Transcendigital blog

Yahoo said Wednesday it will anonymize most of the data it collects about
people’s Web searches after three months, a move that could put further
pressure on competitors Google and Microsoft to do the same due to privacy
concerns.

Yahoo, which previously kept the data for 13 months, will now retain it for
the least amount of time compared to its rivals.

Google said in September that it would anonymize data after nine months, down
from 18 months. Microsoft keeps data for 18 months, although it said earlier
this month it would reduce the period to six months if its rivals did the same.

A European Union group has recommended that search engines discard data after
six months. The recommendation has been endorsed by data protection officials
from the 27 countries in the European Union. Countries could eventually choose
to enforce the recommendation, which will be discussed further next year

Original article can be found here:www.pcworld.com/article/155610/yahoo_to_scrub_personal_data_after_three_months.html

Mozilla issued eight patches for its Firefox Web browser, three of which fix
problems classified as critical.

The patches come after security experts recommended using a browser other than
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 and older versions of IE due to a dangerous
vulnerability. Microsoft is due to release an emergency patch for that problem
today.

Two of the critical Firefox problems could allow an attacker to execute a
cross-site scripting attack, in which scripts or commands from one Web
application that shouldn’t run in another are successfully executed. The third
problem relates to Firefox’s browser engine, and could make it crash or
possibly allow someone to remotely execute code on a PC, Mozilla said in its
advisory.

Original Article Posted Here:computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9123679&intsrc=hm_list

One of the first posts I wrote for this blog last summer tried to define what
we at Google mean when we talk about the concept of net neutrality.

Broadband providers — the on-ramps to the Internet — should not be allowed
to prioritize traffic based on the source, ownership or destination of the
content. As I noted in that post, broadband providers should have the
flexibility to employ network upgrades, such as edge caching. However, they
shouldn’t be able to leverage their unilateral control over consumers’
broadband connections to hamper user choice, competition, and innovation. Our
commitment to that principle of net neutrality remains as strong as ever.

Some critics have questioned whether improving Web performance through edge
caching — temporary storage of frequently accessed data on servers that are
located close to end users — violates the concept of network neutrality. As I
said last summer, this myth — which unfortunately underlies a confused story
in Monday’s Wall Street Journal — is based on a misunderstanding of the way
in which the open Internet works.

Edge caching is a common practice used by ISPs and application and content
providers in order to improve the end user experience. Companies like Akamai,
Limelight, and Amazon’s Cloudfront provide local caching services, and
broadband providers typically utilize caching as part of what are known as
content distribution networks (CDNs). Google and many other Internet companies
also deploy servers of their own around the world.

Original Article Posted Here:googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/12/net-neutrality-and-benefits-of-caching.html

This document is meant to provide web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers. Insufficient understanding of these often poorly-documented characteristics is a major contributing factor to the prevalence of several classes of security vulnerabilities.

Although all browsers implement roughly the same set of baseline features, there is relatively little standardization - or conformance to standards - when it comes to many of the less apparent implementation details. Furthermore, vendors routinely introduce proprietary tweaks or improvements that may interfere with existing features in non-obvious ways, and seldom provide a detailed discussion of potential problems.

Article Link:www.transcendigital.net/blog/wp-admin/post-new.php

The first thing you’ll notice about 2.7 is its new interface. From the top
down, we’ve listened to your feedback and thought deeply about the design and
the result is a WordPress that’s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do
on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a
previous version. Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly
sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange
with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress,
comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your
dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with
a single click, and sticky posts.

Article Link:wordpress.org/development/2008/12/coltrane/

Of the three major search engine companies, Microsoft is the first to voice
its willingness to meet a request by EC regulators to keep users’ search data
for just six months. But Microsoft will only do so if Google and Yahoo also
comply.

Microsoft told European authorities on Monday that it’s willing to retain
search data for six months rather than the current 18, but only if Google and
Yahoo also agree to keep search data for six months.

Last spring, an advisory panel of the European Commission requested search
companies to start keeping search for six months only. Google currently keeps
search data on hand for nine months, and Yahoo for 13 months.

In replying to the EC some nine months after the request was issued, Microsoft
contended that keeping search data on hand gives a company a competitive
advantage.

Original Article can be found here:www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_is_open_to_purging_its_search_caches_after_six_months/1228841842

In September, Google announced plans to scan and index the content of
historical newspapers — that project just got a huge boost with the
acquisition of Paper of Record’s archives.

Paper of Record started off by being the first to index the entire history of
the Toronto Star newspaper in original published form. Since then, they have
expanded their efforts internationally to UK, Australia, Bahamas, Belgium,
Canada, Chile, Ecuador France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and
Mexico.

Newspapers are an excellent source of historical information, and thanks to
the combined efforts of Google and Paper of Records, it will be unlocked for
everyone to search and read. This shows how these companies percieve the
importance of all kinds of information — be it breaking news, or hundreds of
years old.

Article Link:logs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=1198

MySpace users with mobile phones are about to find out if
they can walk and watch TV at the same time.

On Wednesday, News Corp’s online social network will make video clips from its
members’ pages available for viewing on mobile devices including the
BlackBerry Bold, Palm Centro, Motorola Q9, LG Voyager, Nokia N95 and Samsung
Instinct.

Members will be able to look at video on their own homepages as well as
friends’ pages. They also will be able to view professionally produced video
from TMZ, the celebrity news and gossip website owned by Time Warner Inc; the
National Hockey League; National Geographic magazine; satirical newspaper The
Onion and others.

The free service will be supported by advertising. MySpace and many other
companies are trying to exploit the small but growing mobile advertising market.

MySpace declined to comment on the cost of the project or how much money it
would make them.

Article Link:uk.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUKTRE4B216V20081203

Facebook has thrown the switch on a system that lets users browse other sites
via the networking portal.

Called Connect, the system lets Facebook members use their login credentials
to access other websites.

The system also gives feedback about what a Facebooker’s friends have been
doing on those partner sites.

Among the first sites visitable through Connect will be the Discovery Channel,
social news site Digg, as well as video site Hulu.

Audience fight

Connect was first announced in May 2008 and is Facebook’s response to the work
of rivals, such as MySpace, who have rolled out similar systems.

All the sites are keen to ensure that they do not become a place that members
go but are the only place they have to go as they can use their login
information to get at content anywhere else.

Behind the initiatives are software projects that open up the basic interfaces
for the social sites, so others can understand how they format data about
members’ activities.

The built-in socialising tools on sites such as MySpace and Facebook will mean
that friends can virtually gather, for instance, to watch a video via Hulu and
chat about it all in the same place.

Article Link:news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7759304.stm

Google has published its plan to build into Chrome what is arguably its most
requested feature: the ability to accept extensions that can customize how the
open-source Web browser operates.

And guess what? Google’s dependence on advertising notwithstanding, one of the
extension examples the company points to is the ability to block advertisements.

The Chrome extensions document, spotlighted Saturday by Google programmer
Aaron Boodman, doesn’t include a timeline, but it does shed light on why the
project is a priority for Chromium, the open-source project behind Chrome.

“Chromium can’t be everything to all people,” according to the document.
“User-created extensions have been proposed to solve these problems: the
addition of features that have specific or limited appeal; users coming from
other browsers who are used to certain extensions that they can’t live
without; bundling partners who would like to add features to Chromium specific
to their bundle.”

Article Link:news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10110247-2.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0