Google Chromebooks: The Chrome OS!!

The first laptops running on a Google-designed software system will go on sale in the US and six other countries next month.

The June 15 release date announced Wednesday means the lightweight laptops will hit the market nearly two years after Google Inc. began working on an operating system based on its Chrome Web browser.

Since then, Apple Inc.'s iPad and other tablet computers have become hot sellers. The growing popularity of tablets has raised questions about how interested consumers will be interested in buying Google-powered laptops specifically tailored for Web surfing.

Samsung Electronics Co. and Acer Inc. are making the first Chromebooks. They will sell for $349 to $499 at Best Buy and Amazon.com Inc. in the US. The cheapest IPad sells for $499.

Acer's Chromebook, at $349, will have an 11.6-inch screen display and up to six hours of battery life. Samsung's version, selling for $429 to $499, will have a 12.1-inch screen and up to 8.5 hours of battery life. Both models will have keyboards, but no hard drives for storage. The machines will be like computer terminals dependent on a connection to the Internet. The laptops come with 16 gigabytes of flash memory - the kind found in smartphones, tablet computers and some iPods. They have slots to plug in other storages device you buy separately.

The Chromebooks also will be sold in Britain, France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain.

In an effort to get people to use Chromebooks, Google is offering three-year subscription plans to businesses and schools similar to how the mobile phone industry subsidizes devices up front and make the money back over the life of a service contract. For a monthly cost of $28 per user in businesses and government agencies and $20 per user in schools, Google provides the laptop, tech support and a warranty for the duration. Google will replace the Chromebooks at the end of the three years.

Chromebook's long-awaited debut will intensify Google's competition with Microsoft Corp., whose Windows operating system remains the foundation of most personal computers.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have long felt that Windows computers took too long to power up and were too clunky to operate. They believed that Windows' drawbacks were discouraging people from spending even more time online, where they could click on ads sold by Google.

To address the perceived problem, Google announced its plans in July 2009 for a Chrome-based operating system that would enable computers to turn on in a matter of seconds and encourage more Web surfing.

"The complexity of managing computers is really frustrating for users out there," Brin told reporters Wednesday at Google's conference for software developers. "It's a flawed model."

Brin, who began focusing on special projects earlier this year, said he didn't have enough information to comment on a Justice Department investigation into the online ad system that generates most of Google's revenue. The company disclosed Tuesday that it has set aside $500 million to settle the probe. It provided few details.

Besides attacking Microsoft's Windows franchise, Google's Chromebook also will represent another challenge to Apple, which makes Mac computers as well as iPads. Google and Apple have been engaged in a fierce competition in the smartphone market for the past two years.

Google itself has joined the tablet computer craze by creating a special version of its Android software for mobile devices. Apple sold nearly 20 million iPads during the tablet's first year on the market. and analysts expect people to buy tens of millions more tablets from Apple and other manufacturers during the next few years.

How to Stop Bom Sabado Worm? Here is the way!

Everyone whose orkut account has been affected with the Sabado Worm, can use this simple trick to get out of this issue. People whose account is not yet affected, please follow the below steps to keep this worm away from your accounts.

The worm injects a hidden iframe containing a malicious javascript [do not click this] http: //tptools. org/ worm . js [do not click this], which steals the user cookie which contains the password in an encoded form. Even though the attacker does not get to know your password, they can login to your account using your credentials by impersonating the cookie to fool the identification system. 

So a trivial solution is to diable javascript, another solution is to disable iframes or u can take an advanced measure by blocking the domain http : // tptools . org / by editing your hosts file and redirecting it to a safe address, say 127.0.0.1 go to C:>windows>system32>driversetc There is a file named %u2018hosts%u2019. It is a read-only file. Go to it's properties and un-check the read-only option and edit it with you favourite editor. add this line at the end of it 127.0.0.1 tptools.org save it. and then restart your network interface. ( in simple words, just reconnect your internet connection ). Bingo!! the worm%u2019ll became useless!!!! 

Orkut is attached by Bom Sabado Worm!!!

In a major XSS (cross-site scripting) attack this week, Google owned Orkut was flooded with "Bom Sabado" scraps.

The word "Bom Sabado" means "Good Saturday" in Portuguese, which is the also the official language of Brazil, one of the last remaining Orkut bastions in the world.

The worm seems to be posting scraps with the text "Bom Sabado" and also adding affected users to new Orkut groups. Such XSS attacks have targeted Orkut in the past too.

Experts have advised users to avoid logging on to Orkut till Orkut engineers fix the hole and also not to click on any suspicious links. Orkut had just last month announced new updates to the website.

