Articles tagged with 'News'

Didn’t take long for Safari to take the headlines again. Yesterday, Safari generated a fair amount of press by releasing a Windows beta version. For better or for worse, this brought about the close scrutiny of many people. Naysayers were quick to respond, telling that even Mac users don’t use Safari.

To make matters worse, security experts tested and subsequently released information of its vulnerabilities - for both OSX and Windows beta. Porting to Windows represent a double edged sword, you’ll get a slice of the market share while security exploiters will pay more attention as well. Were it not for the decision to port Safari to Windows, we believe that Safari would’ve remain relatively more secure (in the ’security by obscurity’ sense).

Sources:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=283
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9728500-7.html
http://larholm.com/2007/06/12/safari-for-windows-0day-exploit-in-2-hours/
http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2007/06/niiiice.html

Now everyone can see PLUS traffic condition before setting out for work. PLUS has recently introduced this service which shows you live feeds from their many traffic cameras. The feeds (static images) are updated every few seconds and the viewable locations are as follows

Central
DAMANSARA
SG. BULOH
BKT LANJAN
SUBANG IC
FHR2
SHAM ALAM IC
SHAH ALAM KM 0.50
EBOR
USJ

We knew it was coming, and it came - Google buys over Feedburner. Almost everyone is delighted with the deal: Google, Feedburner, advertisers and publishers. You can read the announcement by Feedburner and the short post by Google on this matter.

So what does this mean for Feedburner users?
from the acquisition FAQ

Q. What does this mean for FeedBurner’s partners, advertisers, and users?
A: We are excited to continue offering FeedBurner’s exceptional tools to content creators throughout the world, and our teams will work together to improve the experiences of feed users, advertisers, and publishers. Users can continue to sign up for FeedBurner’s services and take advantage of their feed tools and features immediately, and advertisers can continue to leverage FeedBurner’s media network to achieve their marketing objectives.

Come June 1st 2007, many Google AdSense publishers’ account will be disabled. Specifically, those that are of ‘Made For AdSense’ (MFA) or ‘arbitrage publisher’ nature. This news follows numerous reports of publishers receiving notices from Google regarding the disabling of their account, citing the reason as their use of AdSense is an unsuitable business model. The ‘unsuitable business model’ being generally understood as MFA sites.

So a little background story here for the uninitiated. Arbitrage is defined as “The simultaneous purchase and sale of similar commodities to take advantage of price discrepancies between markets”.

Share, reuse, and remix — and win!
Share your original or derivative creative works and win cash prizes! Winning entries will also be featured on the Creative Commons Malaysia web portal and the first Creative Commons anniversary celebration in July. Besides cash prizes, winners are also eligible to win the People’s Choice awards which are based on online voting.

Online news sites have been ablaze with rumors of Microsoft’s intention to acquire Yahoo! (henceforth referred to as Yahoo without the exclamation). It seems that Yahoo has been approached again by Microsoft to enter into acquisition talks. This follows numerous inconclusive talks in the past between the two parties. Microsoft is rather desperate this time, offering up to a (reportedly) sum of $50 billion for the deal to go forward.

Experts have been hinting otherwise, as the takeover and integration process would be a massive task.Imagine all the overlapping services that have to be streamlined. This is not made easier by the fact that Yahoo and Microsoft have been actively copying each other since forever.

The move didn’t came out as a surprise, given the latest purchase of major online advertising company DoubleClick by Google which might have slightly offset Microsoft’s world domination plan. A more plausible explanation would be a joint partnership on search and advertising in order to fight evenly with Google. Google currently leads search and advertising market followed by Yahoo and Microsoft. Microsoft’s struggle against Google has been pretty futile so a partner in crime might help out a bit.

After the dust settled, we now know that the latest episode of talks ended up inconclusive again. Too bad, I was looking forward to the result of this unholy union.

(from TechCrunch)

A couple of days ago I received a notice from Pandora’s founder, Tim Westergren who broke the news - Pandora will no longer be accessible outside US. This is terrible news to me as a fan of their service.

Delivery of Pandora is based on proper licensing from the people who created the music - we have always believed in honoring the guidelines as determined by legislators and regulators, artists and songwriters, and the labels and publishers they work with. In the U.S. there is a federal statute that provides this license for all the music streamed on Pandora. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent license outside the U.S. and there is no global licensing organization to enable us to legitimately offer Pandora around the world. Other than in the U.K., we have not yet been able to make significant progress in our efforts to obtain a sufficient number of international licenses at terms that would enable us to run a viable business. The volume of listening on Pandora makes it a very expensive service to run. Streaming costs are very high, and since our inception, we have been making publishing and performance royalty payments for every song we play.

Until now, we have not been able to tell where a listener is based, relying only on zip code information provided upon registration. We are now able to recognize a listener’s country of origin based on the IP address from which they are accessing the service. Consequently, on May 3rd, we will begin blocking access to Pandora to listeners from your country. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.

well, it’s been quite awhile since I last blogged due to various commitments and lack of materials. Time passes, people change, people blog. Having gone through many versions and styles of blog, I hope that this one will stick, no promises though! So without further ado, I bring you the first post…

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