The new Amazon Kindle!

Let’s be honest — you saw this one coming, didn’t you? Yesterday Amazon introduced a new reading device for e-book aficionados dubbed simply… the Kindle. The new handheld — slated to be released on August 27th — is 21 percent smaller and 15 percent lighter than the previous model, has a 20 percent faster refresh rate on its E Ink (yep, still E Ink) screen, and will now come in two colors (graphite, like its big brother the DX, and the original white). In addition to the color changes, there will be two radio configurations available: a $139 WiFi only version, and a $189 3G version (utilizing AT&T’s network, just like the last model).

The screen will remain the same 6-inch size as the last two Kindles, though the company claims page turns are faster and contrast is improved. The internal storage on the device has been cranked to 4GB, and the battery life is now rated at a month with no wireless, and 10 days with wireless switched on. The company also announced plans for a UK-localized version at £109 and £149, respectively, as well as a UK e-book store.

Along with the big changes, there have been minor tweaks as well — the keyboard and five-way controls have been streamlined and altered slightly. The rocker is now more compact and flush with the device, and the side buttons have been modified in length to emphasize the forward paddles, while the back buttons have been downsized. Software wise, there are some interesting new features, the most notable being the inclusion of an “experimental” Webkit-based browser. If you’re expect future iterations to go even bolder with their multimedia capabilities, we kindly direct you to some choice quotes by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos care of WSJ: “For the vast majority of books, adding video and animation is not going to be helpful. It is distracting rather than enhancing.

You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets,” adding later, “there are going to be 100 companies making LCD [screen] tablets… why would we want to be 101? I like building a purpose-built reading device. I think that is where we can make a real contribution.”

Those who had a chance to play with the device for a short while during a meeting with the company,  can report that the Kindle is still very much the reading device you know and love (or hate, depending on your preferences). The build quality and materials used did seem slightly more polished than the previous version, and they really liked the new, more subtle rocker.

They can also attest to screen refreshes and overall navigation feeling noticeably more responsive and snappy compared with the previous generation. Amazon was showing off a jacket accessory which will be made available at launch that includes a small, pull-out light for late-night reading sessions. I’m sure it will please a lot of folks eager to keep their partners undisturbed while they tear through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Screenshot of the "Ask Question" option.

Facebook’s worst-kept secret is finally ready for its closeup: the company is starting to roll out Facebook Questions, a Q&A service that allows users to poll all of Facebook. Facebook has been inviting users to apply to join a sneak peek of Questions for months now, so we’ve seen much of this before, but this marks the first time that it will begin rolling out to users who didn’t apply for the beta program. Facebook says that this is intiitally rolling out to 3-5 million users, with plans for a broader rollout down the line.

The motivations behind the launch are clear: millions of people already use Facebook status updates to poll their friends — it’s only natural that the site would offer a dedicated mechanism to do this (and it’s also likely to be a boon for page views, especially once Questions are syndicated to search engines). But If you were hoping the new product would incorporate Facebook’s extensive privacy settings, you’ll be disappointed: everything in Questions is shared with everyone else on Facebook, and every question you ask is tied to your real name; likewise, anyone who answers will have their response tied to their account.

Questions choice on the homepage.

Of course, having all questions set to public does have one nice side effect: you’ll be able to poll from Facebook’s massive audience of 500 million users. Facebook obviously isn’t going to ask your question to everyone else on Facebook; instead, its system is going to try to analyze a user’s interests to determine who would be best able to answer your question. The service will also show the question to some of your friends, so ideally you’ll receive answers from a healthy mix of friends and experts (we’ll see how well it actually works).

You’ll be able to ask a question from a few places: the Questions tab that appears in the site’s left navigation area, the publisher that appears at the top of the page (where you typically post things like status updates), and, most interestingly, the search box. When you start typing a question into Facebook’s search box, the site will start displaying a list of similar questions that have already been asked on the site. If yours doesn’t pop up, or you really want to re-ask the same thing, you can ask it directly from the search field.

This could be a big, big deal for the site. Given its size, it won’t take long for Facebook to build up a massive amount of data — if that data is consistently reliable, Questions could turn into a viable alternative to Google for many queries. Facebook will also be integrating Questions and their answers into the Community Pages it launched in April, which already include content from Wikipedia and Facebook user status updates.

In May this year, the United States District Court of California ruled that RapidShare is not guilty of copyright infringement. In a hearing closer to home for the Swiss company, a German court ruled in the same month that RapidShare cannot be held not liable for acts of copyright infringement committed by its users.

In a related case in Germany against the movie studio Capelight Pictures, RapidShare has booked another success after a lower court initially ruled against the file-hoster last year. RapidShare successfully appealed against a preliminary injunction granted by the Düsseldorf Regional Court, and the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf has now reversed the decision.

