News

There could be a denial-of-availability risk to the enterprise in the new anti-piracy law passed by the British Parliament yesterday. Employees using company machines to swap pirated files could trigger a suspension of Internet service. The law is aimed at repeat offenders, however, employee misuse of company resources or botnet takeovers of machines for use as file-trading servers are a significant threat. At minimum, unintentionally offenders will have some paperwork to deal with when their ISP lets them know they’re in violation. ...

Multitasking, the feature that has been the absolute top of every iPhone user’s want list –which, by proxy became a major marketing point for both Android and webOS — has made its way to iPhone OS 4. “We figured out how to implement multitasking for third party apps and avoid those things [battery life and lag]. So that’s what took so long,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs this morning. While it’s not actually full background processing, Apple has devised a way to reproduce the feeling. The company provided 7 APIs to developers which constitute the always-on services that apps can communicate with. These include: background audio, VoIP, Background Location, push notifications, local notifications, task completion, and fast app switching. ...

Now we know for certain: Twitter is working on a major redesign of its web interface. Twitter’s lead designer has just revealed a taste of what’s to come. Doug Bowman, the head of Twitter’s design team, posted a teaser picture displaying the new interface. While it doesn’t reveal much, it does show that the profiles are being overhauled, and so are the stats that are displayed on profiles. As you can see from the image, new stats displayed on profiles include the amount of days you have been on Twitter, the average number of tweets you send per day, and the percentage of @replies recently. ...

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! ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Just after the launch of iPad, Apple has just announced iPhone OS 4.0 Event at 8th April 10 AM PT. A lot more speculations are being made about the upcoming features of iPhone OS 4.0 Following are some most closest guesses on the features of apple iPhone OS 4.0 Key Features iPhone OS 4.0 There will be multi-touch gestures support everywhere on iphone OS 4.0 Multitasking will be there to allow to run third party apps in background Many graphical and UI changes to make navigating through iPhone OS easier and more efficient. The update will be most probably available for only the iPhone 3G and 3GS There might be some new way to sync contacts and calendar applications. Lets what all out of these features listed above to be come out as truth, on 8th April 2010 at iPhone OS 4.0 Event ...

“Shadows in the Cloud” hang over the otherwise sunny PRC A spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign ministry has tried to minimize a report from investigators in Toronto that hackers based in China breached computers of the Indian Government and others and downloaded classified material. The Information Warfare Monitor and the Shadowserver Foundation extensively documented an eight-month investigation that revealed a network of infected government and military computers. The net was controlled from servers in China and stole a variety of classified documents. They posted their 52-page report, “Shadows in the Cloud: investigating cyber espionage 2.0” today on scribd.com ...