is the future of search. Even before Google was a verb, the search engine Holy Grail was to deliver you the most relevant search results despite not knowing who you were and what exactly you were looking for. Now Facebook can stop guessing who you are—because it already knows you—and start serving up hyper-personalized answers tailored to you and based on the Facebook social universe. deep into its search engine. The hyper-personal search race has already been sparked; Facebook’s Graph Search ignites the revolution. designed to keep you coming back to watch more movies and TV shows. Amazon recommends books, music, and numerous other products based on your past purchases. Pandora developed an algorithm that can generate playlists based on songs you tell it you like.
Google thinks it might have found an answer to the vexing problem of forgotten or weak passwords: "physical" passwords, which might come in the form of a piece of jewelry such as a ring. In a research paper, two of its engineers write that current strategies to prevent the hijacking of online accounts, including the system, are insufficient, partly due to the constant threat of attacks that exploit new bugs. Google highlights in which hackers dupe account holders into revealing sensitive information by making them sign into a fake account log-in page, as one of the biggest security threats of today. "It's time to give up on elaborate password rules and look for something better," the authors say. The research paper, by Google's Eric Grosse and Mayank Upadhyay, is to be published January 28 in the publication on Friday.
Digital civil rights groups asked a federal court in New York Friday to reject what they call an attempt by the Associated Press (AP) to restrict Fair Use of content on the Internet. "If adopted by this or any other court, this view would sharply curtail the essential role fair use plays in facilitating online innovation and expression, restricting the use and development of services that allow users to find, organize, and share public information, services that depend on making intermediate copies, and even personal consumer uses such as time-shifting," argued a filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Public Knowledge and the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society. The brief was submitted in a lawsuit between the AP wire service and news clipping service Meltwater of Norway. against Meltwater in February 2012, the wire news service's president and CEO Tom Curley called Meltwater "a parasitic distribution service that competes directly with traditional news sources without paying license fees to cover the costs of creating those stories."
Researchers from Security Explorations, a Poland-based vulnerability research firm, claim to have found two new vulnerabilities in Java 7 Update 11 that can be exploited to bypass the software's security sandbox and execute arbitrary code on computers. Oracle to infect computers with malware. Security Explorations successfully confirmed that a complete Java security sandbox bypass can be still be achieved under Java 7 Update 11 (JRE version 1.7.0_11-b21) by exploiting two new vulnerabilities discovered by the company's researchers, Adam Gowdiak, the company's founder, said Friday in sent to the Full Disclosure mailing list. The vulnerabilities were reported to Oracle on Friday, together with working proof-of-concept exploit code, he said. According to Security Explorations' disclosure policy, technical details about the vulnerabilities will not be publicly disclosed until the vendor issues a patch.
MegaUpload is no more, but Mega is reborn. And, this time, the site promises to play by the rules. While the site appears to for now, Mega promises in the coming weeks to release more features, including “mobile access, sync tools for all major platforms, and a mount for Windows.” The launch of Mega comes as "massive worldwide online piracy." Now, founder Kim Dotcom is making a comeback, according to several news organizations, including Forbes.
It's hard to believe , but late last week a release candidate for its next major version appeared. “The Document Foundation is pleased to announce the first release candidate of our upcoming LibreOffice 4.0,” wrote Thorsten Behrens, SUSE developer and deputy chairman of the Document Foundation board, in the official . “4.0 will be our fifth major release in just over two years, and it comes with a nice set of new features.” Last month the foundation held a “. After two more release candidates in the coming weeks, LibreOffice 4.0 is due to arrive in its final form next month. In the meantime, there's nothing like a release candidate for offering a sneak preview. Ready for a quick peek? Here are a few key features we can expect.
The price for upgrading to Windows 8 Pro will shoot up after Jan. 31, when the existing special offers to acquire the new OS lapse. on Friday that a Windows 8 Pro upgrade will cost US$199.99, up from special prices as low as $14.99. Microsoft is running two special offers for upgrading to Windows 8 Pro. One is for people upgrading an existing Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 PC and lets them acquire Windows 8 Pro for $39.99 via Windows.com download or $69.99 from a retail store DVD. The other offer, priced at $14.99, is for consumers upgrading a new Windows 7 PC bought between June 2 of last year and Jan. 31.
DivX Plus Software is a desktop media player. And a video conversion application. And a Web browser plug-in. And a codec pack. And a DLNA server for streaming videos to compatible devices. In short, there's not much this free application can't do when it comes to video, and it handles most of the tasks very well. As a desktop media player, DivX Plus is easy to use and attractive. It features a sleek black and gray design that looks more modern than the orange color scheme of , another popular free media player. The design of DivX Plus is busier, though; where VLC tends to fade right into the background so you notice only the video you're watching, DivX Plus is harder to ignore. A column (collapsible, luckily) along the right side of the application reminds you that you can do more than just watch your video, as it sports icons for streaming your video or transferring it to another device. While the icons are large and make all of these tasks look super easy, they were not all quite as user-friendly as I'd expected. The first problem occurred when I tried to stream a video to a networked Samsung Smart TV. DivX Plus got me started on the task, leading me through the process of turning sharing on and identifying which folders I'd like to share, but didn't provide much additional guidance. I would have liked some notification that the files were actually being shared, as I was never able to view them on the TV. I was unable to figure out if it was the TV or the software causing the problem. I had more luck with the DivX To Go feature, which helps you transfer your videos to DivX devices. You select the video you'd like to transfer, and what kind of device you'd like to view it on (such as a TV or Blu-ray player). You then decide whether to burn it to a DVD or save it to a USB drive, and DivX Plus handles the transfer for you. The process isn't super fast, as transferring a 22 minute TV show took nearly that same amount of time, but it worked well.
