TechBlog

Heavy Gmail label users will appreciate the latest experimental feature, available in Gmail Labs: Nested Labels, which let you organize your inbox into as many categories and subcategories as you like. To enable it, open Settings – Gmail Labs, and enable the “Nested Labels” option. Now, if you want to create a child label – or a subfolder, if you will – you must name it with slashes (/). For example, you can create a label named “Friends”. A nested label for that label could be named “Friends/Workplace”. It would be nice to manipulate nested labels via drag and drop, but for now this naming scheme is the only way to do it. ...

One month ago we heard about the official Twitter app for BlackBerry, which has been in the works for quite some time now, bringing features such as automatic URL-shortening, easy photo-sharing, push and message list integration and search filtered by geolocation. Today, the first public beta of the app is available in the BlackBerry App World. Based on the feedback from closed beta testing, the developers have added several additional features. These include notifications of new tweets and @replies/mentions, support for lists, profile editing and persionalization settings, and changing the font size and style. You can get Twitter for BlackBerry here. How do you like it? Please, share your opinions in the comments!

Microsoft has put the PC-using world on notice that next Tuesday there will be 11 bulletins released addressing 25 vulnerabilities in Windows, Exchange and Office. Jerry Bryant, Group Manager of Microsoft’s Response Communications, said: “I also want to point out to customers that we will be closing the following open Security Advisories with next week’s updates: — Microsoft Security Advisory 981169 – Vulnerability in VBScript could allow remote code execution. ...

Search terms that are censored in China: “Tibet” “Tiananmen Square protests” “Carrot” Apaprently “carrot” has a Chinese character that is the same as the surname of President Hu Jintao. The New York Times has run a great story by Shiho Fukada about Internet censorship in China, where the effort to control the content seen by 384 million Internet users who have 181 million blogs is like “herding cats.” “This is China’s censorship machine, part George Orwell, part Rube Goldberg: an information sieve of staggering breadth and fineness, yet full of holes; run by banks of advanced computers, but also by thousands of Communist Party drudges; highly sophisticated in some ways, remarkably crude in others,” Fukada wrote. ...

A couple of weeks ago, Digg (finally) launched its official iPhone application to much fanfare. Like all first versions, however, it suffered from a couple of glitches, some of which have been addressed in this latest update, which brings the version number to 1.1.0. The list of improvements and fixes is as follows: – Closing the app on a Digg story page doesn’t result in a crash when reopening the app – A range of stability improvements allows the app to be used for longer periods without crashing – An “open in Safari” option for viewing websites from the story pages – The app opens on the last page viewed when it was last closed ...

Qualcomm’s mobile broadcast television service called FLO TV existed for about five years under different wireless carrier brand names: Sprint TV, Verizon V Cast TV, and AT&T MediaFLO TV. But the carriers didn’t push it very hard, so it did not break through into the public’s consciousness. But then Qualcomm began advertising FLO TV on its own, with its own smartphone-sized pocket TVs made by HTC, and it looks like it is finally beginning to stick. ...

If you’ve updated iTunes to the latest version, 9.1, you may have noticed that iPad and iPhone apps are now separated by a tab at the top of the page. Switch tabs and you will pull up device-specific views of the App Store, which renders the entire experience a bit more elegant and better-organized than before. This is a slight change from the old method, which previously divided apps into categories like “New and Noteworthy” and “Staff Favorites.” There is a downside to the new design, however: If you are browsing a category of iPhone apps and want to begin looking at similar apps for the iPad, you have to start your search over on the front page. ...

It was only a matter of time before the merest of “iPad” mentions on sites such as Twitter would result in autospammed messages like this: These bots will fire a message claiming “we need someone to test and keep one iPad” (or simply “Free iPad here”) to anyone discussing the latest gadget to hit the streets, sending you to various promotional sites like the one below: ...

For those of you armchair mayors who cheat with your Foursquare checkins, your time has come. The mobile social network has announced that checkins outside the immediate vicinity of the venue in question will no longer net points, badges or mayorships. Foursquare is now using your mobile phone’s GPS location (other tactics are used for phones without GPS) to verify your whereabouts to reward only those that happen near the actual place in question. Checkins that appear to take place far from the venue users are trying to checkin to trigger the “cheater code” and block incentives. ...

Hong Kong-based security firm Network Box reported that Korea was the country of origin for 31.1 percent of the malware on the Internet in March. In February the country only pumped out 8.9 percent, leading researchers to theorize that there has been a huge increase in infected machines there pushing out phishing spam. Network Box includes phishing in its calculations of monthly malware statistics. They also include North and South Korea as one country in their categories, but say the lack of public computers in the North means that South Korea is the country of origin for the bulk of the statistic. ...