The dispute between Capelight Pictures and the file-hoster dealt with the question of whether RapidShare had undertaken all reasonable measures to counter the illegal distribution of one of the films owned by the movie outfit in Germany. While the lower court ruled RapidShare did not, the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf overturned this decision.

“The ruling is a further step in the right direction,” said RapidShare lawyer Daniel Raimer. “The previously common practice of copyright holders [suing] RapidShare on the off-chance there might be something to be gained from it, misunderstanding the realities it is operating within and showing contempt for its business model, will no longer bear fruit. The newest court rulings in Germany and the USA indicate this very clearly.“

Christian Schmid, founder and CEO of RapidShare, commented: “We are also pleased with the ruling because it is connected to a claim for compensation of costs. Copyright holders should therefore think very carefully in future about whether they wouldn’t prefer to save themselves some time and above all the expense of suing RapidShare for something for which the company cannot be held liable.“

Together with the positive outcomes from the other court cases this year, RapidShare has less to worry about on the legal front in the future. The verdicts are undoubtedly a major victory for RapidShare, and they will also reflect positively on other file-hosters and even torrent sites. In fact, many of the arguments used by the Court also hold for the average torrent site, as long as they stay away from other means of facilitating copyright infringement.

A post in a support forum says customers should hear from Dell shortly. It does not provide any technical explanation of what type of spyware is included with the hardware or what extra cleaning process customers should go through.

Some forms of malware are likely to have spread if the hardware has been attached to a network. The forum post, from yesterday morning, is here.

The forum poster was concerned not to have more technical information – and that the call he received to book technical support said the call might not happen for up to ten days.

In response a Dell support staffer said there was an issue with a small number of service motherboard stock – new PowerEdge systems are not infected. He said the malware would not infect non-Windows servers.

Dell has also sent out the following statement:

“Dell is aware of the issue and is contacting affected customers. The issue affects a limited number of replacement motherboards in four servers – PowerEdge R310, PowerEdge R410, PowerEdge R510 and PowerEdge T410 – and only potentially manifests itself when a customer has a specific configuration and is not running current anti-virus software.

This issue does not affect systems as shipped from our factory and is limited to replacement parts only. Dell has removed all impacted motherboards from its service supply chain and new shipping replacement stock does not contain the malware.

Customers can find more information on Dell’s community forum.” – Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager of server platforms at Dell.

Fortunately the forum has also been updated with information which answers some of the relevant questions – the malware was found in the flash on motherboards, not in firmware. It is a W32.Spybot worm which should be detected by any decent anti-virus software.

Dell said that less than one per cent of boards shipped have the infection. Systems using an iDRAC Express or iDRAC Enterprise card will not be damaged. In fact systems will only be hit if you run an update to either Unified Server Configurator (USC) or 32-bit Diagnostics.

The main reason for the concern? There’s an explosion of data about to happen to the Web – thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other Internet of Things data. Other reasons include the increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet and the annual growth in user-generated content on the Web.

IPv4 countdown on Twitter - less than a year to go before IPv4 addresses run out...

Currently the Web largely uses IPv4, Internet Protocol version 4. Each IPv4 address is limited to a 32-bit number, which means there are a maximum of just over 4 billion unique addresses. IPv6 is the next generation Internet Protocol and uses a 128-bit address, so it supports a vastly larger number of unique addresses. Enough, in fact, to give every person on the planet over 4 billion addresses!

John Curran from ARIN, the non-profit responsible for managing the distribution of Internet addresses in the North American region, told ReadWriteWeb that of the approximately 4 billion IPv4 addresses available, all but 6% have already been allocated. Curran expects the final 6% to be allocated over the coming year.

This is largely an issue that ISP (Internet Service Providers) and telecoms carriers need to deal with. However content service providers, including large-scale Internet companies like Google and Facebook, also need to ensure that the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 takes place. Curran explained that a content company like Google (for example its YouTube operation) will need to work with its ISP to transport the content via IPv6 as well as IPv4.

This transition is happening “slowly,” says Curran. But he warns that “deployment is where we’re behind.”

John Curran told us that large carriers like Verizon and Comcast have announced trial IPv6 activity. Curran also noted that new Internet of Things initiatives that use sensor networks, power grids, RFID and similar technologies, are being directed to use IPv6 and not IPv4.

There is also solid support from the big Internet companies. Curran said that Google has already put the majority of its services onto IPv6. Declaring its support for IPv6 on a special webpage, Google states that “IPv6 is essential to the continued health and openness of the Internet [and] will enable innovation and allow the Internet’s continued growth.”

In June, Google held a Google IPv6 Implementors Conference. At that event, Facebook announced that it had begun to use IPv6.

In his opening remarks to the conference, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf urges ISPs to move to IPv6, so that a “black market” for Internet addresses won’t occur.

