Category: Internet
OPINION: Why Google must say 'no' to the big publications
What a wind up! I’m saying that because I’m utterly wound up and it’s going to take me to write this semi-controlled tirade of editorial opinion on the subject of Google indexing to get myself ironed out again.
I know what you’re thinking. No, Google indexing does not sound like a good read nor anything worth getting passionate about, but trust me here. Stick with me a sec and I promise I’ll have your blood boiling by the end of the next para.
Internet Explorer 8 hacked within 24 hours
If you’re going to announce that your new browser is the safest on the market, you’d best be damned sure you’re right. It seems Microsoft releasing Internet Explorer 8 out of open beta yesterday was a red flag to a bull (or a challenge to a hacker), because within 24 hours a new exploit has been found in the browser.
The feat occurred at the annual CanSecWest security conference, which hosted its PWN2OWN hacking contest, where the exploit was found. A German hacker going by the name of Nils found it and claims a prize of $5000 in cash and a Sony Vaio laptop as a prize.
It’s only fair to mention that the same hacker managed to claim an additional $10,000 for successfully hacking Safari and Firefox. There’s still two days left for more browsers to succumb to the hacker’s codey wiles – perhaps Chrome and Opera will let their guard slip as well.
Exploring London's highlights with Google Street View
As Dan reported yesterday, Google has quietly rolled out Street View for a select number of cities in the UK.
Of course, London is one of those included allowing us to explore our immediate surroundings without even leaving the office. Judging from a photo of outside my house, the photography is around eight months old, as I remember moving a table visible in my window shortly after moving into my flat.
Internet Explorer 8 out today
Although we happily use a combination of Chrome and Firefox in the office, a new version of Internet Explorer is still big news. Of course, it’s been in open beta for the last year so none of its new improvements and features are big breaking news – especially as most of these changes will be old news to anyone who has been used Chrome, Firefox, Opera or Safari in the last few months. That said, if you’re in an office where Internet Explorer is the only authorised browser, then there’s quite a lot to be excited about. Well, maybe not “excited about”, but it should make your day slightly more enjoyable at least.
So, what kind of features are in Internet Explorer 8? Well there’s a lot under the bonnet to begin with – better security and malware protection mainly. External sources have estimated that IE8 catches two to four times as many malware attacks as other browsers, which is a really impressive step forward for a browser that has always been seen as vulnerable. Another, more tangibly testable, feature is Microsoft’s claim that the new Internet Explorer is the fastest browser on the market. Of course there are two caveats to that – firstly that we’re talking the difference of a fraction of a second, and secondly that with all the major players working on new versions of their browser this lead may well be short lived.
Google Street View launches in the UK & Netherlands
Late last night Google Street View UK & Netherlands went live. Sneaky old Google for keeping that one quiet. Fortunately, there were a few sharp eyed peeps out there who spotted ground level street views of cities in the UK including:
Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Coventry, Derby, Leeds, Liverpool, London…
20 years of the internet: 10 sites that changed my life
The internet is 20 years old today, and that fact made me start thinking about what the internet has given me over the years. I’m not going to get too gushy on you, I promise, but here’s ten websites that have completely changed my life.
What are the internet applications that have changed your life? Our comments box isn’t working at the moment, but you can drop us an email or a Tweet sharing your favourite sites, past and present. Please do, I’d love to hear your stories. Now, without further ado, let’s begin the in-no-particular-order list. Click on the big Hotmail logo to begin.
Buy a digital red nose for your Facebook & Twitter profile pics
I don’t generally write about charitable causes on TD because I’m not a very nice person.
Chris Moyles, apparently, is though – well, nice enough to donate a pound to Comic Relief in exchange for a digital red nose to stick on his Facebook/MySpace/Bebo/Twitter/I-suppose-anywhere-he-likes page.
Yes, you could probably Photoshop it yourself but a) that would be rather mean and b) there’s some kind of statement in that about your time being worth less than the pound it would cost…
UK named 10th most techie country in the world
The International Telecommunications Union has released figures from their survey of 154 countries that name the United Kingdom as the 10th most technologically advanced country in the world.
The study, which takes into account variables like access to technology…
Real-time Twitter searches on Google results
Have a click on the image just here on the right and once it’s bigged itself up, you’ll notice it’s a Google search page with five Twitter results at the top. That’s because some clever soul over on MT-Hacks has created code for the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox which offers a degree of real-time search on Google…
Amazon makes a terabyte of public data available on its servers
Amazon’s got quite a bit of spare server capacity. In its goal to become the world’s top online retailer, it bought so many servers that it’s now also running a cloud computing business on the side that’s actually rather cheap.
Last night, Amazon announced on its Amazon Web Services blog that it would be making a terabyte of public data available to its cloud computing users, for them to do whatever they like with.
The data includes stats from the US bureau of transportation , an *entire* dump of Wikipedia, the DBPedia knowledgebase (which includes info on 2.6 million people, places, films, albums and companies) and all publicly available DNA sequences, including the entire human genome.
There’s also a bunch of other stuff, and it’s all being made available at lightning-fast speed in machine-readable databases to Amazon’s cloud computing customers. It’ll take a while for the internet to really get to grips with this stuff and use it, but anything that’s about freeing up data and information is wholly supported around here. Three cheers for Amazon.
What would you do with the data? Work out why your trains are always late? Work out how many degrees of link separation a random Wikipedia article has to another? Use the human genome to create a clone army and take over the world? Share your ideas in the comments, and make me your second-in-command as world leader.
Amazon Blog (via ReadWriteWeb)
