News

According to Australian Macworld, a new version of the MacBook Air may show up in the Apple Online Store tomorrow morning. The same source who correctly predicted the MacBook Pro refresh last month alerted Australian Macworld of a new Apple product number in the Apple database. The product number, MC516LL/A K87 BETTER BTR-USA, suggests that it is a Mac product (the “BETTER” nomenclature is the big clue there, as it often refers to the different tiers of Mac products). As AppleInsider also notes, it is possible that the number could refer to a new Apple Cinema Display, one that is 27″ and matches that of the 27″ iMac, but we’d place our bets on a new MacBook Air. ...

Demand for Evernote’s notetaking tool is growing at an ever increasing rate. The startup has just surpassed three million users, which means the company has attracted over one million new users in four months and that growth is rapidly accelerating. Evernote is now registering 8,000 new users per day — no doubt with the help of its fantastic iPad app. The company also points to international interest as well as partner referrals as drivers of growth. ...

In the UK, Google was forced to give its email service Gmail a different name, Googlemail, because of a trademark dispute. These disputes take a long time (Gmail was changed into Googlemail in October 19, 2005), so Google opted on using a different (yet recognizable) name until the dispute is resolved. Four and a half years later, UK users will finally get their @gmail.com addresses, as Googlemail is changing back into Gmail. Users will have the possibility of keeping their old @googlemail.com address or switching to a new one. From the announcement: “If you already have a Google email account in the UK, you’ll soon have the option to switch your existing @googlemail.com address to the matching @gmail.com one, but you’re also free to stick with @googlemail.com. And starting later this week, anybody who signs up for a new account in the UK will get an @gmail.com address.” ...

Many bloggers and commentators are making much of the fact that San Mateo police served a search warrant on the home of Gizmodo blogger Jason Chen and confiscated computers, servers and other equipment, probably as a result of his postings about the capabilities of the lost prototype Apple 4G iPhone. Gawker Media, which owns Gizmodo, made public the fact that it paid $5,000 for the prototype iPhone which was accidentally left in a bar by one of Apple’s software engineers last month. ...

Make big money! $.80 to $1.20 per 1,000 People in China, Bangladesh and China are bidding on jobs solving CAPTCHAS so spammers can create new email accounts, but the work is a bit tedious, according to a story in the New York Times. Many brokers and middlemen who manage the service for spammers and do the hiring are finding it difficult to make a profit. CAPTCHAS is an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart” and are used by Web email providers to prevent spammers from using automated agents to create new email accounts to send spam. ...

A spokesman for Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has said that legislation that would set up a $120 million Internet censorship system requiring ISPs to block pornography (and information about euthanasia) will not be introduced before Australia’s upcoming elections, possibly October. Labor party Prime Minister Kevin Rudd stirred up massive controversy when he made an election promise to block “illegal content” on the Internet including pornography. Critics have said that the censorship wouldn’t be effective, would slow downloads and suppress the free flow of information. ...

A new blog post from the Twitter media team suggests that the company will launch an embeddable tweets feature sometime tomorrow. Most of the time, when a blog or website wants to add specific tweets to its blog posts, it has to either quote the text or screenshot the tweets and put them in the post. Suffice it to say, the former doesn’t have have the same impact as the latter, but the latter is a time-intensive affair. ...

YouTube’s movie rental service is still in its infancy, and it still only offers a small selection of films, but that could change quickly. YouTube exec Hunter Walk told MediaPost that the site will soon offer its users the ability to charge rental fees for their uploaded videos. For the past couple of years YouTube has been focusing on ways for its users to monetize their videos should they become very popular. It launched the YouTube Partnership Program last year, which allows some folks with popular videos (YouTube staff decide which ones are eligible) to share advertising revenue with Google. ...

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. ...

Niels Provos of the Google Security Team has blogged about the rise of malicious web sites carrying rogue security products, which the Google team calls “Fake AV.” Google has been engaged in a constant battle against the sites because the operators who peddle them have been refining their techniques for poisoning Google search engine results in order to victimize Google users by drawing them to malicious download sites. He wrote: “we conducted an in-depth analysis of the prevalence of Fake AV over the course of the last 13 months, and the research paper containing our findings, ‘The Nocebo Effect on the Web: An Analysis of Fake AV distribution’ is going to be presented at the Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET) in San Jose, CA on April 27th.” ...