Critics view some of the push for IPv6 as Chicken Little ‘the sky is falling’ talk. Commented @ajbraun, a self-described technology leader at Sony Ericsson, via Twitter: “We should call this “IPv6: Y2K II.” An obvious issue for 10 years, we will panic at the end and finally much ado about nothing.”

Others see a technology called NAT (Network Address Translation) as a solution – it maps multiple addresses to a single IP address, thus reducing the amount of unique IP addresses required. However this is at best a temporary solution. Google argued back in 2008 that NAT and similar technologies “complicate the Internet’s architecture, pose barriers to the development of new applications, and run contrary to network openness principles.”

Whether or not there is Y2K-style fear mongering, the bottom line is that IPv6 is a much larger platform for the coming Internet of Things. So one way or another, the move will have to be made.

Company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement today on the official Facebook blog.

“To celebrate, we’ve put together a collection of stories you’ve shared with us about the impact Facebook and your friends have had on your lives,” writes Zuckerberg. “We’re launching a new application called Facebook Stories where you can share your own story and read hundreds of others, categorized by themes and locations around the world.”

Despite the company’s recent bumpy rides through themires of privacy disputes, over the last 6 and a half years, Facebook has redefined how we maintain relationships with our connections. We here at ReadWriteWeb even had the adventure of unknowingly confusing thousands of Facebook users who thought our homepage was a radical new redesign of their favorite social network.

500 million users later, distant families and long-lost friends are reconnecting and keeping abreast on one another’s lives. I moved away from my hometown at the age of 9, but I managed to find my childhood friends on Facebook. I also have relatives that I see maybe once a year at best, but with Facebook we can stay connected – and it’s only because the network is as large as it is. Certainly, there are other social Web solutions for staying connected, but the massive scale and acceptance by users young and old of Facebook makes it the best tool we have right now.

Children growing up today don’t remember a time before Facebook – and that’s both scary and fascinating. Future generations will be more and more accepting of sharing their lives on the Internet, which has its obvious pros and cons. At the other end of the spectrum, when my generation grows old and wants to look back on our lives, we won’t need an old crusty photo album. We will simply use whatever popular device at the time that lets us flip through our life’s history as aggregated from decades of social sharing. Facebook has been at the forefront of paving the way for that future.

It has taken 77 months for Facebook to go from 0 to 500 million and the company shows little sign of slowing, even with many leaving the network over privacy issues. The truth is, there is no viable alternative yet, but perhaps Google or those four students from N.Y.U. can change that.

Steve Jobs talking at the Apple Press Conference dealing with the antenna problems.

Are antenna grip problems universal among smartphones? Even if they are, handset makers RIM, Nokia, and HTC are not happy with Apple for insinuating that the iPhone 4 isn’t alone in suffering from signal loss when gripped in a certain way.

During a press conference on Friday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs called media coverage of the iPhone 4′s antenna problems overblown. Jobs said that reception issues were something common to all smartphones, playing a video that showed smartphones from HTC, Samsung, and other manufacturers dropping signal when held in various ways.

Apple’s attempt to paint other smartphones with the same wide brush didn’t sit well with RIM, makers of the BlackBerry. Calling the whole saga “Apple’s self-made debacle,” RIM co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie didn’t mince words. “Apple’s claims about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public’s understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple’s difficult situation,” they said in a statement obtained by CrackBerry. “RIM has avoided designs like the one Apple used in the iPhone 4 and instead has used innovative designs which reduce the risk for dropped calls, especially in areas of lower coverage.”

The co-CEOs also slammed Apple for its free case program, pointing out that all BlackBerrys can maintain “proper connectivity” without having to resort to cases and bumpers. They concluded by criticized Apple for shirking responsibility for its design choices by accusing other hardware makers of making similar antenna tradeoffs.

HTC was more restrained, even though a Droid Eris was shown dropping from four bars to zero during Apple’s video. Instead, HTC highlighted user satisfaction and a corresponding lack of complaints about the Eris’ design. “We have had very few complaints about signal or antenna problems on the Eris,” a company spokesperson told Pocket-lint. He said that only about 0.016 percent of Eris owners have complained to the manufacturer about dropped calls and signal weakness, compared to 0.55 percent of iPhone 4 owners.

Jobs also singled out Nokia, highlighting models from the Finnish company that ship with stickers on the reverse saying “don’t touch here.” Nokia defended itself, saying on its corporate blog that it considers antenna design a “core competence… for decades.”

Nokia says it designs its phones to account for real-world usage, including a variety of grips. “In general, antenna performance of a mobile device/phone may be affected with a tight grip, depending on how the device is held,” the company said. “That’s why Nokia designs our phones to ensure acceptable performance in all real life cases, for example when the phone is held in either hand. Nokia has invested thousands of man hours in studying how people hold their phones and allows for this in designs, for example by having antennas both at the top and bottom of the phone and by careful selection of materials and their use in the mechanical design.”

