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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…

A Chinese court has jailed four people for spreading their bootleg “Tomato Garden” version of Microsoft’s Windows XP program, in what the Xinhua news agency called the nation’s biggest software piracy case.

Hong Lei, the creator of the downloadable “Tomato Garden Windows XP” software, was jailed for three and a half years on Thursday by a court in Suzhou in eastern China, Xinhua reported, citing local media. 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…

AT&T is shutting down its broadband TV service on Sept. 1, leaving users with a little over two weeks to continue watching live TV streamed to their PCs. AT&T launched the service in 2006. When it comes to streamed television over the Internet, several new entrants — Hulu and Netflix, for instance 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…

It’s a long weekend and you’re happy because you’ll get to spend the next three days with your family. You left the office in an excited mood but as the cab was approaching home, you suddenly realized that you forgot to shut down the Office PC. Oops!

It’s a sinking feeling because there’re so many confidential documents on the computer and since most of your trusted colleagues have also left for the day, there’s no point calling them for help.

So what do you do? Drive back to Office? Well that’s not required – just take out your cell phone or switch on the laptop at home, send an email (or an SMS or a tweet) and that will instantly lock your Office workstation. And if you share the same computer with multiple people, you can use another email command to remotely log off or even shut down the computer from anywhere in the world. 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…

On a trip to India where he received the Indira Gandhi peace prize, Bill Gates gave a surprising number of candid interviews.

The first big question, obviously, was about Google and the Chrome OS. Gates reiterated his earlier stand of how Google’s build-up and secrecy are a lot more exciting than the product itself.

“Everything Google hasn’t shipped yet is exciting. It’s after they ship it that it becomes not exciting,” he told The Economic Times.

While acknowledging that Bing won’t become the dominant search engine anytime soon, he quickly added: “But there are people within Microsoft who dream of such glory. After all, Google needs some competition and who the heck is going to do it but Microsoft?”

Gates also said that Microsoft was keen to work with former Infosys head Nandan Nilekani, who is now in charge of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIAI), which is set to roll out identity cards for all Indians from 2011. Continue reading…