CISPA is Effectively Dead in the Senate

Last week, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) was passed in the House of Representatives. At that point it was then sent over to the Senate for them to vote on it, but it looks like CISPA is going to end there. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that while the bill is "important," its "privacy protections are insufficient." CISPA in its proposed form encompassed far too many things, as it not only allowed for security concerns to be shared but any information on specific users could be sent to the government.

It seems the Senate was concerned about that last part, as a representative of the Senate Commerce Committee stated "issues and key provisions" in CISPA are being divided up. Separate bills could come out of parts of those, like how email privacy, location tracking, and the like are being considered in a reform of the Electronic Communication Privacy Act (ECPA). One thing that's certain with any new bills is privacy protection has to be a stronger component, as the White House will veto any legislation that doesn't include them.

Source: US News

House and Senate at Work on Bills to Better Protect Online Privacy

Back in 1986, the Electronic Communication Privacy Act (ECPA) was passed, which stated any emails older than six months were considered abandoned and eligble to be seized by authorities without a warrant. The reasoning at the time was because emails would be deleted after being read, since cloud servers and large amounts of network storage weren't being considered. However that isn't the case now, as emails can be kept on a server indefinitely due to 10GB or more of storage capacity on the likes of Gmail. The good news is the US Congress has taken notice, as tomorrow the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to meet to "mark up" a reform for the ECPA. The House Judiciary Committee held a meeting on it last month, but both are working to ensure a warrant is needed for much more than just emails.

Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Mike Lee (R-UT) proposed the new bill, dubbed the Leahy-Lee bill, which "would require a warrant for all private electronic content. So it's e-mails, it's texts, Google Docs, it's photos in Picasa, it's private social networking posts." Google Docs and other non-communcations require a subpoena to be accessed. The senators want everything protected by the Fourth Amendment, both for the privacy of US citizens and companies with cloud services. The ACLU supports the bill and hopes it can pass the Senate Judiciary Committee with a voice vote.

The US House of Representatives is also considering email privacy, as well as location tracking. A separate hearing tomorrow by the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to address location tracking, with senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Ron Kirk (R-IL) proposing that one. It isn't known if the Senate would incorporate both bills into one or address each separately, but the fact Congress is looking into it can only be seen as positive.

Source: Ars Technica

Google to Bring Gigabit Internet to Austin, TX; AT&T Hopes to if Offered Same Deal

Residents in the Texas state capital have something to look forward to, as Google has announced its plan to bring Gigabit Internet to Austin by the middle of next year. The company says pricing and choice of options should be similar to what's currently available in Kansas City (and Olathe, KS), which is the first time Google has said anything about expansion. Current options in Kansas City include a $120 a month package for Gigabit Internet, TV-over-IP, and a DVR; a $70/month package for just the Gigabit Internet; and finally a one-time $300 construction cost (with an option to split it up over a year) for 5Mbps Internet at no additional cost for seven years. Google also plans to connect public buildings like hospitals, schools, and community centers to the fiber service at no extra cost.

Not to be outdone, AT&T announced it hopes to bring Gigabit Internet to Austin if it gets the same deal as Google. According to AT&T, it'll do so if "granted the same terms and conditions as Google on issues such as geographic scope of offerings, rights of way, permitting, state licenses and any investment incentives." Both Google and City of Austin officials, including mayor Lee Leffingwell, were quick to say there were no incentives offered and it's simply a way to bring more choices to Austin residents. There were also no incentives offered in Kansas City, although officials there are allowing Google to set up any Central Office equipment in city buildings.

The agreement between Google and the City of Austin hasn't been made public yet, but it should be available on the city website before long. Hopefully other cities and communities get Google Fiber too, otherwise Kansas City, Olathe, and Austin are going to get a lot of new residents.

