BBC: The once dominant MySpace has turned to the company that stole its crown, Facebook, for help to drive users to its ailing site. The two launched Mashup with Facebook, to let MySpace users log in to their Facebook accounts through their MySpace page. This means users can port over their likes and interests listed on Facebook. In turn users will get a stream of entertainment content based on these preferences. ...
Microsoft says Google is a bad habit, and it’s hard for people to break it in order to try alternatives, such as the company’s search engine, Bing. “It’s a hard thing. Habits die hard,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s Senior Vice President of Online Audience Business, said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, according to PC World. Mehdi is referring to users’ tendency to use Google for online searches without a second thought. It’s almost second nature to them. Many people even head to Google as their first webpage when they’re testing to see if they have an Internet connection. ...
Thousands of female Facebook users had their accounts inexplicably disabled today. They did not violate Facebook’s terms of use but nevertheless, they are seeing messages claiming their accounts are “inauthentic,” according to Me & Her. Facebook has confirmed the issue and is asking users to scan and upload a copy of a valid driver’s license in order to reactivate their accounts. The mass-deactivations are a small percentage of Facebook’s total subscriber base, but the number of users affected is easily in the thousands. ...
We’ve all heard of graphics card makers optimizing their drivers for various benchmarks—some of you might recall the Quack story as one of the earlier examples. I think this might be the first time I’ve heard about the same thing happening in the world of web browsers, though. Believe it or not, Digitizor says a Mozilla engineer has found evidence that Internet Explorer 9 is “cheating” in the popular SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. ...
Righard Zwienenberg from Norman Security Center Blog posted something interesting, Thanks to Mr. Fagerlid for Sharing: There is some commotion in The Netherlands. Telecom/ISP provider UPC is providing its customers with the Thomson TWG870U router, a Docsis 3.0 router. On the tweakers.net forum (Dutch language), a user discovered that the router, which is also providing Wireless Access, has a second hidden wireless network. Problem here is that: ...
Sophos Labs: Two weeks ago, an automatic session-hijacking plugin was released for Firefox. It was named Firesheep, and it’s been downloaded over 600,000 times so far. The decision to release Firesheep publicly is a controversial one. On the good side, it’s reminded people that some of their common web surfing habits are dangerously insecure. Many websites use HTTPS (secure HTTP) for login, which protects your password. But they revert to insecure HTTP for the rest of the session. After you have logged in, security relies on the browser sending a session cookie – a secret authentication token – in every request. ...
With the expanding amounts of storage available on cell phones, mp3 players, digital cameras, and gaming devices it’s no surprise that malware is increasingly being transmitted over USB. avast! Software is reporting that out of 700,000 attacks reported by its Community IQ system in October, one in eight were exchanged over USB connections. “Cyber-criminals are taking advantage of people’s natural inclination to share with their friends and the growing memory capacity of USB devices,” says avast! virus analyst Jan Sirmer. ...
Last quarter was the first time ever that US pay-for TV subscription rates declined, and in Q3 2010, cable lost over 518,300 subscribers in total, according to GigaOm. Four of the five biggest cable companies lost customers: Comcast had more than half of the losses at 275,000, Time Warner took a 155,000 subscriber hit, Charter Communications lost 63,800, and Cablevision waved goodbye to 24,500 customers. The third largest cable provider, Cox Communications, is privately held and therefore doesn’t have to announce its subscriber numbers publicly. The number is thus likely even bigger if we could include Cox plus all the smaller cable companies. ...
David McCandless recently gave a presentation about data visualization in which he unveiled this graph, which tracked 10,000 Facebook status updates to determine precisely when people in relationships broke up. The results look like this: Note the huge surges around Spring Break, the beginning of Summer, and two weeks before Christmas, as well as the sharp decline on Christmas Day itself. The majority of the breakups are announced on Mondays (Garfield was right – lasagna is awesome. Non sequitor.) The graph also doesn’t show what happens when someone in a relationship makes a detailed graph about ending relationships, but I’m guessing that’s been an instant breakup one out of one times. ...
Mashable: Today marks exactly three years since Google and a slew of hardware and carrier partners officially announced the Android mobile operating system. It was almost a year after that before the first major Android handset was released – the G1 on T-Mobile – and not until late 2009 that the Motorola Droid, complete with an aggressive ad campaign, catapulted the platform into the mainstream consciousness. Today, a wide variety of manufacturers are producing Android phones, and they’re sold on all major carriers in the U.S. In fact, in aggregate they’re now outselling those running on Apple’s iOS, with recent numbers putting Google’s share of the mobile operating system market at nearly 20%. ...