Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
As part of the fall dress up, the Bing search website will undergo some design updates.
One big update involved the MSN video site. Microsoft announced that it will be merging its video search efforts with its MSN Video site that will be framed in the Bing brand. Bing Video will offer new content options through deals with Hulu, CBS, MySpace, DailyMotion, and YouTube–featuring both viral clips and full length features.
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
A nine million UBS Worldpay ATM hacking ring has been taken down by U.S. and international prosecutors in Atlanta. Eight men were indicted (16-count indictment charges) by a federal grand jury in connection with the scheme on conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit computer fraud, computer fraud, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft
The hacking ring was said to have used fairly sophisticated techniques which allowed the hackers to bypass the encryption on debit cards.
The technique also “provided a network of ‘cashers’ with 44 counterfeit payroll debit cards, which were used to withdraw more than $9 million from more than 2,100 ATMs in at least 280 cities worldwide, including cities in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan and Canada.” (Source: Department of Justice, http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2009/November/09-crm-1212.html, “Alleged International Hacking Ring Caught in $9 Million Fraud”)
The whole scheme lasted less than 12 hours.
Monday, November 9th, 2009
European Union regulators finally make a clear and formal objection to Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. The central focus of the EU’s concern dealt with the open source MySQL database product.
The U.S. Justice Department has taken that firm stance that they believe the merger is not anticompetitive.
Sunday, November 8th, 2009
A worm has been reported to have affected jailbroken iPhones that exploits users who have installed SSH and not changed from the default password. From the initial reports, the worm so far has only “graffitied” iPhones by changing their wallpaper image. Sophos Anti Virus stated that this worm has a dangerous potential.
There have been no reported cases of this worm outside of Australia so far.
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
Some T-Mobile Sidekick users have been experiencing problems for over a month.
In a statement released Oct 30th, T-mobile said that many of their users who previously thought their information had been lost were able restore their contacts. Not everyone was able to retrieve address books however. Some of the information that was lost included calendars, to-do lists, notes, pictures and other data.
Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, powers the Sidekick. This extreme incident will come as a big blow to Microsoft just as they are about to launch a cloud based operating system–Windows Azure.
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
Google was awarded a new patent for a formula that modifies search results based on query patterns and aggregated click results. When people conduct related searches resulting in a click on a specific page, this formula will help to score sites higher when this action is repeated by a group conducting related searches. This patent helps identify that Google is giving more preference to sites that gain clicks from a broad audience looking for related topics. There will be a concern for this formula to be manipulated fairly easily. In addition, just because Google received this patent does not mean that it has been implemented within their ranking factors. They could simply be trying to claim this method as their own.
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
On its first weekend in China, the iPhone wasn’t a blockbuster. The iPhone only picked up 5000 initial subscriptions. China Unicom says that it expects to sell 460,000 annually.
The China-version iPhone does not have Wifi, and it is very expensive in comparison to other phones on the Chinese market. Also Apple doesn’t quite have the same cult following as they do in the US.
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
On Monday Google’s Chrome 4 browser will go on BETA release for Windows.
One of the features that has been a real excitement during the developer preview issue in August of this year was the bookmark sync feature.
Mac and Linux will not get a BETA release.