Source: Google and Ars Technica

Google Chrome Drops WebKit for Blink

It won't be long before Google bids adieu to WebKit for its Chrome browser. The technology giant recently announced its browser will switch to the Blink rendering engine, which is an open source rendering engine based on WebKit. Google stated the reason behind the switch is because Chromium uses a different multi-process approach than other WebKit browsers, which has led to increased complexity. It's also been slowing down innovation, so in a way to curb all of that, there's Blink. Google didn't come to that conclusion lightly however, as a new rendering engine can introduce significant changes to the Web as a whole. What the company is banking on is having more rendering engines will lead to more innovation and improves the Internet's ecosystem.

Blink allows Google to strip out a ton of unnecessary components on Chrome, with initial figures of 4.5 million lines of code being removed. That equates to seven build systems and 7,000 files with the first switch, which can only mean good things for the browser. Long term it should lead to more stability and less bugs, so that's a welcomed benefit. Google's Chrome OS is going to switch over to Blink, as will the Opera web browser, which moved to WebKit barely two months ago.

Google is set to implement Blink in build 28 of Chrome that's due in about ten weeks, but it's already available in the Canary version for developers and early adopters. More information on Blink can be found here.

Source: Chromium Blog and The Next Web

Mozilla and Epic Team Up to Bring Unreal Engine 3 to the Web

Near the end of 2011, Epic Games announced its Unreal Engine 3 would be ported to Adobe Flash Player 11. It brought the popular game engine to a larger audience, but now it looks like that was just the beginning for UE3. Yesterday during the Game Developers Conference, Epic and Mozilla unveiled plans to bring Unreal Engine 3 to the Web. Mozilla believes it can "rival native performance" with UE3 on the Web, which would open the doors for games of all types, even AAA titles. However, one sort of big problem deals with load times for modern games, as streaming a gigabyte or so of data isn't a viable solution. That's where Khronos Group, the non-profit organization responsible for developing OpenGL and WebGL, comes in.

It's planning a set of common data formats for 3D models, textures, and other resources needed by a game. Those would allow for a game to tell a server the amount of bandwidth it has, screen resolution, and other information in order to be sent the correct resources. Faster connections would allow for better quality textures, while slower connections would get lower quality ones in order to load quicker. Khronos Group is still in the early phases of design, but there's a lot of hope for it once it's completed.

Source: Ars Technica

Enjoy the Web in a New Way with Google's Chrome Maze

If you need a little break from your daily grind or just want something new to do, Google has you covered. The folks in Mountain View have a new experiment for you to try, and so long as you have Google Chrome on your PC, you can take part. Google's Chrome Maze turns any website into a 3D maze where you have to navigate a ball from start to finish. Controls are handled by your smartphone (Android 4.0 and higher or iOS 5.0 and higher), but you can use just the PC if your phone isn't handy. All you need to do is head on over to the Chrome Maze website, follow along on the tutorial to sync your smartphone (or just click on the PC only link), type in a website of your choice or use one of Google's, and start playing!

Some websites are easier than others, so be sure to experiment with your favorites. There are leaderboards to try and top to keep you coming back for more. So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and play!

Source: Chrome

Google Fiber Expanding to Olathe, Kansas

Google has received permission to expand its fiber service to Olathe, Kansas. Google Fiber provides infrastructure and sets up a fiber optic network in selected areas, and provides up to 1Gbps speeds to anybody purchasing its $70/month package. It also offers free internet at 5Mbps speeds, as well as offering an Internet and TV package for a $120/month subscription fee.

Google Fiber has been available in certain areas around Kansas City for some time, however until now, Olathe has not been covered. Thankfully for those in the Olathe area, permission was granted for the work to commence a couple of months ago. Google Community Manager Rachel Hack noted that there is is still "a lot of planning and engineering work" to complete before Google can give a set timescale for the rollout. 

Source: Google Fiber Blog

Microsoft Fined $732 Million Over Browser Choice Lawsuit

The EU has fined Microsoft $732 million after it was deemed Microsoft failed to complete a 2009 settlement that required it to offer users a choice of web browsers. The lawsuit was originally filed by Opera Software, the company that develops the Opera web browser that accused Microsoft of forcing users to use Internet Explorer when Windows was installed. Opera Software went on to win this lawsuit, and eventually formed a settlement with Microsoft in late 2009.

