Front page of The Pirate Bay, 20th June 2009. Screenshot. Text - "Click here to help Iran" "The Persian Bay" Licensing: TBP website carries the Kopimi license (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Pirate Bay has been down for over 24-hours as a result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, according to the website’s Facebook account.

It’s not uncommon for the popular file-sharing website to be down for a few hours, but an outage this long is rare.

Torrent Freak and ZDNet have speculated that Anonymous may be behind the attack. Last week, The Pirate Bay criticized Anonymous for taking down Virgin Media’s website after the service provider blocked The Pirate Bay under an order from the British High Court.

The Pirate Bay responded to the attack on Virgin Media by saying, “We do NOT encourage these actions. We believe in the open and free internets, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us.”

The BBC reports it is unlikely that Anonymous is behind the current Pirate Bay DDoS though, since they typically defend–not attack– sites like The Pirate Bay.

The attack may be the least of The Pirate Bay’s problems, though. Founder Fredrik Neij is currently serving jail time in Sweden over copyright violation charges. The Hague recently ordered Dutch internet providers to block the Torrent-friendly website, making it virtually inaccessible to the entire country.

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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iPhone 2g, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 (Photo credit: reticulating)

For about five years now, the question for smartphone buyers has been a classic either/or: “Android or iPhone?” Answering that question is more difficult than ever, thanks to large advances in Android, as well as the emergence of a third viable option: Microsoft’s beautiful Windows Phone OS.

This week, we’ll attempt to break down your three options, looking at each operating system’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. Which one you choose should depend largely on how you use your phone.

For the first part of this comparison, let’s look at the iPhone and the iOS operating system. The most oft-repeated (and spot-on) description of the iPhone and its operating system is that Apple knows what you want and gives it to you and doesn’t let you change it; you can’t really alter or customize the experience because — well, why would you want to?

Frankly, you would want to. There’s a lot that’s perfect about iOS, but there’s also a lot it could learn from Android and Windows Phone. Here’s where it sparkles over its competitors and where it could use work:

Strengths :-

• Games And Apps: Apple doesn’t just have the most apps in its app store; it also has the best apps. This is especially true for gaming: Gameplay on the iPhone is smoother than on any other smartphone I’ve tried.

• Camera: The camera on the iPhone 4S trumps any other smartphone camera I’ve tried. The HTC One X comes close, but for high-quality photography day or night, the iPhone 4S is your best bet.

• Easy To Use: The iPhone still has a simple interface that makes it a good buy for a first-time smartphone user. I think Windows Phone is a little easier to use — the larger icons help, especially for older buyers with declining eyesight — but the iPhone is still idiot-proof, from initial use, to navigating the phone, to the use of each individual app. The always-available Apple support team of Geniuses also helps.

• iMessage: The iPhone is the most popular single smartphone in America, and with iMessage, texting any other iPhone is essentially free. Rather than counting against your monthly text message, any message sent over iMessage counts a minimal amount against your data plan.

• Device Speed: Forget processors — the iPhone is still, screen-to-screen, the fastest smartphone experience that is available. Apps and games load quickly and without stutter, and the touchscreen is always responsive to your touch, something that no Android phone can say quite yet. It’s a satisfying experience and a big reason why the iPhone maintains its slick appearance.

Weaknesses -:

• Maps/Navigation: We’re still waiting on voice navigation — spoken turn-by-turn directions — on the Maps app on the iPhone. You can download other apps (for free) with Voice Navigation, but when you click on an address in an email or on a website to get directions, you’ll be taken into Apple’s Maps, not your GPS app of choice. Frustrating.

• Facebook: Uploading photos to Facebook — and Instagram, Google+, Dropbox and more, but let’s focus on the world’s largest social network — is harder than it should be on the iPhone. When you take a photo on Android or Windows Phone, there is an option to upload it to Facebook and even tag your friends straight from the camera. On the iPhone, you have to go into the Facebook app and manually upload it. Apps just don’t communicate with each other very well on the iPhone. For example, here is what I can do with a photo on the HTC One X versus what I can do with a photo on the iPhone 4S:

iPhone on the left, Android on the right. The list of apps you can share with grows as you download more applications (like Tumblr, Google+, etc.).

• Homescreen: The iPhone’s homescreen, and your options for what can be shown on it, is the most rigid and limited of the three major operating systems. When you unlock your iPhone’s screen, you’re going to be looking at your static rows of icons and nothing else. On Android and Windows Phone, you have the option to have “widgets” or “live tiles,” respectively, that can give you a preview of your new mail, the current weather, top headlines, Facebook and Twitter updates, etc, without having to open any individual app.

