a reasonably bigger keypad (with big and comfortable button, at lest to the naked eye), larger screen + White and Grey colors that makes it look good anyhow.

The keypad is a QWERTY type and you just can't miss that big Space bar which is nice touch and it seems that it's designed to let you easily type messages while using social services such as Facebook for instance. The keys that contains numbers are marked with the color Orange which is easily visible as well.

Main hardware specifications...

*. Unlike with the European mobile phones, a lot of Asian manufactures make sure to create a lot of Dual-SIM phones for their customers and the Q55 is also a Dual-SIM phone (900/180 MHZ bands supported).

*. 2.4" QVGA display screen with 262K color depths.

*. 2 Mega pixel camera (which is way below when compared with other recent models such as A70 for instance).

*. Opera Mini is the web browser.

*. Facebook integrated (obviously! :D).

*. You won't be getting an Wi-Fi or 3G with it but EDGE/GPRS and Bluetooth are included.

*. The MicroSD slot supports up to 3GB of maximum memory expansions.

*. FM Radio.

*. Phone-book with a capacity for 1000 entries and 300 SMS messages saving space.

*. Comes with a simple music player that supports MP3, MIDI, WAV and AMR.

*. Weights about 75 Grams and the dimensions are: 70×70×16.3 mm.

The battery seems to support 4 hours of continuous talk time while the standby time is about 7 days. Both these values will change according to actual conditions thus as all knows, we should always be quite skeptical about manufacture's claims on such things :).

Anyhow, as said, if you're a dude then this is certainly not for you but if you wanna impress your girl friend with a gift (that doesn't take much out of your wallet ;-) ), then the Micromax Mobile Q55 might save your day!.

Micromax Android A 70 Mobile Phone: Hardware Specifications

2011-08-03T02:57:00.000-07:00

It took some time for the India based mobile phone manufacture Micromax to come up with few smart phones for the Google Android platform. If I'm not mistaken A 60 was one of the first Micromax mobile phones to use the Android OS after seeing its success few weeks ago they announced its successor called the A 70 which is the latest of the bunch.

To start, the A 70 has a much much better looking physical design when comparing with the A 60 model, which wasn't that bad but but ;-). Although in general the look-n-feel is a lot similar to the other smart phones especially those LG Android ones.

Main features...

*. The screen is a 256K TFT captive touch screen although it still misses the 16M colors which otherwise would've look awesome. But for its price I think this is more than acceptable anyway.

*. Resolution of 320 x 280 with 3.2 inch screen size.

*. Proximity and accelerometer included.

*. Internal memory of 160MB, MicroSD slot supports memory expansions up to 32GB.

*. Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 and HSDPA up to 7.2 Mbps.

*. USB 2.0 port.

*. 3.5 mm audio output jack.

*. Runs the Android 2.2 Froyo version.

*. Camera - 5 MP, 2592х1944 pixels, autofocus.

*. Processor speed - 600 Mhz.

*. 2G network support - GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900.

*. SMS, MMS, Email, Push Email, IM

*. Web browsing support - WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML.

*. Comes in the Color Black only.

*. FM radio included.

*. Multimedia files support - MP3/WAV/AAC and MP4/H.263. But since it's Android, you can always find a hell lot of other multimedia players with ease anyway :).

*. Li-Ion 1450 mAh battery.

*. Stand-by time up to 168 hours + a continuous talk time of 4 hours (these values are according to the manufacture thus may change in actual circumstances).

*. Dimensions - 111 x 58 x 13.5 mm

*. Weight - 85 g.

Conclusion: Well, I haven't used it so cannot make any claims but when considering the powerful 5MP (well not that powerful by today's standard but still it's pretty darn good) camera, HSDPA support and the bigger touch sensitive screen + most importantly it runs the Android, for a price range about RS 8000-9000 (India rupees) Micromax Mobile is certainly going in the right direction without a doubt :).