In the same way that widespread user and media criticism of the iPhone 4 antenna problem touched a nerve within Apple, the iPhone maker’s saying that its latest gadget is just one of many smartphones with signal loss problems has aroused the ire of its competitors. All handset makers are faced with antenna design challenges, but only Apple has managed to bring its antenna design decisions so spectacularly into the public consciousness. That’s not something Cupertino should feel good about.

Russian Federation Ministry

Following the country’s first ever raid on a BitTorrent site in 2009, Russian authorities have now begun a criminal investigation into the operators of Interfilm.ru. Run by a married couple, the site is now at the center of copyright infringement claim which runs to a staggering $1.25 billion. Reports suggest that the investigation has also traced some of the site’s top users.

Claiming that the site was a major source of pre-release cammed movies with links to piracy groups outside the country, on May 26th 2009 the Russian Federation Ministry of Internal Affairs Investigation Committee under the Ministry of Internal Affairs carried out a raid on the the Russian BitTorrent tracker, Interfilm.ru.

The action followed complaints from anti-piracy group RAPO, a founding member of the MPA which represents the interests of Universal, Paramount, Sony, Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox in Russia.

At Interfilm’s Moscow base the police arrested several staff and also the main targets, husband and wife team Ivan and Irina Podorozhnikovymi.

Just over a year later the Interior Ministry Investigation Committee has now filed criminal charges against the pair, known online as ‘Ripper’ and ‘Nadezhda’. The scope of the accusations are quite incredible. Domestic and foreign film companies claim that the tracker caused 38.7 billion rubles in damages – a mind-blowing $1.253 billion.

Interfilm.ru Logo

Although it has not been revealed how this astronomical figure was reached, if convicted the founders – who the authorities say moved house and took technical measures to keep the site up during the investigation – could be facing up to six years in jail under Part 3 of Article 146 of the Criminal Code.

In addition to action against the site’s founders, there is an ongoing investigation into some of the top users of the site. However, in order to prove that regular users committed any crimes, under Russian law it would be necessary to prove they profited from their actions on a large scale.

There are claims that some individuals downloaded fresh movie releases from Interfilm and then uploaded them to their own sites. Police are considering whether to launch criminal investigations in these cases.

Although Interfilm went down after the initial raid, it reappeared at LeaseWeb in The Netherlands. The site remains operational today with a Malaysian host but is perhaps preparing for trouble. In addition to using the Interfilm.ru domain, the site is also in operation from BitHouse.org. Russia’s biggest torrent site, Torrents.ru, recently had to change its name to RUTracker.org after its domain was seized by Russian authorities.

Windows XP Professional

Microsoft originally said that new owners of Windows 7 who wanted to downgrade to XP would only have until 2011 to do so, but now the company has changed its mind and extended support for the old operating system until 2020.

That’s right. Windows XP, an operating system that is already almost 10 years old, will apparently still be relevant for another 10 years.

“We have decided to extend downgrade rights to Windows XP Professional beyond the previously planned end date at Windows 7 SP1,” wrote Microsoft in an official blog post. “Going forward, businesses can continue to purchase new PCs and utilize end user downgrade rights to Windows XP or Windows Vista until they are ready to use Windows 7.”

Because users did not seem to be overly outraged about Windows 7 the way everyone was about Vista, it seemed perfectly fine to cut off the remaining life of Windows XP without too much haste. And for the majority of individual computer owners, that probably wouldn’t have been a problem.

However, what is a problem is that 74% of businesses still use Windows XP, and for a lot of them, the cost of upgrading all of their machines to Windows 7 is not financially tenable. Thus, companies risk having old computers with Windows XP and new computers with Windows 7 which would fragment their network and make it impossible to streamline systems.

It is as a result of that statistic that Microsoft will now continue to allow downgrades to Windows XP for people who purchase Windows 7 Professional through 2015, and through 2020 for people who purchase Windows 7 Ultimate, according to a report from Computerworld.

However, as of yesterday, Microsoft ended all support for Windows XP SP2, so anyone who still wants to be covered by Microsoft support will at least have to move to XP’s Service Pack 3.

With word of the iPhone’s reception woes travelling well beyond the blogosphere, it surely looks like a software fix will do little to stop the bleeding.

When Apple released its iPhone 4 late last month, users quickly began reporting reception issues when the phone was held a certain way. At first, the company played off the glitch as user error, telling owners not to hold it that way. When it realized the issue wasn’t going away, Apple admitted there was a problem, but pointed at a software rather than hardware issue. The company said that its software had been mis-reporting signal reception all along and that a retroactive patch to all iPhones would correct the issue. As we reported then, however, an independent analysis by the popular hardware news site Anandtech.com seemed to directly contradict this explanation.

