Scientists Prove that Voting Machines are being Hacked

Computer scientists from California universities have hacked into three electronic voting systems used in California and elsewhere in the nation and found several ways in which vote totals could potentially be altered. more

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Facebook App Sees Small Selling Price. What’s it Really Worth?

A Facebook application called Advent Calendar (one of a handful) had put itself up for sale on eBay last week, but hasn’t gotten more than $7,099 by the final bidding time. That wasn’t enough to meet the reserve, and gives a rather dismal outlook to the overall value of Facebook apps. While there has been a lot of interest in Facebook’s platform and the subsequent applications on the investment end, no applications have seemed to fetch a large acquisition price.

This seems to be for several reasons, most of which seem to be associated with the current market. But I don’t really have to state the obvious when it comes to this particular Advent Calendar application that’s been put up for sale–how do you monetize such an application that can only be used for 24 days of the year?

Nevertheless, this is the second company in the past week to seek a buyout in time for the holidays. DivShare has kept the details of its “for sale” status pretty under wraps, but a lot of speculation regarding its selling potential has been swirling around as well. But when it comes to the Advent Calendar application, it’s a rather unique situation, considering the newness of applications, the “market” and the rest of the world joining in on the open bandwagon.

[via allfacebook]

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coComment Yourself on Facebook

coComment has found another way to let you follow your comments across the web. It has two new Facebook applications that will track and display the comments from blogs and websites that you participate in. One app is for individual users, while the other is for publishers. So no matter what your purpose behind comment-tracking, you can share it with friends on Facebook. The good thing about the application designed for individual users is the ability to customize which blogs’ comments display in the app. This of course will also be displayed on your profile, so all your friends can see your comments from across the web. Now, setting up the Facebook apps for coComment is a different story. It’s not so easy if you don’t already have a coComment account, and of course you’ll need to register and install the coComment application prior to starting with your app on Facebook. 

So is it worth the trouble? The hope is to find new places to congregate your comments, and get friends more interested in all those smart things you say on other people’s blogs. But I’m actually less inclined to read comments when they’re “floating” around without context. At the very least, I do like the idea of having access to my aggregated comments available on Facebook.

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Can Yahoo Structured Search Beat Google?

In an effort to stand out (and then beat) Google, Yahoo may soon be rolling out a structured search for particular keywords, which would give a more informative set of results than just links to websites containing relevant information.

While very few details have been released about this possible new search setup, one example given is for the search term “mobile phones.” This could return a set of results that offer drop down menus for manufacturer information, brands, technologies, prices and stores. Based on your selections from the drop down menus, your search query will become further tailored to your specific needs.

It’s more of a custom search that borrows some ideas from many that are striving to achieve semantic search, from Grayboxx to Mahalo and Twine. If you look at the basics of what Yahoo is proposing, it appears to be most similar to Grayboxx and Krillion, where users search for certain terms and get a set of results that can be narrowed down for products. Obviously this search setup is more inclined to work better for e-commerce product searches, from a structured level. And it builds on concepts that Yahoo’s been toying with for some time, including the promotion of Yahoo Store search results being included in a pertinent search, or its recent push for an improved Yahoo Local.

So could this in fact help Yahoo differentiate itself from Google, by bringing more value to end users? The idea is useful, especially for those masses of users that aren’t terribly accustomed to online search. But it probably won’t make much of a dent in Google’s dominant market share. Especially after buckling yesterday during Cyber Monday shopping. Ask.com has also been tweaking its search tools in order to offer a broader set of results, giving you song clips and videos that play directly from your query page, and other results that speak towards a structured semantic search as well.

[via macworld]

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MySpace News Feeds, Coming to a Profile Near You

Newsfeeds. Everybody’s got them, and MySpace wants them too. You’ll find them added to your account in the next month or so, alerting you to all of your friends’ activities. This isn’t the only time MySpace has moved to better emulate Facebook, which seems to have all the right moves when it comes to engaging users and promoting useless information.

