Nokia announces Rihanna app

December 9, 2009, Espoo (Finland)

Nokia announced the launch of its Rihanna app. The new app will deliver news, music, photos and video content direct to Nokia's handsets including the Nokia N97, Nokia X6 and Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.

Video content available through the app will include live performance videos from Rihanna's album launch event. Additionally, fans can access music samples, a Rihanna biography and photo library, and, when available, information on Rihanna's forthcoming 2010 tour. The app content will be unavailable elsewhere.

The app also provides a direct link to the Nokia Music Store where fans can download album content including a Nokia bonus track, Hole In My Head, written and produced by Justin Timberlake.

In addition, a Donni Hotwheels remix of Rihanna's smash single, Russian Roulette, is also available to those who download her album, Rated R via the Nokia Music Store.

On November 16, Rihanna performed tracks from her new album with Nokia that was streamed live globally to her fans. The show included live Twitter commentary from music fans.

The Rihanna app and video content from the show is available at www.nokia.com/rihanna

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Pop-ups on computer screen set back performance

Indo-Asian News Service, December 9, 2009, London

Although pop-ups on a computer screen may only last a few seconds, they tend to set back our performance, say researchers.

Helen Hodgetts and Dylan Jones, professor of psychology at Cardiff University, examined the cost of such interruptions in terms of the time taken to complete a simple seven-step computer task.

"Our findings suggest that even seemingly brief and inconsequential on-screen pop-up messages might impact our efficiency, particularly given their frequency over the working day," says Hodgetts.

They found that, even after only a five second interruption, people take longer than normal to complete the next step in the task they are working on.

But in a more realistic work environment, where there is more information to retrieve after the interruption, the loss of concentration could have a greater impact on performance.

Other results from the study show that an interruption lag - a brief time between a warning for a pop-up and the interruption itself - can reduce the time we lose trying to find our place again.

A warning sound was found to be most effective because it allows us to consolidate where we are in the current task before transferring our attention to the interruption.

Conversely, a flashing warning signal on the screen can be just as disruptive as the interruption itself, said a Cardiff release.

Researchers suggest that e-mail alerts and similar pop-up messages should be as small and discreet as possible and should not obscure the original activity.

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How fake sites trick search engines to hit the top

Even search engines can get suckered by Internet scams.

With a little sleight of hand, con artists can dupe them into giving top billing to fraudulent Web sites that prey on consumers, making unwitting accomplices of companies such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Online charlatans typically try to lure people into giving away their personal or financial information by posing as legitimate companies in "phishing" e-mails or through messages in forums such as Twitter and Facebook. But a new study by security researcher Jim Stickley shows how search engines also can turn into funnels for shady schemes.

Stickley created a Web site purporting to belong to the Credit Union of Southern California, a real business that agreed to be part of the experiment. He then used his knowledge of how search engines rank Web sites to achieve something that shocked him: His phony site got a No. 2 ranking on Yahoo Inc.'s search engine and landed in the top slot on Microsoft Corp.'s Bing, ahead of even the credit union's real site.

Google Inc., which handles two-thirds of US search requests, didn't fall into Stickley's trap. His fake site never got higher than Google's sixth page of results, too far back to be seen by most people. The company also places a warning alongside sites that its system suspects might be malicious.

But even Google acknowledges it isn't foolproof.

Some recession-driven scams have been slipping into Google's search results, although that number is "very, very few," said Jason Morrison, a Google search quality engineer.

On one kind of fraudulent site, phony articles claim that participants can make thousands of dollars a month simply for posting links to certain Web sites. Often, the victims are asked to pay money for startup materials that never arrive, or bank account information is requested for payment purposes.

"As soon as we notice anything like it, we'll adapt, but it's kind of like a game of Whac-A-Mole," he said. "We can't remove every single scam from the Internet. It's just impossible."

In fact, Google said Tuesday it is suing a company for promising "work at home" programs through Web sites that look legitimate and pretend to be affiliated with Google.

Stickley's site wasn't malicious, but easily could have been. In the year and a half it was up, the 10,568 visitors were automatically redirected to the real credit union, and likely never knew they had passed through a fraudulent site.

"When you're using search engines, you've got to be diligent," said Stickley, co-founder of TraceSecurity Inc. "You can't trust that just because it's No. 2 or No. 1 that it really is. A phone book is actually probably a safer bet than a search engine."

A Yahoo spokeswoman didn't respond to requests for comment. Microsoft said in a statement that Stickley's experiment showed that search results can be cluttered with junk, but the company insists Bing "is equipped to address" the problem. Stickley's link no longer appears in Bing.

