Yahoo, Google Set Up Web Sites For Election in India

Google and Yahoo have launched special sites dedicated to coverage of the General elections starting April 16 in a bid to build their brands among Internet users in the country.
The interest of the companies signals the growing importance of the role of the Internet in Indian elections. A number of Indian political parties are using Web sites, e-mail and videos on YouTube to reach voters.

Google, for example, estimates that 25 million of India's 45 million Internet users are of voting age and are actively looking online for information on the elections and other issues.
The Internet has emerged as an important medium for people to interact and debate with other voters, political parties and candidates, said Gopal Krishna, Yahoo's vice president for emerging markets and acting country head for Yahoo India, on Tuesday.

An estimated 100 million new, young voters will be qualified to participate in this election, and many of them are likely to be Internet users, Krishna added.
Last week, Yahoo set up a micro-site, Election '09 (http://in.elections.yahoo.com/), which offers election news coverage, schedules, online polls and discussion forums.

A tool on the site, called "Your Manifesto," also allows users to select issues of importance that let politicians know what interests them. "This feature will be of tremendous value for political parties, because it provides an insight into what is going on in the voters' minds," Krishna said.

Google launched on Monday an online elections center (www.google.co.in/loksabha2009) in both English and Hindi. The company has partnered with a large media company, Hindustan Times Media, to offer a co-branded site.
Find full text at http://pcworld.in/india/news/5996544/Internet/Yahoo,_Google_Set_Up_Web_Sites_For_Election_in_India

Google, Microsoft Say They Still Support Net Neutrality

Google and Microsoft said Monday that they have not backed away from their support for net neutrality principles, despite a report to the contrary.

Both companies denied much of the information contained in a Wall Street Journal story, which suggested both companies have abandoned their support for network neutrality rules. The article reported that Google is trying to negotiate with broadband providers for an Internet fast lane for its content, apparently in conflict with its support for net neutrality rules prohibiting broadband providers from blocking or slowing content from some applications or companies.

The Google efforts described in the article, to enter into edge caching agreements with broadband providers, are consistent with the company's efforts to support net neutrality, Richard Whitt, Google's Washington, D.C., telecom and media counsel, wrote on Google's public policy blog. Edge caching involves the temporary storage of frequently accessed data on servers that are located close to the users accessing that data, and Google has offered to colocate caching servers within broadband providers' facilities, Whitt wrote.

Whitt, in a blog post from June 2007, suggested that local caching would be an acceptable behavior for broadband providers, under Google's view of net neutrality. "These activities do not rely on the carrier's unilateral control over the last-mile connections to consumers, and also do not involve discriminatory intent," Whitt wrote then.

In Whitt's Monday blog post, he defended edge caching as an already common practice, offered by companies such as Akamai, Limelight and Amazon.com's Cloudfront, and used by broadband providers to distribute Web content.

"Google and many other Internet companies also deploy servers of their own around the world," Whitt wrote. "These solutions help broadband providers by minimizing the need to send traffic outside of their networks and reducing congestion on the Internet's backbones. In fact, caching represents one type of innovative network practice encouraged by the open Internet."

Google's colocation agreements with broadband providers are nonexclusive, meaning other online companies can make the same agreements, Whitt added. "Also, none of them require (or encourage) that Google traffic be treated with higher priority than other traffic," he said. "In contrast, if broadband providers were to leverage their unilateral control over consumers' connections and offer colocation or caching services in an anti-competitive fashion, that would threaten the open Internet and the innovation it enables."

The Wall Street Journal article also said Microsoft and Yahoo have quietly withdrawn from a net neutrality coalition. A Microsoft spokeswoman said there have been no recent changes.

Back in October 2006, Microsoft withdrew from the now-defunct It's Our Net coalition, during debates over a proposed merger between AT&T and BellSouth. Microsoft continues to support consumer net neutrality rights, and it has long supported the ability of broadband providers to offer tiers of service and other enhancements, said spokeswoman Ginny Terzano.

Both Microsoft and Yahoo were members of It's Our Net, but chose not to participate when the coalition morphed into the Open Internet Coalition, a group focused on broader broadband issues, when it formed in early 2007, said Eric London, a spokesman for the newer coalition.

Several groups supporting net neutrality said Google's support of local caching does not raise concerns.

Google has never been against tiered pricing as long as broadband providers "offer the same deal to everyone else willing to pay more, although there are legitimate questions to be asked about some configurations of such schemes," Ed Black, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said in a statement. "The article equates mundane, beneficial caching services with potentially illegal broadband discrimination."

The push for net neutrality is "alive and well" and includes support from Google, added Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a digital rights group. "The practices described in the article, known as 'caching,' are commonplace and have been for many years," Sohn added in a statement. "Caching in no way is a part of the net neutrality issue of preventing discrimination by telephone and cable companies."

Google Suggests Gmail Users Dump IE

Google Inc. is pushing users of its Gmail  e-mail service to dump Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer for its own Chrome browser or Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox.

When users of IE6 reach Gmail.com, a "Get faster Gmail" message appears in the Web-based service's menu bar. The message, in turn, links to a page on Google's Web site that touts Chrome and Firefox 3 as being "twice as fast" at running Gmail.

Last week, the Gmail site also displayed the message to users browsing with Microsoft's IE7, but Google has since discarded that version of the notice. Users running other browsers, including Apple Inc.'s Safari and Opera Software ASA's namesake browser, haven't been shown the speed-up message.

Google currently lists IE7, Firefox 2.0 and later releases, Chrome and Safari as the only supported browsers for Gmail . Others, including Opera and older editions of IE, Firefox and Safari, can be used to access the e-mail service but aren't able to handle some of its features.

Google has been aggressively marketing Chrome since it stripped the browser of its beta label earlier this month. A day later, for example, Google dropped Firefox as the default browser bundled with Google Pack application bundle and added Chrome in its place.

Google, Mozilla and WebKit -- the open-source project that provides the engine for Apple's Safari -- have spent much of the second half of this year trumpeting JavaScript performance improvements , a necessary move, they say, to make Gmail and other Web applications run at speeds similar to that of traditional desktop software.

Google Chrome Password Manager Slammed

Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari browsers could do a better job of protecting passwords, according to a security researcher who released a study of browser password managers.

"Safari and Chrome are essentially tied for the worst password manager built into a major web browser," said Robert Chapin, president of Chapin Information Services, in his report, which looked at the types of security checks browsers used to make sure that they were sending username and password information to legitimate websites instead of clever hackers.
Two years ago Chapin reported a widely publicised password manager flaw in the Firefox browser, rated critical by Mozilla developers. The bug was used by attackers on the MySpace.com website who had set up a fake login page to steal account information from users of the social-networking site.

Firefox has now done a lot to improve its password manager, but all of these products are still far from perfect, Chapin said. "Should everyone put 100 percent implicit trust in every password manager?" he asked. "Not at all."

One problem is that today's password managers can be tricked into submitting different password credentials to different parts of the same website. That's what hackers did with the MySpace attack, posting a fake password entry form on a MySpace page. Because both the fake and real login forms were on the myspace.com domain, browsers like Firefox could be tricked into automatically sending login information to the fraudsters. That bug has been fixed in Firefox now, but Chrome and Safari are still vulnerable to similar attacks. Another problem is that browsers will send passwords meant for one domain, Google.com for example, to another domain - say Myspace.com - without warning the user, he said. That's because browser makers assume that the page asking for the password should be trusted, even if it is sending the password to another domain, he said.

Chapin says he uses the Opera password manager because it does a better job of letting him save passwords for specific web pages. He has posted an online test where users can test the security of their own password managers.

Robert Hansen, CEO of web security consultancy SecTheory, said that the security community has known for several years now that browser password managers are unsafe. This is mainly because the browsers themselves are vulnerable to so many different types of attack. "They aren't a great idea from a security perspective once they are integrated into the browser," he said via instant message. "The browser itself isn't designed to stop a large chunk of exploits that enable password manager theft. Without those exploits, password manager hacks wouldn't work."

Microsoft to Offer web-Based Word and Excel

Microsoft plans to make most of its Office software - including Word and Excel - available online. Web-hosted apps, also known as 'Software-as-a-Service' (SaaS), allow users to benefit from lower initial prices for the programs, as the apps are hosted online and don't need to be downloaded to computers.

 

Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's business division, told Reuters: "What we think is in five years, 50 percent of the use of Exchange and Sharepoint could be serviced from the cloud." "Between now and then, a year or two or whatever, if it's going to be tough economic times, that means we expect quite a lot of movement in that direction, a lot of people taking advantage of that," he added.

 

"I think the economy will help it." Microsoft's online offerings will directly compete with Google's web-services such as Google Docs, as well as Google Calendar, Gmail email and instant messaging. Microsoft wouldn't confirm exactly which services would be made available on the web but revealed they would be rolled out as early as 2009.

Facebook, Google Launch Data Portability Programs to All

Google and Facebook separately announced the general availability of their respective data portability program. Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect are generally designed to extend social-networking capabilities broadly across the Web.

In the real world, this means making it possible for people to use their previously created Google and Facebook accounts to sign in to other Web sites that accept them. That way, people don't have to create an account for every Web site that requires one, reducing the number of log-in details they need to remember. MySpace's Data Availability Initiative has a similar mission.

These programs also aim to let people port elsewhere content they have entered into Google, Facebook and MySpace, like profile information, photos, notes, list of contacts, comments, status updates and the like. In its announcement, Google said Friend Connect is now available to any Web site publisher and that the social features available can be added by copying and pasting snippets of code, so advanced technical knowledge isn't necessary. To access Friend Connect features on a Web site, people can log in using not only their account information from Google but also from Yahoo, AOL and the industry standard OpenID, Google said.

Meanwhile, Facebook urged its users to contact their favorite Web sites and encourage them to implement Facebook Connect, which is already running on places like Citysearch, CNN's The Forum and CBS' The Insider. "Obviously our launch partners don't cover all the websites you use on a daily basis, so if you want to see this list grow, get in touch with your favorite websites, developers, and services, and tell them you want to connect. With your help, we can all share more information across the web," wrote Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a blog posting.

Hackers Port Linux Kernel to IPhone

If you know one thing about Linux users, it's probably this: they enjoy the challenge of installing their operating system of choice on pretty much anything with a transistor in it. It's only a matter of time before they get around to replacing all those electronic singing greeting cards to make the sound of penguin mating calls.

So the news that Linux has been ported to the iPhone and the iPod touch shouldn't exactly come as a shock; please hold your cries of heresy until the end. OpeniBoot, which brings the Linux 2.6 kernel to the iPhone platform was developed by members of the iPhone DevTeam, the same folks who have long been working on cracking the iPhone's firmware every time a new version comes out.

The capabilities of OpeniBoot are still incredibly limited--at present, there's no support for writing to the flash memory, using the touch screen, wireless networking, the cell phone, sound, or the accelerometer. So if you thought that you'd be ending up with a fully operational Linux iPhone--or even a partially operational phone--I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed for now.

There's also some talk that this may pave the way for installing Google's Android OS on the iPhone, though as someone who's been using a G1 for a few days now, that seems like overhauling a Porsche to run like a Hyundai. But then again, there's always somebody who wants to prove that it's possible.

Details in http://pcworld.in/india/news/5800044/Hardware/Hackers_Port_Linux_Kernel_to_IPhone

Google Browser 'Chrome' Takes on Microsoft and Mozilla

Google is launching a beta version of its own Web browser today in more than 100 countries, the company announced yesterday in a blog posting.
The open-source browser, called Chrome, first appeared on an unofficial Google blog in the form of a comic book. "As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit 'send' a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome," the company said in the official announcement that appeared late Monday afternoon after the Internet began buzzing about the comic-book site. The blog posting was by Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director.

The browser window is "streamlined and simple," they said, describing in words what can be seen visually at the unofficial blog, Google Blogoscoped. "To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff —the pages, sites and applications that make up the Web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go," the blog posting said.

Chrome will run Web applications "much better," they wrote, with tabs kept in an isolated "sandbox," which will prevent "one tab from crashing into another and provide improved protection from rogue sites." Better speed and responsiveness are also part of Chrome, which features "a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of Web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers."
Components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox are part of the open-source Chrome, they said.

Mozilla to Get Google Cash for Three More Years

Mozilla has renewed an agreement with Google that pays the browser maker for assigning Google's search engine as Firefox's default.
"This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income," said Mitchell Baker, currently the chairwoman of Mozilla.

Mozilla generates the bulk of its income from ties to Google, according to the company's latest financial results. For the 2006 tax year - the most recent numbers make public by Mozilla - 85 percent, or about $57m of the company's $67m in annual revenues for the year, came from Google.
Firefox assigns the Google search site as the default for the browser's search bar; users can, however, change that to a rival search site if they wish. The browser also defaults to a Google URL for its home page.
Mozilla and Google last inked a two-year deal in 2006 that was to expire in November.