Internet & Websites - Page 35

Facebook's Hacker Cup is a contest in which programmers from around the world are given tasks that they must program solutions to. The third annual Hacker Cup championship took place over the weekend at Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters. This year's winner is the same as 2011's: Petr Mitrichev.

Mitrichev represents the first repeat winner of Facebook's Hacker Cup, though it's only been held for three years. Petr Mitrichev hails from Russia, though other countries were also represented at the finals. Contenders came from Australia, Belarus, China, France, Germany, Poland, Japan, Russia, Switzerland, and Ukraine.

Mitrichev was awarded first place and $10,000. Second and third place were given to Jakub Pachocki and Marcin Smulewicz, who both hail from Poland. Now the question remains: why wasn't the United States represented in this competition?

Google is taking a page out of Facebook's book and is pushing images as a main part of Google+. As part of this initiative, Google has added support for Gifs to be used as Google+ profile pictures. Interestingly enough, Twitter dropped support for Gifs last September. It'll be interesting to see if they reverse their decision.

Animated Gifs will be supported on both the desktop and mobile versions of Google+. As Matt Steiner, the person who first posted that Gifs are now supported, said, "[it is] like newspapers in Harry Potter." We imagine some creative people will make use of this to do some funny and interesting things, much like people did with Facebook cover photos when they were first introduced.

After a security hole was discovered in Apple's iForgot password recovery page that allowed passwords to be recovered with just an e-mail and date of birth, Apple has disabled the page for obvious reasons. Navigating to the page now returns a "Currently Unavailable" status message that suggests you "check back later."

Make sure to enable two-step authentication on your account to help protect from future vulnerabilities such as this.

At the time of writing, Apple's page continually timed out for both my coworkers and myself.

Sixty seconds on the Internet doesn't sound like much, but think of all the millions of users on simultaneously, all doing different things and the numbers add up very quickly. In only 60 seconds, around 640TB of data is transferred around the world.

The data comes from an infographic by chipmaker Intel, who breaks it down into even more interesting numbers. Google is a big part of these numbers, where more than two million searches are conducted every sixty seconds. YouTube pushes out around 1.3 million videos, while at the same time consumes 30 hours worth of uploaded video for public consumption.

Moving onto social networks, Facebook sees around 6 million views, and Twitter enjoys around 100,000 new tweets per minute. E-mail is still a huge number, with 204 million e-mails sent out every minute. Most of these are most likely spam, but they still count as data being transferred. Intel has also made some projections looking into the future, where they expect the number of networked devices to double by 2015.

Google has climbed some of the highest peaks in the world to bring Street View images so that you don't even have to get out of your seat. While this won't satisfy some of the most adventurous Google Maps users, it will satisfy those of us who may not be physically capable of climbing these mountins.

You might be interested in checking out Mount Everest, Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua, and Mount Elbrus. You might also be interested in checking out the blog post drafted by one of the people who went on the adventure.

Last week we learned that Google Reader would be put out to pasture this coming July, and while Google continues to sever the heads of some of its apps, it seems to be planting seeds for new services to grow.

Earlier today website Android Police spotted some source code that alluded to a new service from Google called "Keep" that would let users easily take, store, and sync notes using one's Google Drive storage space. After some more digging, the sleuths discovered that the desktop version had already gone live at drive.google.com/keep.

The site has since been taken down, suggesting that Google had not meant for the public to see the new service yet. TheNextWeb was able to demo Keep for a few minutes before it was pulled offline and they described the interface as being "basic" and "made for mobile". They said that it did include a search feature, but integration with the rest of Google Drive was nonexistent.

I know many of us are saddened by Google's choice to close down the Google Reader product. Many of the TweakTown staff use it daily. However, some good news has come out of the decision: new competitors are stepping up and developing new products or improving existing ones.

A petition was started on Change.org that asks Google to rethink its plans regarding shutting down Google Reader. Impressively, the petition has already surpassed 100,000 signatures. The Google Reader closure was announced just two days ago. For comparison, it took nearly 30 days for the White House petition regarding cell phone unlocking to gain a similar count.

We're not sure that this petition will have any effect on Google's stance. A Google spokesperson said in a statement, "We've given an overview of our reasoning and plans on our blog posts on the Official Google Blog and the Google Reader blog, and we'll be communicating directly with our users as we make these changes."