To fool people into thinking they were following the right link, Stickley established a domain (creditunionofsc.org) that sounded plausible. (The credit union's real site is cusocal.org.) After that, Stickley's site wasn't designed with humans in mind; it was programmed to make the search engines believe they were scanning a legitimate site. Stickley said he pulled it off by having link after link inside the site to create the appearance of "depth," even though those links only led to the same picture of the credit union's front page.

The experiment convinced Credit Union of Southern California that it should protect itself by being more aggressive about buying domain names similar to its own. Domains generally cost a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars each a pittance compared with a financial institution's potential liability or loss of goodwill if its customers are ripped off by a fake site.

"The test was hugely successful," said Ray Rounds, the credit union's senior vice president of information services.

Stickley's manipulation illuminates the dark side of so-called search engine optimization. It's a legitimate tactic used by sites striving to boost their rankings by designing them so search engines can capture information on them better.

But criminals can turn the tables to pump up fraudulent sites.

"You can do this on a very, very broad scale and have a ton of success," Stickley said. "This shows there's a major, major risk out there."

Robert Hansen, a Web security expert who wasn't involved in Stickley's research, said ranking high in search engine results gets easier as the topic gets more obscure. An extremely well-trafficked site such as Bank of America's would always outrank a phony one, he notes.

Still, Hansen said, criminals have been able to game Google's system well enough to carve out profitable niches. He says one trick is to hack into trusted sites, such as those run by universities, and stuff them with links to scam sites, which makes search engines interpret the fraudulent sites as legitimate.

"I don't think we're anywhere near winning" the fight against such frauds, said Hansen, chief executive of the SecTheory consulting firm.

Roger Thompson, chief research officer for AVG Technologies, who also wasn't involved in the research, said search results can be trusted, for the most part.

"But the rule is, if you're looking for something topical or newsworthy, you should be very cautious about clicking the link," he said. That's because criminals load their scam sites with hot topics in the news, to trap victims before the search engines have a chance to pull their sites out of the rankings.

"The bad guys don't have to get every search," he said. "They just have to get a percentage."

Consumers can protect themselves from scam sites by looking up the domain at www.whois.com, which details when a site was registered and by whom. That can be helpful if the Web address of a phony site is similar to the real one.

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Google bundles coverage from NYT, Wash. Post

Associated Press, December 9, 2009, Mountain View (US)

Internet search leader Google Inc. is teaming up with The New York Times and The Washington Post in its latest attempt to help out the ailing newspaper industry.

The new project, called "Living Stories," debuted Tuesday in the experimental "labs" section on Google's Web site.

The service is supposed to make it easier for readers to follow evolving news stories. It will package stories from both the Times and the Post so the coverage can be more easily updated to include new developments.

Some of the initial topics featured on the service Tuesday included health care reform, executive pay and the Washington Redskins.

Google isn't paying the newspapers to feature the content, and there aren't any immediate plans to sell advertising alongside the material, said Josh Cohen, a Google product manager overseeing the project.

Still, Google thinks Living Stories can help newspapers adapt to a shift that is causing millions of people to get their news from online sources instead of print. That's a huge problem for newspapers because they make most of their money from ads appearing in print.

As print advertising has crumbling, some newspaper publishers have lashed out against Google, which is based in Mountain View. They depict Google as a leech that has profited by showing snippets of their online stories and photographs.

Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corp., has been among the most outspoken critics. He has even threatened to block Google from listing News Corp.'s publications, including The Wall Street Journal, in its search index.

The New York Times, though, regards Google as an ally, according to Martin Nisenholtz, who oversees the newspaper's online operations.

"We have a very successful, significant relationship with Google," Nisenholtz told investors and analysts Tuesday at a media conference in New York.

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MySpace buys imeem music site for under $1 million

December 9, 2009, Los Angeles

MySpace's online music venture with recording labels completed its purchase of song streaming site imeem on Tuesday, scooping up its 16 million users and mobile phone applications for less than $1 million.

In a blog post, MySpace Chief Executive Owen Van Natta said the deal would allow the MySpace Music venture to integrate imeem's offerings over time.

One of imeem's functions that MySpace lacks is a mobile phone application that streams songs on Apple Inc.'s iPhones and devices using Google Inc.'s Android operating system, such as the new Droid phone.

"In the coming weeks, our team will be working to take the aspects of imeem that users love and migrate them to MySpace Music," he wrote.

The music industry continues to experience falling sales of CDs, while digital revenues have not yet made up the difference, in part because consumers tend to buy singles rather than full albums when they do pay for music.