Microsoft agreed to show users a screen showing four of the most popular Internet Explorer alternatives, in order to allow users to choose the browser they wanted. Microsoft did not, however, live up to this claim, as users of Windows 7 SP1 would not see this message between May 2011 and July 2012. For this reason, EU antitrust officials have fined Microsoft for breaching the terms of the settlement.

Source: PCWorld.com

Instagram Surpasses 100 Million Active Users

As of today, Instagram has over 100 million active users that use the photo sharing network every month. The site, owned by social network giant Facebook, allows users to upload photos directly to the site from almost any device with an internet connection.

What makes this announcement even more surprising is that just one month ago, Instagram announced it had surpassed the 90 million user mark. This increase comes despite disagreements about its privacy policy last year, as well as a content disagreement with Twitter. Over 40 million photos are uploaded to Instagram every day, coupled with over 8,500 likes and 1,000 comments every single second. These facts may make Instagram's growth seem almost unstoppable.

Source: CNET.com

New File Upload Site Launched by Kim Dotcom

Kim Dotcom is the founder of the site Megaupload, which was taken down by United States authorities last year for helping to facilitate up to $500 million in entertainment industry losses due to piracy. Kim has just launched a new service, Mega, and is already boasting half a million users. Kim held a press conference and launch party at his mansion in New Zealand, complete with a re-enactment of the raid by law enforcement on his mansion. The site features 50GB of free storage and adds encryption and decryption, a feature that Kim believes will keep him safe from any legal proceedings in the future. The decryption keys are held by users and therefore Mega has no ability to know what files are being stored and transferred using its service.

Xbox 360 to Receive Microsoft SkyDrive App Today

Microsoft has announced in a blog post it will be launching an Xbox 360 client to its popular SkyDrive online storage system today. The new app will allow users to transfer files between any other device connected to their SkyDrive account and their console, including Windows Phone devices. The app also supports interaction through Kinect for Xbox 360, with both voice and gesture control. The blog post put a focus on the Xbox app's ability to display photos and videos stored on the user's SkyDrive account.

Microsoft has been focusing much attention to its SkyDrive division in the last couple of months after reporting that usage of the system had doubled in the last six months. SkyDrive is also more closely integrated into the new Windows 8 OS, and the release of the SkyDrive app for Xbox will continue Microsoft's aim to make its devices more unified. The app will be available to launch from the Xbox dashboard to Xbox LIVE Gold members from 10am PST today.

Mozilla Halts Progress on 64-bit Firefox for Windows

Well, this isn't exactly the best news for some people, but it is what it is. Mozilla has halted progress on its 64-bit Firefox for Windows due to issues with add-ons and a low project priority. A developer with consulting firm Mozdev (and contributor to the 64-bit Firefox) said progress could be halted for some time and to not argue about it on Bugzilla, the bug and change-tracking database. Firefox's Nightly channel, which was for the 64-bit version, hadn't received any updates in months, and probably won't throughtout 2013. About 50% of Mozilla's Windows users were estimated to use the Nightly build, but the bugs and add-on incompatibilty meant it isn't a priority. Firefox's director, Asa Dotzler, said there eventually will be a 64-bit Firefox, but right now the company is working on other projects, like the Windows 8 app for Firefox.

Internet Explorer 10 Preview Now Available for Windows 7

It was just last month when Microsoft revealed the preview version of Internet Explorer 10 would arrive for Windows 7 in mid-November.  Well, a look at a calendar says we're in the middle of November now, and Microsoft has delivered right on cue. The Release Preview of Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 is now available to download direct from MS. The look of IE10 on Windows 7 is very similar to the look on Windows 8, and many of the features made the jump. Full-screen browsing, hardware acceleration, multitouch support, and a "Flip Ahead" feature that predicts what page you want to view next are all in the W7 version of the browser. Many of the multitouch gestures can be performed on a trackpad with the right drivers if you lack a touchscreen on your Windows 7 computer. A mouse and keyboard work just fine, too.

