Internet & Websites - Page 43

Programming bugs almost always make their way into production code through some inadvertent way. This time it is Kickstarter who has found a flaw in some of its code. This bug allowed access to 70,000 unpublished projects' project description, goal, duration, rewards, video, image, location, category, and user name.

On the Kickstarter Blog, they have made it abundantly clear that no financial data was ever publicly visible. Of the 70,000 "visible" projects, only 48 were viewed, and that includes views by the Kickstarter team trying to verify and patch the bug. The bug had been introduced into the code with the April 24 homepage redesign.

Microsoft is rolling out what they are calling "the most significant update to Bing since we launched three years ago". The new update will roll out over the next few weeks as Microsoft introduce a new way to search that is designed to help you take action and interact with friends and experts "without compromising the core search experience".

Microsoft point out that the search industry is built on keywords, links and labels - static nouns pointing to pages. Whilst this approach is great for finding sites, searching is not just about finding information or data, its about taking action. You might search flights, or accommodation, and usually when doing so, you'd like to take action in the form of placing a booking, etc. Microsoft note that 68-percent of people tell them they expect to get something done when they type into a search box.

Bing ups the ante on this, where you're you'll be able to share virtually everything you do, where you are, who you are, all in real-time. The new updated Bing will include a "brand new information architecture" with three columns: the left will feature familiar algorithmic results, the middle provides a "snapshot" of relevant information and services, such as maps and reviews, whilst the sidebar to the right will include social-orientated results.

According to a new study done by the Harvard Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab shows that talking about oneself on a social networking site engages portions of the brain that are responsible for love, pleasure, and rewards. Curiously enough, these same sections of the brain are active when having sex.

This good feeling that is associated with posting about oneself explains why 80% of the average user's social networking posts consist of self-disclosure. These social networking posts account for 30-40% of the average user's speech output for each day. To verify this, Diana Tamir and co-author Jason Mitchell hooked participants up to an MRI to monitor brain activity while being asked questions.

The questions were about their own and others' attitudes on various subjects. The point of the two different questions was to discover if there was a difference between talking about oneself or someone else. The findings show that talking about oneself engages the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA) which are both associated with rewards. As previously stated, these same regions are active during sex or eating good food.

Social networking giant Facebook have just announced App Center, a portal for the social networking site that is designed for app discovery. App Center is designed for socially-oriented apps, features an in-depth rating system that provides developers with demographic information on user ratings.

The new App Center covers both iOS and Android, making the new Facebook feature one of the only places someone can find apps from the competing stores side-by-side. Apps found within the new App Center will sport detailed individual pages laying out the apps' function.

From there, users can browse apps for their particular device, be it iOS- or Android-based, and apps that require installation on a mobile device will link users directly to the iOS App Store, or Google Play for Android users. Developers will have the keys to in-depth demographic data on app usage, with sample pages from Facebook show app ratings broken down by gender and age range. The App Center will give developers the ability to offer paid apps, as well as in-app purchases.

It has been a while since there has been news surrounding the upcoming top-level domains that ICANN was accepting applications for. Once again ICANN has had to push back the deadline for applications due to technical issues. The system had to be shut down lost month after receiving "a report of unusual behavior."

ICANN was originally going to reopen the application process yesterday and require applications to be submitted by the middle of next week. After which, ICANN has to go through the applications and decide who gets what names and which names will have to go up for auction. Before the bug that shut the system down, ICANN has reportedly accepted 2,091 applications and collected about $350 million in fees.

The system was originally shut down "following a technical glitch that may have allowed some users to see some file names and user names of other users." This latest delay is due to ICANN's continuing need "to review the extensive database of system logs and system traffic." ICANN continues by saying:

Apparently Twitter's security was breached which resulted in the compromise of 55,000 accounts. The credentials to these accounts were subsequently posted online. Twitter has now said that they are launching an investigation into the matter of how these accounts were compromised. Luckily, it seems as though most of these accounts were banned spammer accounts.