Efforts such as MySpace Music and imeem are meant to allow people to listen and share music freely online, with revenue generated from advertising.

San Francisco-based imeem launched its free music business in 2007, but advertising revenues were unable to support debt and music royalty payments, and the company was running out of money.

The price tag of less than $1 million represents a bargain for MySpace and is an indication of how difficult the free music business remains.

In May, Warner Music Group Corp. wrote off its entire $16 million investment in imeem and also forgave $4 million it was owed by imeem in song royalties in exchange for a small, minority equity stake. Warner, EMI Group PLC, Vivendi SA's Universal Music and Sony Corp.'s Sony Music Entertainment are all part of the joint venture with MySpace, a unit of News Corp.

Imeem visitors are now being directed to MySpace Music, and imeem users who have set up profiles and song playlists will have them migrated over to the MySpace Music platform soon.

Imeem Chief Executive Dalton Caldwell, Chief Technology Officer Brian Berg, Chief Operating Officer Ali Aydar and Vice President of Sales David Wade are staying on as consultants during the transition. It is not clear whether they will become permanent employees.

Imeem was majority owned by private equity firm Morgenthaler Ventures, but none of the equity investors got their money back.

MySpace is revamping its music service under Van Natta, who took over in April as CEO from co-founder Chris DeWolfe

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Student ordered to destroy downloaded music files

A graduate student who must pay four record labels a combined $675,000 in damages for downloading and sharing songs online has been ordered to destroy his illegal music files but a judge declined to force him to stop promoting the activity that got him in trouble.

Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University student from Providence was ordered Monday to refrain from future copyright violations and to destroy copies of recordings he downloaded without authorization.

Record companies wanted US District Judge Nancy Gertner to go further. They claimed Tenenbaum has been encouraging people to visit a Swedish Web site where they can illegally download the songs he was sued for sharing.

Tenenbaum said he had nothing to do with the Web site, and Gertner said she would not attempt to silence Tenenbaum's criticism of the recording industry and copyright laws.

Tenenbaum said he was pleased.

"She said, look, this isn't your business, he can say whatever he wants about the issue, he has First Amendment rights," Tenenbaum said.

Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America, said the group was satisfied that the judge required Tenenbaum "to destroy all illegal music files and refrain from further theft of our music."

In July, a federal jury in Boston ordered Tenenbaum to pay $675,000 to four record labels for downloading and distributing 30 songs.

Tenenbaum's attorney, Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson, said Monday that he plans to file a motion for a new trial by Jan. 4.

In a separate memorandum released Monday, Gertner described her reasons for rejecting Tenenbaum's "fair use" defense before the case went to trial in July.

Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognizes that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose such as education or scholarship it may be considered "fair" and not infringing.

Gertner said Tenenbaum acknowledged that a purpose of his song-sharing was so that his friends could enjoy the music "that is, the very use for which the artist or copyright holder is entitled to expect payment as a reward."

Gertner said that although Tenenbaum's case does not constitute fair use, she could envision a fair-use defense for someone who shared files only during a period before the law concerning file-sharing was clear and before legitimate download services were widely available. She urged Congress to consider changing copyright law. The judge wrote that "there is a deep potential for injustice in the Copyright Act as it is currently written."

"There is something wrong with a law that routinely threatens teenagers and students with astronomical penalties for an activity whose implications they may not have fully understood," Gertner added.

Duckworth said the industry disagrees with Gertner's assessment.

"Judge Gertner's hypothetical statements on fair use are not supported in the law, and courts have routinely rejected this theory since it would essentially strip copyright owners of the important right to control the use of their work," Duckworth said. "Regardless, it wouldn't apply to Mr. Tenenbaum, who admitted to illegally downloading music long after iTunes and other services emerged."

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Scientists come up with formula for instant battery

Dip a piece of paper into ink infused with carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires, it morphs into a real battery. Crumple the piece of paper and it still works. These are some of the newest ways of storing power, says Stanford University researcher Yi Cui, assisitant professor of material science and engineering. Stanford scientists are harnessing nanotechnology to quickly produce ultra-lightweight, bendable batteries and supercapacitors in the form of everyday paper. Post doctoral students in the lab of Yi Cui, light up a diode from a battery made from treated paper, similar to what you would find in a copy machine. The paper batteries are treated with a nanotube ink, baked and folded into electrical generating sources. Simply coating a sheet of paper with ink made of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires makes a highly conductive storage device, said Yi Cui. "Society really needs a low-cost, high-performance energy storage device, such as batteries and simple supercapacitors," a Stanford statement quoted him as saying. Like batteries, capacitors hold an electric charge, but for a shorter period of time. However, capacitors can store and discharge electricity much more rapidly than a battery. Cui's work was published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Amazon's Kindle to get audible menus, bigger font

Amazon.com Inc. will add two features to the Kindle e-book reader to make the gadget more accessible to blind and vision-impaired users.

