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. Vodafone 360 lets you share photos, music, text and your location with contacts. All the information you stuff in to the service is backed up in the cloud. 

Keeping your stuff in the cloud also means Vodafone 360 has a set of online services that’ll work on a PC or Mac. Vodafone 360 also includes a DRM-free music service and a whole host of apps.

Apps shown so far by Vodafone include one to order pizza (win!), one to check your stocks (depressing) and one to get the weather (soggy). 

Vodafone 360 will work on more than 100 devices at launch and the Vodafone 360 apps shop will have at least 100 apps to start with too. 

Following Nokia’s lead with Ovi, Vodafone are also allowing non-Vodafone customers to have an online account to try out the service. 

Vodafone 360 will have clients for Symbian S60 and S40 phones as well as the iPhone OS and Blackberry. However, it’ll work best on new phones customised for the service. The first we’ve seen are the Samsung H1 and M1 touchscreen beauties.

The service doesn’t seem to be live yet but you can register your interest on the Vodafone 360 website.

Let us know what you think of this feast of new apps and services from Vodafone and if you’re looking for a new phone.

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.

As well, Facebook will make it clear that users can delete their accounts, not just deactivate them, if they do not want their information kept indefinitely. And information about nonusers will be better protected.

“These changes mean that the privacy of 200 million Facebook users in Canada and around the world will be far better protected,” Stoddart said in a statement.

She had ruled in July that Facebook had serious gaps that breached Canadian privacy laws. The company swiftly agreed to address them in a way that meets her concerns and will also apply to developers and subscribers around the world.

“This is a global change,” Stoddart told reporters.

“We’re satisfied that, with these changes, Facebook is on the way to meeting the requirements of Canada’s privacy law,” she said, noting the popular website has a year to make the changes.

Facebook, which lets users share pictures, videos, news stories, opinions and private and public messages, has 12 million Canadian users.

Canada is the first country to complete a full investigation of Facebook’s privacy practices. Stoddart said European and Australian regulators had also begun looking at social networking issues.

The outcome of Canada’s investigation could influence the practices of other social networking websites, such as MySpace. Stoddart said another major site has already approached her office to discuss its approach.

She plans to release a paper in coming weeks analyzing the practices of other sites as well.

“We believe that these changes are not only great for our users and address all of the commissioner’s outstanding concerns, but they also set a new standard for the industry,” said Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice-president of global communications and public policy.

However, analysts and officials cautioned that users still needed to be careful about how much information they put on Facebook.

“All the personal information that the privacy commissioner is worried about advertisers stealing — we (users) put it up there in the first place,” said Duncan Stewart, an analyst with DSAM Consulting.

The regulator first started its investigation of Facebook as a result of complaints by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa.

The assistant commissioner who negotiated with Facebook, Elizabeth Denham, said her office had been alarmed by the lack of safeguards applied to the more than one million developers of third-party applications around the world.

“The notion that some teenager working in a basement halfway around the globe could have access to all this personal information was unsettling, to say the least,” Denham said.

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.The extra features include a landscape mode and the ability to organise the new homescreen. As for what’s new since the old version – the homescreen makes it easier to navigate through the app, there are video uploads for iPhone 3G S users, better photo management, and it adds the ability to make friend requests, view and RSVP to events, and read and create notes.

Check out the full list of new features on the App Store, and get to downloading it sharpish. There have been some reports that the app isn’t showing in the “updates” section of the App Store for those who currently have Facebook 2.0 on their phones. If this is the case for you, simply delete the old app and reinstall the updated version for all the new functionality.

It’s been getting good reviews from what we’ve seen so far, but be sure to have a play yourself and let us know below what you think to it

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.

So with Twitter introducing support for location metadata, we will surely find some amazing applications. With the new metadata tags, you can now know not only who is sending the tweets, but from where, so you can laugh at a friend who tweets “The Shammi Kabab in Taj Palace are TO DIE FOR” while sitting in “Kake da Dhaba” around the corner.

