Logging The Cyber World

Tags: community, facebook, facebook features, location based, twitter, twitter features

Facebook is expected to enable location sharing in its users’ News Feeds, a move that could automatically make the social network the dominant platform for location-based Web services. Twitter already has a geolocation feature that has been spotted in the wild. Meanwhile, social location upstart Foursquare will offer a free analytics tool and dashboard to give business owners information and statistics about visitors to their establishments. Google is also heavily invested in the future of location and social networking.

Facebook is expected to enable location sharing in its users’ News Feeds, a move that could automatically make the social network the dominant platform for location-based Web services.

A March 9 report in the New York Times cited sources saying Facebook would announce the news at its F8 developer conference, slated for April 21 and 22 in San Francisco.

More on eWeek.com

Tags: Browsers, death of ie6, ie6 funeral, ie6 internet explorer, ie6 last days, ie9

Microsoft sent flowers to last night’s IE6 funeral, thanking the browser for “all the good times.”

The nine-year-old IE6 was laid to rest yesterday in Denver, Colorado, after suffering a “workplace injury” at the offices of a certain search giant in Mountain View, California. Mourners unable to attend were asked to send flowers, and Redmond’s Internet Explorer team was among those who did so.

“Thanks for the good times IE6, see you all @ MIX when we show a little piece of IE Heaven,” read the card, a reference to this month’s MIX tradeshow in Las Vegas, where the company is expected to announce the arrival of a new browser, Internet Explorer 9.

More at TheRegisters

Tags: arctic ocean, doomsday, frozen methane, global warming, methane, siberian sea, temperature rising

Doomsday scenario goes something like this: If global temperatures keep rising, some methane hydrates will melt, sending methane gas bubbling up through the ocean and into the atmosphere. Like any good greenhouse gas, the methane will trap heat close to Earth’s surface, causing temperatures to climb even higher. Hotter temperatures will melt more hydrates, and on and on. In other words, methane hydrates could trigger the mother of all feedback loops. The story, says David Archer, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, “has a great apocalyptic side to it.”

A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov.

The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.

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Tags: captions, deaf, speech recognition, Videos, youtube, youtube features

YouTube is making the tens of millions of videos it hosts more accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing by putting automatic captions on them.

The Google-owned company said this use of speech recognition technology is probably the biggest experiment of its kind online.

Previously captions were only on a small amount of content.

“A core part of YouTube’s DNA is access to content,” said the firm’s product manager Hunter Walk.

More on BBC News

Tags: botnet, botnet masters, mariposa network, ring network, virus infected computers

SAN FRANCISCO – Authorities have smashed one of the world’s biggest networks of virus-infected computers, a data vacuum that stole credit cards and online banking credentials from as many as 12.7 million poisoned PCs.

The “botnet” of infected computers included PCs inside more than half of the Fortune 1,000 companies and more than 40 major banks, according to investigators.

Spanish investigators, working with private computer-security firms, have arrested the three alleged ringleaders of the so-called Mariposa botnet, which appeared in December 2008 and grew into one of the biggest weapons of cybercrime. More arrests are expected soon in other countries.

Spanish authorities have planned a news conference for Wednesday in Madrid.

Read more at Yahoo News

Tags: Google, google new tools, photo editing, picnik, search giant

Google is adding yet another online service to its growing portfolio of Web-based tools. The search giant today announced that it has bought Picnik, a photo utility that lets users edit digital photos in a Web browser. Picnik launched in 2005 and has 20 employees. Terms of the deal were not announced.

Google’s Intentions
What plans does Google have for Picnik? It won’t say just yet.
“We’re not announcing any significant changes to Picnik today, though we’ll be working hard on integration and new features. As well, we’d like to continue supporting all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo-sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks,” says Google product management director Brian Axe in a blog post.

More on PC World

Tags: elitebook, intel, laptop, notebook capacity, notebooks, processors

Lest anyone be left out of the tablet/slate wave that’s currently crashing over the laptop and ultraportable industry, HP has announced a new 12.1-inch EliteBook convertible tablet for the business-minded who feel the need for pens and capacitive multitouch displays at the same time.

Equipped with a stainless steel finish and magnesium casing, the EliteBook 2740p tablet PC will be available with either a Core i5 or Core i7 processor, a reinforced glass screen, and a touch interface that will also work with an included pen. The 2740p (and its non-tablet sibling, the 2540p below) also meet military standards for high temperatures, dust, vibration and altitude, like its tablet predecessor the 2730p. Built-in HP DriveGuard technology also builds some impact resistance into the design.

More at CNET…

Tags: 50 million tweets, daily tweets, total tweets a day, tweets a day, twitter

Twitter, a popular microblogging site, is continuing its phenomenal growth trajectory. The site, which was launched back in 2007, has seen rapid growth in the past months. Unlike other places where you need other metrics to measure growth, on Twitter, this is quite easy. The easiest way to check its growth is to track the number of tweets sent per day!

Twitter, which was launched in 2007, has enjoyed rapid growth in recent months. In 2007, around 5,000 tweets were sent per day. That increased to 300,000 messages per day in 2008 and now in 2010, it has reached a staggering 50 million tweets per day!

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Tags: space tweet, tweet, twitter

Tweeting is no longer only an earthly phenomenon.

A NASA astronaut made Twitter history on Friday by sending the first tweet from outer space. Flight Engineer T.J. Creamer broadcast the following message directly from the International Space Station:

“Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! More soon, send your ?s”

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Tags: commercial travel, space tourist, space travel, spacecraft

Five years ago, with the winning of the Ansari XPrize, hopes for commercial space travel seemed to soar as high as the space vehicle, SpaceShipOne, that had flown the series of sub orbital flights in the summer and autumn of 2004. Now, with the unveiling of SpaceShipTwo, hope has taken another step toward reality.

SpaceShipTwo, which has been under development the past few years by Scaled Composites, will take two pilots and six paying passengers on sub orbital barn storming flights. For two hundred thousand dollars, anyone can experience micro gravity and witness the curvature of the Earth, experiences hitherto only reserved for astronauts flying on government space craft.

The first commercial flights past the one hundred kilometer mark will likely take place in 2011, after an extensive testing regime. As with SpaceShipOne, SpaceShipTwo will be taken to a height of about fifty thousand feet by a mother ship, the White Knight Two, and then released as it fires its rocket engines.

Read the full article at Examiner.com