Monday's announcement comes a month after Syracuse University in Syracuse and the University of Wisconsin-Madison said they would not consider widely deploying the device as an alternative to paper textbooks until Amazon makes it easier for blind students to use. Both universities bought some Kindles to test this fall.

The Kindle has a read-aloud feature that could be a boon to blind students and those with other disabilities including dyslexia, but turning it on requires navigating through screens of text menus.

Amazon said Monday it is working on audible menus, which would let the Kindle speak menu options out loud. It's also working on an extra-large font for people with impaired vision. The additions should reach the Kindle next summer, Amazon said.

Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the National Federation of the Blind, said Monday that the organization doesn't know enough about the new features to say whether they adequately address concerns of the blind community. But, he said, it's a good sign Amazon is expressing commitment to improve the Kindle.

Amazon released this year the $489 Kindle DX, a large-screen model aimed at textbook and newspaper readers. Several colleges including Arizona State University are testing the gadget this academic year and sending feedback to the company.

The federation of the blind, which is based in Baltimore, teamed up with another advocacy group, the American Council of the Blind, to sue Arizona State in an attempt to block it from using the Kindle as a way to distribute electronic textbooks because the devices can't be used by blind students.

It also filed complaints with the Justice Department against five other schools participating in the Kindle trial with Amazon: Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Pace University in New York, Princeton University in Princeton and Reed College in Portland.

Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin were not among the pilot-test schools.

Danielsen declined to comment when asked if Amazon's proposed changes would lead the federation to abandon its complaints.

Even as the advocacy groups push for greater read-aloud capabilities, the Authors Guild has expressed concern that the feature will hurt sales of audio books. So Amazon has given publishers and authors the ability to silence the text-to-speech function for their books.

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Apple confirms purchase of music site Lala.com

Apple Inc. has purchased online music retailer Lala.com, a Silicon Valley startup that has threatened "the end of the MP3" with its fast song-streaming application.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling confirmed the purchase Sunday, but would not provide any further information, including how much the deal was worth.

"Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans," he said.

Lala has developed an application not yet available to the public that allows users to buy the right to stream songs from a digital locker for an unlimited time on their iPhones for 10 cents each.

The song quality is lower than what Apple's iTunes songs offer, but tracks can played in seconds, and cost much less than the songs on iTunes, which generally are priced at 69 cents to $1.29 each.

Lala, a private company based in Palo Alto, Calif., was launched in 2006 with $35 million in venture capital from Bain Capital LLC, Ignition Partners and Warner Music Group Corp. Lala began as an online CD-trading site but relaunched in October 2008 as a music retailer

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Yahoo, Microsoft finalize search deal

Yahoo and Microsoft have finalized their agreement to install Microsoft as the exclusive search provider for Yahoo's network of sites, the companies announced Friday.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer first approved a search deal in July, but the matter took a little extra time to complete.

(Credit: Yahoo/Microsoft)

The deal, first reached in July, still needs to be approved by the U.S. government before it becomes final. But the companies said in October that they needed more time to complete the deal due to the "complex nature of this transaction," and Friday's announcement is likely the result of hundreds of hours of painstaking review from expensive lawyers.

At least company executives didn't have to rack up the frequent-flier miles to finalize this year; they signed it virtually, with Microsoft's Qi Lu and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz representing their respective companies on the licensing agreement and Ballmer and Bartz inking the definitive agreement, according to sources familiar with the deal.

Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft will provide search technology to Yahoo for up to 10 years, also gaining access to Yahoo's search technology assets and several hundred employees. It will then pay Yahoo a significant portion of the ad revenue generated alongside those searches.

A Yahoo representative declined to comment on the specifics of what held up the final approval of the deal. Both parties said they still expect the deal to become final in early 2010, although the government is sure to take a long hard look

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MS Office 2010 Beta 1 Build 4417 screenshots

The screenshots of the latest build of Microsoft Office 2010 beta 1 has been leaked,the latest build being 4417.The complete build string being 14.0.4417.1000.

