Karuptedblue - The blog about everything..Gossip,Fashion,Gadgets,News

Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of Geographic and Local Services, joined in 1999 as the company's 20th employee. During a recent 22-minute interview on Digg Dialogg, Mayer was asked "What do you think Google's biggest mistake has been during your presence there?" Mayer's answer pertained to three products: Wave, Dejanews.com, and Gmail.

Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of Geographic

Answers Corporation, which owns and operates a community-generated Q&A site at Answers.com, this morning announced that its database of answers now tops 10 million.

In conjuction with the announcement, Answers Corporation is today debuting its first iPhone app, a free fast-paced trivia game dubbed blufr.

The 10 millionth answer registered by the Israeli/US company came in response to the question: “Who was the first Native American to play pro-football?” (direct link).

The company points out that the answer to this question can improve over time as people contribute their knowledge by using the site’s “Improve” feature. Questions can also be discussed in Answers.com’s community forum and can easily be shared on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Bob Rosenschein, CEO of Answers.com, also reveals in the press release that its community is now 5.5 million registered members strong.

If you want to be a phone company you can’t go dead. Ever. People rely on their mobile phones for everything these days, so when calls aren’t going through it’s a really big deal. And as far as we can tell, Google Voice is currently having some serious issues.

Update, 12:15PM PST: After over an hour of issues, Google says that the problem should be resolved. Here’s Google’s statement:

    “We had an issue this morning that affected some outbound calls placed through the Google Voice mobile app. Inbound calls or calls from the web were not affected, and the issue has now been fixed.”

Google will now pay you to find and report vulnerabilities in its various Web properties. The company made the announcement yesterday, and it applies to sites like google.com, youtube.com, and orkut.com. Should you report a qualifying bug, you can expect to walk away with at least $500.

The program echoes an earlier program Google had launched for its Chromium project. Find a bug, report it, walk away with cold hard cash.

Prizes range from $500 to $3,133.70.

Get it, 1337?

The vulnerabilities Google is looking for are primarily of the XSS variety.

And bad news if you live in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria: you’re not eligible to win cash money.

I somehow doubt we get too many readers from those countries.

By now you may have heard that Google today settled a privacy lawsuit filed by a group of Buzz users. What’s sort of odd though is that Google actually emailed all U.S.-based Gmail users (Buzz resides within Gmail) to let them know about the resolution. And, apparently, also to let them know that they’re not getting a dime.

Internet watchers of South Florida and all around speak of disturbing news of Internet Security faults.

Wi-Fi could be synced with devices on the Internet. T Eric Butler, developer of "Firesheep," showed that the free extension for Firefox browser, helps sync with an open Wi-Fi using personal identifiers of any subscriber to a wireless access point, e-mail account, Facebook profile, Windows Live Mail. It is stated that most of the systems will be working on unsecured networks, whether domestic or public, such as railway stations, airports, restaurants and hotels.

The popular Google search engine has a new challenger - Blekko, the new search startup founded by Rich Skrenta, who is the co-founder and ex-CEO of community site Topix.

According to a blog post by Skrenta, Blekko essentially aims at delivering better search results by leveraging the assumed wisdom of the masses, enabling users to participate in the search process to improve the experience.

An undercover operation by Dutch and Russian authorities resulted in the arrest of Georg Avanesov earlier this week. Avanesov had allegedly been running a network of hacked computers around the world, typically referred to as a botnet, for over a decade. According to a source close to law enforcement, the 27-year-old made millions during that time frame.

YouTube not only gets 2 billion video views per day as one of the biggest video sites in the world, but now it has announced that it crossed the 1 billion subscription mark. In other words, YouTube is now sending more than 1 billion notification e-mails every week. The yellow subscribe button made its debut in 2006.

The internet web address sex.com has been sold for $13.


The distinctive name was put up for auction in July 2010 when its former owner, Escom LLC, went bankrupt.

Clover Holdings, a company registered on the Caribbean island of St Vincent, put in the highest bid for the domain.

The domain name for sex.com has been sold for $13m

There are now about 20 percent fewer spam e-mails hitting your inbox, thanks to efforts from the Russian government. Russian authorities this week cracked down on suspected spam kingpin Igor A. Gusev, according to The New York Times.

Moscow police said the 31-year-old, who by now has fled the country, was a central figure in the operations of SpamIt.com, a website that paid spammers to promote online pharmacies. SpamIt.com suddenly stopped operating on September 27 and Gusev's house was raided this week. His illegal spam network helped earn his partner company $120 million. With less financial incentive to send their junk mail, spammers reduced their activity by an estimated 50 billion messages a day.