• Mail: Email on the iPhone is disappointing. Email reliably arrives slower on my iPhone than it does on Android devices, and searching through your archives for old messages is harder on the iPhone.

• 3G: Word is that Verizon salespeople are now pushing prospective iPhone buyers over to 4G Android devices, because the iPhone 4S runs on the slower 3G network rather than the newer, faster 4G network. Some writers are upset about this, but they really shouldn’t be: The fact is that, to a consumer who just wants a phone that can make calls, send text messages and surf the Internet, the difference between operating systems matters less than the difference between 3G and 4G speeds. According to a 2012 study from PCWorld, 3G smartphones’ (like the iPhone 4S) data speeds were around 1.05 megabytes per second on the download. On Verizon’s 4G LTE network, that number rose to 7.35 megabytes per second. It’s a speed advantage that is tangible when you are surfing the web or downloading apps on your smartphone.

So Who Should Buy The iPhone?

Buying an iPhone 4S is like walking into a pizza shop and getting a slice of pepperoni pie. It’s a safe choice that won’t let you down, but if you start to think about it, you might end up wondering what else you might have gotten.

The iPhone 4S is easily the best smartphone option for those who spend a lot of time playing games on their phones or who download a lot of apps to fill out their phone’s functions. For those who use their phone as their primary camera, the iPhone 4S is also the best choice. Given how easy it is to use, and Apple’s famously accessible “Geniuses” at its retail stores, I would also recommend it for first-time smartphone buyers who don’t feel comfortable or confident in their ability to navigate the system. If you anticipate having lots of questions or needing assistance, Apple’s help desk is phenomenal.

For those using their smartphone as an email, text message, Internet-browsing-portal, I would hold off on buying the iPhone until it upgrades to 4G LTE (probably in October), especially if you live in a large city, where 4G coverage will arrive first. You just might feel awfully silly with a 3G phone two years from now, considering the booming speeds and multibillion dollar expansion in 4G LTE networks that the four major U.S. carriers are going through right now. If you’re committed to iOS and the iPhone, wait five months to get a new phone.

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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Apple Inc. New Headquarters (Photo credit: MarkGregory007)

The Apple inspirational note left of the desk of Instagram user “M” and discovered by New York Times columnist Nick Bilton, sums what it means to be an Apple employee.

Basically, “Team Apple! F**k yeah!”

The Instagrammer who posted the photo of the note included these words: “What greets you on your first day at Apple. I’ve had this taped to my dresser for two years. Words to live by.”

The letter left on the desk of new Apple hires reads as follows, according to “M’s” image:

There’s work and there’s your life’s work.

The kind of work that has your fingerprints all over it. The kind of work that you’d never compromise on. That you’d sacrifice a weekend for. You can do that kind of work at Apple. People don’t come here to play it safe. They come here to swim in the deep end.

They want their work to add up to something.

Something big. Something that couldn’t happen anywhere else.

Welcome to Apple.

WARNING! Severe cynicism below!

Welcome to Apple. We’re going to throw you into the deep end and you’re going to work weekends. Be inspired. Don’t play it safe, take risks, take chances, design the next iPhone by putting an “S” in the name. (Nobody is confirming if they drop these notes on new hires at Foxconn, an Apple supplier.

Cynicism aside, Apple is a company built that was built in no small part by a man named Steve Jobs, a man with a reputation for developing revolutionary products that have quite literally changed the landscape of how humans communicate with one another. So it should probably stand to reason those people taking up positions at Apple are there because they’re passionate about what they do and will willingly jump into the deep end over the weekend.

No matter which way the note rubs you; towards the cynical or the inspired, the words do have impact. They’ve had enough of an impact that this note has been around for at least a couple of years, as TheNextWeb points out this Apple inspirational note has surfaced on the internet back in 2010.

Source:- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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Image via CrunchBase

The technology has got advanced to a great extent, even; social networking phones are running on a fuel cell. But the main competition is in the field of social media network of goggle. There have been a lot of speculations that users made regarding Google’s social network known as Google Plus. With its rapid growth which surpassed other networks by 25 million in just a month, by far surpassing the growth of huge social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have achieved in their past years, it has shocked the entire online community and has even posed as a threat for the existing social media giants. However, true the figure is, it is still not enough. Google+ was still unable to draw in a huge number of followings and keep them intact in the network unlike what its giant competitors did. Google+ indeed has some unique features such as their “Hangouts” feature and other video conferencing tools which can’t be seen within any other social networks. In fact, these are truly impressive but the point here is how come that Google’s latest social networking attempt is a big failure?

There are in fact several reasons behind why users tend to stick to their current social networks rather than deviate to a whole new one. And for the part of the premature Google plus, here are some reasons why the network just won’t catch the heart of the crowd.

Nobody wants another social network as of this time -:

“Nobody wants another social network right now”. Those words came straight from Brian Solis, a well-known social media analyst from Altimeter Group. This might sound to be quite illogical, but it is in fact true. People are just too hooked up to the already famous social networks, and they just can’t find the time to jump off to a new one. Even though Google plus have just reached about 90 million registered users, it still pales in comparison with Facebook’s 845 million monthly users and 100 million that of Twitter. These numbers only show that you can find a lot of your colleagues and friends on Facebook and Twitter than you can on Google plus.

Also by comparison, ComScore has the number that Google+ users only spent a few three minutes per month on the network from September to January as compared to that of Facebook which goes around an average of 405 minutes per month.

Negative aspect of G+ -:

Lately Google has been coming under pressure in recent weeks because of the news that their user numbers and the amount of time that people are spending on the site are getting down by great time. To be honest here it is no surprise as I’ve been very negative on their chances since day one, but even I can’t believe on the sort of stuff they are releasing now. They have just announced that their latest feature is a mask that you can add to their Google Hangouts product so as you can turn yourself in to, wait for it….A cat or a dog. I literally thought it must have been April fool’s day or something when I first saw the story but it clearly isn’t and this is the level they have descended to in order to get attention for something that is turning in to a huge failure for them. People will turn around and say that this is only a bit of fun and a quirky little feature but Google seem to be doing more and more of this useless attention seeking stuff in recent times and it really is bordering on pathetic.
Google continues to ship upgrades to Google + at an unprecedented level. Even though Google considers it’s users of Google + as more of a “product” versus a customer they are obviously concerned about keeping the users satisfied and making sure that their over all experience on the site is a positive one.  There are at least two new upgrades this week worth noting: New invite feature to Hangouts and the change to the +1 button.

Over a million websites use Google+ plugins — like the +1 button and the badge for Pages – to help visitors connect with their brand and share their content with others. Today we’re excited to announce a number of improvements to these plugins that make sharing and connecting even easier.

Easier to share from the +1 button -:

Well, starting from today itself, it’ll be a little easier to share right from the +1 buttons all across the web. Now, after you +1 something, the share box will pop open right away, without an extra click. Add a comment if you want, choose the people you want to share with, and you’re done.

Easier to follow brands and businesses -:

When you add Google+ pages to your circles, it’s typically to follow their news and updates. That’s why we’re updating badges for Google+ pages to read “Follow.” With just one click, this button adds a business or brand to your “Following” circle, and if you want to customize which circle they’re in, you can do that too.

If you’re one of the many businesses and brands with a Google+ page, we’ve also put together a handy style guide (pdf) which includes recommended language and images for promoting your page.

Adding a badge for people, not just pages -:

We heard you! Now anyone (including Britney Spears!) can add a personal Google+ badge to their web pages, and let visitors add them to circles quickly and easily.

We’ve got lots more planned for the Google+ plugins, stay tuned!

About the author: Claudia is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on luxury and technology. These days she is working on google autonomous. 

YouTube - snapshot (Photo credit: tarop)

From the Dollar Shave Club to the taxidermy mastery of Chuck Testa, YouTube has shown itself to be an indispensable tool for businesses with creative campaigns to market themselves. Yet, until now, YouTube lacked the insightful and statistics-heavy tools that many brands use on sites like Facebook for evaluating their advertising campaigns. In a blog post on the YouTube blog, Baljeet Singh, a group product manager for YouTube, has introduced Google AdWords for video.

“With a global audience of 800 million monthly visitors to YouTube, every day can feel like you’re advertising in the Super Bowl, and one video can launch a business,”Singh wrote in the post.

Google AdWords for video will offer several ways for a businesses advertisements to gain visibility and micro target users who show interest in their products or industry. Combining YouTube with the Google Display Network, which includes millions of websites, allows brands to decide whether they want to pay to have their content searchable by a specific keyword or in connection with common interests or searches.

