News

Have you ever wanted to quickly send a file to a friend who’s online? Now you can share pictures, documents and other files directly with your friends while chatting in iGoogle and orkut, without having to switch to email to send the file as an attachment. File transfer works directly in the browser so you don’t need to install anything. Just start a conversation with a friend and click “Send a file…” in the “Actions” menu. After you select a file, your friend will be asked if they want to accept the transfer. You can learn more on the Google Talkabout Blog. ...

Could the manufacturers of DVD players (no, not just Blu-ray, but the original DVDs) owe back royalties to Alcatel-Lucent for the use of patented technology by way of the MPEG-2 codec? The MPEG Licensing Authority had asserted that Alcatel may have structured its 2006 merger with Lucent in such a way that it could hide up to five patents in a special trust, and spring their overdue royalties on the video industry long after DVDs already began the march to obsolescence. ...

Google Inc., owner of YouTube, said an outage of the popular video-sharing site Thursday was technical and not caused by outside tampering. “YouTube is up again following a technical issue which has now been resolved,” a spokeswoman for Google said in a written statement. “We know how important YouTube is for people and apologize for any inconvenience the downtime may have caused.” The outage apparently lasted for just over an hour, from roughly 7 to 8 a.m. ET. ...

Google and the Chinese government are continuing to trade shots in the PR battle over net censorship. Earlier in the week, Google moved its Chinese search facility to Hong Kong where it claims it is legal under Chinese law to provide searches without censoring results. In China: The Chinese government slashed Google in an op-ed piece in China Daily. The op ed, under the name of Ding Yifan, included the assertion: ...

In the Pwn2Own hacking contest at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, Canada, security researchers and hackers quickly hacked three of the major browsers to take control of the underline operating systems. — A German hacker who goes by the handle “Nils” used a previously unknown vulnerability in Mozilla’s Firefox to gain control of a 64-bit Windows 7 machine. — Peter Vreugdenhil an independent researcher from the Netherlands, used several vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer to take control of a machine running a patched 64-bit Windows 7 implementation. ...

There is a risk to computer security from governments. Regulatory changes, even if they are very positive measures, can impose huge demands on an enterprise (i.e. HIPPA, Sarbanes-Oxley, California’s law requiring notification of customers whose personal information is hacked on company sites.) The “government” risk can get no bigger than the clash of Google and the government of China over the censorship issue. The world suspects that the Chinese government or its proxies were behind a campaign of hacking against Google and other major U.S companies several months ago. Google reacted to the hacks by saying in January that it would stop censoring search results for web users in China. Monday it said it would move to Hong Kong. ...

In spite of the polarized, poisonous atmosphere in Washington, D.C., generated by President Barak Obama’s health care reform campaign, two Senators from very opposite ends of the political spectrum are co-sponsoring a bill to fight international cybercrime. U.S. Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) have cosponsored a bill aimed at fighting international cyber crime: the International Cybercrime Reporting and Cooperation Act. If enacted into law, the bill would give the U.S. government the power to help countries that need assistance in their fight against cyber crime. It also gives the U.S. government the power to cut off financial assistance to countries that don’t crack down on net criminals. ...

Recently, Opera team submitted its Opera mini app to Apple for inclusion in iTunes app store. It may take quite some time for the opera app to be approved. Till then you can see below the official screenshots of Opera Mini running on iPhone.

BürgerCERT, Germany’s government information security organization, is recommending that Web users NOT use the Firefox browser until Mozilla fixes a vulnerability in it March 30. No malicious use has been found yet, however a researcher posted proof-of concept code for exploiting the previously unknown vulnerability. A malicious operator could use the vulnerability to run arbitrary code. Mozilla is expected to post version Firefox 3.6.2 to fix the problem. In January, the governments of France and Germany urged users to stop using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser until the company fixed the vulnerability that was blamed, at least in part, for the attacks from China on Google and more than two dozen other companies. ...

Google’s decision to stop censoring search results in China may lead the Chinese government to block access to its sites. Google on Monday announced it has stopped censoring search results in China. The announcement came amid speculation that the search giant would pull out of China entirely and sets up a showdown with the Communist leadership there. In a 3:03 p.m. ET post on its official blog, Google said it stopped running the censored Google.cn service on Monday and was routing its Chinese users to an uncensored version of Google based in Hong Kong. ...