Microsoft is suing Motorola alleging it has infringed nine patents in its Android phones, in that certain functions of said phones – including but not limited to synchronizing e-mail, calendars and contacts – are based on Microsoft technology.
Microsoft said Motorola licensed some of its mobile technology from 2003 to 2007 but continued to use the technology without renewing the license. So they have now filed a lawsuit in a federal court as well as filing one with the International Trade Commission.
Its court filing specifically mentions the Motorola Droid 2 and the Motorola Charm smart phones, but Microsoft claims that the infringements were not limited to those devices.
A Motorola spokeswoman said the company has not yet received a copy of the suit, but based on its strong intellectual property portfolio, plans to “vigorously defend itself”.
Google has released developer tools for a new image format that Google believes could replace JPEG as the ideal photo format for the Internet. Called “WebP”, the new format – invented by Google themselves – would offer improved performance while maintaining image quality. Google claims that files compressed with the new format would be as much as 39 per cent smaller than those compressed in the current JPEG photo format.
According to Google product manager Richard Rabbat, the open-sourced format is an attempt to cut the size of “lossy” compressed images, reducing file sizes and data traffic loads for networks with slower connection speeds such as mobile broadband platforms. “Most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time,” Rabbat wrote in a blog posting. “Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution.”
The company is currently offering developer tools to help developers add WebP support to their applications. The company also plans to introduce support for the format with the next version of its Chrome browser.
Some time ago, Google launched its own URL shortening service – a service that turns long website links into shorter, more manageable ones – to not only help the site promote its own products through services like Twitter, but also help others with theirs. Dubbed Goo.gl, the service was previously available only with certain other Google services, including the Google browser toolbar, FeedBurner RSS service, News, Blogger, and Maps. But now, since last night, the service has its own website – http://goo.gl/ – where it can be used all by itself.
Google says its URL shorter is all about “stability,” “security,” and “speed.” Matt Cutts, a major Google player, had this to say about the service (spelling in context): “Google needed a url shortener for its own products where we knew the shortener wouldn’t go away. We also wanted a shortener that we knew would do things the right way… and that would be fast, stable, and secure.” That “right way” includes permanent redirects.
From the new goo.gl site, you can not only shorten URLs, but monitor traffic to your URLs after you shorten them. Google provides top referrers for each link as well as visitor profiles. “This can be a great way to better understand who’s interested in your links, how they’re finding them and when they’re reading,” the company says.
Thanks to various news sources for the Matt Cutts quote and for confirming the feature list!
There is one thing about GMail’s web interface that makes it stands out compared to other email solutions, and it’s the thing they’re both praised and criticised for in equal measure. Unlike most email clients, which stack your emails in chronological order and make no obvious links between the conversations they relate to, Google GMail has since the very start had a feature that groups all the emails in the same conversation together into one “thread”, making a whole conversation easy to find and read through in it’s entirety. This feature, called “Conversation View”, has split opinion. Threading enthusiasts say they spend less mental energy drawing connections between related messages and that their inboxes are much less cluttered. On the other hand, email traditionalists like many former Outlook users think conversation view just complicates something that has worked for years.
Today, Google has announced it is finally introducing a new option to cater for those in the latter side of the argument. Read the rest of this entry »
For the past four years now, over a million users – myself included – have been using XMarks, a brilliant free service that syncs bookmarks, passwords and other data between other computers – and browsers – automatically, only requiring that the XMarks add-on is installed on the computers and you log in to your XMarks account (which can be made automatic after the first time).
Today, however, I am sorry to report that there is bad news regarding the service. In fact, probably the worst news you could hear if you’ve made heavy use of the service. If you, like me, have been a loyal XMarks user until now, you either already have, or will shortly be receiving the following email which explains what I’m talking about: Read the rest of this entry »
The failure of security that caused the infection of more than 190 thousand users on Orkut has been fixed by Google. In a statement, the American company says the cause of this problem was a code in the ‘New Orkut’, which was modified by the developers of social network.
