Articles about Cloud

A trio of Google product developers on Wednesday night blogged the arrival of Google Voice, a new service for phone and voicemail management. The application, which includes such features as SMS text searches and voicemail transcripts, will preview first to GrandCentral subscribers.

Craig Walker, Vincent Paquet, and Wesley Chan posted the notice, advising GrandCentral users to expect changeover instructions via e-mail. (The rest of us can sign up to get on the invite list.) A full list of Google Voice features, including more mundane phone-service capabilities such as conference calling and voicemail forwards, is available on the site and demonstrated by a collection of short videos showing the service's integration with Gmail's contact list and an ordinary handset.

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This morning, Google's initial experiment with so-called behavioral advertising officially emerges from beta. The company's categorical system for targeting users' interests is now officially under way, with tracking of responses to ads now active by default for all users who read Google AdSense-affiliated sites (including Betanews).

As a video posted to Google's advertising support site explains, Google's system is already maintaining cookies on users' computers that contain codes relating to categories of the users' interests, both ascertained and designated. A user may go to Google's preferences site (linked above) to choose specific interest categories, which are less like department store categories and more like content categories.

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The first American woman to earn a Ph.D in computer science has won the Association for Computing Machinery's AM Turing Award. Barbara Liskov, who currently heads the Programming Methodology Group in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has helmed innovations in software design that provide the underpinnings of every significant programming language introduced since 1975 -- not to mention much of the Internet as you know it.

Dr. Liskov's earliest work brought the concept of data abstraction into a central role in software engineering, making development and maintenance a much easier proposition; she created the CLU proto-OOP programming language as part of her teaching workload at MIT in 1974 and 1975. Her later work on distributed system design makes possible scalable systems with millions of concurrent users -- a crucial component of the very largest Web sites (think search engines). Currently, she's pondering ways of improving system fault tolerance, especially as it relates to arbitrary failures, including such problems as errors and intrusions.

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Streaming digital video showing activities inside and outside the International Space Station and the view of Earth from up there will now be available for about twelve hours every day, according to NASA. The feed will also contain audio of communications between Mission Control and the astronauts, including (for instance) live video of maintenance activities outside the station during today's prep for the incoming space shuttle.

The ISS is 200 miles up and moving at 17,500mph, posing a unique assortment of problems not encountered in the average video stream. Satellite coverage can occasionally drop out as well. (On the upside, there's a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes, and many views of activity outside show the Earth below looking ridiculously lovely.) When no spacewalks are underway, video will originate from inside the station during on-duty hours. Don't expect The Real World: ISS from the video setup, though; off-camera time is expected to run about 12 hours each day, from 2pm to 2am EDT. During those hours, the familiar location-and-path map will be streamed from Mission Control in Houston.

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Over the weekend, some -- though not all -- users of Google Docs received notifications in their Gmail inboxes stating that some of their cloud-based documents marked as private may have been sharable with other users anyway. The problem apparently concerns marking multiple documents as private with a single command, which ended up not fulfilling that task.

Here is the text of the letter Google Docs users received, which was published over the weekend independently by multiple bloggers who use the service:

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Trend Micro is reporting, and Twitter confirms, that Twitter users are once again under attack by people who need to upgrade their ethics. Targets receive a tweet from someone claiming to be female, 23, and in possession of a webcam. Click the link and you end up on an "adult" site that both attempts to phish your credit-card info and slathers your computer with ads for the same stuff.

Twitter says it has changed the passwords and removed the spam from the 750-odd accounts, none of which were believed to actually be kept by anyone female, 23, and in possession of a webcam. Trend Micro notes tartly that though it's not clear how how the attack was undertaken, "with Twitterers' willingness to enter their Twitter username and password into any number of third-party websites offering Twitter-related services, the opportunities for cybercrime are many."

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The vast Zoho online applications suite is on the march to tab heaven, and the word processor is leading the pack. Version 2.0 of Zoho Writer, unveiled Thursday, throws over its previous chock-full-o'-icons interface for a menu-and-tabs look that's eventually be integrated into all of Zoho's offerings.

Those familiar with previous versions of Zoho Writer are apt to remember the three-row-deep mass of icons at the top of the browser, and may also call some of the more oblique commands in the menus (Name-Name, anyone?). That's gone. The icon stack is replaced by six tab-shaped buttons in the toolbar, each of which clicks into a well-organized menu of choices. At the bottom of the screen, at last, word and character counts join the usual authoring and page count information.