Earlier this week, the popular microblogging website Twitter was also at the receiving end of an XSS exploit. The attack, which emerged and was shut down within hours Tuesday morning, involved a XSS flaw that allowed users to run JavaScript programs on other computers.

Earlier on Sep 2010, the most popular social networking hub with more than 500 million users, Facebook, also faced networking glitches due to an outside technical problem. It was Facebook's most tragic outrage in its history.

YouTube tests new live streaming platform!

The world largest video sharing service, YouTube is testing a new live streaming platform. The trial would continue for two days - September 13-14. The new service begins as a limited trail with four participating partners.

YouTube had previously hosted live streaming of events such as the U2 concert at Rose Bowl and season three of the Indian Premier League (IPL). YouTube will evaluate the results of the test before planning a roll-out for its partners worldwide.

The new YouTube platform integrates with the existing YouTube channels and broadcasters need only a webcam or an external camera to use the feature, when it is made available.

With the new service YouTube adds to the competition of websites such as, ustream.tv, livestream.com and justin.tv.

YouTube's IPL live streaming had exceeded the website's expectations. The official IPL channel on YouTube racked up nearly 55 million views, against YouTube expectations of around 10 million streams.

Does that mean a free Television Era's begining??

Google Instant: A new faster search system in real time!!

Internet giant Google today introduced "Google Instant", an enhanced version of its search engine that locates the content defendants as the user enters the terms to search. Google adds innovation and speed thanks to its new search function has been presented Wednesday at a news conference.

With this new feature, the user will not have to complete the search, because the results will appear as you type the text, which saves 2 to 5 seconds per search, and "more than 3,500 million seconds a day and a eleven hours every second "globally, the company said.

This breakthrough was described by the Vice President of Search Products at Google, Marissa Mayer, as a "fundamental change" in how to locate content on the Internet.

The new search system will be available in the U.S. throughout the day today for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer 8 and next week will start in domains related to six other countries: Spain, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Russia. The company goal is to offer in the coming months this instant service to a greater number of languages and countries.

In addition to automatically predicting the content that appears on the screen without pressing the button "enter", "Google Instant" includes a system of "auto" of terms to help guide users to refine your search.

Google is betting that in a world of nearly instant communication that search is going to have produce an answer just as fast as updates are spat out from Twitter or other real-time Web services. It's a bit chaotic at first and will certainly throw a few searchers off their game as well as make those in the search-engine optimization game a little anxious.

Should it prove popular with users, however, Google Instant is also the type of search innovation that might be difficult for competitors to duplicate in a matter of weeks or even months, giving Google a distinct advantage heading into a new era of Internet search.

HTML 5: A way to revolution!

The HTML5, the next version of the language used to create web pages, has drawn attention for its ability to display video within a web browser without plug-ins like Adobe Flash. However, ultimately a series of lesser-known features may have a far greater impact on how users experience the Internet.

Experts say that HTML5 does behind the scenes-such as network communications and storage features of browser-can make pages load faster (especially on mobile devices slow), make web applications work much better, and even allow browsers to read older websites more easily.

Many websites today act like desktop applications, for example, the office productivity suites and internet-based photo editing tools. However, many of the sophisticated features of these sites rely on developers to build connections between different web technologies such as HTML, JavaScript and style sheets (CSS), a connection that does not always work perfectly. As a result, Web sites can become slow, work differently in different browsers, and be vulnerable to security holes.

Bruce Lawson, who preaches about open Web standards Opera Software says that for Web sites running Internet functions for which it was originally designed, developers must perform complex coding tasks easily, can end up making mistakes and introducing applications to fail.

The group working on HTML5, says Lawson, was assigned the difficult task of making the specification was more tolerant than their predecessors, so that the oldest web sites or miscoded work better in browsers authorized to implement HTML5. They also wanted to extend the specifications and to support modern trends, such as rich internet applications. "The foundation of HTML5 is relentlessly pragmatic," he says. "It is designed to reflect what people are really doing."

Experts point out a feature called Web Sockets as an example of the improvements that the HTML5 can provide. Sockets provides a Web site an application programming interface (API) that opens a permanent connection between a page and a server, so that information can pass between them in real time. Normally, the browser must make a request each time you want an update.

The effect is like going from having a conversation via email to switch to using instant messages, said Ben Galbraith, who co-founded the web development site Ajaxian.com, and is the director of relations with Palm developers. With email, each message is sent as a single event, while instant messaging allows conversation flowing and is establishing permanent connection.

