Internet & Websites News - Page 74

Couch vacationing just got even easier as Google has just released their biggest update ever to Street View. With more than 250,000 miles of roads around the world updated and double the number of special collections, Google is the definitive mapping application and couch vacationing service.

Google specifically calls out the use of couch vacationing (my term, not theirs) in their announcement: "Street View, as you know, is a useful resource when you're planning a route or looking for a destination, but it can also magically transport you to some of the world's picturesque and culturally significant landmarks."

Google even throws in what I take to be a jab at Apple: "We hope you enjoy taking a virtual stroll around some of the world's beautiful places, and stay tuned for more Street View updates as we look to make our maps more comprehensive and useful for you." Apple does insist that their maps are getting better, but they have a long way to go to catch up to Google.

Twitter conducted a study after the first presidential debate and found some interesting statistics regarding Twitter users and a possible connection between seeing political tweets and donating. Even better is the fact that the trends don't vary significantly between political affiliation, meaning that both sides can take advantage of Twitter to further campaign contributions.

The study showed that the average Twitter user was 68 percent more likely to visit a campaign donation page than the general internet user at large. Even more incredible is the statistic that the average Twitter user exposed to political tweets is 97 percent more likely to visit a campaign donation page.

Furthermore, repetition works. Users who saw a tweet for three to seven days were more than 31 percent more likely to visit a donation page as opposed to someone who just saw a tweet for one or two days. Even repeating the tweet for more than eight days has a positive effect with a user being 130 percent more likely to visit.

Dropbox have just made some changes to their mobile site which will help users check out their photos while on the move, following the same type of changes we saw with their Android, iOS apps and their desktop site.

Dropbox have moved toward a gallery-style image viewer, which is available to anyone with a mobile device. Windows Phone is included, which is great news as there's no official Dropbox application on Microsoft's mobile OS.

The changes that Dropbox have pushed out give users a more streamlined experience across all apps, desktop and mobile sites. Dropbox have said:

Everyone's favorite online radio, Pandora, had its CEO reveal some interesting numbers at the SF Musictech Summit in San Francisco. Among these tidbits of information is the bit about how some artists are making over $2 million dollars in revenue from Pandora. "You would be surprised how many artists are making over $100,000."

These payments to artists are hurting Pandora's bottom line. As it stands right now, Pandora has to pay much more in royalties than satellite providers and typical radio stations do. "We want the same standard being extended to web radio that currently is being applied to our competition," said Westergren.

Pandora pays over 55 percent of its entire revenue to Soundexchange, an agency that collects for licenses for performing musicians. This is something that normal radio stations don't have to do. Instead, they just pay money to composers. As Pandora has gained users, their losses have continued to mount. If musicians want Pandora to be able to stick around, they're going to need to lower their fees.

OK, so it might not be quite as bad as the title made it sound, but it certainly got your attention, right? Unfortunately, the title is mostly true in that Facebook does automatically increment share counts on websites where the Facebook social plugin is being utilized when a link to that page is shared through private messages.

So, if you copy the link to this page and send it over to a friend, indeed, the "Share" counter will increase by two. Now, Facebook does use robots to scan private messages in order to produce the preview that is shown when a link is sent and to look for sexual predators using the site to look for victims.

But, the fact that a private message is then turned into a public like or share is where the problem comes in. Even though no personally identifiable information is provided, transferred, etc, it still brings to light a massive issue with Facebook and privacy concerns. Facebook's full response is below:

We knew it was coming, but Facebook have confirmed some amazing stats for the biggest social network ever. Facebook reached their one billion monthly active users (MAU) on September 14, at 12:45 PM Pacific time.

Since the launch of the social network, they've experienced 1.13 trillion likes, 140.3 billion friends connected, 219 billion photos uploaded, 17 billion location-tagged posts and check-ins, and 62.6 million songs have been played 22 billion times - enough music to fill around 210,000 years of music.

Facebook's numbers found that the median age of a Facebook user is 22, with the top five countries connected to Facebook when they reached the one billion MAU milestone were Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the US. The social network enjoys an insane 600 million mobile users.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to announce something that is being dubbed as a "historic milestone" during an interview with Matt Lauer on the TODAY show, tomorrow. Zuckerberg's interview will be the first television interview post-IPO, and with the historic milestone being thrown around, most people are wondering what the Facebook founder could announce.

We know that Facebook could smash through 1 billion users, but are they all active? This could be the announcement, and the social network probably burst through 1 billion users a while ago, but daily active users is a completely different number - this could be the 'historic milestone' - one billion active users. No other site can claim this, and no other site is even close. Competing social network, Twitter, has 555 million users for example.

Digital marketing agency, iCrossing, examined Facebook's usage and based on the site's growth rate, the firm estimated that Facebook would hit one billion users sometime in August this year. Facebook have also had quite an amazing last six months, growing from 800 million users, to close to one billion. In the past three years, we've seen the social networking site go from 300 million users, to close to (if not more than) a billion now. Insane.

YouTube has loads of content. Hours of video are uploaded every second, some of it legitimate home footage and some of it infringing footage. Formerly, if a content owner alleged that a video contained their copyrighted material, YouTube would allow them to monetize the content or take it down.

YouTube has updated this process so that users who have had their video taken down can appeal the claim. Furthermore, YouTube has updated the algorithms to detect false take-down notices, so this should help reduce the number of automated mass take-downs that shouldn't have been taken down.

"Users have always had the ability to dispute Content ID claims on their videos if they believe those claims are invalid. Prior to today, if a content owner rejected that dispute, the user was left with no recourse for certain types of Content ID claims (e.g., monetize claims). Based upon feedback from our community, today we're introducing an appeals process that gives eligible users a new choice when dealing with a rejected dispute. When the user files an appeal, a content owner has two options: release the claim or file a formal DMCA notification."

A victim of a hacker has written up a long piece regarding Twitter's security processes and how he believes he became a victim. Twitter's password recovery system is reportedly to blame, as it allowed a hacker to use a brute-force style attack on his handle. A brute-force attack tries common passwords as quickly as it can until it finds a match or exhausts a word list.

The issue seems to stem from the fact that Twitter doesn't limit login attempts per account, rather they limit them per IP. What this means is a hacker just needs to use a proxy network or some other way of IP switching and they would be able to brute-force an account indefinitely, or at least until the password was found.

However, why the victim, Daniel Dennis Jones, had chosen to use a simple, common password that could be brute-forced is beyond me. His story makes sense, though, and is why most password recovery systems limit login attempts on a per account basis, or at minimum throw up a CAPTCHA after a few failed attempts at logging into an account.

Google gives and Google takes. Today sees a rarer event of the latter as Google does it's annual fall "spring cleaning." Many of the features that are being discontinued today are ones that I hadn't even heard of, so likely you haven't heard of them either. In the rare chance that you have, we'll give you the information you need.

The majority of today's discontinuations will likely only affect a small portion of the population at large. One of the main "spring cleaning" changes that will affect the most people is the change to storage. Google is combining Picasa and Drive storage into one single pool AND the free 5GB of storage will count towards your paid storage limit.

The rest of the changes are detailed in Google's blog post, which we have replicated here for your convenience: