Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with Google, Yahoo and IceRocket. As of December 2007, Technorati indexes over 112 million weblogs. The name Technorati is a portmanteau, pointing to the technological version of literati or intellectuals.
Technorati was founded by Dave Sifry and its headquarters are in San Francisco, California, USA. Tantek Çelik was the site's Chief Technologist.
Technorati uses and contributes to open source software. Technorati has an active software developer community, many of them from open-source culture. Sifry is a major open-source advocate, and was a founder of LinuxCare and later of Wi-Fi access point software developer Sputnik. Technorati includes a public developer's wiki, where developers and contributors collaborate, as well as various open APIs.
The site won the SXSW 2006 awards for Best Technical Achievement and also Best of Show. It was also nominated for a 2006 Webby award for Best Practices, but lost to Flickr and Google Maps.
Feb 17, 2008
Technorati - For Searching Blogs
R.I.P. HD DVD: Toshiba reportedly ends the war
Well, that's it. Toshiba appears to be pulling the plug on HD DVD. Toshiba has not commented publicly, but a report on Japan's NHK says Toshiba has made the decision to withdraw from next generation high-definition DVD production.
This news certainly doesn't come as surprise to anyone remotely following HD DVD's format war with rival Blu-ray. HD DVD had suffered a string of defections, with Warner, Netflix, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart all recently pledging their alliance to Blu-ray.
The NHK report says existing HD DVD products will remain in the market for a while, but Toshiba will stop further development of HD DVD. The report also estimates that Toshiba will take a hit to the tune of "hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars" and will close factories in northern Japan.
Elsewhere this weekend, Sony and its Blu-ray buddies are going to make like VHS and party like it's 1989.
Outfitting the iPhone for business
Executive pressure is pushing the iPhone through the side door of the enterprise, but will the CEO's crush object ever truly be business legit?
You've heard it all before. The CEO buys an iPhone, falls in love, and leans on IT to shift its stack of tasks to make work-enabling his new gadget IT Priority No. 1.
But as IT departments scramble to sync e-mail and slap together Web apps for Safari-based iPhone access, the question remains: Can Apple's ear-candy crush object draft off this executive effect to true enterprise mobile legitimacy, or are execs' iPhone fetishes jeopardizing the integrity of their company's mobile strategy?
Here we examine the iPhone ecosystem's evolving backdoor bid for enterprise, one that pits security concerns, vendor intentions, and gadget affinities against caution-minded enterprise IT.
Executive inroads to the enterprise
A midsize company providing inventory supply services to schools, government facilities, and other institutions across the United States was perfectly happy with its mobile Palm-based inventory software until the CEO and other high-level execs purchased their own iPhones.
"Suddenly, they were saying, 'Hey, this is really nice,' and reevaluating their whole handheld strategy," says Ben Gottlieb, president of Stand Alone, which provides business inventory software and consulting services to the aforementioned inventory supplier. "Then came the questions about where the Palm OS was headed and whether their inventory application could be iPhone-enabled."
Mark Russell, vice president of sales and marketing at U-Line, a Milwaukee-based manufacturer of under-counter icemakers and refrigerators, had an iPhone for fun and a Nokia E70 for work until he accidentally crushed the Nokia device in his mother-in-law's recliner. Instead of getting a new E70, he asked IT to sync his iPhone with the corporate Exchange server.
"Our IT guy was nervous at first, but when Visto added iPhone capability to its Visto Enterprise Server, he gave it a try," Russell says, referring to the mobile messaging service provider, Visto. U-Line was already using Visto to sync its smartphones with Exchange.
Russell is perfectly happy with his business iPhone and has no intention of repurchasing the Nokia or any other device. And according to Daniel Koshute, U-Line systems administrator, several other employees are ready to make the switch as well.
The above examples are not unique. Like the PDAs, USB storage devices, and Wi-Fi devices that came before it, the iPhone is pushing its way through the side door of today's enterprises, thanks to a sexy interface, a superior mobile browser, and executive pressure.
"Apple has definitely achieved its goal of making you smile every time you press a keystroke," says Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner.
Google finds evil all over the Web
Google turned its Web-crawling technology loose to hunt down malware-serving pages and found 3 million, meaning about one out of every 1,000 pages is malicious
The Web is scarier than most people realize, according to research published recently by Google.
The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.
These Web-based attacks, called "drive-by downloads" by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers.
In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.
Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim's browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim's PC. "The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks," said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.
In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.
Some of the data surprised Provos.
"When we started going into this, I had the firm intuition that if you go to the sleazier parts of the Web, you are in more danger," he said.
It turns out the Web's nice neighborhoods aren't necessarily safer than its red-light districts.
"We looked into this and indeed we found that if you ended up going to adult-oriented pages, your risk of being exposed [to malicious software] was slightly higher," he said. But "there really wasn't a huge difference."
"Staying away from the disreputable part of the Internet really isn't good enough," he noted.
Another interesting finding: China was far and away the greatest source of malicious Web sites. According to Google's research, 67 percent of all malware distribution sites are hosted in China. The second-worst offender? The U.S., at 15 percent, followed by Russia (4 percent), Malaysia (2.2 percent), and Korea (2 percent).
It costs next to nothing to register a Web domain in China and service providers are often slow to shut down malicious pages, said Thompson. "They're the Kleenex Web sites," he said. Criminals "know they're going to be shut down, and they don't care."
Malicious site operators in China fall into two broad categories, Thompson said: Fraudsters looking to steal your banking password, and teenagers who want to steal your World of Warcraft character.
So how to stop this growing pestilence?
Google's Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic updates on. "You should always run your software as updated as possible and install some kind of antivirus technology," he said.
But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about building secure Web sites. "I think it will take concentrated efforts on all parts," for the problem to go away, he said.
Feb 15, 2008
PlayStation 3 Outsells Xbox 360 by 16% -- Nearly Passes Wii
To be honest, I didn't see this one coming. Certainly not in the opening month of the year and after the holiday rush. But here it is anyway, courtesy of the NPD, whose numbers are some of the most reliable in the industry. So I'll just cut to the chase and give you those January 2008 numbers:
274k - Wii
269k - PlayStation 3
251k - Nintendo DS
230k - PlayStation Portable
230k - Xbox 360
Can you believe it? I wonder if Sony CEO Jack Tretton can, or if there's not at least a little eye-rubbing and arm-pinching going on. Whatever the case, here's his ebullient reaction to the news:
Coming off a great holiday sales season we see strong momentum behind PS3 in 2008, and feel confident about the year ahead. We have an exceptionally diverse lineup of exclusive games, from Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Resistance 2 to more mainstream games such as LittleBigPlanet and SingStar. Beyond that, we have Blu-ray emerging as the de facto high def standard, the developer community is hitting their stride, consumers are recognizing the tremendous value and innovative services such as PlayStation Home are all in the works, so this is definitely shaping up to be a breakthrough year for us.
Yeah, I know, it sounds exactly like what he said a year ago when everything was in the toilet. These things have a way of playing like top 40 songs after awhile, so file it skeptically under "wait and see," and then we certainly will as everyone deploys their next rounds of salvos.
More on the rest of the numbers later, but given the fact that only one piece of PS3 software even charted (Call of Duty 4, which was #8) I'm guessing a substantial portion of the PS3's sales uptick was Blu-ray related.
Disney, Microsoft, HP, Others Build 'House Of The Future'
Innoventions Dream Home in Disneyland's Tomorrowland will exhibit everything from mobile phones and PCs to digital music and gaming.
The Disneyland Resort this week teamed up with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), HP (NYSE: HP), software provider Lifeware, and home builder Taylor Morrison to create an attraction featuring digital home technologies of the future.
The 5,000-square-foot Innoventions Dream Home attraction will reside in Disneyland's Tomorrowland for the purpose of introducing resort visitors to technologies that will enhance their everyday lives, according to the companies. The visitors will be able to learn about the technologies and interact with them.
"This exciting alliance gives each of our partners a forum to inspire our guests' imaginations and motivate them to incorporate and enjoy the new technologies that are available today," said Ed Grier, president of the Disneyland Resort, in a statement.
Innoventions Dream Home will exhibit everything from mobile phones and PCs to digital music and gaming. The technology will be interconnected in the home, providing visitors with a ubiquitous experience. HP is providing the "connected entertainment," Microsoft is supplying its latest home technologies, and Lifeware is adding its automation software to technologies contained in the home. Lifeware's software program works with Windows Media Center to control lighting, security, audio, and entertainment systems.
Taylor Morrison is constructing the futuristic home in Disneyland.
The new attraction builds on Walt Disney's legacy of the "House of Tomorrow," which was built in Disneyland in 1967. Then in 1998, the Innoventions attraction opened with a similar purpose of showcasing future technologies, such as voice-activated computers, high-definition TVs, smart-cars, and satellite broadcasting.
Innoventions Dream Home is expected to open in its doors to the public in May.
'Critical' Linux kernel bugs discovered
The three bugs, which allow unauthorized access to kernel memory, exist in all versions of the Linux kernel up to 2.6.24.1, including Ubuntu, Red Hat, and others
Security researchers have uncovered "critical" security flaws in a version of the Linux kernel used by a large number of popular distributions.
The three bugs allow unauthorized users to read or write to kernel memory locations or to access certain resources in certain servers, according to a SecurityFocus advisory.
They could be exploited by malicious, local users to cause denial of service attacks, disclose potentially sensitive information, or gain "root" privileges, according to security experts.
The bug affects all versions of the Linux kernel up to version 2.6.24.1, which contains a patch. Distributions such as Ubuntu, Turbolinux, SuSE, Red Hat, Mandriva, Debian and others are affected.
The problems are within three functions in the system call fs/splice.c, according to an advisory from Secunia.
"In the 2.6.23 kernel, the system call functionality has been further extended resulting in ... critical vulnerabilities," said iSEC Security Research in an advisory.
Secunia disagreed about the bugs' seriousness, giving them a less critical ranking.
Exploit code for the vulnerabilities has been released publicly on the hacker site milw0rm.com, and Core Security Technologies has also developed a commercial exploit for the bugs, researchers said.
Researchers advised system administrators to update their kernels immediately.
Last month, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security bug-fixing scheme uncovered an average of one security glitch per 1,000 lines of code in 180 widely used open-source software projects.
Secunia also previously discovered that the number of security bugs in open-source Red Hat Linux operating system and Firefox browsers, far outstripped comparable products from Microsoft last year.
Feb 13, 2008
Top 10 trends at the Mobile World Congress
There's something to interest almost everyone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week:
For the lost
GPS is built in to an increasing number of mobile phones. Nokia is still the most aggressive vendor. This year it plans to sell 35 million phones with GPS. The Finnish phone giant is not alone; its competitors are also embracing navigation, so don't be surprised if in a few years GPS is as common in phones as cameras are today.
Trendsetters: HTC P3470 and Samsung G810
For shutterbugs
Phone makers also continue to develop cameras. Among the features that popped up during this year's show are face detection, image stabilization, and the ability to take better pictures in the dark. Phone cameras with a 5-megapixel resolution are also becoming more common, although you still only get a digital zoom.
Trendsetters: Sony Ericsson C902 and Samsung F480
For Linux
Apple isn't the only company redrawing the mobile phone map. Linux is nothing new in mobile phones, but the launch of Google's Android has given it a lot of extra attention. On the show floor, several chip manufacturers showed prototypes. The first real phones should be ready before the end of the year. One benefit with Android is the reduction in the time it takes to develop a new phone, according to Texas Instruments.
Trendsetters: ARM and Texas Instruments
For cineasts
If the mobile phone makers are to be believed, we should also use our next phone to watch movies. Two things that get us there: bigger screens in a widescreen format and larger storage capacity.
Trendsetters: Nokia N96 and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1
For globetrotters
Geotagging is a feature that combines built-in support for navigation and photography. When you take a picture, your location is also saved. Then you can overlay that information on services like Google Maps and see where you've been.
Trendsetters: Sony Ericsson C702 and Nokia 6220 Classic
For CIOs
With Sony Ericsson on board, four out of five of the biggest phone makers have phones based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system. The last holdout is Nokia and it still has no plans. One interesting thing about a few of the Windows Mobile phones launched at the Mobile World Congress is that they fit just as well at home as at work.
Trendsetters: Samsung i200 and LG KS20
For speed freaks
Phones with support for HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) are arriving at a steady pace. A few phones now support 7.2Mbps -- but to get the most out of that bandwidth, you need a laptop. A few phones also support HSUPA (High Speed Uplink Packet Access), an abbreviation that in the real world means faster upload speeds.
Trendsetters: Toshiba Portege G810 and LG KF700
For speed freaks II
To get more bandwidth to your phone, you can also use Wi-Fi. Support for this technology is also becoming more common. One of the advantages with Wi-Fi is that you can sometimes browse the Internet for free. Good luck doing that on a mobile network.
Trendsetters: Motorola Moto Z6w and Sony Ericsson G900
For your car
So how do you listen to your MP3 player without using headphones? One solution is to use the FM transmitter integrated in some new phones, and listen on your car radio. A small step for technology, but a big one for usability, according to Nokia.
Trendsetters: Nokia N78 and Sony Ericsson W980
For the touchy
Touch-based user interfaces are fast becoming the norm in mobile phones -- although buttons will still not disappear. The goal is, if all goes well, to make phones easier to use. Only the imagination of the phone makers limits what can be done.
Trendsetters: HTC Advantage and Samsung Soul
Mozilla delivers Firefox 3 Beta 3
Mozilla Corp. released the third beta of Firefox 3 yesterday, eight weeks after it made the last major milestone for its open-source browser, and right on a schedule it set a dozen days ago.
Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's interface designer, touted additions and enhancements to Beta 3 in a post to the company's Web site Tuesday, touting several new or enhanced security features, an improved download manager, one-click bookmarking, offline application support, faster page rendering, and new progress on plugging the browser's noted "memory leaks."
As he has previously, Beltzner discouraged casual users from trying the new code. "We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 3 milestone release," he said. "It is intended for testing purposes only."
Mozilla has already committed to at least one more beta before Firefox is allowed to move on to the release-candidate stage. A week and a half ago, however, Beltzner declined to set a release schedule for the next beta, saying then only that "our goal is to do a quick turnaround on Firefox 3 Beta 4."
In its release notes, Mozilla trumpeted the fact that Beta 3 includes more than 1,300 changes made since mid-December's Beta 2 and boasted that its developers had also plugged over 50 new memory leaks in the past eight weeks.
Firefox has long been criticized by users for consuming increasing amounts of memory the longer it remains open, to the point where the browser hinders overall performance on the computer. The company made leak plugging a top priority, particularly after a member of the Mozilla board of directors said late last year that memory problems would make it tough to compete in the mobile browser market.
Firefox 3 Beta 3 also uses an XPCOM cycle collector that, said Mozilla, "completely eliminates many more [leaks]." The cycle collector, which periodically checks memory usage and tries to free any unused memory, has been in play since last summer, but as Beta 3 development has proceeded, more of its code has been written or rewritten to support the collector.
One noted addition to Firefox 3, however, is still buggy. Places, a souped-up bookmarking and browser history management tool that was once slated for Firefox 2, does not yet allow users to shuffle bookmarks by dragging and dropping. According to notes from a Tuesday Firefox 3 status meeting, Places is stuck.
"Cannot drag-and-drop items across different views/menus," the notes read. "This is blocking on resolution of platform bug 389931, which is a P1 [Priority 1] blocker regression from the thread manager rewrite, and seemingly unowned (no response from owner since July 2007). This is the cause of much weeping and gnashing of teeth."
Firefox 3 Beta 3 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 32 languages from Mozilla's site.
E-Mail Carries Love And Viruses For Valentine's Day
The FBI is warning that an unexpected e-card in your in-box may contain the Storm Worm virus.
Just in time for Valentine's Day, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) on Tuesday released the results of a survey showing that young people are embracing e-mail to send love letters. Coincidentally, the FBI warned on Tuesday that cybercriminals are embracing e-mail to send fake love letters.
"The survey affirmed that e-mail is an increasingly important part of our most intimate and personal interactions, and that younger people are leading the charge: they are more likely to use e-mail for everything from sending love letters to ending relationships," said Google group product marketing manager Jen Grant in a blog post.
But the FBI advises caution. "If you unexpectedly receive a Valentine's Day e-card, be careful," the agency said. "It may not be from a secret admirer, but instead might contain the Storm Worm virus."
Security software vendor Trend Micro issued a similar warning on Monday. "As we had already forecast last month, Storm is already sending their Valentine greetings this week," said security researcher David Sancho in a blog post. "The owners of this powerful botnet are doing as much as possible to [sustain the number of compromised machines at their disposal]. This includes spamming people and making them click on malicious links. This time around, the messages are of love."
More and more of this virus-laden e-mail love is coming from Russia. According to Sophos, Russia has overtaken China to become the second largest sender of spam, behind the United States.
"Responsible for a third of all unwanted e-mail, USA and Russia can be viewed as the two dirty men of the spam generation, polluting e-mail traffic with unwanted and potentially malicious messages," said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos, in a statement.
Memo to Microsoft: Yahoo's A-list
Working at Yahoo is getting riskier by the day. Even before merger-minded Microsoft could lay off some of the stars within its acquisition target, Yahoo executives beat them to it.
But there are some key Yahoo employees who are so indispensible for their experience, skill or leadership, that Microsoft would be crazy to let them go in the event of a merger, observers, insiders, and former Yahoo employees say.
Several of those mentioned by sources as vital to Yahoo were among the casualties of Tuesday's layoffs, which totaled an estimated 1,100. The layoffs are the latest black spot for Yahoo, which has been struggling to redefine itself in the shadow of Google's dominance in both search and online advertising. In an attempt to better compete with Google, Microsoft has made a $31-a-share offer for Yahoo, but Yahoo's board has rejected it as too low.
"The company was significantly overstaffed and with a coming consolidation with Microsoft there is going to be pretty dramatic overlap," said Jim Barnett, who left Yahoo in 2003 and is now chief executive of Turn, an automated targeting ad marketplace.
One of the main reasons Microsoft is aiming to buy Yahoo is to improve its expertise on the Web--a market the software giant has yet to dominate despite its best efforts. Even though Yahoo has been struggling, the Internet company is viewed as rich with valuable online brands and talented people. Microsoft will likely want to keep Yahoo employees in a host of areas, including online advertising, social media, and Web search.
"Microsoft needs assistance in the Internet business so they're going to be looking to bring in some Internet-based talent. Yahoo's a step up for them," said Steve Weinstein, research analyst at Pacific Crest Securities.
Still, many talented people departed Yahoo with the layoffs. Casualties include Randy Farmer, who was a community strategy analyst at Yahoo and a virtual worlds pioneer, and Bradley Horowitz, who headed up Yahoo's Advanced Technology Division and oversaw Brickhouse. Horowitz, who could not be reached for comment, may have taken a voluntary severance package and is reported to be joining Google. Salim Ismail, one of his top managers at Brickhouse--a program dedicated to launching innovative products--left voluntarily.
The departures of Brickhouse executives seem to undermine a need at Yahoo to focus on innovative, community-based Web services.
Who to keep
Among the talent pool at Yahoo, several executives stand out in divisions such as social media and search. Those include Jeff Weiner, who oversees Yahoo's consumer Web products. Several sources said he would be a must-hire for Microsoft. "He's a brilliant guy with tremendous insights," said Brian Bowman, who left Yahoo in 2006 as vice president of community and is now chief marketing officer at Reply.com.
Flickr co-founder Katarina Fake is also revered for creating one of the most popular social-media applications, at Yahoo and on the Web. "It would be absurd to lose anyone from Flickr or Delicious," said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land.
Several sources also praised Tapan Bhat, vice president of front doors at Yahoo; Scott Moore, who left MSN and is head of Yahoo News; and Brad Garlinghouse, head of communications and community at Yahoo, who bravely wrote the famous "Peanut Butter Manifesto" in 2006 that foreshadowed Yahoo's current problems and suggested layoffs, management changes, and a refocusing on core products.