In the past, Web developers have managed to develop different ways to keep browsers and servers in constant communication, although Galbraith describes the techniques as "clever hacks" that are complicated to implement and do not scale well. Web Sockets, he says, promises an easy way for developers to create web pages that change in real time, something increasingly important with the proliferation of more data sources in real time, such as instant status updates from users social networks. Users would benefit from web applications with real-time feeds and a run smoother and with fewer errors.

The HTML5 could also help make web applications work better when the devices are disconnected from the Internet or intermittently connected, as is usual with smart phones, said Alon Salant, co-owner of Carbon Five, a company based in San Francisco that specializes in creating web applications. A feature called Web Storage allows applications to store more data in web browser, recover smarter, and control how browsers have certain parts of pages to speed loading.

Galbraith is also excited about several features of the new version of CSS, designed to work with HTML5. These features make Web pages more responsive to user input and allow high-quality graphics-areas in which web pages are usually not good. The HTML5 allows developers to integrate animation window on a page, but Galbraith said that the new CSS functionality would have a better performance.

Lawson points out that users will also see an improvement in performance with other features of HTML5. For example, a number of improvements in the way the browsers handle forms will reduce the amount of JavaScript necessary and accelerate page loading, especially on mobile devices.

Chris Blizzard, Mozilla evangelism director, points out the importance of the parser of HTML5. The parser reads a browser trademarks used to build a page and look for ways to show it on screen. Blizzard says this is one of the most important parts of the specification. His intention is to make the browser more interoperable, particularly in the way they handle poorly written code. Instead of letting each browser maker decides how to handle imperfect code, the parser specifies what should be the responses to the errors. This should give users a more consistent experience, regardless of the browser you are using, he says.

While the HTML5 seems to present a long list of big changes, says Lawson, the main objective is to provide a simpler way of doing so developers are already doing today, making it less likely to make mistakes. Lawson said: "The greater simplicity, greater robustness and therefore the greater the end-user experience-that's how I see it."

Apple and Google are preparing to bring the Internet to television

After years of timid attempts, technology companies have decided to bet heavily on the integration of the Internet on television with the launch this fall in the U.S. of novel devices to interact with the "idiot box."

The updated Apple TV, which was filed this week, we must add the anticipated sale of products Revue Google adapter-TV- or its competitor Boxee Box, expected a market still looking for an efficient way to spread the liability viewer restless spirit of the Internet.

To date, those wishing to enjoy Web content while watching TV they have done acquiring some of the faces flat screens with Internet applications or purchasing devices that are a bridge between the two universes as XR Roku, Tivo or Apple TV. However, none of these devices can freely surf the Internet and are limited to providing access to a number of content such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook or channels rental of films and series such as Netflix and Amazon VoD.

Aims to fill a void that Google with its Google TV service will be available built into Sony TVs or via modem Reveu box manufactured by Logitech, whose estimated price could be around $ 200.

Google TV platform, and includes the above applications, is designed to surf the Web from your TV using Google Chrome as if they used a computer, follow the same philosophy as creators of Boxee, a software to watch series and movies Internet, which developed the Boxee Box. That device, valued at $ 199 and is slated for release in November, which will be announced as the largest set of applications for viewing content available on the Internet, also serve to surf the Internet.

The new Apple TV filed Wednesday by the company CEO, Steve Jobs, will seek another approach is less ambitious in terms of interaction, but more simple and economic management, $ 99. The device will hit U.S. stores in October with the idea of becoming a home video store with competitive rates and access to some Internet applications, an offer similar to that currently includes Roku XR, which moves in the same strip of price.

A matter of time to know what vision ends up convincing the viewer, the most interactive Google or Apple the most practical of a commercial pulse is called upon to modify more or less the way television is consumed. Amazon also announced its jump to this growing sector.

Key players in this technology race are content providers, mainly the large television networks and Hollywood studios, which since the advent of the Internet have seen a loss of income, especially in DVD sales, a business area would suffer even more.

Google may launch their music service along with Android 3.0!

You may have heard a thing or two about Google’s music service, likely to be dubbed Google Music.  The idea was discussed at I/O back in May, which expectations we would see something around September.  Well, September is here, and we’ve really heard nothing new about Google Music, until now.

Reports are now coming in that sources are revealing that Google Music may be landing sometime around Christmas.  Sources are also revealing that Google is planning to launch the service along with Android 3.0.  There’s only one catch, it seems that Google Music, being spearheaded by Andy Rubin himself, is having zero luck in signing deals with any major record labels.

Music is not the only area where Google is reportedly having difficulty getting content providers to come on board.  There have been numerous reports that they are having an equally difficult time swaying studios and networks to partner with them over Google TV.  One thing is for certain, though, and that is Google had better hurry up and get some record labels on board, or they will be launching a shiny new music service with no music to be found.

