Significantly increasing the utility and competitiveness of its Web-based e-mail service, Google is enabling an experimental ability to read, write, and search Gmail messages even while not connected to the network.
Google attracted the greatest number of unique visitors among the top 10 Web brands for the month of December, while AOL was best at keeping its users glued to its site, according to figures released Tuesday by Nielsen Online.During December, 133.9 million unique visitors went to a Google
Mozilla has donated 0,000 to help fund a collaborative initiative with the Wikimedia Foundation to improve open standards-based technology for video on the web.
An ‘immortal’ jellyfish is swarming through the world’s oceans, according to scientists.
Google Chrome was built from the ground up to be a more secure Web browser, and Google and its Chromium developers should be applauded for the attention they have brought to browser security.
Barack Obama will do his first formal interview as president with an Arabic cable TV network. The interview is set to air at 11pm EST, it reports. Al Arabiya is a 24-hour Arabic news channel based in Dubai that broadcasts across five continents, according to its website. A 2003 BBC report said it was one of the top-rated pan-Arab network.
cweditor writes in with an updated version of a story the likes of which you might have read before, What the Web Knows About You. But reporter Rob Mitchell found out vastly more about himself (his research subject) online than he could have even a year or two ago. The big difference is that state and local governments are putting online digitized records, often with Social Security numbers and other personal details intact. Mitchell ends by questioning how much good it does for banks or credit card companies to require 4, 5, or more independent identity “factors” before providing access to account details, when most or all of the factors they request can be found online about nearly anyone.
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 CNET News |
Kindle 2 for Valentine’s Day?
Christian Science Monitor – 2 hours ago By Andrew Heining | 01.27.09 Jeff Bezos isn’t giving any hints, but many indicators point to the rollout of a revamped version of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader in two weeks. Amazon holding press conference to announce launch of Kindle 2? Telegraph.co.uk Amazon’s Kindle 2 Will Debut Feb. 9 New York Times CNET News – Seattle Times – Seattle Post Intelligencer – StreetInsider.com (subscription) all 61 news articles |
Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference is available from Amazon for , but—best of all—the book is also available as a free PDF download from the official web site. Can’t go wrong with free.
LWATCDR writes “Mozilla has given the Wikimedia foundation 0,000 to fund Ogg development. The reason is simple: ‘Open standards for audio and video are important because they can be used by anyone for any purpose without royalties, and can be inspected and improved by an open community. Today, video and audio on the web are dominated by proprietary technologies, most frequently patent-encumbered codecs wrapped into closed-source player widgets.’ While Vorbis is a better standard than MP3, everything I have heard about Theora is that it is technically inferior to many other video codecs. I wonder if wouldn’t be better to direct effort to Dirac, perhaps putting Dirac into an Ogg container. No mention was made of FLAC or Speex funding. If more media players supported Speex it would be an ideal codec for many podcasts and audio books. It really is too bad that these codecs so often get overlooked.”
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