Today’s announcement from Fox Interactive Media President Peter Levinsohn includes other changes that MySpace will be making to its social network, including profile privacy settings that let you create multiple profiles so you can “change faces” according to friends, family and business, something that several other social networks like Friendster are considering as well. This was all hinted at with MySpace’s set of rather significant updates that were mentioned a nearly two months ago, taking MySpace in the same direction as so many other social networks out there–towards the path of Facebook.

The other big announcement from Fox Interactive today is in regards to the expansion of its new ad network, which will now incorporate the entire Murdoch online media empire for advertising options to online marketers.

[via Reuters]

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Google's big green energy goal: A distraction?

Google is announcing a new strategic initiative to develop electricity that's generated from renewable sources--wind, solar and geothermal systems--and cheaper than coal. This initiative, called the rather clunky Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal, will hire engineers, energy experts and "spend tens of millions on research and development and related investments in renewable energy." Meanwhile, Google says it anticipates "investing hundreds of millions of dollars in breakthrough renewable energy projects which generate positive returns." One question: Is Google the right company to be taking on this effort? Google co-founder Larry Page's answer on a conference call: "This doesn't count as search and advertising, but we do want to give our business some latitude to look into new areas especially when they... more

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British TV Rivals Team Up For Joint Online TV On-Demand Service

British TV networks the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 will launch a new joint online TV on-demand service that will provide a one-stop shop of content from all channels.

The new service, as yet unnamed will be launched in 2008 and will include free downloads, streaming, show rental and purchase via the internet, with possible future expansion onto other platforms. Shows available will include locally produced content and possibly US and other non-British content as well. Like existing online offerings from the networks it is presumed that the service will be available to residents of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland only.

The BBC has had ongoing problems with its iPlayer service which faced delays and budgets blowouts, then came under attack for being available to Windows users only.

The significance of the service has been described by the BBC as “historic;” to put the deal in perspective it would be like CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox coming together for a joint portal where all their shows would be available to be viewed on demand, for download (to say an iPod), purchased or rented. Ultimately the biggest winner from the deal will be the British viewer who will have unparalleled access to legal TV content online in the one spot. Here’s hoping that the idea might be taken up in other countries.

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How to find Good Torrent Content ? PickyPirate might help you

BitTorrents aren’t your average video-sharing networks. They’re different in their own right, and command a different breed of user. That user is often less concerned with the typical wiles of popular web 2.0 trends, but every once in a while, some interesting mashups come about as a result of the existence of the two in the online world.

PickyPirate has picked up on one such need and has created a mashup that aggregates reviews from Metacritc and matches them up with content you can find on Mininova and The Pirate Bay, and directing you to the healthiest torrent accordingly. Metacritic is an aggregator itself. Part of the CNet family, it gathers reviews from trusted critics across the web. And PickyPirate then passes this aggregated knowledge onto you.

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YouTube Desktop is Now iDesktop.TV

You may remember YouTube Desktop, a video aggregator that came on the scene at the height of the video aggregator onslaught. You can read our initial review here. Well, we haven’t heard from the company since the launch, but that’s probably because its team has been behind the scenes working on its new version, which is a complete relaunch of the service. And given its name, perhaps it’s gotten in some hot water due to its namesake video-sharing network. Whatever the case may be, part of this relaunch is a name change. YouTube Desktop is now iDesktop TV.

As great as this name change is, let’s talk about its new features. One of the biggest new features is the ability to download videos, converting them to pretty much any format–AVI, MP4, 3GP, WMV, FLV, ZIP, etc. This means you can view the videos on your mobile as well. An import option has been added for the integration of your YouTube account, or for other YouTube users that you’d like to follow through iDesktop TV. This imports their playlists or favorites.

Speaking of favorites, this seems to be a new option for users as well, which appears as a star icon on each video thumbnail. Another helpful feature is search filtering, which lets you better sort through your results. Enhancements to the player include new themes, and the option of being opened in a new window. All these new features add onto an already easy-to-use aggregation tool for collecting videos from across the web.

iDesktop TV is still sticking to YouTube for gathering all of its content, which makes for a unified experience in dealing with the videos you aggregate on the site (download options, etc.) I don’t think it’s focus on YouTube is necessarily a hindrance in this case. However, as YouTube continues to add features and search options into its own service, the necessity for parasitic aggregators may eventually be minimized.

