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Vodafone’s obviously been looking at all that lovely social media stuff on the HTC Hero and the Motorola DEXT. The networks’s just launched its own suite of social media services called Vodafone 360. 
Vodafone 360 is its own specially created interface mashing together info from Facebook, Windows Live Messenger, Twitter, Google Talk and more right into your contacts book. Continue reading…

Facebook agreed on Thursday to give its worldwide users better protection over their personal information as the result of negotiations with Canada’s privacy commissioner.

The changes will give users of the social networking website more transparency and control over the information they provide to third-party developers of applications such as games and quizzes, Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart announced. Continue reading…

We heard about the new Facebook 3.0 iPhone update a few weeks ago, and after Apple taking its time in approving it, it’s now available from the App Store.
Even better news is that the app is now even better than the first one that was submitted.
After submitting it, developer Joe Hewitt started tinkering with the app for further improvements, and when Apple came back to him yesterday to ask him to fix a minor bug, he fixed it within his new version. Continue reading…

As if we already don’t know enough! Soon Twitter will be overloading you with another piece of information, the “location” of your tweets.

GPS is getting increasingly integrated into our lives, and has had some brilliant applications in cameras and mobiles, by providing location sensitive services we couldn’t have thought of before. No longer do we associate the GPS with noble causes such as finding your way out of a desert. No, today we can use the GPS to crash parties by seeing how many of our friends collect  in a single location on Google Latitude. Continue reading…

A new playlist can be created in the iTunes 9 and shared with a Facebook account.

Almost a week back, buzz about upcoming iTunes 9 integrating Blu Ray Discs, Social media and App organization support had surfaced. Now, screenshots of purported iTunes 9 beta build software depicts Facebook playlist integration and third party device support. The images showed that a new playlist can be created in the iTunes 9 and shared with a Facebook account. Continue reading…

An anonymous user of Pirate Bay, a massively popular website for downloading pirated music and movies, has placed an archive of the entire site online for anyone to download. The file can be found at — where else? — Pirate Bay. How meta.

Fearing the site’s demise, more than 2,200 people have started downloading the file, called TPB index, since it was uploaded Friday. After a high-profile win for Hollywood against Pirate Bay co-founders and a planned sale to Global Gaming Factory, some users say they’re grabbing the file as a souvenir of a once-dominant bootleg paradise. Others indicate that they may mirror the site with their own version. Continue reading…

Google Chrome developers have announced that it’s working on a feature to sync your internet bookmarks to your Google account. 

The feature will launch for developers later this month but will come to consumer versions of Chrome soon. It’s just for bookmarks at the moment but Google Chrome OS will do the same with your data. 

Bookmark synching in Google Chrome will be push so anything you do in one browser will pop up straight away in any other windows you have open on other PCs. Continue reading…

One of the most popular activities on the microblogging service Twitter is sharing links. However, this activity is also one of the most dangerous, too. Ever since Twitter gained in popularity, hackers and spammers have been using the service to direct traffic to their unsavory web sites. For the end user, clicking on those bad links could result in, at best, an annoyance as they’re directed to some spammy web site or, at worst, a full-on malware attack on their PC.

Today, it appears that Twitter is starting to do something about the problem. According to security firm f-secure, Twitter is now blocking malicious URLs from being posted to their service.

With the new malicious URL protection built into Twitter, you’re no longer able to posts links to known malicious web sites. If you try to do so, you’ll receive a message reading: “Oops! Your tweet contained a URL to a known malware site!” Continue reading…

We have received numerous reports of excessive FriendFeed posts showing up in Facebook this evening. While we are not 100% sure, it appears to be an issue on Facebook’s end due to ignoring application settings. We have disabled all FriendFeed updates to Facebook until we are sure the problem is resolved. Continue reading…

Windows 7 has yet to even be released officially to the general public, and already the dodgy folk on the Internet have fully cracked and activated the Ultimate version, with help from a leaked Lenovo OEM DVD .ISO file.

The news comes from various Chinese forums who state that you can already pass Windows Genuine Advantage validation offline, OEM style. 