AdWords will also allow businesses to better understand the effectiveness and efficiency of their ad campaigns on YouTube. Tools will allow businesses to see how many people stayed to watch the entire video, visited the company website, stayed on the channel to watch another video and if they shared the video or subscribed to the channel after viewing an ad. In conjunction with AdWords will be TrueView video ads which allows for less wasteful spending, ensuring creators are only charged when people are truly engaged by the video and not those who skip the video or are repeat viewers.

To get the initiative rolling, Google and YouTube are offering $50 million in free advertising to help 500,000 businesses get into the online video world. Companies new to YouTube will receive a $75 credit when they sign up, enough money for a video campaign to reach 1,500 customers on YouTube for one month. YouTube is also offering an Advertiser Playbook sharing tips on how videos can help your business and the My Business Story channel, which are free tools you can use to create your first video. A so-called ambassador program, comprised of nine businesses who have built a following through successful through video campaigns, will be another resource for businesses that are new to YouTube to learn how to grow their brand.

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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Looks like TIME isn’t a big fan of Anonymous.

The loose-knit hacker group ended up in the number 36 spot on TIME’S 100 Most Influential People list, released on April 18, even though the group had been voted to first place on TIME’s online reader poll.

As of 5 p.m. ET on Friday, April 6, the hacker-activist collective beat out all other nominees with 395,793 votes in favor of its inclusion on the TIME 100 list. Jeremy Lin, who came in ninth on the poll, snagged TIME’s top honor on the official list.

So why did the TIME editors chose to place the hacker group at such a low spot on the list considering how high Anonymous placed in public polling and its widely publicized cyberattacks (to name just a few: striking government websites around the world in Tunisia, Algeria Zimbabwe, China, the United States and elsewhere; crashing the CIA’s public site; and, more recently, intercepting an FBI conference call and posting it online).

To be fair, Anonymous wasn’t the only TIME 100 contender whose place on the final list didn’t reflect people’s votes. For example, general manager of Reddit Erik Martin,came in second on the public poll with 26,4193 votes but then dropped drastically to number 83 on the final list. And Indian politician Narendra Modi, who came in thirdin the web poll with 25,6792 votes, didn’t even make the final list at all.

It may well be that Anonymous’ low ranking on the final list is due to the fact that TIME editors suspect the group of rigging the voting. If that’s the case, it wouldn’t be the first time someone gamed TIME’s poll. As ZDNet pointed out in 2009, 4chan users “took advantage of the lack of authentication or validation of the online process” using “autovoters” to reorder the names that appeared on the poll.

Writing the official intro for Anonymous on the TIME 100 list, Barton Gellman asked bluntly, “Did Anonymous fix the TIME 100 poll?” He went on to include an unnamed person’s response to his query, an unnamed person said, “Depends on who you think is smarter, a global collective of highly skilled hackers or the TIME IT department.”

Check out TIME’s final 100 Most Influential people list here and the results of its pollhere.

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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mappa_blog (Photo credit: francescopozzi)

Whether you blog for a hobby or blog for business/professional purposes…more likely than not one of your main goals is to get your word out there and draw as much traffic as you can to your posts. So if you are new to the blogosphere or maybe have found yourself in a bit of a blogging rut, be sure to check out the following basic types of blog ideas so that you can get to composing your most click-worthy posts yet:

• Round-up Posts –  This type of blog post is one of the most popular kinds found on the internet—and the good news is that they are some of the simplest to create! Round-up your content into a list that outlines, “The Top 10 Reasons…,” “The 7 Least Likely Places…,” or “The 100 Best of…”—you get the idea here, the possibilities are endless!

• Personal tales – Stories from your own personal vault are some of the best ways for you to reach your target audience. Your blog instantly becomes more interesting when you talk about real life events—people love posts to which they can relate. Sharing an experience or tale that can define a lesson or give a moral will be a great way for you to help others. And it doesn’t even have to be serious—have some fun and tell a humorous story to give your blog some personality!

• News, news, news – A proven method of effective blogging stems from news that is happening not yesterday, not two hours ago, but right this very second. So if there is a current event that you find especially entertaining or intriguing and your readers would want to know about it, then jump on the story fast! Put the story in your own words and you can even spin it so that it fits better with the content of your blog. Readers will appreciate your timely rehash of the latest happenings and will be more likely to visit in the future to stay informed about what’s going on in your niche.

• Reviews – Because consumers trust fellow consumers more than they trust the marketing tactics of huge corporations just trying to make a buck selling them something, cyber surfers are constantly searching blogs for reviews on things like music, movies, restaurants and much more. So try giving your readers an honest review of products or services that relate to your blog. Describe your own personal experiences that detail your likes, dislikes, pros, cons, comparisons to similar products/services and conclude your reviews with a final recommendation for your blog visitors.

