TechBlog

A group of Second Life users is suing Second Life’s creator over a virtual land dispute. They say their contractual property ownership rights have been changed and that this alteration of the terms of service constitutes fraud and violates California consumer protection laws. Before you scoff too much at this seemingly ludicrous lawsuit, remember that virtual worlds aren’t just “funny money” and avatars. They’re serious business, both for the owners and investors who profit from them and for the users who pump hundreds and even thousands of dollars each into creating characters and interacting online. ...

On a day when investors began celebrating Apple’s report of having already sold its one millionth iPad, news from this morning’s New York Post — which was the first with the story of the Sirius + XM merger — has thrown a cold towel on investors’ sentiments. The Post cites a single anonymous source as saying that essentially the only thing stopping a government inquiry into whether Section 3.3.1 of Apple’s Developers’ Agreement violates antitrust law, is a dispute over which government department gets first crack: the Federal Trade Commission, or the Dept. of Justice Antitrust Division. ...

Self-proclaimed social media scientist Dan Zarrella has already applied linguistic methodologies to psychologically profile Twitter users. Now he’s using the same technology and approach to break down Facebook sharing behaviors. Zarrella uses the Regressive Imagery Dictionary (RID) and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) methods to arrive at the conclusion that, “Articles … that include sexual references in their titles are shared on Facebook far more than the average story.” ...

For the second time recently, a security researcher has pointed out that running machines without administrative privileges could significantly improve security. Mikko Hypponen, the head of research at Finnish AV company F-Secure in an interview with The Inquirer, said a great way to stop a lot of malware would be to take administrative rights away from online users. “Most wouldn’t notice (although those who did would be incandescent with annoyance) and most malware would be stopped from functioning. It should have been done already,” he said. ...

We want to warn you of an email message in Spanish we’ve received with the subject ( Urgente ) Posible Terremoto y Tsunami con un 89 % de efectividad and that is of course false. The message consists of different images and informs users about an alert of earthquake and tsunami in Chile. Besides, it passes itself off as a warning of National Geographic, in order to make it more credible. ...

Microsoft Visio 2010 Viewer allows anyone to view Visio drawings and diagrams (created with Visio 5.0 through Visio 2010) inside Internet Explorer (versions 5 through Web browser. ****The Visio 2010 Viewer has all the functionality of the previous viewers, and includes all the security fixes. Visio Viewer enables users to discover the advantages of using Visio drawings, charts, and illustrations in a Web-based environment. You can view Visio drawings files with a .vsd, .vss, .vst, .vdx, .vsx, or .vtx extension) in Windows Explorer. Internet Explorer will open, and Visio Viewer will render the drawing in the browser window. ...

For a short while today a couple of treas.gov websites were hacked, and were reaching out to an attack site in Ukraine. The websites involved were bep.gov (Bureau of Engraving and Printing), bep.treas.gov and moneyfactory.gov. They had been script injected with the line of code circled in red… Btw, you should _not_ mess with the attack site (grepad) … it was dead earlier today, but could easily come back to life. ...

Hi dear visitors, I’m sorry I’ve not been here for a while, there are some personal problems here in my life and I could not keep up updating my blog 🙁 , I guess it would take up to one more week, so I hope I can back here updating my blog from next week 🙂 The best way you can help me is donate via the link in right column of the my blog. ...

The Obama administration’s Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission has been working with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer to make a computer game about managing the United States federal budget and deficit, USA Today reports. President Obama appointed Erskine Bowles and Alan K. Simpson to lead an 18-person, bi-partisan commission to generate ideas for dealing with the nation’s rising deficit and other fiscal challenges. The game is just a footnote amid the commission’s broader objectives, of course, but it’s actually not a bad idea. ...

Gmail has a new feature for Firefox 3.6 and Google Chrome users: drag-and-drop file attachments. The feature is very straightforward — just drag files from your desktop onto your e-mail, and a green box will appear where you can drop your files. Google promises it will “enable this for other browsers as soon as they support this feature.” Why the wait? Drag-and-drop functionality is an HTML5 feature. Currently only the Gecko layout engine — the engine that powers Firefox — fully supports HTML5 drag-and-drop. WebKit, which powers both Safari and Chrome, has only partial support for drag-and-drop. ...