New logo: Bottom

Additionally, Google has taken steps to redesign their logo (right).

Having read an article years earlier, which I do not have time to research and link back to, I can speculate with certainty that a long time (months) was taken on simply deciding the strength of the bevel or the tone of the blue (or green, red).

For further reading check out the official google blog.

UPDATE 1/7/2010: It appears as though Technorati is inching forth, but the backlog which they are developing far outweighs the amount of blogs being approved.

UPDATE 1/7/2010: An employee, Phillip Winn, who is a senior web developer has taken up a PR stance and resumed replying to the thread. It appears as though Technorati is inching forth, but the backlog which they are developing far outweighs the amount of blogs being approved.

Technorati has been an authorative and integral part of the blogosphere, positioning itself as a benchmark and indexed search engine for blogs in the start of the Web 2.0 boom. This was then, however, and how fast things change…

In October to November of 2009 a peculiar problem arose, the real-time search engine of Technorati was no longer indexing new blogs. According to some wizardly mathemagic a new blog is created every second and Technorati, as a search engine, is not indexing any of the 26,000,000+ new blogs which were created in the past 2+ months, according to math.

But Technorati’s inactivity does not end here, a brief look over Get Satisfaction, Technorati’s official support forum, shows an utter lack of support resolution. Technorati employees are no longer offering support or resolutions. A thread, created by an employee in early November, claims that Technorati is hard at work “drastically speed[ing] up the blog claim review process”, DW provides further analysis. Fair enough; however, after my detective analysis I noticed that the last post from both employees comes on November 25th, the one year anniversary of 2008 Technorati layoffs, where their high performers were replaced by lower paid and lower skilled workers. No posts were made after the 25th.

A review of their official blog quickly sets off new alarms, the last update was on 10/21/09, something about manually sifting out all the Acai berry and make money at home crap from their entire index while working on a brand new clean data set. Prior to this date the format seems to be two posts per month, after this date there are no posts.

Lets leave their domain for a second, and look at Technorati from a 3rd perspective…

Traffic Trends.

Checking Google Trends shows an obvious decline, with some empty blocks. I downloaded the CVS and removed Jun 29, 2008 to Feb 15, 2009 as it would upset the graph. I put the data into a scatterplot and added a trend line, which forecasts Technorati’s coming demise.

Now, if we move from Google’s trendlines and check out Alexa’s more detailed stats (alexa only tracks users who have the Alexa tracking cookie, afaik). Technorati’s search volume, visitor count, and total reach is dropping faster than the 911 stock market.

So what does all this mean?

Technorati is on life-support, its pre-built scripts and algorithms are able to pull content from other sites and generate a dynamic page without human input. Search engines supposedly place higher value on websites listed on Technorati, which is terrible. Technology strategists at Tequinox have written Technorati an open letter warning of impending doom if they choose to continue these fraudulent lending business practices.

If you want to take action, DIGG THIS STORY, the more people see it the more pressure there is on Technorati to take action.

If you signed up for YouTube prior to Google’s acquisition you may be displeased to see that you are no longer allowed to use your YouTube account independent of your email. The change merges your YouTube account with whatever email was associated with it at the time.

The qualifying conditions are as follows:

• You’ve signed up for their original YouTube account before May 2009.
• You’ve joined your YouTube and Google Accounts together.
• You’re still signing in with your original YouTube password.

It has long been apparent that YouTube is not generating anywhere near its $1.6 billion price, with additional server and employee upkeep costs.

Apparently Google figures they can make money by linking your email with your YouTube habits, and, dare I say, build a psychological profile. Maybe it will have something to do with the ads in Gmail, or the suggested videos on YouTube; or maybe Google plans to take over the world.

Stay tuned for further developments on the situation.

• Google FAQ

This week The Pirate Bay confirmed it would shut down its tracker for good, instead encouraging the use of DHT, PEX and magnet links. This move confounded many BitTorrent enthusiasts, who although wishing to adapt, were confronted with hard to grasp terminology and technology. Time for some explaining.

The Pirate Bay’s recent confirmation that they had closed down their tracker since DHT and Peer Exchange have matured enough to take over, was coupled with the news that they had added Magnet links to the site. This news has achieved its aim of stimulating discussion, but has also revealed that there is much confusion over how these technologies work.

The key thing to understand is that nobody is being forced to use Magnet links or trackerless torrents. While these long-standing technologies may prove to be the future, they will co-exist with tracker-enabled torrenting for quite some time. For now, nobody will be forced to immediately change their existing downloading habits, although it may be wise to switch to a BitTorrent client that is compatible with these technologies.

In an attempt to clear some of the mystique surrounding DHT, PEX and Magnet links we will walk through all three briefly, hoping to assure those who’ve become confused earlier this week.