Now, Consumer Reports agrees, stating that “It’s official. Consumer Reports’ engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4, and have confirmed that there is a problem with its reception.” According to the review, testers tried several phones, bought at different locations, and compared results with other phone models. The results contradicted Apple’s claims that the reception issue was one that was “true of iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, as well as many Droid, Nokia and RIM phones.”

While many early adopters and tech watchers were well aware of the issue, Consumer Reports’ non-recommendation brings the problem to the mainstream. It’s no longer just a topic for the tech blogs and the back pages of newspapers, but rather an oft-repeated mantra of the five o’ clock news, mainstream media and talk radio. Cult of Mac’s Leander Kahney spoke with several public relations experts who agreed that an iPhone recall was “inevitable” in order to preserve “its brand image, its crown jewels, at all cost.”

Aside from the reception issue, however, Consumer Reports says that the iPhone 4 “sports the sharpest display and best video camera we’ve seen on any phone, and even outshines its high-scoring predecessors with improved battery life and such new features as a front-facing camera for video chats and a built-in gyroscope that turns the phone into a super-responsive game controller.” But before the magazine will issue a recommendation, it says, “Apple needs to come up with a permanent–and free–fix for the antenna problem”.

Zynga

The investment part of the deal closed a month ago or so. A larger strategic partnership is still in process.

The investment was made by Google itself, not Google Ventures, say the sources, and it’s a highly strategic deal. Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year, say multiple sources. Not only will Zynga’s games give Google Games a solid base of social games to build on, but it will also give Google the beginning of a true social graph as users log into Google to play the games. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see PayPal being replaced with Google Checkout as the primary payment option. Zynga is supposedly PayPal’s biggest single customer, and Google is always looking for ways to make Google Checkout relevant.

And there’s more. These same sources are saying that Zynga’s revenues for the first half of 2010 will be a stunning $350 million, half of which is operating profit. Zynga is projecting at least $1.0 billion in revenue in 2011, say our sources. This blows previous estimates out of the water.

Zynga continues to work on high level strategic business development deals. The reason these deals are so attractive to companies like Yahoo and now Google is this – Zynga allows them to rebuild the massive social graph, currently controlled by Facebook. For whatever reason people love to play these games and get passionately addicted to them, coming back day after day. That’s helped Facebook become what it is today. Google, Yahoo and others want some of that magic to rub off on them, too.

There will be lots more news on Google Games in the near future, I am guessing. Here’s a job opening for a Product Lead for Google Games, for example.

The one question everyone is asking, however, is why would Facebook close down a venture that sells imaginary, low-to-no overhead items for real-world money?

Facebook’s product manager for games and credits Jared Morgenstern wrote in a blog post that “Closing the Gift Shop may disappoint many of the people who have given millions of gifts, but we made the decision after careful thought about where we need to focus our product development efforts. We’ll be able to focus more on improving and enhancing products and features that people use every day, such as Photos, News Feed, Inbox, games, comments, the ‘Like’ button and the Wall.”

The Facebook Gift Shop

All Facebook’s Nick O’Neill suggests that Facebook is simply getting serious about the virtual goods market. Instead of fake teddy bears, however, the company is setting its sights on applications. O’Neill points to Facebook’s acquisition of NextStop as the company positioning itself in the mobile application provider space.

Inside Facebook’s Justin Smith comes to a similar conclusion, saying that we’re witnessing a symbolic moment when Facebook “decided that it doesn’t want to be in the business of creating virtual goods for users to buy” but instead the platform on which they sell those goods and the creator of the currency with which they sell them.

The question still lingers – could virtual gift cards and flowers really have taken that much in the way of “product development efforts”? I can’t imagine so, in relation to the nearly pure profit the gift shop must have offered. It did, however, give the impression that Facebook’s Credits were only for those who were into the idea of throwing away money at things that didn’t actually exist.

The closing down of the gift shop looks to us like a concerted effort to overhaul the image of Facebook Credits. Up until now, Credits have been used primarily for virtual gifts, with the recent addition of games and in-game items. I can’t imagine it will be long before Credits are used to purchase apps, real-world items like tickets to events and on-site advertising.

Maps Logo

A few months ago, Google launched 45° imagery for select cities through its Google Maps API. In February, Google launched this new way to browse maps as an experimental feature in Google Maps Labs and starting today, this bird’s eye view imagery will be available for all users by default. These high-resulution images – which are currently only available in a select number of cities in the U.S. and South Africa – will automatically appear once users zoom in to an area while in satellite mode.

For Bing, a similar bird’s eye view feature has long been one of the differentiating features of Microsoft’s mapping product. For the time being, Bing’s bird’s eye view is available in more places, but otherwise, the feature sets of Google’s and Microsoft’s products are very similar. Just like Bing Map, Google also allows users to rotate images and see a location from different angles, for example.

