News

.png) Web-based photo editing suite Picnik announced today that it has been acquired by Google for an unspecified amount that Picnik CEO Jonathan Sposato called a “very, very happy number.” The startup opened in 2005 and was chosen to be Flickr’s default photo editor in 2007 when Yahoo was introducing a host of new features to the popular photo sharing site. Long before Adobe released its Web-based version of Photoshop, Picnik was already going strong. ...

Communications security firm FaceTime of Belmont, Calif., has released the results of a survey (of 1654 people) that strongly indicates we are all using a lot of Web 2.0 applications at work and a third of our IT staffs aren’t aware of it. It was FaceTime’s fifth annual survey. Social media and Web 2.0 apps are being used by virtually all end users (99 percent) to support business processes, but 38 percent of IT professionals surveyed think there is no social networking on their networks. ...

Google Wave has finally turned on email notifications as a feature for users who want to see immediate, hourly, or daily email notifications for new and updated waves. Email updates can be turned on via the Inbox dropdown menu. Once on, Google Wave will notify you with a summary of updates to your waves and email you when you’re added to a new wave. Thankfully you’ll only receive one update for each individual wave — instead of receiving an email for each update to a wave — until you log into that wave again. ...

Facebook Connect integration with Yahoo Mail! The new feature means that Yahoo Mail users can now connect their Facebook accounts and integrate their Facebook friends’ email addresses into their Yahoo Contacts list. Users can visit the Import Contacts page to be guided through he Facebook friend import process. What do you think of this, do you like it or dislike it. Tell us in the comments!

The battle over RealNetworks’ DVD copying software, called RealDVD, has finally come to a close, and Real has lost. Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the United States District Court, Northern District of California ruled today in favor of the DVD Copy Control Association, who argued that RealDVD actually made illegal copies that violated the Content Scramble System (CSS) license agreement. The case began in late 2008 when RealDVD was only a couple of weeks old. RealNetworks preemptively sued the DVD Copy Control Association for the right to copy DVDs, using a previous case (DVD CCA v. Kaleidescape Inc.) as a hopeful legal precedent. ...

“…in that space one can easily indulge in depravity, lies, vulgarity…” Here’s a sort of comment about the Internet that you don’t see much in the news. The Russian government news service RiaNovosti is reporting that Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia (head of the Russian Orthodox Church), told school students in Moscow that “Nowadays the Internet is a kind of laboratory where an individual should be formed and where a character should be sharpened.” ...

Microsoft Vice President of Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney, in a keynote address at the RSA security conference in San Francisco yesterday, called for quarantines on malware-infected PCs. His remarks were widely covered by a variety of web news outlets. He compared the threat from infected PCs with the threat from smokers in public places and resulting bans on smoking because of second-hand smoke: “You have a right to infect and give yourself illness. You don’t have the right to infect your neighbor. Computers are the same way.” Charney didn’t discuss specific techniques. ...

Remember Microsoft’s action against 277 Waledac domains last week? Well, that’s one way of going after a botnet… Another way of shutting down a botnet? Arrest the botmasters! Three Spanish citizens have been arrested for running the “Mariposa” botnet. The three reportedly have no criminal records and have limited hacking skills. Mariposa is a Butterfly Kit based botnet, and the kit is no longer for sale. Details are available from the BBC and The Register. Kudos to those involved in the arrests.

It won’t work if you have a rootkit infection, but it won’t blue screen your machine either. Microsoft has reissued Security Bulletin MS010-15 from last month to work around a problem that had occurred when a WinXP user attempted to install the patch on a machine that was infected with a rootkit. (blue screen, blue screen) Jerry Bryant, Microsoft’s senior security communications manager lead, writing on the company TechNet blog said that the new installation packages for MS10-015 have new logic that will prevent the security update from installing on rootkit-infected systems. Microsoft also is offering guidance for those with infected machines and a scanning tool that can detect system conditions that will prevent the patch from applying itself. ...

For anyone that missed Microsoft CEO’s Q&A during the Search Marketing Expo West yesterday, a transcript is now available online. I went through and picked out key quotes, so that you don’t have to read the whole thing. Several things stand out from Ballmer’s comments: Mobile operators that want a search engine other than Bing can’t have Windows Phone 7 Series. Microsoft almost certainly is stirring up trouble for Google in Europe through third parties. Microsoft isn’t interested — at least for now — in releasing a Bing application for Android phones. A Bing for iPhone search deal is still possible, simply because Ballmer deflected the question rather than denying it. Twitter is a great Microsoft partner, but the value of an acquisition is “not clear.” My favorite quote from the Q&A: “I haven’t found that when you’re trying to sell something to somebody yelling is very effective.” How funny is that. coming from boisterous Ballmer? ...

Last month, Baidu, the leading search engine in China, filed suit against US-based Internet registrar Register.com, in a legal event that took place at the height of the debate over Google’s continued business dealings with China. Baidu accused the registrar of changing its DNS records, so that customers were redirected to a completely different site purporting to represent the “Iranian Cyber Army.” But that original suit was heavily redacted, so we didn’t know the specifics of the alleged defacement. This week, US District Court in New York released the unredacted version of Baidu’s complaint, and now, as the man once said, we know the rest of the story. ...

Popular instant messaging, voice chat, and video conferencing client Skype and Skype Lite are no longer available on Windows Mobile devices. The company says, “We’ve chosen to withdraw Skype Lite and Skype for Windows Mobile because we want to offer our new customers an improved mobile experience — much like the version that has proved so popular on the iPhone, and which is now available on Symbian phones. Our focus is on providing a rich user experience that allows you to enjoy free Skype-to-Skype and low cost calls as easily on the move as you do at your desktop. We felt that Skype Lite and Skype for Windows Mobile were not offering the best possible Skype experience.“ ...

London, England (CNN) — Twitter this week endured a number of “phishing” attacks, in which some users unwittingly gave out their passwords to malicious sites. Haven’t we all learned to keep our passwords to ourselves, you ask_?_ Perhaps. But the truth is we’re all vulnerable to social engineering, and two major Web trends are creating further confusion for new Internet users. The anatomy of these attacks is simple: You receive a message, seemingly from a friend on a social network. The message contains a link and some strong incentive to click it — in the case of the most recent Twitter attack, the note simply asks “This You????.” When you click the link, you’re prompted to log in again to view the page. ...

There were a couple of news items that I thought were interesting enough, albeit unrelated, to comment on. The first (story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8537771.stm) is that Microsoft has taken legal action to shut down the Waldec botnet, and folks are divided about whether there was any point to it. While I don’t expect it to cause any noticeable lessening of spam, I’m pleased that they did it. Spam-sending is a business, after all, and if you can create a situation where it costs more to run it than they are making, then they might actually stop. After all, if your outgo exceeds your income, then your upkeep becomes your downfall. ...

If history is any gauge, this is probably the first of several incidents like this. The Register – which is worth reading twice a day for its insanely funny headlines if nothing else – is reporting that a hacker (hacktivist?), possibly British, who goes by the handle Neo, has gotten his hands on tax documents for about 1,000 companies and is tweeting the salaries of Latvian bank managers and other execs to Latvian TV. ...