Facebook stuffs. 2 Compact Cameras Move Closer to Perfection - David Pogue. Why doesn’t everyone wear steel-toed work boots? So rugged, so protective! And why doesn’t everyone buy S.L.R. cameras? Gorgeous photos, sensational low-light shots, interchangeable lenses, no shutter lag! This is a rhetorical exercise, of course. You know very well why everybody does not buy those things: For most people, they’re excessive, huge and unwieldy. But what if they weren’t? That’s the engineering challenge that’s been keeping camera engineers awake at night for two years now. Panasonic and Olympus took the first step with a format called Micro Four Thirds. This month, two more big-name camera makers join the fray, Nikon and Pentax. The Pentax Q, for example, is the smallest interchangeable-lens camera in the world.
Yet incredibly, this camera is completely usable — and it’s loaded. There’s even a remarkable flash. The Q’s screen is a three-incher, which leaves only a narrow strip of camera back to contain the nine buttons there. The headline here is speed. And another thing. Dish and Blockbuster to introduce Netflix competitor Friday. Verbling Links Up Language Learners With Native Speakers Through Live Video Chat. It’s a well known fact that people improve foreign language skills when interacting and communicating with other people who speak the same foreign language. Y Combinator-backed Verbling is launching today as a easy to use online conversation exchange for language learners, leveraging in-browser video chat. The site allows you to sign up and choose the language you want to learn. Since the site doesn’t have a massive userbase just yet, Verbling hosts sessions as specific times daily (12 pm PT and 7 pm PT) where people can show up and chat with each other.
Once you join the site during a session time, you are automatically paired with a language speaker who is fluent in the language you wish to learn. So if you speak French and want to learn English, you’ll be paired up with a native English speaker who wants to learn French. The site soft launched this past week and already has 1,500 signups. How To Build An Audience On The Internet: The Kevin Rose School Vs. The Fred Wilson School. Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Tom Anderson, the former President, founder and first friend on MySpace. You can now find Tom on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ What kind of content creator are you? Kevin Rose or Fred Wilson? Blogging or “self-publishing” in any form was supposed to democratize and revolutionize the media industry. Content creators no longer needed mainstream platforms to get their voices heard.
Bloggers weren’t beholden to editors, and self-publishers could monetize their content with AdWords or any host of ad network partners. Three days ago, Kevin Rose posted this on Google+: “Decided to forward to my Google+. Kevin’s decision was made rapidly, and may well be reversed when it suits his needs. Where to host your content is a tricky issue. And again, this is not just an issue for bloggers. In the offline world, most writers would never think to publish their own magazine or newspaper. The E-Note Is An Ultra-Simple Note-taking Tablet. The vision of an endless, always-on tablet that is designed for simple note-taking has always haunted me.
Call it a Celestial Trapper Keeper, if you will. To be able to write on a screen and then press a button to erase the notes would be a dream and this $52 device does just that: you can write on the LCD screen with the included stylus and it just shows up, like on regular note paper. Then you press a button and poof. The pad lasts for 50,000 iterations and the battery can remain charged for five years. In short, it’s the world’s most high-tech whiteboard.
But do you see the fatal flaw? I’m sure that functionality is coming soon and if you want to set this up as a quick to-do and grocery list storage system, you’re probably good to go. UPDATE – Looks like these guys will have a storage-capable version this year. Product Page. As Spotify Nears U.S. Launch, Rdio Launches A Native Windows App. As a non-ashamed Windows user and straight up Rdio fan, this makes me happy. Rdio has expanded its product suite with a native app for Windows XP, Vista, and 7. To be fair, I’m likely not going to use the desktop app much, as I’m mostly using Rdio on my mobile phone and iPod touch, as well as via my Sonos system. But it’s great to have options – I have always lamented Spotify for not having a browser-based application, for one, since I like to keep the number of desktop apps I run to an absolute minimum. And the iTunes desktop application (at least the one for Windows) is practically unusable, at least in my experience.
Before I digress too much: there’s now a native Rdio app for Windows. And yes, Mac users, there’s a native app for you too, since March 2011 actually. Spotify, meanwhile, is gearing up for a U.S. launch, though admittedly it has been gearing up for that for the past few decades (ok, years). Rdio just gave you one more reason to try them out while you wait for that to happen. Internet Security Experts Introduce Secure DNS in Singapore. “It won’t matter where you are in the world or who you are in the world, you’re going to be able to authenticate everyone and everything,” said Dan Kaminsky, an independent network security researcher who is one of the engineers involved in the project. The Singapore event included an elaborate technical ceremony to create and then securely store numerical keys that will be kept in three hardened data centers there, in Zurich and in San Jose, Calif.