Gmail's Priority Inbox Auto-Filter importent E-Mails!

Google Inc. can sift through more than a trillion Web links in a matter of seconds, but can the Internet search leader help people wade through their overflowing e-mailboxes?

That's the challenge Google will try to tackle Tuesday with the introduction of a tool called "Priority Inbox" in its Gmail service.

The feature relies on formulas devised by Google engineers to automatically figure out and highlight which incoming messages are likely to be the most important to each Gmail user.

Users who opt to turn on the Priority Inbox will see their messages separated into three categories. "Important and unread" e-mails will be at the top followed by messages that have been previously stamped with a star by an accountholder. Everything else appears at the bottom.

Switching back to the standard view of the inbox can be done with a click on a link along the left side of the Web page.

Google's e-mail analysis is based on a variety of factors, including a person's most frequent contacts and how many other people are getting the same message. The content of the e-mail also is factored into the equation.

Although it might unnerve some people, the notion of Google's computers scanning through the content of individual e-mails isn't new. Google has been doing it for years to determine what kinds of ads to show to the right of e-mails and to block junk e-mail commonly known as "spam."

With more than 100 daily e-mails pouring into some inboxes now, people now need help to identify "the bacon and baloney" along with the spam, said Keith Coleman, Gmail's product director.

Google helped create the information clutter six years ago when it introduced its free Gmail service with a then-unheard of 1 gigabyte of storage per account. Other e-mail services quickly expanded their capacity limits to remain competitive, and now most inboxes can store multiple gigabytes of information.

Google updates its privacy policy!

Google has relooked and renewed its privacy policy after the settlement of privacy lawsuit over its Buzz. The users are warned with new privacy policy when they visit the Gmail website.  The company faced the lawsuit due to disclosure of private information including all contacts of Gmail.


“Long, complicated and lawyerly—that’s what most people think about privacy policies, and for good reason. Even taking into account that they’re legal documents, most privacy policies are still too hard to understand,” Associate General Counsel, Mike Yang, said in the Google’s official blog.

He further said that Google is not changing anything with regards to policy. He indicated that only thing that will be changed is the wording of the language.  “So we’re simplifying and updating Google’s privacy policies. To be clear, we aren’t changing any of our privacy practices; we want to make our policies more transparent and understandable,” he further said.

Google is going to delete 12 product-specific policies because of the duplication with Google main policy. In simple words, any policy that is being covered by both Google’s main policy and product specific privacy policy will be removed from product’s privacy policy.  Google is also updating the main privacy policy by “cutting down the parts that are redundant”.  The new privacy policy will be effective from October 3.

Gmail: The Bug That Turned Email into Spam is fixed!

Google has fixed a bug with Gmail. The bug caused some of its accounts to repeatedly send email messages over and over.

The bug affected less than 2.5 percent of the Gmail users. It involved odd behavior including the repeated messages. 

The bug was resolved Thursday night, according to Google's Google Apps dashboard.

"The problem with Google Mail should be resolved," Google's tech support staff wrote. "We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better."

MrEvan, a Google employee, also added his own apologies. "Thank you again for the patience you have shown, and sincerest apologies for the inconvenience this has caused you," he wrote. "I too have friends and professional contacts and absolutely understand the value of those relationships and how it could be very frustrating to have bothered some of those folks unintentionally. While I can't take the messages back with some sort of magical Undo Send, I totally sympathize with your situation. Please understand that the Gmail Team has worked tirelessly to investigate this issue and get it solved for you. Your reports were very helpful in our investigation."

At a press conference announcing the integration of Google Voice and Gmail this week, Google executives were asked about the number of Gmail users. Executives declined to provide an exact number, although comScore numbers cited by The Wall Street Journal put the number at over 160 million, putting the maximum number of users affected by the bug at about 4 million users.

Pentagon: Computers Attacked With Flash Drive!!

A foreign spy agency pulled off the most serious breach of Pentagon computer networks ever by inserting a flash drive into a US military laptop, a top defense official said Wednesday. The previously classified incident, which took place in 2008 in the Middle East, was disclosed in a magazine article by Deputy Defense Secretary William J Lynn and released by the Pentagon Wednesday. He said a "malicious code" on the flash drive spread undetected on both classified and unclassified Pentagon systems, "establishing what amounted to a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control." "It was a network administrator's worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary," Lynn wrote in an article for Foreign Affairs. "This ... was the most significant breach of US military computers ever and it served as an important wake-up call." The Pentagon operation to counter the attack, known as Operation Buckshot Yankee, marked a turning point in US cyberdefense strategy, Lynn said. 