Google Chrome 23 Arrives with Do Not Track; Videos Receive Graphics Acceleration for Windows

Google has updated its Chrome browser to version 23 and with it comes some welcomed features. Google has added an option to send a "do not track" to various websites, which you can toggle on or off in the Settings screen. Website permissions are also easier to control, with a simple drop down menu allowing you to adjust geolocation, pop-ups, notifications, and even camera or microphone access. Just click the icon on the left of the site's URL and adjust accordingly. Windows users should be happy to know that Google has added graphics acceleration for video decoding for a smoother experience. Laptop users should see a 25% increase in battery life with the GPU-accelerated decoding enabled, which should be most appreciated for users on the go. All these updates should have already applied to your Chrome browser, but if you're still on version 22 then just restart the browser and you're good to go.

Swedish Police Raid Hosting Company PRQ

PRQ, a hosting company started by two founders of the Pirate Bay, has been raided by police. As a result of the raid, a number of public and private torrent sites, as well as some sports streaming websites were taken down. The Pirate Bay appeared to be down at the same time, but the site attributed the outage to a power failure. Owner of PRQ Mikael Viborg claimed that the police were "looking for four servers," potentially related to intellectual property theft.

Google Details High Speed Internet Pricing

Google first announced its plans to develop a high speed fiber Internet service in February 2010 and Kansas City was chosen as the lucky city to get the service first. There will be 180 areas of the city that receive the service starting in October 2012 and finishing in Fall 2013. Google has now detailed the pricing scheme for the service which has three plans, all of which are better than nearly all plans currently offered in the United States in price, speed, or both. The base plan costs only the $300 install fee and includes seven years of Internet connectivity at speeds of 5Mb/s download and 1Mb/s upload. The second tier features one gigabit upload and download speeds for only $70 per month, which at one third the price of the Verizon FiOS plan that offers 300/65 speeds makes me very sad. The highest tier adds the Google TV service to the blazing fast Internet for $120 per month. The installation fee is waived on the mid and high tier plans.

GoDaddy Outage Caused by Hardware Issue

Millions of websites that are hosted by GoDaddy were down for several hours yesterday, and the company has come forward with an explanation. It was suspected that a DDoS attack was responsible, but GoDaddy CEO Scott Wagner stated, "We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables." During the outage there was no risk of compromise of any customer data, and it was merely an access problem.

Dropbox Testing Two-Factor Verification

Dropbox recently stated that it was working on implementing two-factor authentication for the cloud storage service. The company has now enabled the feature in an "experimental build" and plans to release it to the public soon. Forum users can test it out before an official release by downloading version 1.5.12 and enabling the two-factor authentication option. Dropbox will give users the "option of receiving a text message with a six-number code, or a private list of codes that can be used offline."

Grum Botnet Taken Down

The Grum botnet was reported to produce 20% of spam e-mail in the world. The botnet has now been shutdown after authorities in the Netherlands, Russia, and Panama disabled the command and control servers that give direction to infected machines. Senior staff scientist at FireEye Atif Mushtaq has reported that "We've seen the number of infected machines sending emails drop from 120,000 to 20,000 to zero. In addition, reports from SpamHaus and Trustwave indicate that the Lethic botnet has gone underground. Overall, we're seeing a global reduction in spam of about 50 percent—the lowest levels ever." Researchers are confident that the infected machines won't be able to get back in contact with new servers as the Grum software didn't have any sort of adaptive mechanisms.

The Internet Defense League Rises

You want to defend the freedom of the Internet, like the blackout against SOPA and PIPA did, but you need a symbol. This symbol must represent the importance of your mission and the gravity of the situation. It must unify people to take action defending the Internet at a single glance. What should the symbol be?