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is currently up on stage talking about how they want to turn the News Feed into the best newspaper in the world. He has pulled up a picture of what the News Feed looked like in 2007. Zuckerberg notes that the News Feed has shifted towards visual content:

Zuckerberg has just debuted the new look:

They are looking to feature the same design across the desktop and mobile environment. The new design will make use of more of the available screen real estate. The current design uses only about 40 percent of available space. The new design features larger pictures that will be the focus of the updated design.

Back in 2010, the Internet Movie Database or IMDb.com was banned from access from within China's borders because of a documentary on Tibet that was prominently displayed on its homepage. The ban was not a popular one among Chinese citizens, but remained in effect until today.

The Chinese government has unexpectedly lifted the ban on the encyclopedic movie website, making it fully available in both Chinese and English. The South China Morning Post is reporting that the removal of the ban is being met with great fanfare with many people thanking China's new leaders.

No official explanation on why the ban was lifted has been released by the Chinese government yet, but in my opinion, that does not really matter. The important story here is that China has removed one of its long standing website bans, and hopefully we will see similar action taken to other internet bans being currently enforced.

Patents are often a double edged sword that can lend an interesting look into the way a company thinks. It's something we see and speculate on all the time, and this morning is nothing different. Facebook has filed a patent that could drastically change the social network's business model.

US Patent 20130030987 A1 was filed in 2011 and was granted in January of this year. It's titled "Paid Profile Personalization" and describes a method that would allow Facebook to remove ads, and implement "premium" features to the profiles of users who subscribe to a monthly service.

Does this mean that Facebook could be investigating a paid subscription service that would let you spice up your profile and remove those annoying tiny ads? Truthfully, I have no idea. The fact is that most patents remain unused and in recent times, they are used more as a blocking agent than a true "innovative idea."

A new report by Fortune says that YouTube is working on a music streaming service that will compete directly with competitors such as Spotify. YouTube has long been a source of music, both legally and illegally, so a streaming service is not too far out of the norm for the site.

The current model relies on advertising revenue generated from showing ads during music videos. A portion of this ad revenue is shared with the label or content owner. A new service would likely continue to rely on these advertisements to offer a free service, though a premium service would likely be offered with an ad-free experience.

Fortune cites sources in both the record industry and Google. YouTube's spokesperson said:

North Korea has accepted The Pirate Bay onto their networks after offering the site virtual asylum. This network switch comes on the heels of the Norwegian Pirate Party being forced to stop routing traffic for The Pirate Bay. "We can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network."

When I run a traceroute, I don't seem to be bounced through North Korea, though TorrentFreak posted an image of their traceroute being sent through North Korea, seen above. The Pirate Bay says that they will work to influence the leader of North Korea to allow citizens to access the site.

Last week I wrote about a copyright activist group called The Rights Alliance who planned on suing the Swedish Pirate Party for its role in hosting the infamous torrent search site The Pirate Bay. All initial indications alluded to the Pirate Party standing its ground, but I guess the old saying "when the going gets tough, the tough get going", is true.

Rights Alliance Group is backed by all the major Hollywood studios, and therefore has virtually unlimited monetary resources and an entire army of lawyers who are just itching to rack up thousands of billable hours. The Swedish Pirate Party knows this and they did what they had to do to survive.

The Pirate Bay has been handed off to not one, but two Pirate Parties in separate countries: Norway and Catalonia, a small country within the borders of Spain. Swedish Pirate Party officials said that they knew that the resources backing Rights Alliance were simply too massive for them to go head to head with, and that they did what they deemed necessary to ensure that The Pirate Bay lives on.

Image storage is becoming a major issue for social networking giant Facebook. The service sees over 300 million photos uploaded every single day, which equates to over 109 billion photos uploaded to the social network annually. Naturally, not all of these photos are viewed every single day - some of them go months without being viewed.

Facebook says that 82-percent of all traffic that the service sees is made up of only eight percent of the images stored on the company's servers. This equates to a very large amount of energy inefficient storage for files that are rarely accessed. Facebook has come up with a plan to solve this issue, though.

