TechBlog

Though it is primarily known as a social networking site, Facebook is actually one of the top destinations for photo sharing, and a new user profile design change unveiled Monday ups the visibility of Facebook photos and encourages users to share personal information in a more visual way. Two years ago, Facebook came forward with some staggering figures about the photo sharing taking place on its sites, which amounted to between 2-3 Terabytes of photos being updated daily with a peak of 300,000 images per second. Facebook would serve about 15 billion photos, and the storage dedicated just to photography amounted to more than a petabyte. ...

Mashable: The AOL-Yahoo rumors are heating up once again. This time, they involve splitting up the AOL empire into two divisions before engaging in a merger of the two Internet companies. AOL has two main components: A content and display advertising business, and its longstanding dial-up business. In the past few years, AOL has focused on developing and expanding its advertising arm, its web portal and its media properties (e.g. Engadget and TechCrunch). ...

At first glance, two recent security stories, the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear industry and the WikiLeaks breach of US State Department communications, don’t seem to have much in common, but they do. They are united by a vector, a method of transmission and that vector is removable media. I am sure that the Iranians felt pretty secure with air-gapped systems, but like a spark from the burning house next door that finds its way into your shingles, the right USB found its way into the right PC and then suddenly all those uranium enrichment centrifuges running at 807-1210 hz started to act funny and fail in unexpected and reportedly fairly energetic ways (you can see some pics of failed centrifuges here http://web.mit.edu/charliew/www/centrifuge.html and here http://www.chem.purdue.edu/chemsafety/NewsAndStories/CentrifugeDamages.htm). ...

Google just released version 8 of its web browser Chrome. It fixes 13 security vulnerabilities of which 4 got rated “high”ly critical – the people reporting these all got rewarded with 1.000 US-$ and 500 US-$, respectively. Additionally to these security fixes, the update to Chrome 8.0.552.215 contains more than 800 bugfixes and stability improvements according to the Google developers. The new version officially includes and uses the built-in, stripped-down PDF reader which is additionally secured with a sandbox. This feature, tied together with Googles sandboxing of the browser processes in general and including and updating the Flash Player automatically makes Chrome one of the most secure, yet full-featured web browsers currently available. ...

According to The Telegraph, German prosecutors are accusing two local hackers of breaking into the computers of over 50 pop stars, including Lady Gaga, Kelly Clarkson, Justin Timberlake and Ke$ha. (Wouldn’t you have to be pretty brave to blackmail Lady Gaga? She can be, um, scary. ) Ralf Haferkamp, from the Duisburg prosecutor’s office, said in an interview with Deutsche Welle that the hackers, two boys of 17 and 23 from the West of Germany, infected the machines with malware in order to steal all sorts of files. ...

Avira TechBlog: We discovered a new ransomware threat which is downloaded by a Trojan of the Oficla family. This downloaded threat replaces the MBR (master boot record) of the hard disk with its own MBR which asks the user for a password and thus blocks the loading of the operating system. Upon starting the Oficla Trojan and successive execution of the downloaded payload the system will be rebooted and the user will be presented the ransom notice. ...

Righard Zwienenberg, Chief Research Officer at Norman posted this on Norman Security Blog, Thanks to Mr.Fagerlid for sharing: I have been a user of PayPal for many years, actually ever since PayPal opened its services for international users. PayPal, originally only for US citizens, is now used worldwide with local offices in many countries. From the Dutch affiliate, I just received the next message from PayPal (the actual message was in Dutch, see picture below): ...

An iPad 2 could hit shelves as early as next year, according to at least one source. An Apple iPad 2 will go into production beginning in December – and hit shelves as soon as Q1 of 2011. That’s the news this week from Economic News Daily, an English-language Taiwanese paper. According to News Daily staff, the new iPad will include FaceTime functionality, fresh display tech, a pair of cameras – one forward-facing – and a USB port. ...

Remember that peppy aftermarket 256GB SSD upgrade from PhotoFast that easily smoked (on paper anyway) the SSD found in Apple’s latest MacBook Air? It’s been halted upon Apple’s request before it ever went on sale, similarly to those HyperMac batteries before it. 9to5Mac first reported the news based on a source close to the company and we just confirmed it directly with the PhotoFast GM2_SFV1_Air product manager. The risk of losing access to Apple’s product licensing program was just too grave a threat to ignore. So, enjoy your 160MBps max SSD transfer rate and 128GB top-end capacity MBA 11 owners, you’ll get your storage and 250MBps sequential read/write speed bumps only when Apple’s good and ready to provide it themselves — possibly sooner, we’re told, if PhotoFast is given the green light to start sales after Toshiba’s SSD modules (Apple’s MBA partner) are available for purchase.

Microsoft appears to be preparing themselves to step into the streaming media field alongside Apple, Netflix, Hulu, and other competing providers who have joined their ranks over the past year. According to two anonymous sources quoted by Reuters in a report published on Monday, Microsoft is holding talks with media conglomerates in an attempt to license networks for a new subscription service they are planning to offer via Xbox, PC, and other devices. ...