Overall, this is nice update to Google maps, as it allows users to zoom in closer and see buildings and other locations with more detail. As Google’s Randy Wilson – a member of Google’s Imagery Team – notes, “even when looking at familiar areas, seeing driving directions overlaid on 45° imagery will give you a whole new understanding of the neighborhood.”

Google Maps 45° option

Knowing Google and how they like to get things done quickly, we can only expect them to start this new option to more places. Lets just hope they get this pushed out to everywhere sooner rather than later!

It seems that Google Maps has also added shortened URLs to the map links on the site!

Sending someone a Google Maps URL can be a pain, because they tend to be very long. To remedy this, Google has integrated their previously mentioned goo.gl URL shortening service into Google Maps, so you can shorten links right from the map.

The feature is still in Google Labs, so you’ll need to turn it on by clicking the green flask in the top right corner of the Maps page and enabling the “Short URL” feature. After refreshing the page, clicking on the “link” button will no longer give you a mile-long URL, but a concise link that you can paste into Twitter or send in an email. It does disable the embedding feature, but if you don’t tend to use that anyway, it’s a pretty handy little feature for figuring out those last few summer vacations.

The Pirate Bay

A series of attacks on The Pirate Bay, one of the most well known and controversial file-sharing websites has allowed a group of Argentinian hackers, headed by malware researcher Ch Russo, to access both the user database and the website administration panel of The Pirate Bay, comprising over 4 million usernames and email addresses in the process.

It is thought that the group first targeted the website administration panel on The Pirate Bay, the group succeeded and then employed a series of SQL injection vulnerabilities to gain access to the user database, where they were able to add and amend records and obtain information to identify trackers and torrents uploaded by specific users.

Ch Russo posted a cryptic message on his blog detailing reasons behind the attack:

As any other website, as any other system or mechanism, www.thepiratebay.org has robust parts and soft spots. We beleive that the people behind this comunity always acted with the local laws on their side, and so have we. The community caused problems to huge companies and corporations which turned into threats between this companies and them. What we have done, we did not do it with anger, or for commercial value. As always, we saw the change, the moment and decided to take it. The protocol or procedure done to achieve this wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.

As you can see, Russo acknowledges that the data would be of huge interest to anti-piracy groups like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). In a telephone interview with KrebsOnSecurity he said: “Probably these groups would be very interested in this information, but we are not [trying] to sell it,” adding “Instead we wanted to tell people that their information may not be so well protected.”

Screenshot of the backend of The Pirate Bay

According to Softpedia, the attackers have not been in contact with The Pirate Bay administrators since the attack but the offending weakness has since been identified and patched.

Speaker at the Facebook Conference

Facebook could face fines of tens of thousands of euros under privacy laws. The social networking firm confirmed it had received a letter about the action. ”We consider the saving of data from third parties, in this context, to be against data privacy laws,” said Johannes Caspar, head of Hamburg’s Data Protection Authority.

Mr Caspar said he had received a number of complaints from people who had not signed up to Facebook, but whose details had been added to the site by friends. He accused Facebook of saving private data of non-members without their permission, to be used for marketing purposes.

Switzerland is also reported to be concerned about the use of third-party data. Facebook has until August 11th to formally reply to the legal complaint against it. The California-based company told the BBC in an email that it was “currently reviewing (the complaint) and will readily respond to it within the given time frame”.

“Millions of Germans come to Facebook each day to find their friends, share information with them and connect to the world around them,” wrote spokesman Stefano Hessel.

Facebook has nearly 500 million users worldwide but according to figures by ComScore is only the fourth biggest social network in Germany.

This is not the first time the social networking site has landed in hot water with data protection officials. At the beginning of the year, Canada’s privacy commissioner launched an investigation into the site following complaints about privacy policies.

Facebook Mission Statement

And back in May, Facebook faced a storm of criticism for the way it handled members’ data after unveiling new privacy settings. A number of US senators made public calls at the time for the company to rethink its privacy safeguards. Consumer Watchdog said it was not surprised that Europe was driving this latest legal action against Facebook.

“There are much stronger privacy laws in Europe than here, where privacy is viewed as a consumer protection issue as opposed to a fundamental human right,” the group’s John Simpson told BBC News.

“We see that a number of Silicon Valley companies don’t really understand how seriously privacy issues are taken in Europe and they will continue to run afoul of data protection laws there. I also think there is a growing reaction in the US that we should beef up our privacy laws along the lines of those in Europe.”

Germany has some of the world’s most stringent data-protection laws, while the Hamburg Data Protection Authority has a reputation for taking possible privacy breaches by internet companies seriously.

Google Street View Car

It was the first to launch an investigation into search giant Google for intercepting personal data from unsecured wireless networks while gathering photos and data for its popular Street View project. That investigation is still going on, although last week Google said it was close to handing over the data it had collected to German officials.

A number of other countries have also launched investigations while more than 30 states in the US are considering pooling resources to investigate whether Google broke any laws.

