Headline Feeds
What we're seeing in Iran could be the beginning of some big political changes. Fishy results in the presidential election held in Iran last week have led to massive protests, some of which have turned violent. The way the news about the country's turbulence is reaching other parts of the world is monumental in its own right -- symptomatic of the changes that have been brewing ever since the term "Web 2.0" moved into cliché territory.
Iran's efforts to suppress international news coverage of the unrest have largely failed, because the tools of journalism are in the hands of too many people. Digital cameras, low-cost video recorders and cellphones are being used to record, compose and transmit multimedia accounts of protests and reprisals in Tehran and other cities through Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and countless other social media and networking services. Compared to these channels of communication, mainstream news establishments -- even the ones that operate on a manic, never-off-the-air, 24-hour cycle -- seem downright slow.
The downside, of course, is that with so much noise, it's hard to separate real, verifiable information from hearsay -- or even deliberate lies.
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Leaky Dam
China's government is calling its latest Web-filtering technology "Green Dam," and the stream it's supposed to shore up is information -- namely, any information the government considers pornographic or politically incorrect. Companies selling personal computers will soon be required to install the software in all machines they sell in China.
That could be a big problem for the forces against censorship, who see Green Dam as just one more way for the government to control information. But it could also be a big problem for the rest of the world, if a study released by security experts at the University of Michigan is correct.
That study says Green Dam is full of holes and that installing it renders a computer completely vulnerable to Web-based attacks. If it's suddenly installed on all new Chinese PCs, it doesn't take much energy to imagine what kind of enormous botnet someone could create with the right exploit.
The report also asserts there's evidence that the developers of Green Dam swiped their blocked sites lists from Solid Oak Software, a U.S.-based company that makes a parental control application called "Cybersitter.'
The developer has denied pirating the information, and China says a patch for Green Dam's security problems is on the way.
Taking Our Browser and Going Home
Remember the good old early '90s, when your out-of-the-box operating system didn't have a Web browser, and you had to use one of those free AOL discs in order to get online? That would have been the future of some Windows users in Europe, if Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) little plan hadn't been squashed by the European Commission.
A while back, browser maker Opera Software complained that Microsoft was using Windows' dominance in Europe unfairly by bundling its Internet Explorer browser into Windows. When people buy a Windows computer, a lot of them just use the default Microsoft browser, which puts rivals at a disadvantage -- so the reasoning goes, anyway.
The European Commission decided the complaint had merit, and it wanted to know what Microsoft was going to do about it. So Microsoft basically told them, fine, if you don't want IE bundled in, we'll offer European buyers the option of getting Windows with absolutely no browser built in whatsoever.
Two problems with that: First, if you don't have a browser at all, how do you go online to download alternative browsers? Sounds like Microsoft was being a little snotty.
Secondly, that solution sounded a lot like the plan Microsoft and the EC agreed upon years ago when this same issue was brought up around built-in media players. Microsoft was compelled to offer a version of Windows without its Windows Media Player, and it actually sold about six copies, four of which I'm told were returned. The whole thing ended up looking like a useless waste of time on the EC's part.
This time around, the commission gave Microsoft's plan a big thumbs down and will likely insist that Windows ships with multiple browsers, rather than one or none at all. My prediction: People who don't care will continue to use IE because it's familiar to them; those who do care will continue to use the browser they've been using all along, nothing will really change, and this will end up looking like yet another useless waste of time on the EC's part.
Bing Theory
Could Microsoft possibly be on some kind of roll this summer?
First there was Windows 7, which has made some good impressions as a release candidate. I know, it's hard to get excited about Windows, but after Vista, it's nice to see signs of recovery.
Then there was that Xbox controller they showed at E3. Perhaps it's pronounced Natal as in "Femme Fatale," or maybe it's Natal as in "helpless newborn." Either way, the demos looked cool -- we'll just have to wait and see if it ever reaches the market.