Twitter posted on their official communications account, TwitterComms, that "We're looking into the situation and have pushed out password resets to potentially affected accounts." They also confirm that many of the accounts were spammer accounts or duplicates. "The list of alleged accounts & passwords consists of more than 20,000 duplicates. Also suspended spam accounts & incorrect login credentials."

Still, compiling a list of accounts that big most likely wasn't done through brute force, as that would take some time. Of course hackers affiliated with Anonymous are attempting to take credit. When don't they? It would be an odd move considering how much the group uses the micro-blogging service. The accounts were released in 5 Pastebin posts and Twitter has said that many of the usernames and passwords weren't linked together, meaning incorrect combinations.

In the wake of a UK court ordering UK ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay, many sites have popped up as proxies to allow access to the site. The site is actually happy that sites are helping people access The Pirate Bay even when the sites copy its index. However, they aren't so happy when the copy charges users for access.

The idea of charging for access to The Pirate Bay is in direct contradiction to what they stand for. As such, when these copy sites use their index and charge for access, they aren't the happiest website on Earth. "We've noticed at least 3 sites that are tricking users to buying access or similar. We do not condone this behaviour, The Pirate Bay is a free service!" says an official blog post.

So, there are a couple of messages to take away from this. One, beware of illegal torrent sites that are illegally copying blocked illegal torrent sites. Two, if you are behind the blockers, make sure you are using a good proxy to access a free service. "Take care and don't get tricked. There's a war going on. It's the mafiaa against the people. Let's make sure that the people win."

Just last week, a British school principal threatened to turn parents of underage Facebook users into Child Protective Services. In yet another story of people in a position of power abusing Facebook, a Missouri high school principal has resigned after being accused of creating a fake Facebook profile and adding her students.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch claims that a former school quarterback is the one who publicly accused Losos of being behind the profile Suzy Harriston. "Whoever is friends with Suzy Harriston on Facebook needs to drop them. It is the Clayton Principal," Chase Haslett reportedly stated.

While not outright confirming that this is the reason that Ms. Losos has left the post of principal, the district has issued a statement saying they and Losos "had a fundamental dispute concerning the appropriate use of social media." Adding more evidence to the claim, the Post-Dispatch says there is no one in the state of Missouri with the name of the alleged fake Facebook profile.

Social networks really do take up a lot of a user's time as they try to read and respond to everyone. I'm not saying I don't spend my fair share of time of Facebook; I probably spend more than average. However, I mostly access Facebook from a computer. A new study shows that users spend more time accessing Facebook from their cell phone than they do the computer.

The study says that the average user spent more than seven hours pursuing Facebook via their cell phone, while only spending six doing the same from a computer. This is based off of data for the month of March. "Social networking proved to be a particularly popular activity on smartphones with several brands demonstrating exceptionally high engagement, in some cases higher than the corresponding time spent by users via traditional Web access," ComScore's report says.

It's not just Facebook that is doing well, either. Twitter users spent quite a bit more time on the site via cell phone. Whereas they only spent 20 minutes on Twitter from a computer, they spent on average just about two hours. Wow! Once again, this data is for the month of March. ComScore was able to collect this data using a new mobile behavioral measurement service called Mobile Metrix 2.0.

Spring cleaning is in full effect over at Google. Usually during the spring, Google attempts to rid itself of dead-end projects or, you know, push to overhaul the internet's DNS system. In this case, Google would like to replace HTTP with a new protocol called SPDY. To encourage this, it's showing potential speed gains on mobile networks.

Relying on the company's benchmarks, I can say that mean page load times on a Galaxy Nexus are 23% faster with the new system. Google hypothesizes that even more speed can be gained with future optimization. Google has already implemented SPDY in Chrome and Mozilla in Firefox. For once, even Microsoft seems to be on board.

So, as a way to transition, Google is proposing an Apache 2.2 module called mod_spdy. This module would allow web servers to take advantage of features such as stream multiplexing and header compression. HTTP, you've been good to us, but it appears that it is about time for you to go into the history books.