The feature will be opened for developers to use and integrate into their apps before coming out in Twitter’s mobile, and desktop websites, thus making sure all Twitter applications support it before unveiling it to the public.

The feature will be off by default, probably due to privacy concerns, and since GPS is still not ubiquitous. If people opt to turn it on though, each tweet will now be loaded with even more information.

Among the possibilities of such a feature, the two listed on their blog post announcing the feature make the case quite well, a concert and an earthquake, if one doesn’t cause the other.

This could add some interesting new ways to find information which is location centric. Twitter will almost certainly allow for searching for tweets by location, follow the tweets happening around you perhaps, they have already shown their interest in searching tweets with their recent redesign. All in all an incredibly useful feature, which comes just in time to enjoy the rise of location sensitive computing.

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. Also, the third party media player support evidence and chapter wise viewing of video files from VCD or DVDs existed.
From the leaked images grabbed by Boy Genius Report, it appears that a beta build of iTunes 9 has been screen captured. As mentioned earlier about Facebook integration, the new screenshots show that iTunes Playlist can be directly shared from the software. The shared playlist appears in the user’s Facebook wall along with the iTunes link. So, either Facebook integration would be built in or Apple will offer Facebook Connect support.

The images also show third party device support as the in the image Samsung YH-J70 HDD MP3 player is shown connected to iTunes. This might just get Palm Pre owners wondering if Apple is going to disable support for Palm Pre Media Sync, especially after palm  released webOS 1.1.0 update.

Movies on DVD can be played Chapter/Title wise. Once the DVD info shows up, users can select the sequences they want to view. Also, in the full screen mode, one can jump between Chapters of the movie.

It should be noted that these screenshots might not be real and Apple may pull the support plug for these features. However, our eyes are set on the September event which Apple is expected to make slew of music related offerings announcements.

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.

Theoretically, someone could install the 21-gigabyte file onto a Web server and pick up where the Swedish moguls left off. But scrapping together the computer power to sail such a behemoth ship (the site’s co-founders once famously attempted to raise money to buy an island in order to house their servers) is an insurmountable task for most people. Plus, who wants the legal headaches?

The user who stripped the files from the Pirate Bay’s servers said he found 873,671 separate torrent files for download.

“Remember that all torrents from TPB now have the new tracker openbittorrent.com included, so they will continue to track even after the TPB tracker shuts down,” the anonymous submitter noted. In plain English, it means that even if the Pirate Bay site closes shop, drastically transforms and the old servers are seized and smashed into a million pieces, the bootlegs will continue to live on — at least with these 2,200 users.

Sorry, Hollywood. It’s not over yet.

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. The bookmarks you save won’t be restricted to Chrome either. They’ll be synched to your Google account and accessible through a web app. 

Bookmarks are a cool beginning but true data synching across machine with Google Chrome OS could be its killer feature. Read more about Google Chrome with our 10 things you need to know.

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!”

Since the company has not made any official announcement about the new protection, it’s unknown at this time if Twitter is using a particular service to provide the lookup capabilities for the malicious URL identification or if they are managing this process in-house. If we had to bet, though, we would go with the former. Maintaining a current “block list” for malicious web sites would be a major undertaking for the startup. It’s more likely they’ve partnered with a security company of some sort to provide this service or are using a publicly available API, such as Google’s Safe Browsing API, which checks URLs against Google’s blacklist.

The need for this type of protection on Twitter is more than apparent. As of late, the service has been overrun by those wanting to use it for their own nefarious purposes. Besides just getting their links posted to Twitter itself, hackers have managed to get their malware links into Twitter’s trending topics, too. There have also been instances where the Twitter accounts of high-profile users, like Guy Kawasaki for instance, have been hacked and have then been used to push malware links out to that person’s unsuspecting followers

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.

Earlier this evening, a small Facebook bug allowed a handful of apps to publish to the stream on behalf of users who had previously authorized the app. The situation has now been resolved, and all application settings will remain intact for users.

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.

This is quite concerning; as mentioned, Windows 7 has yet to even be released, and it can be fully activated. This demonstrates the risk such a huge company as Microsoft takes when distributing a product as significant as an operating system, but this was essentially inevitable, regardless. It’s interesting that a product can be pirated and activated before it’s properly released to customers.