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Book retailer Barnes & Noble today announced it has purchased Fictionwise, the company which runs the e-Bookstores Fictionwise.com and ereader.com, in its move to launch its own e-book store this year.

Fictionwise is one of the country's largest independent sellers of e-books, and supports a number of formats, including Palm, PocketPC, Hiebook, Mobipocket, eBookMan, Adobe, MS Reader, and WinCE, several of which are supported by Amazon's Kindle. The site also offers free eReader software for Windows and Mac OS, as well as software for Palm OS, Symbian S60 and UIQ, and Windows Mobile devices.

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It is now well-established that social network Facebook was built up from the idea (if not the actual code) of HarvardConnect, which later became ConnectU. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was sued for stealing the idea of Facebook from HarvardConnect, which he briefly worked on as a student.

So when Facebook announced yesterday that interface changes would soon be rolled out, which will turn the user's page into a real-time update feed of his friends' activities, many assumed this move was to replicate some of the more popular functionality of microblogging service Twitter, and remove some of the luster from that popularity. This idea is largely due to repeated rumors of an attempted Twitter buyout by Facebook.

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YouTube's probably not running scared just yet, but the Flickr community has finally gotten general access to video-posting capability. The Pro (paid-user) community has been uploading 90-second "long photos" to the service last year, but now any registered user can post to two standard-definition videos each month on the service.

According to Yahoo's Yodel Anecdotal blog, which announced the change earlier this week, the limit is in addition to the usual 100MB/month cap on photo uploads for non-paying users. Paying users also get a service boost, allowing them to upload HD video. And all hands are free to browse videos through the odd-but-amusing Flickr Clock, which sorts the clips by time.

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Available... no, away... no, available again... wait, no: Users of AOL's Instant Messenger service didn't know whether they were coming or going for a brief period this morning. According to an AOL spokesperson, the outage occurred during a software update and were resolved. By 11:00 am PST, no further glitches were officially reported, though Betanews tests have been revealing evidence of AIM misbehavior up until mid-afternoon.

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The word which perhaps best characterizes the screenshots, leaked today to The Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher, of Microsoft's internal tests of a search service tentatively entitled "Kumo," is unremarkable. They show a remade version of Windows Live Search with a few new innovations -- new for Microsoft, that is -- but at least based on these samples alone, not enough to clearly demonstrate why anyone should use Kumo instead of Google or Yahoo.

The screenshots display search results for three typical types of popular searches. These results are displayed on a page with a categorical navigation bar along the left side, offering ways in which the service can display different types of results (in Windows Live Search, these categories might appear in a line along the top marked See also). Unlike in Live.com, however, results can appear automatically grouped into Yellow Pages-like categories; for example, a search for "Audi S8" returned a list which was subcategorized into "Parts," "Accessories," "Forum," and other groupings with related terms.

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Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox, sent out the call Tuesday afternoon on mozilla.dev.planning: It's time to lock the trees and land the bugs on beta 3 of the 3.1 version of the browser.

As of 3pm PST, just nine bug landings stood between the dev team and handoff of mozilla-1.9.1 to the Release Engineering crew according to the mozilla.dev.planning thread on Google Groups. Beltzner noted in his Twitter stream that he "is hoping we get done with beta 3 code for Firefox tonight" after a day so busy he was wondering if he needed to block off time for bathroom breaks; the staff of Betanews wishes him all the best with, well, all of the above.

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A Microsoft spokesperson today confirmed the text of a statement attributed to Business Division President Stephen Elop this morning, which was interpreted by bloggers including Silicon Valley Insider as meaning that the company's forthcoming Office 14 suite will add advertising as a source of alternate revenue.

"There will be ad-based revenue streams," reads the quote from Elop. "There's an opportunity to draw those pirate customers into the revenue stream. We want to draw them into the Windows family and maybe there's an upsell opportunity later."

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A report released this week by Forrester raises the creepy echo of pay-for-play scandals of yore, recommending that companies exchange goods, gift cards or the like for blog coverage as part of "sponsored conversations."

The report detailing how companies can "Add Sponsored Conversations To Your Toolbox" drew the attention of Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb, who started his blog post by stating that he "respectfully disagree[s]" with the analyst firm's findings, but has words such as "dangerous" and "unsavory" in play by the end of the next sentence.

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