News

We’ve all heard of graphics card makers optimizing their drivers for various benchmarks—some of you might recall the Quack story as one of the earlier examples. I think this might be the first time I’ve heard about the same thing happening in the world of web browsers, though. Believe it or not, Digitizor says a Mozilla engineer has found evidence that Internet Explorer 9 is “cheating” in the popular SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. ...

Mashable: We know that a number of Android tablets are coming in the next couple of months. But will these devices be able to compete with Apple’s iPad, which is currently dominating the market? According to NVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, not only the new Android tablets will be competitive, they’ll be better than the iPad in many areas. Many of the upcoming tablets will be using NVidia’s dual-core Tegra 2 processor, which will “give you the benefit of higher performance and much, much better multitasking and better graphics”, Huang said in an interview with Cnet. ...

BetaNews: Mozilla Wednesday released a significant update to the beta of its Firefox 4 browser. The update adds a new JavaScript JIT compiler, going by the name of JägerMonkey, and improves the browser’s support for hardware acceleration, OpenType fonts, and WebGL 3D graphics (the technology used to create an HTML5 version of Quake II back in April.) Additionally, the latest beta includes a stable add-ons API, so developers can finally update their add-ons to Firefox 4. ...

BetaNews: Ping, the social music service introduced as a part of iTunes 10 in September, can now be linked with Twitter, the popular micro blogging service announced Thursday. Starting today, Ping users can connect their iTunes Ping account to their Twitter account and share their listening activity in their Twitter feed. Tweets sent from Ping include the album and artist information, album cover, song preview, and a link to the iTunes store to buy the music mentioned. ...

Mashable: Facebook’s running out of servers to handle its 500+ million users, so it has decided to build a new data center in North Carolina that will cost a whopping $450 million to complete. The announcement was made by North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue, who said that the facility will take 18 months to complete and will employ 35 to 45 workers to operate (not including the 250 jobs that will be created during its construction). It is being built in Rutherford County, which is to the west of Charlotte. ...

CNet: The latest security fiasco on Facebook’s application platform may involve business pages rather than personal accounts: Sendible, a company that makes software for businesses to manage accounts and presences on various social-media services, looked like it was hit by a virus or hacker on Tuesday afternoon: TechCrunch pointed out that Sendible-managed brand pages on Facebook appeared to be posting malicious links. Now Sendible’s claiming it wasn’t their fault. “Just to clarify, Sendible was not hacked,” the company posted to its Twitter account. “One of our users has discovered a major flaw in Facebook’s security.” Sendible’s Twitter account then quoted the user in question, who said, “i wanted to post only on a few Facebook walls as a fan – and for some reason, posted as the page Owner. weird,” and Sendible added “This appears to be a bug in Facebook’s API as the posts should have been displayed as the user profile and not the page owner.” ...

Google has given all of its employees $1,000 cash “holiday bonuses” and 2011 salary increases of at least 10%, a loyal reader tells us. The 10% company-wide raise will take effect on January 1, 2011. In addition, Google will also give each employee an additional raise equivalent to 1X the employee’s target bonus for the year. And employees will be eligible for additional “merit increases” based on their individual performance. ...

Reuters: Google Inc will begin blocking Facebook and other Web services from accessing its users’ information, highlighting an intensifying rivalry between the two Internet giants. Google will no longer let other services automatically import its users’ email contact data for their own purposes, unless the information flows both ways. It accused Facebook in particular of siphoning up Google contact data, without allowing for the automatic import and export of Facebook users’ information. ...

Mashable: A beta version of Google Instant is now available on many U.S. iPhone and Android mobile devices. According to the Google Blog, the Instant search option is presently on Android 2.2 devices, as well as iPhones and iPods running on iOS 4. As of right now, Google Instant is only available in English, although Google plans on adding more languages and bringing the service to other countries and devices. ...

Mashable: Months ago, Twitter released a clunky tool called Blackbird Pie for embedding tweets in blog posts. Today WordPress has radically simplified and improved tweet embedding with a new feature, also named Twitter Blackbird Pie. Beginning today, WordPress.com users simply need to copy a tweet’s URL and paste it on a line by itself to embed it in a blog post. Pasted URLs are converted into full tweets, which means these embedded tweets look as good as screenshots, but include the link back to the tweet, a link to the source and a retweet option. The new feature will also save users time — letting them avoid the much more manual process of snapping screenshots of tweets. ...