Firefox is slipping in its development schedule; Mozilla says it won't be able to release version 4.0 this year, and will have to delay the final version until early next year. "Completing this work is taking longer than initial estimates indicated as we track down regressions and sources of instability," the company said in a statement. "As part of our commitment to beta users, we will not ship software before it is ready."

The new schedule means that Beta 7 has been delayed till early November. Meanwhile, assuming everything goes according to plan, Beta 8 is set for November 12, Beta 9 is expected on November 26, and Beta 10 should arrive on December 10. "The frequent beta releases have been extremely helpful in identifying compatibility issues with existing web content, so we plan on continuing to release beta milestones through the end of December.

Our estimate is now that release candidate builds will ship in early 2011, with a final release date close behind. Please note that, as always, this schedule is subject to change based on feedback from users and community members."

Firefox 4 was originally supposed to be released in June, but Mozilla keeps making changes to the browser. Currently, Firefox 4 is at Beta 6. Many believe version 4.0 is the only thing that can save the browser from a stagnating market share.

Last week, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, announced the Terabit Optical Ethernet Center (TOEC), which will work on making the Internet a thousand times faster than it is today. TOEC's researchers are designing an optical fiber that would enable the next generation Ethernet, allowing it to handle 1 trillion bits (Terabit) per second by 2015 and 100Tbps by 2020. Agilent Technologies, Google, Intel, Rockwell Collins, and Verizon are all partnering with the center on its Ethernet Terabit networking effort.

Two companies from completely different areas of the tech world today squashed rumors that they are for sale. The CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the second largest CPU supplier, and the new CEO of Twitter, a microblogging social network, have made statements emphasizing that their corresponding company is not for sale.

"AMD is not for sale, but we are happy to listen to any proposal which is in the interest to our shareholders," AMD CEO Dirk Meyer told an industry conference in Barcelona and was quoted by Reuters. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said last month his firm is keen to make more acquisitions and a microchip company could be a good fit. The result was rabid speculation that AMD was at the top of Oracle's list.

"We have a truck-load of work ahead of us but we have no plans to sell out and think of Twitter as being a communications platform for a long time to come," Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told The Telegraph. Earlier this week, Costolo was promoted from chief operating officer to chief executive officer, taking over the role from Evan Williams, whose job title is now co-founder. Speculation that Twitter was up for sale came with Costolo's appointment, who has previously sold two companies: Feedburner, an RSS platform which he sold to Google in 2007, and SpyOnIt, a web page monitoring service he sold to 724 Solutions in 2000.

By Emil Protalinski, TechSpot.com

September proved much of the same in the browser market as the top three browsers continued their trend, either upwards or downwards. The launch of the Internet Explorer 9 Beta didn't do much for the overall share of IE which slid below 60 percent.

Google has launched the official Google TV webpage. With it, Google has also announced partnerships with some of the leading premium content providers, including Amazon Video On Demand (over 75,000 titles for rental or purchase) and Netflix (instantly watch unlimited movies and TV shows).

The company has been working with some leading technology and media companies to optimize their content for Google TV, including news sites (like The New York Times and USA Today), music sites (like VEVO, Pandora, and Napster), information networks (like Twitter), and online networks (like blip.tv). Obviously YouTube is onboard as well. If you want to make your website Google TV friendly, head over to the developer page.

The search giant has also announced several content partners:

    * Turner Broadcasting means TBS, TNT, CNN, Cartoon Network, and Adult Swim are available anytime.
    * NBC Universal is bringing over CNBC Real-Time, an application that allows you to track your favorite stocks and access news feeds while enjoying the best financial news from CNBC.
    * HBO will bring access to hundreds of hours of programming with HBO GO. Authenticated subscribers will soon be able to access all of their favorite HBO content on-demand in an enhanced website.
    * NBA has built NBA Game Time, an application that lets you follow game scores in real-time and catch up on the latest highlights from your favorite team in HD.

Google also posted a video showing how applications will work on Google TV. The applications menu shows the Chrome browser, NBA GameTime, Netflix, Pandora, and Napster:



Google TV, a platform that combines your current TV programming and the Web into a single seamless entertainment experience, was introduced less than five months ago. Devices powered by Google TV will launch this month, so you can expect more information in the next few weeks.

Source: Tech News