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.

Blogged with Flock

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.

Blogged with Flock

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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