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Flixster Tops 1 Billion Movie Ratings

Flixster CEO Joe Greenstein dropped us an email late last and let slip with a rather impressive fact: Flixster, the social media movie rating application, has just crossed over one billion movie ratings, having reached the number in less than two years from launching the service.

“1,000,000,000 is a great milestone but you should see what a mess our office is with all those post-it notes.” said Flixster CEO Joe Greenstein. “We could really use some computer people to help us figure out a better system for the next couple billion.”

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Google Ditches Video Link !!!

Ok, it’s not a big deal, but it’s a holiday, and thus Google replacing a link on their homepage qualifies as news. So, here goes: Google has replaced the “video” link on the classic homepage with the “products” link, formerly known as Froogle. The video link got dumped in the “more” dropdown menu with the other less worthy links.

I could go on about how this means that Google is changing its strategy and focusing on product search, but we all know I’d be wasting your (and my) time. Google Video isn’t all that interesting anymore, they replaced it with something else, and that’s it.

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Down time of popular Social Networks

In an effort to answer the question “which social network is most reliable?”, the folks of Royal Pingdom measured the uptime of 12 popular social networks - MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Orkut, Friendster, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, Bebo, Last.fm, Reunion.com, Classmates.com and Yahoo! 360 - over a three month period.

As it turns out, Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft’s social network (drink up if you haven’t had any idea that Microsoft has a social network) fared poorly, with 3 hours downtime in the measured period. Yahoo! 360 (drink up again if you also had no idea that Yahoo has a social network) was the best of the bunch with absolutely zero downtime, but it was closely followed by Facebook and MySpace which both had only 10 minutes of downtime.

Overall, the results are quite good, with half of the networks having less than one hour of downtime over the three month period; personally, I’d expect worse, so I was pleasantly surprised to know that our social networks are so reliable.

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Yahoo's new social network, myM

Yahoo’s got a new social network up, called myM. Yes, the last letter is capitalized. No, we don’t know why. myM is currently in invite-only beta stage, and it’s described as a social messaging service. Actually, let me quote the whole revelatory sentence from myM’s home page:

“myM is changing the way you think about IM by allowing you to express yourself and connect with your friends in a whole new way.”

Ok, that tells us nothing, but Valleywag claims that the service will be similar to Meebo, meaning that it will let you connect with your IM buddies across several IM platforms: AIM, MSN, Yahoo IM, and Meebo itself. Also, you’ll be able to access Friendster, MySpace, and LiveJournal (Facebook is not mentioned).

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Facebook Blocked In Syria

The government of Syria has made the move to block Facebook inside their borders.

According to sources speaking with Reuters, the official statement from officials is that they fear “Facebook could become a conduit for Israeli penetration of our youth”.  Critics of the government say that it is really to cut off access to the outside world.  This appears to be but one small symptom of a much larger problem for Syrians as Internet cafes are being ordered to limit their communication options, and there is even an Internet Political Crimes ward at one prison now.

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Zumobi Plans To Go Beta On December 14th

Zumobi, formerly known as ZenZui, is getting set to launch its beta version on December 14th.

Aiming to make the mobile web experience more pleasant, Zumobi uses a system of “tiles” to give you a visual representation of the sites you want to visit. The information is pushed to your phone so when you click on a tile you will automatically zoom to the site without waiting for a download. To make things even easier on users, Zumobi users can send their tiles to other users so they end up spreading virally.

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Skype Encryption Too Tough For Ze Police

German police cannot decipher the encryption used by Skype, and they’re complaining about it. How can they monitor all those bad guys if Skype encrypts the damn data? It’s so unfair.

“The encryption with Skype telephone software … creates grave difficulties for us,” said Joerg Ziercke, president of Germany’s Federal Police Office (BKA). Well, the thing about encryption is that it should create problems for those trying to decipher the message. That’s the whole idea. But, the German authorities aren’t really talking to Skype about this; in fact, since using spyware to collect information from a person’s computer is illegal in Germany, this is probably just pressure to legalize this practice.