You can get the activation crack here

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.

For instance, the Google ad system is likely to assign higher Quality Scores to Sony.com or Amazon.com for the keyword “digital cameras” than an advertiser xyz.com who is trying to promote his eBay auction on the AdSense network.

Google than computes the final rank (or ad position) of each advertiser using their respective quality scores and the maximum amount they are willing to pay for a single click (CPC).

Ad Rank of an advertiser = Quality Score * Maximum CPC Bid

Coming back to our original example, let’s say four advertisers are bidding in an auction to show up on a web page that is about “digital camera”.

The advertiser Sony.com has been assigned a score of 8 by Google and they are ready to spend a maximum of $16 per click.  Amazon has an even quality score (9) but they have specified their maximum CPC as $14 and so on.

Now the ad position (column 5) of various advertiser in an AdSense unit is determined on the basis of Ad rank (column 4) but the actual cost (or CPC) that these advertiser have to pay per click to Google is not always in that order.

As Dr Varian explains (time 05:50), the price that an advertiser has to pay (his actual CPC) is equal to the Ad Rank of the advertiser just below him divided by his own CPC bid.

So in the case of Sony, they’ll have pay 126 (the Ad Rank of Amazon) / 16 (CPC Bid of Sony) and this is equal to 7.88.

The click cost for Amazon will therefore be 120/14 = 8.57 which is more than that of Sony but the Amazon ad will still show up below the Sony ad since the Ad Rank of Sony is higher.

Google will share a fixed portion of ad revenue (or click price) with the AdSense publisher (where these ads are shown) and therefore a click on a Sony ad will fetch him less revenues even though the ad occupies the top slot.

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 themto communicate and organize.” NedaNet project coordinator Morgan Sennhauser, who has just written a paper detailing the Iranian government’s latest efforts to thwart hackers, says that the government’s actions have been surprisingly robust and have challenged hackers in ways that the Chinese government’s efforts at censorship have not.

“China has several gigabytes per second of traffic to deal with and has a lot more international businesses,” he says. “They can’t be as heavy-handed with their filtration. The Iranians aren’t as concerned about that… so they get to use all these fancy toys that, if the Chinese used them, could cripple their economy.”

With that in mind, this article will look at five of the most commonly-used technologies the Iranian government has been using to stifle dissent, as outlined in Sennhauser’s paper.

IP Blocking

IP Blocking is one of the most basic methods that governments such as Iran use for censorship, as it simply prevents all packets going to or from targeted IP addresses. Sennhauser says that this was how the government banned access to the BBC’s Persian news services and how it took down websites critical of the election.

But while these sorts of operations are relatively simple to execute, they don’t tackle the problem of individual communications between users, especially if the users have set up multi-hop circuits that use multiple servers to create a proxy ring.

Traffic Classification (QoS)

This is a much more sophisticated method of blocking traffic than IP blocking, as governments can halt any file sent through a certain type of protocol, such as FTP. Because the government knows that FTP transfers are most often sent through TCP port 21, they can simply limit the bandwidth available on that port and throttle transfers. Sennhauser says that this type of traffic shaping practice is the most common one used by governments today, as “it is not too resource intensive and is fairly easy to set up.”

Shallow Packet Inspection

Shallow packet inspection is basically a blunter, broader version of the deep packet inspection (DPI) technique that is used to block packets based on their content. But unlike DPI, which intercepts packets and inspects their fingerprints, headers and payloads, shallow packet inspection makes broad generalities about traffic based solely on checking out the packet header. Although shallow packet inspection can’t provide the Iranian government with the same detailed traffic assessments as DPI, Sennhauser says that it is much better at handling volume than DPI.

“It’s a less refined tool, but it can also deal with a lot more traffic than true DPI can,” he explains. “Shallow packet inspection is more judging a book by its cover. If a packet says that it’s SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) in the header, then a shallow packet inspector takes it at face value.”