Here are the couple of changes we could find in this leak-

• A new upload centre to store the images and documents online
• The activation system has been changed
• The new icons and the new MS Office 2010 logo

Here are the screenshots(thanks to wzor for providing the screenshots)

We would be providing more info as and when available

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Google apologises for offensive Michelle Obama image

Google Inc. is apologising for a racially offensive image of the US first lady that appears at the top of the list when users search for pictures of Michelle Obama on its site.

Google placed a text ad above the image titled "Offensive Search Results" that states "Sometimes our search results can be offensive. We agree."

Users who then click on the ad are directed to a letter from Google that explains its results "can include disturbing content, even from innocuous queries" but notes that Google doesn't endorse content on these Web sites.

Google says its search formula relies on thousands of factors to rank a Web page's importance, and says it doesn't eliminate search results simply because of user complaints. However, Google says it will take down images in certain cases, such as when required by law to do so.

"We apologize if you've had an upsetting experience using Google," the company wrote.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google also posted about the issue in a user support forum.

Spokesman Scott Rubin would not elaborate on how the image ended up as the number-one result for the first lady. He said the company did remove one site displaying the image from its results because it included viruses, which Google policy prohibits. But a different Web site later posted the same image, he said.

The White House declined to comment.

This is not the first time Google has apologized for content in its search results. The company issued a similar response in 2004 when the top result for the term "Jew" pointed to an anti-Semitic Web site.

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Hackers leak e-mails, stoke climate debate

Computer hackers have broken into a server at a well-respected climate change research center in Britain and posted hundreds of private e-mails and documents online - stoking debate over whether some scientists have overstated the case for man-made climate change.

The University of East Anglia, in eastern England, said in a statement Saturday that the hackers had entered the server and stolen data at its Climatic Research Unit, a leading global research center on climate change. The university said police are investigating the theft of the information, but could not confirm if all the materials posted online are genuine.

More than a decade of correspondence between leading British and US scientists is included in about 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents posted on Web sites following the security breach last week.

Some climate change skeptics and bloggers claim the information shows scientists have overstated the case for global warming, and allege the documents contain proof that some researchers have attempted to manipulate data.

The furor over the leaked data comes weeks before the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, when 192 nations will seek to reach a binding treaty to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases worldwide. Many officials - including U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon - regard the prospects of a pact being sealed at the meeting as bleak.

In one leaked e-mail, the research center's director, Phil Jones, writes to colleagues about graphs showing climate statistics over the last millennium. He alludes to a technique used by a fellow scientist to "hide the decline" in recent global temperatures. Some evidence appears to show a halt in a rise of global temperatures from about 1960, but is contradicted by other evidence which appears to show a rise in temperatures is continuing.

Jones wrote that, in compiling new data, he had "just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline," according to a leaked e-mail, which the author confirmed was genuine.

One of the colleague referred to by Jones - Michael Mann, a professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University - did not immediately respond to requests for comment via telephone and e-mail.

The use of the word "trick" by Jones has been seized on by skeptics - who say his e-mail offers proof of collusion between scientists to distort evidence to support their assertion that human activity is influencing climate change.

"Words fail me," Stephen McIntyre - a blogger whose climateaudit.org Web site challenges popular thinking on climate change - wrote on the site following the leak of the messages.

However, Jones denied manipulating evidence and insisted his comment had been taken out of context. "The word 'trick' was used here colloquially, as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward," he said in a statement Saturday.

Jones did not indicate who "Keith" was in his e-mail.

Two other American scientists named in leaked e-mails - Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and Kevin Trenberth, of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Colorado - did not immediately return requests for comment.

The University of East Anglica said that information published on the Internet had been selected deliberately to undermine "the strong consensus that human activity is affecting the world's climate in ways that are potentially dangerous."

"The selective publication of some stolen e-mails and other papers taken out of context is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way," the university said in a statement.

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Samsung announced Bada mobile OS

Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant announced that they are working on a new mobile operating system calledBada OS. Samsung currently manufactures mobile phonesbased on Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Limo Linux and few other platforms. The new Samsung Bada OS will be open source, and will have a user friendly interface and architecture that would help developers to write applications much easier. Bada in Korean means Ocean. This name indicates that possibility of the new operating system is limitless .
Samsung also announced that they will be stopping production of phones based on Symbian OS owned by Nokia and plans to reduce the number phones based on Windows mobile.Open source mobile OS platforms are getting popular day by day. Nokia also released some part of the Symbian kernel for open development . But it might be Samsung's business strategy to make more phones on its on Bada OS platform . We expect the first series of Bada enabled phones to ship by the first quarter of next year. Screenhsots and features of Samsung Bada OS would be available soon.

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