In November 2008, the Defense Department banned the use of the small high-tech storage devices that are used to move data from one computer to another. The ban was partially lifted early this year with the approval of limited use of the devices. Lynn did not disclose what, if any, military secrets may have been stolen in the 2008 penetration of the system, what nation orchestrated the attack, nor whether there were any other repercussions. The article went on to warn that US adversaries can threaten American military might without building stealth fighters, aircraft carriers or other expensive weapons systems. "A dozen determined computer programmers can, if they find a vulnerability to exploit, threaten the United States' global logistics network, steal its operational plans, blind its intelligence capabilities, or hinder its ability to deliver weapons on target," Lynn wrote.

"Knowing this, many militaries are developing offensive capabilities in cyberspace, and more than 100 foreign intelligence organizations are trying to break into US networks," he said.

Defense officials have said repeatedly that the military system of some 15,000 computer networks and seven million computers suffers millions of probes a day with threats coming from a range of attackers from routine hackers to foreign governments looking to steal sensitive information or bring down critical, life-sustaining systems.

Top 10 Mistakes You MUST Avoid in Blogging!

What are the top Mistakes to avoid while setting up your blog? Internet gurus can debate all day about what makes a blog so successful. Indeed, many strategies are subjective. There are, however, certain mistakes that we all agree MUST BE AVOIDED!

Instead of banging on all the time about the keys to success! I’m going to tell you how NOT to fail!

Here are the top 10 mistakes that you must avoid at all costs:

1. Having a slow-loading website

A web page shouldn’t take anymore than a few seconds to load. If people have to wait for our content to load, they will get aggravated. You definitely don’t want anyone’s first impression of your site to be agitation. Avoid this by ensuring all your images are below 100KB. (Ideally all images totalled should be under 100kb).

Sign up to Amazon S3 and get your videos hosted under cloudfront, after you’ve converted them from large file sizes down to the smallest you can manage without affecting the quality. DO NOT have a website full of flash! It’s not flashy if all your audience sees is a buffering circle – 3 seconds and they’re gone……

2. Having a sloppy, haphazard website

Everything should be organized neatly. Your layout should have easy navigation. All of your pages should be interlinked. If somebody wants to find something on your site, they should be able to do so.

Consider creating a sitemap, not only will it help your ranking in the search engines, it will guide people around your website. Ensure you have a search function and make sure there are clear calls to action, where you want people to go, how they contact you, how they get more information etc.

Sometimes when it comes to design – less is more!

3. Don’t forget to submit your site to search engines

This one seems like a no-brainer, yet a surprisingly large number of webmasters neglect doing this. Take the time to manually submit your website to Google, Yahoo, Bing, MSN, Lycos, etc. (I didn’t do this for months – simply because I didn’t know I had to!)

Get your site out there! It’s no good happily filling it with content if no-one’s going to read it!

4. Failing to update your site or blog every single day

At the very least, you should update three or four times a week. The more original content your website has, the better its chances of ranking high in search engines. Plus, consistent updates show dedication, which will give visitors a reason to return in the future.

Look, people want some real bang for their buck these days. The key word here is VALUE! You need to constantly be giving new, up to date, fresh content to your readers. Remember the web is incredibly competitive these days and if you’ve been really canny they’ve subscribed to your RSS and have a reader of up to date content hitting their screens daily.

Now if Mr Jones is posting new interesting stuff daily and you only come up with something new once a month, it won’t be long before your feed is canned, at the very least completely ignored! This takes work!

5. Not giving Social Networking a try

For so long I tried to ignore Facebook. I didn’t understand it and I thought it was a waste of time! Did you know that facebook has over 500 million customers and over 50% of them are active on a daily basis – that’s 250,000,000 people you could be getting your message in front of! That’s phenomenal! You Tube has 2 BILLION views a day – 24 hrs worth of video is uploaded every minute.

I mean you’d be crazy not to include these in your marketing strategies! Be as creative as possible when making videos, images, content, software, etc. Create great relationships with people and have friends and fans link your content through their accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and other social bookmarking sites.

Put your videos up on YouTube and have friends give them two thumbs up! Also create a facebook fan page, it’s essential 

6. Spamming

There is no need to spam your site all over the internet. If it’s good, and you promote it properly, people will visit. Traffic will come inevitably if you know what you’re doing. Spamming your site and adding your URL in linkfarms could cause your site to be reported to your ISP and banned by all search engines!

If you think that popping onto high ranking blogs and adding a vague comment about nothing and including your link is good marketing, think again. The internet as I said in point 4, is all about value and content. You need to build trust and relationships to be truly successful.