Now we have numbers from comScore indicating Microsoft's new Bing search engine is gaining some ground. In the week of March 25, just before Bing became widely available to the public, Microsoft's search sites had a 9.1 percent share of search result pages. By last week, that figure had climbed to 12.1 percent.
That's still a shadow compared to Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), but it could mean Microsoft is finally getting into the search engine game.
At least this time the company got the name thing right -- something like Bing is much easier to remember than that live.search/ms/searchengine.online/internet.keywordsearch/live.com business they had you doing before.
On the other hand, Bing's burst of popularity could be the result of curious searchers just stopping by to see something new, only to go right back to their Google or Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) habits.
Junk Clicks
If you click on an online ad and decide not to buy the product, then you're maybe a savvy consumer -- or maybe a tightwad, but definitely not a criminal. Click on that ad a million times without buying anything, and you're a fraudster, especially if you use automated botnets to do the dirty work, and the result harms your competitors.
That's exactly what Microsoft says three people did in order to drive up clicks on rivals' advertisements. Yes, all companies that advertise on the Web want their ads to get clicks, but they want those clicks to come from REAL people with real money and a real intention of at least considering a purchase. By employing automated systems to hit ads repeatedly, click fraudsters force so-called "charge-per-click" advertisers to either pay more to keep their ads up or just let them rotate out.
Microsoft says Melanie Suen and Eric and Gordon Lam did just that, and in doing so cost Redmond nearly $1 million in reimbursements for wasted ads.
What Do You Suggest?
Maybe you're tired of flipping coins, throwing darts, visiting fortune tellers, looking at tea leaves and analyzing goat entrails whenever you're pressed to make a decision. If that's the case, you may like Hunch.com, a new Web site that aims to lift the burden of decision-making from your shoulders.
The service starts by asking some personal questions to figure out exactly what kind of person it's working with -- sort of like those Facebook quizzes that are supposed to tell you which Star Trek character you most resemble, or which brand you'd be if you were a gallon of milk. Now that it knows your very soul -- no doubt better than you know yourself -- it's ready to tell you where you'd like to go on vacation, or which sort of camera you'd most enjoy.
The moneymaker for all this will be links that direct users to sites where they can purchase the products Hunch suggests, which doesn't sound suspicious at all.
I Want My Web!
The recession has forced a lot of American households to cut back on expenses, and cellphone plans and cable TV packages are often the first things on the chopping block. Lots of people are scaling back their monthly fees for these services, if not dumping them completely.
But one thing they're not giving up, it seems, is home broadband access. The latest research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that even though the average U.S. broadband plan is getting more expensive, more households are buying in. The adoption rate is 63 percent, up from 55 percent last year, and the biggest growth is seen among elderly and lower-income individuals.
Meanwhile, 22 percent of respondents to the survey said they've recently cut back to some degree when it comes to cellphone and cable TV expenses. With broadband, though, you get communication tools like email, VoIP and any number of social networking sites, along with a growing variety of entertainment options. You can get plenty of video with Hulu and maybe a Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) account -- so really, who needs cable?
Smarter Phone
If a new iPhone 3G S isn't in the budget, perhaps a big, fat, free software upgrade will be enough to tide you over.
Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has released iPhone OS 3.0, a package that teaches your phone some new tricks -- like landscape typing in all main applications and universal Spotlight search.
Some new but not-as-compelling tricks include shake-to-undo and shake-to-shuffle, which you might want to turn off if you're trying to listen to some music while doing frantic cardio exercises. Then there are the new tricks that aren't exactly new ideas, like copy and paste.
New tricks that are actually cruel jokes, thanks to AT&T (NYSE: T), include MMS picture messaging and data tethering, none of which work yet because the carrier doesn't support them.
Apple says the 3.0 software update includes over 100 new features in all. Still, this new software won't do much for the camera, the processor or the storage capacity. For that, you'll have to upgrade to a 3G S.
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