The keys and data centers are working parts of a technology known as Secure DNS, or DNSSEC. DNS refers to the Domain Name System, which is a directory that connects names to numerical Internet addresses. Preliminary work on the security system had been going on for more than a year, but this was the first time the system went into operation, even though it is not quite complete. The three centers are fortresses made up of five layers of physical, electronic and cryptographic security, making it virtually impossible to tamper with the system. ICANN's New Top-Level Domains to Cost $185,000. (Photo: Reuters / Thomas Peter)A woman uses a computer in the lounge area of the 27th Chaos Communication Congress (27C3) in Berlin in this December 27, 2010 file photo. June 20, 2011|8:00 pm Since 2009, ICANN, the Internet governing corporation, was in the works to expand domain suffixes to go beyond .com, .gov, .biz, .org or the other 18 existing ones to .missamerica2011, .netflix, or any other combination one may think of.
Today, ICANN officially announced the approval of this plan allowing worldwide entities to register a domain suffix that relates to their products or brands, such as .iphone5 for Apple or just about any suffix name they desire to possess. There is a catch, however. ICANN explained that the funds obtained from the fees would be directed to hire expert technicians who would be responsible not only for developing the new gTLDs (.coke, .google, .church) but for processing the applications as well.
Follow us Get CP eNewsletter ›› The Kno Textbook App Hits The iPad. Last night, Kno quietly released its first digital textbook app for the iPad. It includes its own store of “over 70,000 titles at 30% to 50% off list” price. And the app is a full textbook reader. Kno, whose CEO Osman Rashid previously founded textbook-rental service Chegg, originally developed its own oversized tablet for textbooks. But once the iPad and Android tablets hit the market, the company saw the writing on the touchscreen and bailed on its hardware efforts last April.
At that time, when I spoke to Rashid, he was talking down the iPad because it does not support a stylus, which is the input method the Know software was designed for (although there are styluses that do work with the iPad). The iPad app allows you to organize your digital textbooks and PDFs by dragging and dropping them into “courses.” The highlight feature is a nice touch. All in all, though, the Kno textbook app is pretty solid and will compete based on the breadth of its textbook selection and pricing. Second Defense Contractor L-3 ‘Actively Targeted’ With RSA SecurID Hacks | Threat Level. An executive at defense giant L-3 Communications warned employees last month that hackers were targeting the company using inside information on the SecurID keyfob system freshly stolen from an acknowledged breach at RSA Security. The L-3 attack makes the company the second hacker target linked to the RSA breach — both defense contractors.
Reuters reported Friday that Lockheed Martin had suffered an intrusion. “L-3 Communications has been actively targeted with penetration attacks leveraging the compromised information,” read an April 6 e-mail from an executive at L-3′s Stratus Group to the group’s 5,000 workers, one of whom shared the contents with Wired.com on condition of anonymity. It’s not clear from the e-mail whether the hackers were successful in their attack, or how L-3 determined SecurID was involved. Based in New York, L-3 Communications ranks eighth on Washington Technology’s 2011 list of the largest federal-government contractors.
Five Easy Pieces of Online Identity. Every Internet service that has a concept of users has to deal with identity. And for anything social (which seems like everything these days) identity is a huge part. For the Internet as a whole, there are battles waging to "own" identity—or, at the very least, not let someone else own it. And there have been efforts for years to make identity more manageable for users and to put control in their hands. So, identity is an important concept. But I've always found it a confusing one. I think that's because it's ambiguous in most discussions what "identity" means. A while back, Twitter's CTO, Greg Pass, and I created a framework I've found useful for thinking about all this.
I thought this might be useful framework for others, so, I present to you, the five pieces of online identity: 1) Authentication Question Answered: Do you have permission? There are various ways to check if someone should have access to something. 2) Representation Question Answered: Who are you? 3) Communication Notes. Obama’s Silicon Valley “Tech Supper” – Who Sat Where? Why Was He There? Why was he there? Who wasn’t invited and why? What did they talk about?