Skype uses RSA for key negotiation and the Advanced Encryption Standard to encrypt conversations; these are solid standards, widely recognized for their security. However, if you’re willing to put on your tinfoil hat for a moment, you can always consider the possibility that the NSA put backdoors in some of those standards in the first place.

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Air Pollution on Google Earth. Erin Brockovich Would’ve Loved This.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has created a Google Earth map mashup that shows air quality across the nation. Get started here. There’s even a 3-D map overlay that lets you view the level of air pollutants that are coming from specific businesses. You can see this if you tilt your map, and it’s most useful when used with 3D map renderings, complete with business buildings and all. more

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Facebook Optimized for Windows Mobile

Microsoft has released developer tools for the creation of optimized Facebook applications on Windows Mobile. See the developer tools here. The good thing about these tools is the integration with pretty much all the Windows Mobile applications themselves, so you’ll be able to let your Facebook apps take advantage of mobile media-sharing, contacts synchronization, and Outlook integration.

That makes it easier on the consumer end for the real-life utilization of certain applications found on Facebook. Either way, Facebook apps can ow be better optimized for use on Windows Mobile, but the benefit of this set of APIs is the option for a deeper integration.

We can expect to see similar tools for developers for Google’s own mobile offerings, with OpenSocial integration for the applications that will be made available on Google’s mobile platform. You may also recall that Facebook, which now has APIs for building mobile applications, has also been optimized for Blackberry use, continuing the spurred innovation we saw come about earlier this year with the release of the iPhone.

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Facebook Optimized for Windows Mobile

Microsoft has released developer tools for the creation of optimized Facebook applications on Windows Mobile. See the developer tools here. The good thing about these tools is the integration with pretty much all the Windows Mobile applications themselves, so you’ll be able to let your Facebook apps take advantage of mobile media-sharing, contacts synchronization, and Outlook integration.

That makes it easier on the consumer end for the real-life utilization of certain applications found on Facebook. Either way, Facebook apps can ow be better optimized for use on Windows Mobile, but the benefit of this set of APIs is the option for a deeper integration.

We can expect to see similar tools for developers for Google’s own mobile offerings, with OpenSocial integration for the applications that will be made available on Google’s mobile platform. You may also recall that Facebook, which now has APIs for building mobile applications, has also been optimized for Blackberry use, continuing the spurred innovation we saw come about earlier this year with the release of the iPhone.

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Facebook Optimized for Windows Mobile

Microsoft has released developer tools for the creation of optimized Facebook applications on Windows Mobile. See the developer tools here. The good thing about these tools is the integration with pretty much all the Windows Mobile applications themselves, so you’ll be able to let your Facebook apps take advantage of mobile media-sharing, contacts synchronization, and Outlook integration.

That makes it easier on the consumer end for the real-life utilization of certain applications found on Facebook. Either way, Facebook apps can ow be better optimized for use on Windows Mobile, but the benefit of this set of APIs is the option for a deeper integration.

We can expect to see similar tools for developers for Google’s own mobile offerings, with OpenSocial integration for the applications that will be made available on Google’s mobile platform. You may also recall that Facebook, which now has APIs for building mobile applications, has also been optimized for Blackberry use, continuing the spurred innovation we saw come about earlier this year with the release of the iPhone.

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Facebook Optimized for Windows Mobile

Microsoft has released developer tools for the creation of optimized Facebook applications on Windows Mobile. See the developer tools here. The good thing about these tools is the integration with pretty much all the Windows Mobile applications themselves, so you’ll be able to let your Facebook apps take advantage of mobile media-sharing, contacts synchronization, and Outlook integration.

That makes it easier on the consumer end for the real-life utilization of certain applications found on Facebook. Either way, Facebook apps can ow be better optimized for use on Windows Mobile, but the benefit of this set of APIs is the option for a deeper integration.

We can expect to see similar tools for developers for Google’s own mobile offerings, with OpenSocial integration for the applications that will be made available on Google’s mobile platform. You may also recall that Facebook, which now has APIs for building mobile applications, has also been optimized for Blackberry use, continuing the spurred innovation we saw come about earlier this year with the release of the iPhone.

