News

Google has put up a page that shows what Web services are currently being blocked by the Chinese government. http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en

Google.cn is now redirecting to google.com.hk [ Hong Kong google servers ] – this has happened after the cyber attack on google china servers in december. right now if you try to access the google china web, news and image search are being redirected to google.com.hk Below is short snippet of the update about this on google official blog So earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from Google.com.hk. Due to the increased load on our Hong Kong servers and the complicated nature of these changes, users may see some slowdown in service or find some products temporarily inaccessible as we switch everything over. ...

— 7.68 Terabits/s for growing Asian market — $300 million cost (from consortium of six companies) — 10,000 km length (Chikura in Japan to Los Angeles) — Increases capacity across Pacific by 20 percent — Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing technology (960Gbps per fibre-optic pair with a maximum of eight fiber pairs) — construction time: two years Story here.

The DarkReading site is carrying a story about brand-protection firm MarkMonitor’s finding that phishing increased 62 percent in 2009 with 565,502 attacks in the year. MarkMonitor is based in San Francisco. Other conclusions in MarkMonitor’s 2009 BrandJacking Index report: The huge increase can probably be attributed to the use of botnets and the large amount of personal information that can be scraped from social network sources. 2009 saw the all-time high average of 600 phishing attacks per organization only 33 percent of victims were first-time targets. Social networks suffered 11,240 attacks – two percent of the year’s total. The U.S. hosted 44.7 percent of phishing attacks, up from 36.5 in 2008. DarkReading story Here. ...

At age five most kids can hop, skip and tie their shoes without help. Google Code turns five this week, and while they’re still working on the shoelaces thing, they’ve grown from a simple site for hosting a couple of APIs into a destination for developers to prototype their ideas in a Code Playground, host all kinds of open source projects and find out about our growing family of APIs and products like App Engine, Google Web Toolkit and Android. ...

Del Harvey, Director of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, announced on Twitter’s blog that the micro-blogging service has begun using its own shortening service to stop malicious operators from sending tweets with links to their dodgy sites disguised through shortening. He wrote: “By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.” ...

Scheduling meetings is tough, but rescheduling is even harder. We all know how frustrating it can be to try to find just the right time that accommodates everyone’s availability and preferred working hours. Throw in different time zones and conference rooms and it goes from painful to excruciating. We’d rather schedule dental appointments. On the Google Calendar team, they’ve noticed that when people talk about scheduling they say things like “I’m trying to find a time” or “let’s search for a new date.” They wondered what would happen if they treated calendaring more like a search problem. Just as Google search applies ranking algorithms to return the most relevant results from the web, they hoped they could rank meeting times based on criteria important to the person scheduling the meeting. ...

You can now access Google Buzz from your Android mobiles easily using the official Google Buzz widget, that lets you post text and photos with a single tap. The widget lets you choose to tag your post with the location or place from which it was posted. To save time, your posts will upload in the background. It is initially available in English for Android phones running v1.6 and later. To download it, search for ‘Google Buzz’ in the Android Market. Once installed, you can add it to home screen: tap “Menu” while on the home screen and select “Add > Widgets > Google Buzz”. ...

Microsoft is announcing an update to Windows XP Mode today that will make it a more accessible to PCs in small and midsize businesses who want to migrate to Windows 7 Professional but have applications that still require Windows XP. Windows XP Mode will no longer require hardware virtualization technology to run. This change makes it extremely easy for businesses to use Windows XP Mode to address any application incompatibility roadblocks they might have in migrating to Windows 7. Windows XP Mode will of course continue to use hardware virtualization technology such as Intel VT (Intel Virtualization Technology) or AMD-V if available. You can find more information and download the update which will go live later today here. ...

The more eagle-eyed Reader users have noticed a few tweaks being made to Reader’s mobile interface over the past few days: Google has brought over a few more features from the desktop version of Reader: magic ranking and search. Both can be found in the option drop-down menu. For better consistency with the desktop version, Google has made the titles of items be links to the original page The top of each item now has “collapse” and “next item” links. This way there’s always a consistent space for your thumb to hit so you can advance to the next item. Since Google know the best mobile content is short and sweet, they’re going to leave you with that. Feel free to get in touch with them on Twitter or on their help group with feedback on these changes. ...