The company is planning a new "cold storage" facility that will house the old photos and store them for future retrieval. The facility will be located in Prineville, Oregon, and will have three 16,000 square-foot data hubs. The servers will lay in hibernation until data is requested from them. This will increase the amount of time it takes for an old photo to be served to the end-user, but most will never notice it. The delay will be "a matter of seconds, or milliseconds", said Facebook communication manager, Michael Kirkland.

And now, a human interest story. Meet Marguerite Joseph. She's 104 years old and quite proud of her age. Not only is she old, she is an avid user of Facebook. Due to her age, she was in the perfect position to discover a bug within the website that prevents her from putting her real birth year.

She's been in a little bit of a battle with Facebook to get the bug ironed out, but she hasn't been able to. Now that she's getting publicity about the problem, Facebook has issued a statement saying they've discovered a bug that prevents users from entering a birth year before 1910:

"We've recently discovered an issue whereby some Facebook users may be unable to enter a birthday before 1910. We are working on a fix for this and we apologize for the inconvenience."

Another week, another complaint about piracy from the Recording Industry Association of America. This time the RIAA is saying that Google is not making pirate sites harder to find in its search results. Six months ago, Google offered up a change to the way it ranks sites that could cause pirate sites to appear lower in rankings.

Specifically, the company said: "Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily."

The RIAA say that finding pirate sites in Google's search results is just as easy as it ever has been. They issued a new report regarding the matter, in which they allege the following: "We have found no evidence that Google's policy has had a demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy."

For more than a decade now email has been a way of life, and as with all electronic services that become staples, hackers have found ways to get your information. Fortunately Google has found a way to all but end account hacks to its Gmail service.

Nine times out of ten, a program breaks into your email accounts with the intention of blasting out spam to both your contacts and a list of thousands of others. This is why we see so much spam in our inbox's. Gmail was not left out and the number of hacked accounts soon began to rise. As a result, Google developed a complicated handshake to ensure you are actually you, when logging into your account.

The system performs a complex risk analysis each time your account is logged into. In fact more than 120 variables have to be authenticated before the system will validate you as the correct user. In the event some of these variables do not match, Google will ask you some simple questions. This is why you sometimes get asked for your mobile phone number when logging in.

In an effort to stem the unending stream of pirated material, search giant Google could do something unprecedented (I feel like I'm writing a speech for Obama using that word) and block all funding to websites offering links to pirated material.

This could be films, music, books, games - you name it - any site that is making money from illegal material. Google's plans, while still in the discussion stage, would see them block funding to websites that don't respond to legal challenges, such as being offshore. If this does go ahead, it wouldn't be the first time a website has had its funding cut off, where we saw donations to WikiLeaks cut off from Mastercard, PayPal and Visa back in 2011.

Google would have no troubles getting the support of book publishing firms, or the music and film industries, who would like to see those extra 0's in their bank accounts instead of piracy websites. Google are aware that their move could have unintended consequences - which I'm sure we'll see Anonymous pop up and have a word or two of input - but the Mountain View-based search giant could iron out some issues in the coming months, and put their plan into action in the spring.

Last week we reported that Google were dishing out users' data to developers when they download apps from the Play store, but now it's being reported that Facebook takes data from users even when they're logged out of the social network.

Facebook have confirmed this, but have insisted that the information collected is only for security purposes or to aggregate statistics. Facebook's data collection is from the cookies on your computer when you visit the social network, with the cookies shifting the information over to Facebook from any site that you visit that contains a link to Facebook - such as the "like button".

With this information in-hand, Facebook can map out your web usage. Director of Engineering for Facebook, Arturo Bejar, has said that the data is used to combat spam and phishing attacks by detecting suspicious logins. Not only that, but cookies can use the data to keep users from having to complete extra authentication steps each time they log-in. Because, you know, everyone logs out of Facebook when they're finished with it.

Posterous, a popular blogging platform that was acquired by Twitter last year, has announced that it will be shutting down as of April 30. The site says that they are shutting down in order to focus on Twitter and there will be no more viewing or editing content past the shutdown date.

Because of this, Posterous is offering users the ability to download their data. WordPress and Squarespace are alternatives and both feature importers for Posterous data. A "backup" option is also provided and it will provide you with a zip file containing your data. You can request a backup by heading to the Posterous site.

"We'd like to thank the millions of Posterous users who have supported us on our incredible journey. We hope to provide you with as easy a transition as possible, and look forward to seeing you on Twitter."