7. Not building a list

Ok, so I’m back again to value and content, building relationships. Are you getting a common theme here? Your list is your business. It’s as simple as that. Without customers there is no business, so you MUST collect email addresses and build a list!

Having a list of customers is the key to success on the internet! You will be able to send out regular updates, newsletters, links to your blog, new videos you do, new information and….once they trust you and know that your main intention is to provide value and things that will help them, you can start to send promotional emails with your products or products you believe in, or create a membership site or run events, there are so many ways you can then go on to make money. But the key is the quality of your relationships with a customer database, in other words your list.

8. Choosing the wrong products to promote

This is very simple – DO NOT SELL RUBBISH PRODUCTS! Just because commission rates are high, or the graphics are fancy, if you start farming out complete tosh to your trusted list, you will soon lose all credibility and no-one will buy from you anymore.

Be selective and become known to only ever recommend products that you have used and proven their worth.

9. Not targeting your ads to the right demographics

I think maybe the title of this one should read, not knowing anything about your customers, because it’s not just about targetting your ads, it’s about targetting all of your marketing efforts, free or paid. Clearly not everybody is going to need what you’re promoting.

So make sure you’ve drilled down exactly who your customers are, sex, age, location, interests, desires, buying patterns, keywords etc. Then you can focus on ensuring you get your message directly under the right noses.

10. Failing to interact and network with others

This is HUGE! No man is an island. The power of collaboration is without doubt one of the most effective marketing strategies you can have. So, you must ACTIVELY promote your company. You need to post on forums, join social media communities, comment on blogs, send out press releases, and so forth.

Get to know consumers and other entrepreneurs. Treat consumers as individuals rather than just potential customers. Join in conversations and share tips with others. Join hands and do some marketing projects with other entrepreneurs in the same niche – 2 heads are always better than 1!

Avoid making these ten mistakes and I’m sure you will ultimately succeed at creating a fantastic blogs online!

Orkut changes it's appearance!

Since past couple of weeks Orkut is undergoing minor changes whcih people didn't much notice. But, finally they made it visible to all the users. The Orkut face has changed! They have introduced new appearance to Orkut. They changed the layout to an extend and added an easy access for your favorite application. 

Now you can choose to send a private scrap to a friend. On the new orkut, before posting a scrap, just change its visibility to "private", and that scrap will remain visible only to you and the person receiving the scrap, so it stays completely secret. 

Orkut has made it absolutely clear who else can see the content you’re looking at on orkut. Every scrap (as well as photos, videos, etc) will now have a privacy label, so you can easily tell who else can see it. These are exactly the same as the privacy levels that we already had on photos: private, friends and public. 

Orkut has become a secure place than before. Here you can have a private conversation with your friend via scrap and noone is gonna peep into that. 

I am relaxed now as I don't worry about my private scraps being expossed to whole the world!

Google Docs Incorporates New File Conversion Feature

Google has announced a new file conversion feature in Google Docs that lets you convert files that are already uploaded to your document list into a Google Docs format, as opposed to only being able to do so upon upload.


For example, you can convert PDFs to text using Google's Optical Character Recogniton technology. Files that can be converted include:


For spreadsheets: .xls, .xlsx, .ods, .csv, .tsv, .txt, .tsb
For documents: .doc, .docx, .html, plain text (.txt), .rtf
For presentations: .ppt, .pps
For OCR: .jpg, .gif, .png, .pdf
To use the feature, simply right click on the file and click "make a Google Docs copy". 

Electronic Clearing System of the Income Tax Department, India hacked: Hacker Diverted around Rs 15 crore

The Electronic Clearing System (ECS) of the Income Tax (I-T) Department has been hacked into, jeopardising the functioning of department across Mumbai. On Wednesday, three days after the incident, the I-T department handed over the investigation to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

Sources revealed that the ECS of the I-T department, which facilitates tax refunds of Mumbaikars has been hacked into. It is believed, the hacker also managed to divert crores of rupees from the system. Following this incident, the entire system that processes income tax payment has been shut down since Monday. To prevent further damage, the department has now changed the passwords of all the senior officers with access to the ECS.

Chief Commissioner of Income Tax, R K Singh confirmed the report, stating, “The matter has been transferred to Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).”

According to I-T sources, the incident came to light last week when an additional commissioner level officer discovered unauthorised remittance made from his section. The officer informed his seniors about it and investigations revealed the ECS had been hacked into.

“It seems that more than Rs 15 crore has been siphoned off from the ECS. Investigations are on to ascertain the total amount,” an officer from the I-T Department said requesting anonymity.

ECS system of the I-T was launched recently to clear the refunds of taxpayers in bulk and cut down the tedious paperwork. Sources said that the department has cleared the refunds of one lakh more assesses in a short span of a month through ECS.