DNS, at its roots, is somewhat complicated and complex, so when a couple of years ago a group released a piece of malware that sent people to the wrong sites, fixing it has proven difficult. You see, the piece of malware changed users' DNS settings to point to a server owned by the perpetrators which then forwarded them the wrong IP.

People that are infected with the malware still rely on these "bad" DNS servers. Obviously they aren't bad anymore, but they are being maintained by the FBI. The FBI is planning to shut these servers down come July 9, 2012. If a user's computer is infected, it will no longer have access to the internet due to the lack of DNS.

Starting today, any site running on CloudFlare can simply enable an app that will alert users who come from the improper DNS servers. This is a pretty good reach, but not quite enough. So CloudFlare has gone one step further and released the code on GitHub so that any website can implement the warning page.

In an interesting, yet somewhat expected, turn of events, the High Court's ruling last Friday that all of UK's ISPs must block access to The Pirate Bay has had an affect on The Pirate Bay's web traffic. But not in the direction you think. Instead of losing hits and traffic, the file sharing website has seen an increase of 12 million visitors, more than it has ever had.

I guess this proves what they say is true: "There's no such thing as bad publicity." Clearly. "Thanks to the High Court and the fact that the news was on the BBC, we had 12 million more visitors yesterday than we had ever had before. We should write a thank you note to the BPI [British Phonographic Industry]," a spokesperson told TorrentFreak.

Virgin Media has already started to block access to the website, however, these blocks aren't hard to get around. Now, I'm not going to tell you how to do it, but I will tell you who will. The Pirate Bay, in the time before the rest of the ISPs block access to the site, is using the time to educate users how to beat censorship. If you happen to be on Virgin Media, you can check out The Pirate Party's website as they are mirroring the content.

Google have announced through their Google Docs Blog that the Google Docs Team have unveiled 450 new fonts and 60 creative templates. The new fonts and templates are part of an array of new features an updates announced today, which expand the range of documents users can create.

This drags Google's offering up to compete with the capabilities of its main productivity suite competitor, Microsoft Office. Template options are divided into different sections, Work, School, Home and Fun. The update to Google Docs also supports the importing of images from Google Drive and increased support for screenreaders.

Google Docs supports importing images from webcams and the LIFE Photo archive. The new update also bumps the size limit for files from 2MB to 50MB.

It's pretty tough to run a website, especially a mega-large website, without some sort of revenue. Servers, IT people, web developers, and the rest aren't free, so Tumblr has been living off of its start-up investments for a while now. They have finally decided that they need to make some money off of the site in order to keep running.

Enter Tumblr's first ads. These were first announced two weeks ago at Ad Age's digital conference. The ads aren't very intrusive on users' blogs, which is a good thing. MySpace fell out of favor because of the sheer intrusiveness of its advertising. It wasn't too long ago that the CEO of Tumblr said they would rather sell the desks in the office than put ads on the site. Curiously, that same CEO left the company yesterday. It is possible that that and today's launch have some sort of connection.

These ads aren't ads in the traditional sense. Instead the company is using its Radar and Spotlight features to help highlight content from advertisers/sponsors. According to the company, Tumblr Radar gets 120 million impressions a day. The feature is designed to hgihlight "the most creative and interesting media" on the Tumblr network and advertisers will "get a dedicated share of attention, with the opportunity to gain thousands of new followers, likes and reblogs."

I was sitting around a bonfire at my brothers house last week when my mate Daniel turns to me, laughing, and tells me to check out this new app on his iPhone called 'Viddy'. He said it was the Instagram of video. After showing me Snoop Dogg driving his car and just looking at the road, and various other videos - I could see it had the potential of being an acquisition target by Facebook, or similar.

Now Facebook founder himself, Mark Zuckerberg, has joined the ranks of thousands by signing up for the video sharing mobile app, Viddy. Zuckerberg posted up his first video under the nickname 'Zuck', which featured his dog, Beast, playing around in his house. Zuck's first video received more than 1,200 likes from other users, but this number should expand exponentially should Zuck share it on his Facebook page which sports 13 million subscribers.