“We took swift action to correct a vulnerability to cross-site scripting (XSS) in orkut.com which was discovered a few hours ago. Our analysis of the script code does not reveal any malicious activity. The problem is now resolved, but continued studying Vulnerability to help avoid similar problems in future, “Google said in a statement.
The flaw led the users to be included in the community “Infected by Orkut Virus”, without any need for approval. The group came to be deleted by the site staff in the early afternoon, but the hackers recreated using the same loophole. Besides becoming a member, the user started sending malicious code to your contacts through the network message.
Users who were infected by the code should clear browser history and delete temporary files. It is further recommended that the password for access to social networking should be replaced.
A year ago, Google announced Chrome Frame, a project intended to bring the standards support, HTML5 features, and speed of Google’s Chrome Web browser to Internet Explorer as a plug-in, rather than requiring users to download a separate application. Now, Google has taken the “beta” tag off and announced Chrome Frame’s first stable release, bringing Chrome’s features—and speed—to Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, without requiring users to replace their existing browsers.
We’ll have more information about this story as soon as it is available.
Google has added another layer of security to its Google Apps service, which may make it more appealing to businesses still uncertain about joining the move to Cloud Computing. The new step to keeping accounts secure currently applies to the Premier, Education, and Government editions of Google Apps, with the feature coming to all Google Apps users in the next few months.
It can’t be more simple, yet it’s actually quite clever. When users sign up to Google Apps, one of the details they’re asked to supply is their mobile phone number. With this new step, when you log in to your Google Apps account, a random security code, which changes each time, will be sent to your phone, either via a text or voice call. To verify yourself and actually get in to your account, you will need to type the code you are given into the site. If the code is wrong, you won’t get in. It’s the same concept as those “Authenticators” banks and online games are starting to use in abundance, but it eliminates the need for any new gadgetry, and instead uses the one gadget practically everyone these days has – their phone.
What’s more, to make the feature less annoying, Google lets users tone down the security for devices they trust. If a user is on a trusted computer — their office system, for example — they can opt to have their verification code remembered on that computer, meaning they won’t be asked for a code for 30 days, instead of having to enter a new one upon each login.
One final point, for those Tech-minded people out there who may want to take advantage of this security in their own projects: it may interest you to know that Google has built its verification feature on the open source OATH standard, meaning users can customize it for their own needs or even apply it to non-Google applications.
In a blog post posted today, Dave Girouard – the president of Google Enterprise – stated that the company will soon offer the ability to edit Google Docs documents on Android devices and the Apple iPad.
Little information was given about the additional editing capability in the blog post, which instead seemed more focused on the news that more than 3 million businesses have “gone Google,” a term Google has coined for those using Google hosted services. However, reports suggest the technology may be predicated on DocVerse, which Google bought in March.
DocVerse allows users of PowerPoint, Word, and Excel documents to collaborate and save them to the cloud, as well as chat with the collaborators, and many other features. Although DocVerse originally provided up to 1 GB of free storage, with any additional files costing $0.25 per GB per year, the service would presumably be rolled into the Google Apps Premier Edition fee, or $50 per user per year.
Four New York University students who raised a bundle of cash to build a privacy-preserving alternative to Facebook sure have their work cut out for them.
The project in question, Diaspora, grew out of deep-rooted dissatisfaction many people expressed earlier this year in response to Facebook privacy changes that without warning exposed details many users didn’t want to share with world+dog. When the developers sought funding, according to The New York Times, they asked for $10,000. So strong was the discontent of some Facebook users that they ended up with donations exceeding $200,000.
On Wednesday, to show people just how far the project has come along, some of the open-source code planned to be used in a pre-alpha version of the website was made available to the public. However, only a few hours later, hundreds of security researchers and amateur hackers began identifying security flaws in the code that could seriously compromise those who used the service. Among other things, the mistakes make it possible to hijack accounts, friend users without their permission, and Read the rest of this entry »