Well… We are now just a few days from LinuxCon. For the unapprised, The Linux Foundation will be hosting this high-tech event from 21 to 23 of September in Portland.

The aim of this conference is to create awareness about open-source technologies. It would also serve as a platform for open-source people to meet and interconnect with each other.

As far now, the confirmed keynote speakers include Linux Torvalds (from the Linux Foundation), Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Ubuntu), Joe Brockmeler (from openSUSE), Bdale Garbee (from Hewlett Packard), Imad Sousou (from Intel) and Bob Sutor (from IBM). Apart from keynote speeches, 75 conference sessions and various roundtable sessions are scheduled as well.

Like myself, don’t get disappointed if you cannot manage to make it to Portland. Linux foundation will be providing free live video streaming sessions for the keynote speeches.

Yesterday, Twitter released Twitter 101 for Business, a guide for getting started and establishing your business using Twitter. It covers all basics of Twitter, how to get started, terms, keywords, and includes case studies. Here is what Twitter says about their business guide:

Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with others. Now, people are turning to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to businesses, too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter.

This business guide would be a really important move as a big number of Twitter starters are quitting to use Twitter.

Kazaa is back in music industry with a new business plan. Kazaa, the most popular file-sharing service was shutdown in 2006 as part of agreement with the music industry. Now they are launching a web-based legal music download service with the support of all four major labels.

Kazaa’s sudden rise has been featured on CNET, Gizmodo, Billboard.com and BBC News, to name just a few. This new Kazaa service appears to be launched with the help of music industry because Kazaa’s download offering is going to feature almost 1 million tracks from all the major genres. It uses Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM and offers unlimited download for around $20 per month.

The company issued a press release 2 weeks ago that was as strange as they come: The Kazaa.com domain name was misspelled; a well-known hacker who committed suicide last year endorsed the service. And it featured a number of links labeled “free music” that was pointing to Kazaa.com.

This is just the beginning; Kazaa will have to do a lot to make a solid impact!

Facebook continues to battle against cyber criminals, as they now launch “new verification procedures” to get rid of spammers. Yesterday on their blog, Facebook announced the new tool to Secure Compromised Accounts. Now, if you have ever had your Faceboook account taken over by someone to spam your friends, or if you have been the exclusive spam victim yourself, you should be happy to hear that Facebook is doing something about it.

Facebook also describes how they will handle such accounts. Each time an account is suspected to send spam, the user will get an email from Facebook which will take them to a new verification page to confirm ownership of their account by asking them to pick a new secure password.

This new feature will not only help users but also Facebook in enhancing their web site security. Security is being the next big issue for all sites right now. After hacking of Twitter, ImageShack and various such sites, this issue has to be taken seriously.

Imageshack has been hacked by a movement called “anti-sec“. Imageshack is one the largest free image hosting portals. Millions of albums and pictures are currently residing on their server. Most of the images appearing on imageshack are replaced by anti-sec’s following message:

Still ImageShack server is hacked by “anti-sec” movement, we will keep you updated by any updates we get.

Finally Google did it!!! According to Google’s official blog today, there new operating system “Google Chrome OS” will be released in the 2nd half of 2010. Of course as expected, this operating system will be Open source and available later this year.

Earlier this year Microsoft were bringing “Bing” live and were doing good so far. But now Google has really entered into the software giant’s house. This operating system would be as light as Google Chrome is. This OS is said to be for those who live their lives on web.

So far Google didn’t disclose a lot about their new big thing but we will be bringing you as much as info we can.

An Italian cartoonist, Federico Fieni has portrayed really a cool cartoon showing battle between Google and Microsoft, have a look at this:

]]> http://spyblogger.com/2009/07/google-chromse-os/feed/ 5 http://spyblogger.com/2009/07/google-wave/ http://spyblogger.com/2009/07/google-wave/#comments Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:18:27 +0000 SpyBlogger http://spyblogger.com/?p=546

Mashable’s Ben Parr has an interesting writeup on Google Wave, a new application unvieled at the second day of Google I/O conference and scheduled for release “later this year.”

Since its launch Google wave has become the developer’s dream.  The concept behind Google Wave is to “merge” all communications on the web at a single place. It can be you chatting your friends, writing emails, IM and various other software. The special ability to display the hybrid sequence of communication makes it more interesting. Google wave shows these conversations live in your browsers: you will see your friends type character-by-character. You can even disable the option to let others know you are typing something and suprise them with your instant messages

Google wave is created by two of the guys who were also behind Google Maps, with a small team in Sydney.

Features don’t stop here, Google wave also lets users drag attachments from your desktop into Google Wave. It loads that file and sends it immendiately to anyone in the conversation or even in emails. It also lets you embeds any attachments and conversations into any blog just by drag n drop. So, its multi-tasking features are HIGH!

Google Wave will be launched later this year and right now its only available to selected group of developers, who will be able to create their own wave servers. Its also an open-source project with a lot of API integrations, so developers can make a lot of user-driven innovations and extensions for the platform.

Mozilla Firefox has already crossed 6 million downloads. How do we know this? Because Mozilla has launched a real-time tracker, where live downloads are being shown.

Additionally, you can also see how many downloads there have been by any country, currently United States, Japan and Germany lead in this download race.

As this is a big start again, it seems unlikely that the launch will match that of Firefox 3.0 which had 8 million downloads in its first 24 hours. These 8 million downloads also caused a couple of restarts to Mozilla Firefox downloads server. That’s not surprising given all of the hype for 3.0, but still the current marks shows the huge commitment Firefox fanatics still have for the browser.

More to Follow: Top Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Features

As we reported earlier, Facebook is about to launch some new privacy features.  These features are being considered very good for the users and will further help enhance new upcoming search feature on Facebook.

The Company today ran through the changes with members of the press on WebEx this afternoon, but now slides from that presentations have been made publically available to all.  These slides elaborate quite well the upcoming changes with the screen shots.

The interesting part these slides include is the admin view i.e. How Facebook Views them

Related Posts: New Facebook Status Publisher

Another scam to attempt to steal our social networking passwords is underway this week. This time the target is Twitter, and this scam invovles fake Twitter blogs.

Tweets saying “omg!! is it true what they wrote about you in their twit blog?” are going out from effected user’s profiles. These scams are linking to sbudomain of the site twitterblogs.com in tweets. When clicked, the linked site looks exactly like Twitter’s homepage. In case, you enter your user id and password it tweets out the message mentioned above, and scam spreads.

On Saturday, Britney Spears tweeter profile also got hacked and it posted a tweet saying “Britney has passed today. It is a sad day for everyone. So the last week was quite fun.

However, it appears like tweets for Twittersblogs have stopped but be aware for any similar scams.