“The remittance was made by computers. Now, to check the source and officer who has cleared the refunds, one has to manually go through the entire process which will take a really long time,” said an assessing officer from the I-T department.

In a parallel inquiry, the investigation wing of the I-T is also on a trail of bogus PAN cardholders. Sources said a businessman from suburban Mumbai had filed an income tax return with the help of bogus PAN card. The I-T official got suspicious and found that the card was made in the name of two boys. I-T officials interrogated the boys who revealed that they never applied for any PAN card.

Further inquiries revealed that their father’s employers had managed the fake PAN cards in the name of boys. The I-T officials then approached the local police, but police refused to register the offence. Inquiries are still on in the matter.

I-T payment system has been shut down since Monday following the incident

Gmail down for an hour!!!

A majority of Google mail users were unable to access the service on Tuesday afternoon, in a rare widespread outage of the popular Gmail service.

Google said at 5:37 pm ET that it fixed the problem but was still investigating the cause of the outage, which lasted for over an hour.

Users around the world appeared to be affected, with people from England, Italy, Singapore and South Africa reporting problems on the company's support site.

The outage comes as Google attempts to compete with Microsoft Corp. and IBM to expand its service among business users, who are likely to be less tolerant of long outages. Gmail already competes with Microsoft's Hotmail and Yahoo's Web-based e-mail.

"Anyone thinking of migrating over to Google mail for business might want to think again! It's so annoying - free or otherwise!" one user wrote on the support site Tuesday.

Google offers its email service for free and also sells a version to businesses with extra features and technical support for $50 per user per year.

The fear of outages, in addition to security concerns, has been a reason many businesses are wary of adopting "cloud computing" technologies being offered by Google as well as Salesforce.com and Amazon.com, which help deliver data and services over the Internet

Google Chrome Third Beta Version Goes Faster!!!

Google has unleashed a brand new beta edition of its Google Chrome web browser, promising a speed hike of over 30 percent improvement on both the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks over our current stable channel release.

The supercharged performance isn’t the only reason to grab the new beta: the Google Chrome blog also promises improvements to the New Tab page and Omnibox. For instance, the New Tab page now allows you to move websites in and out of your Most Visited slot by clicking and dragging.

Customize the new New Tab page

The New Tab page has been one of the most popular features in Google Chrome. It's also the one that we hear the most about. Embarrassed that checking out lolcats is showing up as your most popular browser pastime? Now you can bump up something dignified and refined into that top Most Visited slot with a simple click and drag of your mouse. You can pin website thumbnails to a particular spot so they don't disappear even if your browsing habits change. Last but not least, you can hide parts of the page if you don't want to see them using the layout buttons on the top right of the New Tab page.

The Omnibox (which combines URL entry, search and more) now has a better drop-down menu, with new icons added to distinguish between searches, bookmarks, sites from your browsing history and suggested sites.

The Omnibox is indisputably an important part of Google Chrome -- it helps you get to the sites you're looking for with just a few keystrokes. With this release, Google has optimized the presentation of the drop-down menu and added little icons to help you distinguish between suggested sites, searches, bookmarks, and sites from your browsing history.

Lastly, Google Chrome now has themes, allowing you to customise the browser’s look.Now you can pick a wonderful theme from the google galary and dress up your browser to match your mood and taste.

If you want to try it out yourself head over to the Google Chrome beta download page. It’s currently only available for machines running Windows Vista or XP SP2+.

10 Interesting Things about Bing!!!

Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, has had several weeks to prove its worth. It's proved popular, picking up market share from both Yahoo and Google to become the second most used search service on the web.

But there's more to Bing than first meets the eye. Like Google, it has hidden depths and additional features. Here are ten useful bits of Bing you may have missed.

1. Get more from the USMost of Bing's mash-up functionality is embedded in the US version of the site. You don't need an anonymised proxy - like hidemyass.com - to fool the site though. All you need to do is click the country link at the top right of the main page. In the UK it will say "United Kingdom" by default. Choose "United States" instead. Done.

2. Search for wallpaperUsing Bing Image search to find desktop wallpaper? Do your search by keyword, then click "Size > Wallpaper" in the sidebar. Not only is the search narrowed to desktop wallpapers - it's narrowed down to your computer monitor's current screen resolution. If it's set to 1280 x 1024, for example, it only returns images with those dimensions.

3. Remove the backgroundBing's main search page has a background image embedded by default. Want a cleaner page? Step one: enter www.bing.com/?rb=0 in the address bar and hit return. Bing's front page now appears without any background clutter. Step two: drag the Bing favicon in the address box to your favourites or bookmarks bar. Next time you want to Bing something, click that link.