The leaked .ISO was originally posted on a Chinese forum, which was then downloaded in order for people to get hold of the boot.wim, and in turn retrieving the OEM-SLP key, plus the OEM activation certificate. Microsoft uses the same digitally signed OEM certificate, which has an .xrm-ms extension, as that in Windows Vista. Another point to note is that the key is a master one, which can be used to activate other OEM branded installations, like ones from Dell, HP or indeed Lenovo. Continue reading…

If there are multiple Google AdSense ad units on a web page, it is generally assumed that the top ad unit (the one which appears first in the HTML source code) will serve the highest paying CPC ads. Well, that may be true most of the times but not always. Let’s understand why.

But before you dive into the example below, please watch this excellent video by Dr Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, as he explains how an ad auction works and what factors determine the position of AdSense ads on a web page for a given keyword.

The Google AdWords system assigns a “Quality Score” to every advertiser who is participating in the ad auction and this score is determined by the quality of the advertiser’s website, the historical CTR of his ads on Google and a couple of other factors. Continue reading…

Government uses both blunt and surgical tools to stifle dissidents, hacker says

One month after a disputed presidential election sparked widespread unrest in Iran, the country’s government has initiated a cyber-crackdown that is challenging hackers across the globe to find new ways to help keep Iranian dissidents connected to the Web.

While the government’s initial efforts to censor the Internet were blunt and often ineffective, it has started employing more sophisticated tools to thwart dissidents’ attempts to communicate with each other and the outside world. Iranian dissidents are not alone in their struggle, however, as several sympathetic hacker groups have been working to keep them online.One such group is NedaNet, whose mission is to “help the Iranian people by setting up networks of proxy severs, anonymizers, and any other appropriate technologies that can enable them Continue reading…

I’ve owned a lot of iPods.

Not anymore.

For the longest time, I could use gtkpod to seamlessly access my iPods from my Ubuntu desktop. It initially took some reverse-engineering effort to understand the iPod’s data format to be able to access it from non-iTunes software, but it was possible. All of a sudden, Apple is trying everything they can to prohibit interopability.

First, they encrypted the firmware, blocking the use of third-party firmware like Rockbox and iPod Linux. This doesn’t bother me much, as I always prefered the original Apple firmware anyway.

Then, in August 2007, they added a new hash to the database to block non-iTunes software. This was quicky reverse-engineered and support was added to gtkpod once again. Continue reading…

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos apologise in a post to the Kindle Community forum on Amazon’s Web site, as negative reviews from DefectiveByDesign.org campaign supporters criticizing the Kindle’s use of proprietary software and Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to remotely delete ebooks continued to pour in.

Bezos said:

“This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,
Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com”

The Free Software Foundation and Defective By Design, which on Monday called on activists to post reviews calling attention to the Kindle Swindle’s arbitrary deletion of George Orwell ebooks from hundreds of users’ devices, welcomed Bezos’s apology, but said more must be done to remedy the problems exposed by Amazon’s actions. Continue reading…

Time to update your Pre, Palm’s just released webOS 1.1.0. Quite a bit of changes here, but most importantly, the patch notes say that it “resolves an issue preventing media sync from working with latest version of iTunes (8.2.1)” — that issue, of course, being a blockade put in place by Apple just one week ago. Oh yeah, it’s on. In addition, we’ve got emoticons and Exchange support now, and its 31st app, NFL Mobile Live for watching games and audio from the device. There’s also talk of a new gesture, swiping left to right to move forward through web pages, but really it’s no different that scrolling the browser up in landscape mode. Everything else is pretty boring by comparison — looks like that leaked update list was dead on. So when should we expect to see iTunes 8.2.2, eh Apple?

Here are a few things we’ve noticed after playing with the update for a little bit:

• Scrolling through long lists (like contacts) seems improved. We’re seeing a lot less loading, and only the occasional hiccup.
• Push email now seems to actively delete (and represent the count properly) in the background.
• Folder orders for IMAP Gmail accounts are now correct. Previous versions of the software had them totally out of whack.
• The email alert sound is different — softer.
• App load times seem a bit snappier. In fact, the whole device feels a little snappier.
• Maybe we’re crazy, but there seems to be a new animation for the drop-down menus.

Download it here