Why was he really there? These are the questions being debated this morning about Obama’s visit last night to the home (dare I say “lavish Woodside estate”) of tech investor and Google board member John Doerr. Who Was There? Here’s the full list of attendees according to the NY Times, LA Times and SF Chronicle: John Doerr, partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & ByersCarol Bartz, president and CEO, Yahoo! Who Sat Where? Here’s our marked up version of the official White House photo (spotted via The Next Web), showing where everyone’s sitting: Apple and Facebook get spots next to Obama. Who Wasn’t There Who Might Have Been? Who wasn’t there that might have been, ZDNet runs down the list: Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBMLeo Apotheker, CEO of HPJeff Bezos, CEO of AmazonSteve Ballmer, CEO of MicrosoftMarc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com Of those on the “not invited” list, Benioff and and Apotheker are “local” in Silicon Valley. Obama dinner with Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and other tech titans sparks talk but not much information.
Posted: 05/02/2012 10:35:42 PM PDT0 Comments|Updated: about a year ago Congratulations! You found a link we goofed up on, and as a result you're here, on the article-not-found page. That said, if you happened to be looking for our daily celebrity photo gallery, you're in luck: Also, if you happened to be looking for our photo gallery of our best reader-submitted images, you're in luck: So, yeah, sorry, we could not find the Mercury News article you're looking for. There are a couple possible reasons for this: The article has expired from our system. What next? You may also want to try our search to locate news and information on MercuryNews.com.
If you're looking for an article that was published in the last two weeks, here are more options: You can also click on one of our sections: Social Chocolate. Facebook, Groupon, Twitter & Zynga - Collect All Four! - Venture Capital Dispatch. Cairo?s Band of Geeks Survives Tahrir Square Assault | Danger Room. Updated Feb. 3, 5 p.m. Eastern with video (above). CAIRO — For three days, the geeks and online activists and DIY filmmakers protested peacefully here in Tahrir Square.
For three nights, they slept in tents with their laptops by their sides and kept their mobile phones charged by hacking into one of Tahrir’s street lights. On the fourth day, Wednesday, the lynch mob came and encircled them. Thousands of people supporting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak laid siege to the central plaza, pressing themselves into the four streets that lead into Tahrir. “This was a real battle, a real Egyptian street fight, but we kept them back with stones and barricades and fire,” computer security specialist Ahmad Gharbeia, 34, tells me over the phone.
“I need to preserve my phone battery,” he adds, “so let’s talk later.” For the past six years, Gharbeia has been training Arab world activists, journalists and human rights lawyers to hide their internet communications from prying eyes. See Also: Spotlight Again Falls on Web Tools and Change. Scribd Facebook Instant Personalization Is a Privacy Nightmare | Epicenter
Online document sharing site Scribd hooked up with Facebook to create “instant personalization” so Scribd users can get reading recommendations based on their Facebook likes and what their friends are sharing. Sounds interesting, right? But the document sharing and embedding service has created a privacy nightmare that involves drafting users who are already logged into Facebook without offering a clear opt out process either on the site or through e-mail. Instead Scribd has been creating subscriptions and followers on behalf of a user by sending e-mails to contacts obtained through Facebook’s friends list and notifying them — all without requiring the user to ever click a button. “Obviously privacy is extremely important to us,” says Michelle Laird, spokesperson for Scribd. This is not the first time that it has launched a feature on an opt-out basis. In its latest move towards instant personalization, Scribd is counting on piggybacking on Facebook’s presence on the user’s browser.
Internet Explorer 9 gets new anti-tracking privacy feature. Microsoft has revealed a new feature that will ship with Internet Explorer 9 to help users avoid the online tracking that is now widespread on the Web and is used to power behavioral advertising. The new Tracking Protection Lists will tell the browser which third-party content to permit and which to prohibit. Tracking Protection Lists will be an opt-in feature, and Microsoft says that it will not provide any lists itself. Instead, third parties can provide lists to end-users. As such, the lists may come from privacy advocacy groups, ad-blocking advocates, or individuals who want to block certain content. Internet Explorer already contains a feature, InPrivate Filtering, that attempts to block third-party scripting and tracking devices. The announcement comes not long after the FTC called for browser vendors to include a "do not track" button in order to block any kind of third-party usage tracking.
Specifics of the Tracking Protection Lists are not yet finalized. Independent commercial Web publishing: still exhausting? Internet Surpasses Television as Main News Source for Young Adults. Dell To Buy Cloud-Based Medical Data Archiving Solutions Company InSite One. Smarter Than You Think - When Computers Keep Watch. At last, public investors can get in on the PayPal mafia’s racket with LinkedIn. Tablets at CES 2011: Honeycomb, Windows 7, and all the rest. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 teardown: Daintiest of the Android tablets.