A cat!

The Internet Defense League is a group of people and corporations who feel it is their responsibility to protect the Internet from damaging laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act. These corporations include Mozilla, Reddit, Wordpress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Cheezburger Network. Anyone can join the league though either to just be alerted whenever there is something risking the freedom of the Internet, or to use your own website or blog to transmit the information to the world.

The League intends to launch tonight, at the same time The Dark Knight Rises is released to theaters, and project cat signals at launch parties. These signals are not just going to be those from the keychain lights you get for donating over $30 but actual spotlights illuminating the sky.

The League is still developing itself at the moment as it creates code for private websites that will automatically activate when certain alerts from the League are sent out. The collaborative system for identifying threats and opportunities is also still being worked on.

Weather Disables Amazon Cloud

A weekend storm knocked out power to millions of people on the East Coast, including an Amazon data center in Ashburn, Virginia. The storm took out both the primary power and the backup generators and rendered several popular Internet destinations unavailable for six hours. Netflix, Pinterest, and Instagram were among the biggest sites that felt the pinch due to the weather. Compounding the power outage was the Elastic Load Balancing service also going down, which then prevented the server load from being distributed across multiple data centers. Amazon hasn't said much about the outage, but hopefully more information will be available shortly.

Custom Themes Coming to Gmail

Gmail users will soon be able to customize the theme of their email using more than the default themes available from Google. Users will be able to choose their favorite photo from a number of sources to use as the background of the page. Photos can come from Google+, a hard drive, or an image URL. After choosing a photo, you are presented with a choice of light or dark for the rest of the interface. This new feature is expected to rolled out "over the next couple of days." I still haven't forgiven Google for changing the text color of the Terminal theme from green to white.

Passwords Leaked for Several Popular Websites

It has been a rough two days for a trio of websites, with news coming out that millions of passwords on each site have been leaked. It was announced yesterday that both LinkedIn and eHarmony experienced a breach and Last.fm joined the list today. Hackers released 6.5 million passwords for LinkedIn, which used the SHA-1 hashing algorithm and also failed to salt the passwords. Dating site eHarmony came out a bit better, with only 1.5 million passwords being leaked. Last.fm claimed that some passwords were leaked, but a third party researcher claims the breach has caused more than 16 million passwords using the MD5 hash to be cracked. If you have any accounts on these sites, be sure to change your password for them and any other sites that may share a password with it.

Many Facebook Users Refuse to Click Ads

Facebook received some less than ideal news earlier this week when it was revealed that General Motors would be pulling $10 million worth of ads from Facebook from a total a $40 million. A survey conducted by marketing agency Greenlight found that 44% of respondents would never click ads on Facebook. Only 3% of those polled said they regularly clicked ads on Facebook. This comes before the IPO of Facebook which happens tomorrow and is expected to value the company at more than $100 billion. The company is in the unique position that it can use the information you provide to produce targeted ads. I have never intentionally clicked a Facebook ad, but the "Find girls in your area that like Slayer" ad was very tempting.

Facebook to Receive Antitrust Probe

Facebook will be the subject of a routine antitrust probe as part of its acquisition of Instagram. The deal was initially up for review due to the scale of the purchase, as most mergers valued above $66 million will receive some sort of inquiry. However, the investigation into issues of competition could delay the deal up to six months, and may prevent Facebook from closing the deal before the end of the second quarter as it had initially hoped. Facebook claims that the delay could hurt revenue as it seeks ways to profit from mobile users, but most experts believe that the deal will go through without issue.

Mozilla Leaves Firefox 3.6 Behind for Good

There comes a time in the life of every piece of software where it simply must be retired in favor of newer versions. Such is the case with Firefox 3.6, as Mozilla has announced the venerable browser will be retired and anyone still using it will be auto-upgraded to version 12. Official support for Firefox 3.5 ended on April 24th while security updates stopped in January. Mozilla will upgrade any remaining 3.6 users in early May, although the company did not say exactly when. Still, you can always upgrade early to avoid any sudden shock. For those who like to be on the up and up, Mozilla announced the beta for Firefox 13 is now available, which brings with it a new home page, Google's SPDY protocol, and various other features. This is some good news with the bad, but really, people had to upgrade from Firefox 3.6 at some point.