A photo of his dog received more than 250,000 likes, with Viddy benefitting big time from such huge exposure. Viddy has also just hit 15 million users, but the celebrities joining the Viddy game are growing by the day. Viddy has just recently had a new injection of funding from rockstar investors such as Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Skull Candy's Jeff Kearl, Jay-Z, and more.

The Pirate Bay is pretty much synonymous with copyright infringement. As such, a UK court has ruled that because the site is infringing on copyright on a massive scale, six of the country's ISPs must block access to the Swedish website. In what can only be described as a major censorship of the internet, this court ruling could set dangerous precedent.

If you are a British user of Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 or Virgin Media and a user of The Pirate Bay, soon you will be unable to access the site. "Sites like The Pirate Bay destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists," the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) said.

The British ISP BT has requested a few more weeks to decide if they will block access to the site. "Unfortunately, the move to order blocking on The Pirate Bay comes as no surprise," Pirate Party UK leader Loz Kaye told the BBC. "The truth is that we are on a slippery slope towards internet censorship here in the United Kingdom."

Google has yet another bragging point that they've used a blog post to talk about: Google Translate is used by more than 200 million people per month. What some more number stats? Break this number down, and Google translates the equivalent to as much text you'd find in 1 million books. Wow.

Franz Och, a research scientist with Google Translate discusses how Google's translation service has grown through the years. Back in 2001, Gogole offered a service that could translate eight different languages to and from English. This service used state-of-the-art commercial machine translation (MT) and whilst it worked, it wasn't efficient, or very effective.

The service didn't really go well, and in 2003 Google decided to make some changes, one of these key steps was hiring Och away from his research position at DARPA. The team was then able to use Google's massive computing infrastructure, and got some very strong results, but it still wasn't quick enough for practical use. It took Google 40 hours and 1,000 computers to translate 1,000 sentences.

While it's great that the internet is an open, widely available network, this openness yields some security flaws. Most have been dealt with by encryption and other security measures, but one gaping hole remains unfixed. This major hole can cause massive, widespread outages or allow your data to be snooped on.

The problem resides in the routers used by every corporation or company who owns a block of IPs. These routers are constantly communicating with other routers in order to update internal information. This internal information, some 400,000 entries, contains the best routes to get to other networks using a protocol called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

According to InfoWorld, "BGP enables routers to find the best path when, say, a network used to retrieve a web page from South Korea is not working properly. Changes in that routing information are distributed quickly to routers around the world in as few as five minutes."

If you are one of the growing number of consumers who doesn't have a credit or debit card to use while shopping online, WalMart has a new program designed just for you. According to WalMart, many of its customers shop paycheck to paycheck so they need more ways to purchase items online. This is where WalMart's "Pay with Cash" program comes in.

Obviously, most people's computers don't have any sort of cash terminal sitting there, so the program had to come up with a solution. How it works is you shop online and place your order. You receive an email receipt which you then take in to your local WalMart. Head to any register with the receipt and pay cash.

If you still have to go to the store, what's the point of shopping online? Well, WalMart.com offers a much wider selection of goods than the store counterparts do. Additionally, you can have the products shipped straight to your door, rather than having to walk around the store and pick them up.

Netflix and Sony have announced today that the Netflix app is now available on the Sony Entertainment Network for any 2012 Bravia Blu-Ray or Blu-Ray player made by Sony. This new app will allow users to stream any video or television show they would like, straight to their Blu-Ray player. This joins the numerous other apps that Sony already provides on the Sony Entertainment Network.

This new announcement comes at an interesting time for Netflix. Wall Street investors aren't exactly in love with Netflix right now, even though they had a good first quarter. Investors are remembering 2011 instead of looking at Q1 2012 results. Additionally, analysts are predicting only a 200,000 subscriber increase for the second quarter compared to the 1.3 million of the first.