Top Items:
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Google's flub: Do we have a Web monoculture too? — Google had a rough weekend and a human error caused the search giant to list the entire Web as malware for an hour or so. The screw-up is likely to raise questions about the risks of having a monoculture dependent on any one technology supplier.
Royal Pingdom:
Revver and Pageflakes go dark for days — Both the video-sharing site Revver and the personalized start page service Pageflakes have been down since last Thursday, January 29. As of this writing, that is more than three-and-a-half days of straight downtime.
RELATED:
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
Was Anyone Still In Doubt Over LiveUniverse's Demise? — There's currently a thread on Techmeme based on this blog post from Pingdom about the downtime of most of LiveUniverse's services for the past couple of days. We've been getting tips about this since last Thursday …
Dan Goodin / The Register:
Passport RFIDs cloned wholesale by $250 eBay auction spree — Video demo shows you how — Using inexpensive off-the-shelf components, an information security expert has built a mobile platform that can clone large numbers of the unique electronic identifiers used in US passport cards and next generation drivers licenses.
Alexander Wolfe / InformationWeek:
Apple Planning Video-Call iPhone — Recent stories on Apple's iPhone patent have focused on Cupertino's threatened legal action against Palm, which is launching the iPhone-like Pre smartphone. But a closer examination of the Apple patent yields much more interesting news.
Times of London:
India set to follow cheap car with £7 laptop — The government-developed computer prototype will assist in bridging the ‘digital divide’ between rich and poor — India is poised to unveil the ultimate in credit-crunch computing: a 500 rupee (£7) laptop.
Ilinca Nita / Unwired View:
Samsung to present the world's first 12MP phone at MWC 2009 — Samsung was the first manufacturer to release an 8MP camera phone (the Innov8, outed one month before Sony Ericsson's C905), and it looks like it will also be the first to announce and launch a 12MP handset.
Discussion:
SlashGear, Newlaunches.com, Gizmodo, Gadget Lab, Boy Genius Report, Gearlog, Engadget Mobile, SlashPhone, Pocket-lint.co.uk and Obsessable
John Leyden / The Register:
Black hats poison Google video search — Game for a hack — Miscreants have poisoned Google Video search results in a bid to trick the unwary into getting infected with malware. — Instead of video clips, researchers at Trend Micro discovered that around 400,000 queries returning malicious results …
Ross Hill:
Big Websites Start Small — It is easy to forget that the big popular sites were once small too. — The first version of Digg cost $200 to build and launch. — After Kevin Rose came up with the idea back in 2004 he found Owen Byrne through eLance to develop the idea.
Thanks:robinwauters
Tim Arango / New York Times:
Despite iTunes Accord, Music Labels Still Fret — Last month the music industry and Apple, long uneasy partners, seemed a picture of harmony when they agreed on new terms for pricing on iTunes, Apple's online music store. — Behind the scenes, however, the relationship remains as tense and antagonistic as ever.
Newsosaur / Reflections of a Newsosaur:
Why newspapers can't stop the presses — Contrary to some of the ill-informed articles you might have read lately, almost every newspaper company still needs to print newspapers if it wants to stay in business. — Although the idea of paperless newspapers ricochets around the blogs with some regularity …
Discussion:
Mark Evans
Bobbie Johnson / Guardian:
Google Earth, Google Ocean: mysteries of the seafloor are mapped for the first time — Since Google Earth launched in 2006 millions of people have used its virtual globe to “travel” around the planet without leaving home, climbing a digital version of Mount Everest and even flying into space thanks to the website.
Jonathanhstrauss / SnowBlog:
Suggest to Techmeme Button — Techmeme is an essential news discovery tool for me. It replaced my RSS reader and the totally unmanageable list of blog feeds that came with it years ago, and now I'd estimate that at least 95% of the news I consume is discovered via Techmeme or Twitter.
InfoWorld:
The Open Group upgrades enterprise architecture — The Open Group, a technology consortium focused on interoperability and “boundary-less information flow,” on Monday is launching version 9 of TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework), which provides a framework and method for enterprise architecture available to any organization.
Discussion:
Dana Gardner's BriefingsDirect
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Apple 2.0:
Apple starts 2009 with strong Net gains — Apple (AAPL) consolidated its 2008 holiday Internet market-share gains with strong performances from the Mac, iPhone and iPod touch in January, according to preliminary data issued overnight Sunday by Net Applications.
Discussion:
The iPhone Blog, Pocket-lint.co.uk, Edible Apple, AppleInsider, CNET News, marketshare.hitslink.com, Asa Dotzler and 9 to 5 Mac
RELATED:
Pete Carey / Mercury News:
Layoffs mean more than lost wages for H-1B visa holders — For the two out-of-work engineers, it's a race against time. They've lost their Silicon Valley jobs and need to quickly find others at a time when companies everywhere are tightening their belts. — Both are Indians whose advanced degrees …
Stephanie Clifford / New York Times:
Lucky Magazine's iPhone Tool Is All About Shopping — The Condé Nast magazine Lucky has always been an unabashed promoter of shopping. On Monday, it is going one step further, introducing an iPhone application, Lucky at Your Service, that ties into stores' inventories.
Om Malik / GigaOM:
Moto Backing Away From Windows Mobile — Earlier this month reports emerged that Motorola would cut as much as 50 percent of its handset division as it slashes the number of phones it sells to a dozen and focuses solely on Google's Android operating system.
Noam Cohen / New York Times:
Link By Link: Millions of Books, but No Card Catalog — IN 2002, Google began to drink the milkshakes of the book world. — Back then, according to the company's official history, it began a “secret ‘books’ project.” Today, that project is known as Google Book Search and …
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Microsoft Claims Patent Holder Got A Job At Microsoft To Get Info Used In Patent Lawsuits — We see all sorts of strange patent-related lawsuits around here, but this one probably qualifies for the most extreme attempt by a patent holder to come up with info for the sake of a patent lawsuit.
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
TVtrip Raises €7 Million More For Hotel Video Reviews — Paris-based TVtrip has scored €7 million (nearly $9 million) in venture capital funding on top of its previous $4.8 million Series A round, bringing the total of capital invested in the company up to a healthy $13.8 million …
Discussion:
paidContent
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Data breach costs, customer churn up a bit; Repeat offenders abound — The cost of a data breach runs companies $202 per compromised record, up 2.5 percent from $197 per record in 2007 and up 11 percent from 2006, according to research from Ponemon Institute.