Sennhauser notes, however, that this is a double-edged sword. If a user disguises their SSL packets as FTP packets in the header, the shallow packet inspector won’t be able to tell the difference.

Packet Fingerprinting

This is a slightly more refined method of throttling packets than shallow packet inspection, as it looks not only at the packet header but at its length, frequency of transmission and other characteristics to make a rough determination of its content. Sennhauser says the government can use this technique to better classify packets and not throttle traffic sent out by key businesses.

“A lot of things don’t explicitly say what they are. For example, a lot of VPN traffic is indistinguishable from SSH traffic, which means that it would be throttled if SSH was,” he says. “But what if businesses relied on VPN connections? You’d move the system to fingerprinting, where the two are easily distinguishable.”

Deep Packet Inspection / Packet Content Filtering

DPI is the most refined method that the government has for blocking Internet traffic. As mentioned above, deep packet inspectors examine not only a packet’s header but also its payload. This gives governments the ability to filter packets at a more surgical level than any of the other techniques discussed so far.

“Viewing a packet’s contents doesn’t tell you much on its own, especially if it’s encrypted,” he says. “But combining it with the knowledge gained from fingerprinting and shallow packet inspection, it is usually more than enough to figure out what sort of traffic you’re looking at.”

There are downsides to using DPI, of course: it’s much more complicated to run and is far more labor-intensive than other traffic-shaping technologies. But on the other hand, Sennhauser says there’s no magic bullet for getting around DPI as users can usually only temporarily elude it by “finding flaws in their system.” And even this won’t help for long, as the government can simply correct their system’s flaws once they’re discovered.

“Once they fix the flaw, you’ve lost unless you can figure out some real way to circumvent it,” Sennhauser notes.

Endgame still unclear

Sennhauser says that the government has employed these technologies smartly despite being caught flat-footed by the initial furor after the election. Indeed, he thinks the only reason that Iran hasn’t yet completely shut down dissidents’ communications is that they’ve had to fight with an army of hackers who tirelessly search for flaws in their system.

“It really is an arms race,” he says. “They create a problem, we circumvent it, they create another, we get around that one. This continues on until the need to do so is removed. The circumstances which will end the competition aren’t clear yet.”

Thanks to Brad Reed for the information.

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.

In November 2008, they changed the hash again. This time, Apple used code-obfuscation software on iTunes in an effort to complicate reverse-engineering a second time. When a wiki was put up to start documenting the new hash, Apple sent a takedown notice. Fortunately, some people found an ugly workaround to get gtkpod working again.

In 2009, Palm released the Palm Pre. It supported syncing with iTunes. Apple retaliated by updating iTunes specifically to blockPalm Pre interopability. Unfortunately, this changed the iPod database structure, and the workaround for gtkpod no longer works.

While I can understand Apple not wanting the Palm Pre to be able to sync with iTunes, as iTunes integration is one of the main selling points for the iPod, I can’t understand why they would actively block third party software from accessing the iPod.

Everyone is now selling DRM-free mp3 music, so it’s not a question of protecting DRM. You’d think they would want to sell more iPods, not block a certain percentage of their market out.

My 5G iPod broke today. Dear Apple, the replacement I purchase won’t be from you.

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.

FSF’s executive director Peter Brown explained, “Unfortunately this matter requires more than just changing internal policy. The real issue here is Amazon’s use of DRM and proprietary software. They have unacceptable power over users, and actual respect necessitates more than an apology — it requires abandoning DRM and releasing the Kindle’s software as free software.”

The deletion of the Orwell ebooks was Amazon’s third blatant demonstration of the control its software provides over users. In June, Amazon remotely deleted copies of Ayn Rand books, and prior to that, they disabled Text-to-Speech functionality for select titles — a move which was a slap in the face to all users and particularly to the visually impaired community.

FSF operations manager John Sullivan added, “Amazon has been a positive example for Defective By Design to point to in the world of DRM-free music. We hope that this controversy will show Amazon that they need to take the same enlightened approach when it comes to ebooks, so Kindle users can be confident that they won’t be Swindled again.”

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