4. Boolean searchesBing's all about simplicity, but it still does Boolean searches. With multiple keywords "AND" is inferred, but you can exclude terms from searches with - or NOT. For example "auction sites NOT ebay" will exclude eBay from your results. Like Google, using the + operator requires that the specified keyword appears in the page. You can also use "OR", for example "HD DVD OR Blu-Ray" will return results containing either search term.

5. Find instant answers
Like Google, Bing has built in smart algorithms for location data, word definitions, weight and currency conversion and even complex arithmetical calculations. Try "define computer" for a dictionary definition or "$20 into pounds" to sample Bing's conversion capabilities. Want to know the weather in your local area? Try the term "weather" followed by your nearest town or city. You can even search the status of specific flights. Just type "Flight status of ". You'll be prompted to enter a flight number.

Bing goes even further - pulling data from partner sites in response to requests for statistical data. The query "What is the UK population" returns results from online census data, for example.

6. Find your siteIs your site listed in Bing? Type in http://www.blogger.com/yourdomain.com to find out. Once you've established that Bing has you listed, type site:yourdomain.com to see how many of your pages Bing has listed. If nothing turns up, you can submit your site for indexing.

7. Save results for later"Save and Share" is an experimental feature powered by Silverlight. Click "See All" in the Search History section of the sidebar - then "Save and Share". Select the search query you want to save in the list then click "save to". Choose "Saved searches" or create a new folder. Searches can also be emailed or published to you Facebook wall. If you decide you no longer want to use the service, click "return to your history".

8. Convert Search to RSSAn RSS feed of a search result is a handy thing to have - whether you're keeping tabs on a developing news event or want to track the performance of your web site. Like Windows Live Search before it, Bing results pages can be saved as RSS feeds.
On your results page, click the RSS symbol in IE then click "Subscribe to this feed". In Firefox, you can choose to add the feed to Google Reader instead. To add to other feed readers, select and copy the URL in the address bar, paste it into your RSS reader and add "&format=rss" to the end of the address before saving.

9. Add Bing to your BrowserDo you use Chrome but want to search Bing from the address bar? Right click on the address bar then choose "Edit search engines" from the context sensitive menu. Click "Add" and, giving the name "Bing" - enter the URL www.bing.com/search?q=%s
To add Bing to Firefox's quicksearch bar, you'll need an add-on. Install the official Microsoft Bing extension.

10. Quick Add in HotmailHotmail recently added Bing integration. Log in to Hotmail and create a new message. In the Quick Add sidebar click images or video. Use the search box to find suitable content, then click "Insert". The new content is formatted and added to the body of your message.

Microsoft confirmed another zero-day vulnerability!!!

Microsoft confirmed another zero-day vulnerability on Monday in a set of software components that ship in a wide variety of the company's products.

The vulnerability resides in Microsoft's Office Web Components, which are used for publishing spreadsheets, charts and databases to the Web, among other functions. The company is working on a patch but did not indicate when it would be released, according to an advisory.
"Specifically, the vulnerability exists in the Spreadsheet ActiveX control and while we've only seen limited attacks, if exploited successfully, an attacker could gain the same user rights as the local user," wrote Dave Forstrom, a group manager who is part of Microsoft's Security Response Center, in a blog post.

An ActiveX control is a small add-on program that works in a Web browser to facilitate functions such as downloading programs or security updates. Over the years, however, the controls have been prone to vulnerabilities.
The new flaw comes just a day before the company is set to release its monthly patches, including one for another zero-day vulnerability revealed earlier this month. That problem lies with the Video ActiveX control within Internet Explorer and is currently being used by hackers in drive-by download attempts.

In cases of especially dangerous vulnerabilities, Microsoft has deviated from its patching schedule and issued one out of cycle.

Microsoft said that the flaw could allow an attacker to execute code remotely on a machine if someone using Internet Explorer visits a malicious Web site, a hacking technique known as a drive-by download. Web sites that host user-provided content or advertisements could be rigged to take advantage of the vulnerability.

"In all cases, however, an attacker would have no way to force users to visit these Web sites," the advisory said. "Instead, an attacker would have to persuade users to visit the Web site, typically by getting them to click a link in an e-mail message or Instant Messenger message that takes users to the attacker's Web site."

Microsoft issued a list of affected software, which includes Office XP Service Pack 3, 2003 Service Pack 3, several versions of Internet Security and Acceleration Server and Office Small Business Accounting 2006, among others.

Until a patch is ready, Microsoft said one option for administrators is to disable Office Web Components from running in Internet Explorer and has provided instructions.