• How-to – It’s a wonder how people got anything accomplished before the internet. Nowadays it seems that we can’t figure out how to do anything from buy a car to boil an egg without looking up the instructions on the web. Take advantage of the stupidity of the modern man by giving your blog readers easy to follow, step-by-step instructions on how to do something that would be of particular use to them.

• Controversy – Just as long as you devise your post in a way that doesn’t offend or spark an influx of hate mail to your Gmail account, if it’s scandalous, it’s always going to be a hit amongst your fan-base. Create blog posts around current controversial subjects while being sure to cover all the pertinent points and follow up with your own views on the matter. Sound off about it and ask questions that will generate comments and create a place for others to share their input as well.

Mark Weikel is a guest post author who shares with us his blogging tips. In addition, Mark also blogs for gay dating sites where he offers advice to singles for successful online dating.

Seal of the United States Federal Communications Commission. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Federal Communications Commission has fined Google $25,000, saying the online search leader impeded an investigation into how it collected data while taking photos for its “Street View” mapping feature.

The FCC said in a report from Friday that Google Inc. “deliberately impeded and delayed” the investigation for months. The agency said that the online search leader did this by not responding to requests for information and documents.

At the same time, the FCC said it will not take action against Google over its data collection. Part of the reason for that is that it still has “significant factual questions” about the Street View project that haven’t been answered. To get some answers, the FCC had subpoenaed a Google engineer who developed the software code that the company used to collect and store data. But the engineer, who is not named in the report, declined to testify, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against incriminating himself.

In a statement, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google said it disagrees with the FCC’s characterization of its cooperation with the investigation and will be filing a response.

“As the FCC notes in their report, we provided all the materials the regulators felt they needed to conclude their investigation and we were not found to have violated any laws,” the company said in a prepared statement.

Google’s stock fell $17.79, or 2.9 percent, to $606.81 in midday trading Monday. The stock has traded in the 52-week range from $473.02 to $670.25.

Source :- huffingtonpost.com

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The opening studio logo from The early 1960s Metro Goldwyn Mayer cartoon logo (As seen in Gene Deitch's Tom and Jerry cartoons.) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Google is adding 600 movies from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to the titles it has available for rent on YouTube and also Google Play, its digital content store for Android-powered mobile devices.

MGM, whose film library includes classics like “Rocky” and “Rain Man,” joins five other major studios offering movies for rent through Google: Viacom Inc.’s Paramount, Comcast Corp.’s Universal, Sony Corp.’s Sony Pictures, Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. and The Walt Disney Co.

Several smaller studios including Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. and The Weinstein Co. also rent movies online through Google.

YouTube is available on computers and mobile devices, as well as on Google TV, an Internet-connected TV platform available on certain Sony televisions and Blu-ray players and the Logitech Revue set-top box.

Google Inc. is based in Mountain View, Calif.

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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Image via CrunchBase

Facebook’s making more of your data available to you. The social network announced on its Privacy page on April 12 that its users will now be able to download “an expanded archive of your Facebook account history” through the updated Download Your Information feature available on the Account Settings page.

According to Facebook, the Download Your Information feature was first made available in 2010 and allows users to receive a copy of material they have shared on Facebook, including pictures, posts, messages and a list of friends and chat conversations.

With this latest update, a user will now be able to access even more information, such as previous names one has used on the social network, friend requests one has made and Internet protocol addresses from which one has logged on to the site. Eventually, Facebook will add even more categories of information that users will be able to download for themselves.

The Next Web points out, however, that users will not be able to download comments they have made on other people’s posts, friends’ pictures or status updates and any other personal information that belongs to other users.

According to The New York Times, this update is Facebook’s follow-through with an agreement it made with the Irish Data Protection Commission last December, following concerns raised by Austrian law student Max Schrems and others over how the social network stores its users’ information.

While Facebook is now making more information available to users, it’s still not enough for Schrems.

“We welcome that Facebook users are now getting more access to their data, but Facebook is still not in line with the European Data Protection Law,” he told The New York Times. “With the changes, Facebook will only offer access to 39 data categories, while it is holding at least 84 such data categories about every user.”

According to the BBC, Facebook will undergo a formal review by the Irish data protection commissioner of the progress it’s made this coming July.

What do you think about Facebook’s update to its Download Your Information feature? Do you think Facebook users should have more access to data? Let us know in the comments, but make sure to answer our poll below before you do!

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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