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Digg Refugees May Be Heading To Mixx

New startup Mixx, which went in to private beta just two months ago, may be finding itself with the right product at the right time. Digg users, including top contributors, are showing an increasing amount of frustration with the Digg community, and many are leaving. Conspiracy theories that Digg auto buries stories with certain topics or linking to certain sites only compounds the problem.

Some users eventually go to Reddit, Propeller or any of a number of other Digg-like sites. But a disproportionate amount of them seem to be heading to Mixx, and writing about their choice.

SEOSC gives Mixx a thumbs up and says “I have already had quite a lot of success with getting my submissions voted on, this may be partly due to the fact that many of my digg friends have joined the site.”

Vandelay Design says “Unlike 99% of the other Digg clones, I think Mixx has a real chance for success…Mixx has a much more positive audience than Digg. It always amazes me that even the most popular and highest quality articles can get so many negative and unnecessarily degrading comments on Digg. So far the users of Mixx have proven to be quite a bit more pleasant, something that I know will be welcomed by most users.”

Finally, JD Rucker notes that a lot of top Digg users are at least experimenting with Mixx. And he mentions specifically that Greg Davies left Digg for Mixx.

Mixx users have even set up a category in their forums called Digg Refugees for users to discuss the phenomenon and spread conspiracy theories.

Compete shows traffic rising dramatically since launch, without the usual drop off that occurs after the initial press about a site dies down. It’s still a blip compared to Digg, the fact that early adopters are leaving Digg and quite vocally telling the world about it, Mixx may be a startup to keep an eye on.

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'Live Documents' To Break Microsoft ???

Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia announces he’s going to war with Microsoft by (someday) launching an online version of Office. The fact that Bhatia got rich when Microsoft bought Hotmail for $400 million in 1997 only adds additional drama to the story.

The as yet unlaunched product, called Live Documents (see our review from a year ago when the product was significantly different), will be a Flash based online suite that competes with Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The company will also release plugins that work with the desktop Office software that lets users store and collaborate on documents online.

If this sounds a bit like Google Docs and Zoho, that’s because it is. The differentiating factors for Live Documents, besides the fact that it’s built on Flash (Google Docs and Zoho are Ajax applications), is that they are promising feature matches with Office 2007 and they have the offline plugin component. more

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Alexa gone mad !!!

Amazon’s Alexa traffic reporting service has little credibility left among people who follow traffic trends. Most analytics services, like Comscore, don’t measure small sites well, but they tend to get it right for the larger sites. Alexa seems to get everything wrong, no matter how large or small the site.

For example: In August Alexa said that YouTube passed Google itself in total page views. They were wrong, but their data continues to perpetuate this alternate reality.Now, another embarrassing error. Alexa says that Facebook, on a steady growth curve for the last two years, now has a larger audience than MySpace. This isn’t as ridiculous as the YouTube/Google error, but it’s still way off. Comscore says that worldwide MySpace uniques are 109 million/month, whereas Facebook is at 86 million. Compete.com, which measures traffic using similar techniques as Alexa, stills says that MySpace is larger than Facebook.

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While Live Documents Yaps, Zoho Delivers

While some startups issue boastful press releases promising the world, India and Silicon Valley based Zoho is actually doing the software thing. Recently they launched full offline access for Zoho writer, based on the Google Gears open source platform.

In August the company launched partial offline functionality that let users read documents. Documents can now be edited offline as well after this most recent release. Google still does not offer offline functionality for Google Docs, although presumably it’s coming shortly.

Zoho continues to lead the pack in offering a useful online Office alternative. Competing with Google is hard enough for the big guys, but Zoho is winning ground as an independent startup. Adobe has thrown its hat in the ring with Buzzword. Microsoft continues to dither as it contemplates the half-life of its massive Office revenues.

Yahoo remains silent…but some have said they’ve at least sniffed around at acquiring Zoho. Seems like a good fit to me. A big draw of Zimbra, which Yahoo acquired this summer for $350 million, is their offline functionality. Email and Office apps go hand in hand.

Zoho says offline support for their other applications will come as soon as the platform is stable.

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