DHT and PEX working in utorrent

DHT

Using DHT instead of trackers is one of the things The Pirate Bay is now trying to encourage, and torrent downloads that rely solely on this technology are often referred to as “trackerless torrents.” DHT is used to find the IP addresses of peers, mostly in addition to a tracker. It is enabled by default in clients such as uTorrent and Vuze and millions of people are already using it without knowing.

DHT’s function is to find peers who are downloading the same files, but without communicating with a central BitTorrent tracker such as that previously operated by The Pirate Bay.

DHT is by no means a new technology. A version debuted in the BitTorrent client Azureus in May 2005 and an alternative but incompatible version was added to Mainline BitTorrent a month later. There is, however, a plugin available for Azureus Vuze which allows it access to the Mainline DHT network used by uTorrent and other clients.

Peer Exchange (”PEX”)

Peer Exchange is yet another means of finding IP addresses. Rather than acting like a tracker, it leverages the knowledge of peers you are connected to, by asking them in turn for the addresses of peers they are connected to. Although it requires a “kick start”, PEX will often uncover more genuine peers than DHT or a tracker.

Magnet links

Traditionally, .torrent files are downloaded from torrent sites. A torrent client then calculates a torrent hash (a kind of fingerprint) based on the files it relates to, and seeks the addresses of peers from a tracker (or the DHT network) before connecting to those peers and downloading the desired content.

Sites can save on bandwidth by calculating torrent hashes themselves and allowing them to be downloaded instead of .torrent files. Given the torrent hash – passed as a parameter within a Magnet link – clients immediately seek the addresses of peers and connect to them to download first the torrent file, and then the desired content.

It is worth noting that BitTorrent can not ditch the .torrent format entirely and rely solely on Magnet links. The .torrent files hold crucial information that is needed to start the downloading process, and this information has to be available in the swarm.

Pirate Bay links cf. Mininova links: When the Magnet link specification first came out, in January last year it called for a particular format (”base32 encoded”). The links that EZTV, Mininova and ShareReactor have displayed for some time all conform to that original specification. In May of last year the specification was changed, in favor of “hex encoding”, and that is the format of the links being displayed by The Pirate Bay. Torrent clients should accept either format.

Compatible Clients

All the main torrent clients: uTorrent 1.8.5, Vuze 4.3.0.2, BitTorrent 6.3, BitComet 1.16, and Transmission 1.76 (and others) support Peer Exchange and DHT (via a plugin in the case of Vuze). Neither BitComet nor Transmission yet support Magnet links but Transmission is planning to include Magnet link support in the upcoming 1.8 release. Bearing in mind that no site, including The Pirate Bay, has yet abandoned support for traditional torrent files, there is plenty of time for support to be added.

We hope that this article has cleared some of the smoke that was generated by The Pirate Bay’s announcements earlier this week. There is no need to panic, cry or be angry, and it’s not a problem if you’re still confused after reading this article. Torrents will still be available and aside from some extra downloading options thanks to sites that add Magnet links, nothing drastic will change in the near future.

This article was originally published on TorrentFreak by a contribution from user Adapa
via LifeHacker

Microsoft Security Essentials is Microsoft’s leap into the Anti-Virus market. The suite aims at tackling viruses, trojans, worms, and malware. It is surprisingly light on resources (unlike a certain Windows-Defender) and has features to match its competitors.

This is the first week that Essentials has been out of beta, and the MS Malware Protection Center has released some interesting statistics.

Analyzing the data – drawing conclusions, forming predictions:

On the right is the Operating System distribution of MSE. Not surprisingly the Windows 7 group holds almost half of the total users. The same people who download a beta OS will be all the more likely to try out a beta product from the same vendor, coupled with the initial limited availability of Windows 7 compatible AVs and the inherent bugs that coincide with early releases/adoption, MSE appeals to users as it was created with Windows 7 in mind.

The Windows XP category, unlike Windows 7, is a melting pot of pros and noobs. On one side you have professionals who, due to staying informed, have bypassed upgrading to Vista and did yet make the move to Windows 7. The other side is the completely clueless users who had their computer set up by the ‘computer guy’ – these users are the largest source of infections and controlled botnets. It is this fraction of WinXP users who are responsible for the majority of total infections. The last group of Windows Vista are the outcasts, generally users who purchased a PC with Vista bundled, very few willfully upgraded from XP. Many of these users have the same technical knowledge as the noobs from XP, but they are protected from themselves through Vista’s utterly annoying, but apparently helpful, UAC restrictions. UAC, coupled with an updated Internet Explorer, will have a somewhat significant effect on protecting Vista users when compared to XP.