Kuan Yong, Senior Product Manager for YouTube, explained how the feed is created.

“This feed is based on your YouTube settings and preferences, including content from your subscriptions and videos your friends are sharing on Facebook (assuming you’ve connected your YouTube account to your Facebook account).”

Two data sources – your YouTube info and your Facebook sharing – seem insufficient to get at an approximation of something as complex as a person’s taste. Here’s hoping they add in additional sources, such as Twitter accounts and feed readers.

Meanwhile on the handheld front, YouTube’s also pushed live a new mobile site. New touted features include a more touch-friendly UI, further incorporation of the main site’s elements such as favorites and ratings, and a generally speedier existence. YouTube also promises to work at bringing update parity across its desktop and portable kin, “unlike native apps which are not updated as frequently” (come on, tell us how you really feel, guys). Since the TV season is in a bit of a lull anyway, might as well grab your iPhone, Android device, HTPC remote, laptop, or whatever other screen you have and play catchup with your viral videos.

TweetUp is also buying news aggregator service popurls, which has long been placing the most popular items from the NY Times, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, YouTube, Flickr and other news and social media sites on one handy page (it’s also one of my personal favorites on the Web).

Combined, Idealab-owned TweetUp hopes Twidroid and popurls will provide it with a distribution network on which to test and refine its platform for finding the world’s best tweeters. Terms of the acquisition(s) were not disclosed.

Twidroid and popurls weren’t incorporated as such – they were operated by a startup called tomatic, founded by Austrian serial entrepreneur Thomas Marban. The acquisition represents a score for Ralph Zimmerman, and for Marban it’s a coup in a series of three – he has now sold all 3 of his most recent ventures, the longest one he held on to being software company Celum, which was acquired back in 2007 after he co-founded it in 1998.

Here’s a complementary quote from TweetUp CEO (and original Overture founder) Bill Gross:

“Acquiring Twidroyd provides TweetUp with a number of strategic advantages. Twidroyd is widely considered the best Twitter client for Android phones and it leads in market share, so its growing base of users will be a valuable source of well-informed feedback on TweetUp search on mobile devices. In addition, the popurls website, which attracts users looking for a convenient guide to the most popular sites, news, videos and blogs on the Internet, will be a natural spot to display TweetUp search results and gain user feedback.

This combination should enable us to more rapidly refine our offerings, generating better user experiences for distribution partners and for users searching for the world’s best tweeters regardless of their choice of devices.”

Coinciding with the acquisition announcement, Twidroyd has released version 3.4.0 of the Android app, which incorporates a good number of new features.

In April, TweetUp opened registration for its bidded marketplace for real-time search, and in May the company launched its search capabilities on a number of sites at the TechCrunch Disrupt event, including here at TechCrunch, Topix.com, and Businessinsider.com.

TweetUp’s search algorithms and marketplace aim to address the needs of both users and tweeters in a single search mechanism. In addition to algorithms that combine a variety of factors to determine relevance, tweeters will soon be able to bid on keywords in a marketplace very similar to what now occurs at search engines.

It’ll be interesting to see if Gross can make even half the impact he did with GoTo / Overture (acquired by Yahoo 7 years ago almost to the day), which pretty much invented the sponsored search model.

TweetUp has revenue-sharing agreements in place or in the pipeline with a number of partners, including Twitter clients TweetDeck, Seesmic, and Twidroyd but also players like Conduit, Netvibes, TwitterFeed and Klout. Most if not all will be online over the next few weeks.

TweetUp claims the grand total reach of the clients and web sites will bring its search results to more than 40 million unique users per month and serve more than 100 million impressions per month. Which means it’s off to a pretty good start (but still faces a long road ahead).

Facebook's New Auto Face Detection

Facebook has unveiled new features to the site, which are designed to make the tagging of photos easier. Speaking about the new face-recognition tech in a blog, Sam Odio from Facebook says about the updates: “People love tagging their friends and family in photos, but we’ve heard that it can be a tedious process.

“You now can add tags with just a couple of clicks directly from your home page and other sections of the site, using the same face detection technology that cameras have used for years.”

Essentially this means that you don’t have to manually add an image box to faces to tag them, as Facebook will now automatically ‘see’ the faces. Those who are worries that they are automatically going to get tagged smoking and boozing at the work’s party, don’t be, it will recognise your face as an, er, face but you still have to manually add a name to the mug.

Odio knows a lot about this sort of tech as until a few months ago he was part of Divvyshot – a photo-sharing service which was snapped up by Facebook. The company was bought to make Facebook’s photo service better, so the addition of better tagging should be the first in a long line of tweaks.

Here is an piece of the writeup about it on the official facebook blog:

We’re constantly working on making Facebook better, and one area where we’ve been spending a lot of time is on photos.