Google Drive Officially Announced - Up to 16TB of Storage Available

A couple months back, Google was rumored to be working on a cloud storage solution called Drive. Over time, various leaks and teasers appeared for it, which you can see over at TalkAndroid, and now Google has made it official. The folks over in Mountain View formally announced Google Drive today, which will let you store all the documents, videos, pictures, and more that you want. Google will give everyone 5GB for free, but there are paid options to increase the amount all the way up to 16TB. Yes, that is sixteen terabytes of data, although it will set you back $800 a month. Paid options start at 25GB for $2.49 a month and go up from there, although once you upgrade to a paid account your Gmail storage will increase to 25GB. Google Drive will also let you send email attachments larger than 25MB, which will be perfect for sending video files to your friends or from one computer to another.

Google Docs is built directly into Google Drive, so you and anyone you share a file with can easily make edits to it. You can also comment on different files and receive a notification whenever a friend comments on one of your files. If you think searching all these uploaded files will be a pain, Google has thought of a way to simplify it. You can search for specific words in any file, browse for only photos of a certain location, and more that will be added over time.

Google Drive will work without issue on Windows and Mac, while Android users will need to download an app. People with an iOS device will need to wait a little longer as Google is hard at work to get that platform supported.

Cyberbullying is Different from Traditional Bullying

Who here has ever been bullied? I was once. Can still remember what it was like being pushed into that fence, even after all these years. Modern children are not getting bullied like I was though, at least not all of them. Bullying has moved into the digital age, just like much of our lives have, but cyberbullying is not the same as traditional schoolyard bullying.

Traditional bullying often has three characteristics; a power difference between the bully or bullies and the victim, proactive targeting of the victim, and ongoing aggression. Researchers at the University of British Columbia have found that cyberbullying does not always have these properties. For example, online it does not matter how big you are. Also, posts on the Internet can be misinterpreted much more easily than being shoved into a fence. According to the thousands of youth surveyed, 95% of what is posted online is just meant to be a joke, with only 5% meant to be mean. This indicates the youth are underestimating just how harmful cyberbullying can be.

Differences like these make it difficult to address the problem, because the traditional methods used for traditional bullying may not apply. To further confuse the issues, cyberbullying is more fluid than traditional bullying, with someone being in all three roles of bully, victim, and witness, instead of just one or the other. For now the best thing the researchers can recommend is that children and parents have an open and honest relationship, so they can deal with the problem of cyberbullying together.

Google Wants You to 'Start Something' for the Internet

On January 18 of this year, parts of the Internet went dark or otherwise demonstrated in protest to the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act, better known as SOPA and PIPA respectively. Google, for example, had its logo blacked out on its search page and also setup a petition that got 4.5 million signatures. Fortunately the bills were both stopped and on that day several US politicians pulled their support from the bills. Recognizing the victory as just one in a larger war, Google is now asking people to Start Something, to protect against bad legislation and policies in the future.

The Start Something campaign at Google’s Take Action website is currently asking people to explain what the Internet has empowered them to do. The ultimate goal is to be proactive in what happens to the Internet, by sharing with others how important the Internet is and supporting or even suggesting policies to protect and improve the Internet.

"You proved we can stop something, but now it’s time for us to start something."

Google Maps Goes 8-bit

If you happen to take a look at Google Maps today, and presumably tomorrow, you will be greeted by 8-bit graphics that look like they belong on the NES. There is even an instructional video describing how to get Google Maps on an actual NES. Google Maps has found its way onto several types of systems, and Google decided that it wanted to get into the ancient console market as well. The full map of the Earth is very well done, and my hometown is just as sparse in 8-bit as 3D.