How it breaks down:

As I mentioned earlier, Windows XP would be responsible for the majority of infections. There was no requirement to look at the statistics to make that statement. Windows XP users with MSE who were not professionals are a very vulnerable group:

-Had their AV installed by someone else
-Do not care enough to install an AV
-Do not know to install an AV

These few factors raise red flags; as can be sufficiently gathered from world of politics and media, ignorance does not yield positive results.

The specific issue of ignorance is the main reason for the drastic difference of infection distribution per OS. How could an OS with 44% population dominance have only 16% of infections? How can 1/3rd of the sample population report over 50% of infections?

Future Problems:

The responsibility of protecting the computer is shifted from the user back to the computer. The threat? It’s not the virus, the trojan, not even the worm which infect an unpatched pc in 20 minutes – it is the user! The user unwittingly propagates the botnet, spreads viruses and trojans. This is not something easy to fix, there is no money in educating these users, but there is in exploiting them.

Face it, your mobile phone camera sucks. In the age of blogs, social networking, and viral videos it almost becomes a necessity to own a competent HD recording device.

The NS-DCC5HB09 steps up to the plate at an exceptionally affordable price, 3 inch LCD screen, and HDMI output.

This camera is a compact HD recording device which easily fits into your pocket. It is capable of recording video 1280×720 resolution (720p) at 30fps in .AVI format, and capturing images at 5 Mega Pixels at 2592×19 44 resolution in .JPEG format.

Additionally, it functions as a portable media player with mp3 and movie watching capabilities on its 3 inch LCD screen. On the down side I was unable to play any DVDRips so that feature is worthless to me.

This is a test run in the camera’s HD mode in Petaluma, CA, with slight compression on behalf of facebook that blurs the quality more so than the original file.

This is a picture at the highest camera setting. Click through for the original resolution.

Flaws:

1. The device has a tendency to reset the recording resolution to DVI quality, it’s rather annoying.
2. You cannot charge the device through the USB cable provided, and must use the AC adapter.
3. The device is not compatible with the PS3 through the usb interface.
4. The device was not recognized on my XP 64 machine, I did not attempt to install drivers as I can just use the SIM card alone.
5. It is not very responsive when functioning through HDMI output, though this is the standard of most devices.

Final Note:

This is a great product with some minor flaws. It’s a great entry-level HD camera with an easy to use interface that should suffice the needs of most users. For a price of $120, I would give it a 8/10 – with the majority of points detracted due to its inability to charge through USB.

Links:
Official Product Page with Specifications

Not only unsupported, Mobility Radeons are further crippled by their drivers. Laptop distributors (HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc) limit the clocks on the bundled video cards and restrict access to the GPU BIOS. There are a number of logical reasons behind this, namely warranty overheating issues.

There are a number of ways to work around these restrictions, the best likely being a BIOS mod, as it would allow fluent clock changing through ATT, or other programs. However, some GPUs have their BIOS read and write protected, making the process rather futile.

Another, simpler, method is using a specific driver version. 8.9 and 8.10 Catalysts allow you to overclock when used in conjunction with AMD GPU Clock Tool.

So before we begin, these are the ingredients you want:

*optional components

To begin, uninstall your current drivers. If you have the Catalyst bundle installed, go to control panel, remove programs, ATI uninstall – remove CCC, Install manager, and Display Driver, reboot.

If you are running Windows 7, load up DSEO and enable Testing Mode, reboot computer.

If you do not have an ATI entry to uninstall in remove programs then head over to device manager (Run “devmgmt.msc”), select your display adapter, right click on it and select uninstall. Your screen will probably flash.

At this point you have the option of booting into safe mode, by pressing f8 repeatedly in between bios loading screen and the windows logo, and running Driver Sweeper to wipe all traces of ATI from your computer.

When this is done boot back to windows and extract the 8.10 drivers you just downloaded. Now run Mobility Modder, point it to the ATI directory that was created, and click Modify.

For Windows 7, there is an extra step. Skip this if you are not running Win7.

Locate atikmdag.sy_ in the ATI folder, use

DSEO to sign the file.

Now go back to device manager by running devmgmt.msc , select your display adapter, and press Update Driver. Navigate to Browse fo r File, Pick from list of drivers, select Have Disk, navigate to the ATI directory which was created *\ATI\Packages\Drivers\Display\LH6A_INF and press OK.

You may be prompted whether you wish to install an unsigned driver, press yes. If you have Windows 7, you have one more step. Use DSEO to s ign the “atikmdag.sys” in your /windows/system32/drivers folder. Now you can reboot.

When windows boots back up, you can use the AMD GPU Clock Tool to change your clocks.

When installing ATT, make sure to check Disable Overclocking, as it will not function properly. Read these notes if installing ATT on Windows 7.