Coming to Facebook two months ago from Divvyshot (a tiny little photo startup) I was amazed at how much people are using Facebook Photos. Ninety-nine percent of people using Facebook have uploaded at least one photo. More than 100 million photos are uploaded every day. That’s insane.

Despite this, we know Facebook Photos can improve. You’ve told us so, and we hear you.

If you upload a photo today you may or may not have the ability to use this new feature and if you don’t… please try not to panic, it should be out and available to everyone very soon!

Hollywood will provide technological advice and support, as well as helping identify the websites that provide illegal downloads.

“American business is under attack from counterfeiters and pirates,” Immigration and Customs’ Assistant Secretary John Morton said at the press conference. “Internet crooks threaten the U.S. economy on a grand scale.”

To prove the point, the announcement was made at the Disney Studios in Burbank, where Morton was joined by senior representatives from major movie studios, such as Walt Disney Studios President Alan Bergman and Paramount Chief Operating Officer Frederick Huntsberry, entertainment unions and the Motion Picture Association of America.

The message stressed by all the press conferences participants was that piracy was rising and threatened the livelihoods of everyone from those in corporate boardrooms to below the line workers by depriving the U.S. economy of some $20.5 billion annually in lost output.

The initiative’s first action was to seize nine domain names of websites that were offering first-run movies, often within hours of their theatrical release. Among the sites targetted by the inaugural investigation were TVShack.net, Movies-links.tv, Filespump.com, Now-movies.com, PlanetMoviez.com, PirateCity.org and zml.com, NinjaVideo.net, and NinjaThis.net. Officials said Wednesday that those sites had attracted 6.7 million visitors in a single month.

Officials said that those sites are no longer operating and that visitors will now encounter a banner announcing that law enforcement agencies has shut down the sites because they were trafficking in illegal downloads (as of 1:00 p.m. PST, however, some of these sites still appeared to be operational). ”I don’t think that these moves stopped internet piracy in a day, but this is going to be a sustained effort,” Morton said.

Law enforcement officials said that these investigations were targeted specifically at the people running bit torrent sites, but that indicated that in the future they may widen their gaze to include individuals who download films and television shows illegally. While the nine sites shut down on Wednesday were all operating in the United States, Morton said that the agencies involved in the new initiative had jurisdiction in 44 countries.

“This battle won’t be won in the United States. We’ll have to wage it globally,” Morton said.

Seven of those sites were targeted by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. In addition, agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s  Homeland Security Investigations seized assets associated with these sites from 15 bank, Paypal, investment and advertising accounts. It also executed four residential search warrants in several states.

Officials would not say if any arrests had been made, but said that site operators could face jail time. Working undercover, investigators downloaded various newly released movies from the websites and their affiliates. Over the course of the investigation, agents observed links to more than 200 movies and more than 300 television programs on NinjaVideo.

Asked about the potential problems that might arise with partnering so heavily with industry, Morton said, “This is a great national industry. When industry is victimized, they should be treated no differently than an individual who is victimized on the corner of Fourth and Main.”

The new initiative also represents a more comprehensive effort to prosecute downloaders or pirates, rather than the piecemeal approach to prosecution that already exists. For instance, with regards to the seizures and closures announced Wednesday, the class of sites identified were all link sites.

The initiative makes good on a promise made by Vice President Joe Biden earlier this month. On June 22, Biden unveiled the White House’s strategic plan to increase intellectual-property enforcement. “Piracy is theft,” he said at the time. “It is smash-and-grab, no different from smashing a window at Tiffany.”

The website in this malicious iframe led to the download of a BREDOLAB variant detected as TROJ_BREDOLAB.BY (by Trend Micro). This malware family is well-known for being a downloader of other malware onto affected systems, particularly ZBOT and FAKEAV variants.

BREDOLAB first gained prominence in late 2009 when the number of reported infections significantly grew. Upon investigation by senior advanced threats researcher David Sancho, it was found that BREDOLAB was a new malware family similar to earlier PUSHDO variants.

Later investigations by senior advanced threats researcher Loucif Kharouni established the key role BREDOLAB plays in the criminal underworld. As mentioned earlier, cybercriminals running pay-per-install (PPI) scams frequently use BREDOLAB to infect user systems.

Botnet Model

Lenovo has acknowledged the incident on its official forum and has indicated that the affected pages have now been cleaned. Reports from Vietnamese antivirus vendor Bkis indicated that the pages have been infected since at least Sunday afternoon. Some users also reported getting antivirus warnings while visiting Lenovo’s download website since Saturday.

Users who did go to the Lenovo pages to download support materials from late on June 18 (Friday) to June 21 (Monday) may have been affected by this compromise and should check their systems accordingly.

This further proves the point that you should always have an antivirus program running on your computer at all times (and make sure its updated as well!). Even websites that you think are safe can fall victim to these types of attacks leaving everyone at risk. So be safe out there… cause the internet is one crazy place!