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YouTube Celebrates Growth Since Being Acquired by Google

youtube1billionviews.pngToday marks three years since Google acquired YouTube, which has changed its logo today to reflect its growth since that time. When it was acquired, YouTube was getting 100 million views per day, according to CNET, but it has seen an impressive growth in traffic in the past three years, now getting 1 billion views per day.

In his post, YouTube CEO Chad Hurley affirmed YouTube’s commitments:

  • “Speed matters: Videos should load and play back quickly.
  • Clip culture is here to stay: Short clips are voraciously consumed and perfect for watching a wide variety of content.
  • Open platforms open up possibility: Content creation isn’t our business; it’s yours. We wanted to create a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an Internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases make a living from doing so.”

Hurley also stated that YouTube will continue to improve its video quality as bandwidth becomes cheaper and more available and will bring more shows and films to the site.

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By Antoniu – October 9, 2009

Twitter Announces Crowdsourced Translations

At the moment, Twitter is only available in English and Japanese, but it has announced plans to translate its website into additional languages. It will soon release translations in French, Italian, German and Spanish and will then add other languages as well. These translations will also be included in the Twitter API, allowing developers to utilize them in their third-party clients.

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Like Facebook, Twitter will be crowdsourcing its translation efforts, allowing volunteers to make translation suggestions and vote up the translations they believe are most accurate. This speeds up the translation process and helps to ensure that the most accurate translations for words and phrases are used. Twitter is currently testing out the translation system with a small group of people, but will soon allow more people to volunteer.

Volunteers are given a badge on their Twitter page, which both distinguishes them as translators and shows their level, which increases up to level 10 as they complete more translations.

Twitter describes the translation process on their translation page thus:

“Twitterers enabled with our translation tools will see a special set of options on their screen. By clicking the “Translate this page” option on any Twitter.com page, the Translate Box will appear on the screen, pointing to a certain word or phrase. You can type in your own translation or vote on another translation from within the box. The box then jumps to the next phrase until you’ve translated everything on the page. After that, you move to another page. We have another view which allows you to translate everything on the site in a single list. In either mode. you can translate as much or as little as you’d like, and can stop when you’d like without losing your translations. Once we’ve collected a good number of translations for every phrase across the site, we will review them and pick the most accurate one. It’s a fun and easy way for you to help make Twitter accessible to more people around the world.”

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By Antoniu – October 8, 2009

iPhone OS 3.1.2 Released

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Apple has released iPhone OS version 3.1.2, which fixes some bugs that have come up since the last update. It:

  • “Resolves sporadic issue that may cause iPhone to notwake from sleep
  • Resolves intermittent issue that may interrupt cellular network services until restart
  • Fixes bug that could cause occasional crash during video streaming”.

The update is currently available for all versions of the iPhone and an update is also available for the iPod touch. If you are not automatically prompted to install the update in iTunes, manually check for updates.

After installing the update, AT&T customers in the United States are also prompted to install an update to their carrier settings.

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By Antoniu – October 8, 2009

AT&T Enables VoIP over 3G for the iPhone

AT&T has announced that its network is now ready to support voice over IP (VoIP) apps on the iPhone over its 3G network. Previously, VoIP apps were only useable on Wi-Fi networks, but AT&T has now given the green light to Apple to approve VoIP apps that work over its cellular network as well.

This means that apps such as Skype, which has been limited only to chat when connected to AT&T’s network, will now have full voice functionality when connected to the cellular network.

Some speculated that this means AT&T and Apple are preparing to approve Google Voice apps, but this announcement is not likely to have any affect on the status of Google Voice on the iPhone because GV is not a VoIP app.

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By Antoniu – October 7, 2009

Over 30,000 E-mail Addresses and Passwords Stolen

More than 30,000 e-mail accounts and passwords have been stolen as part of a large-scale phishing scam or scams. Affected accounts include accounts from Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Comcast and Earthlink, according to BBC News.

Yesterday, a list of 10,000 Hotmail accounts was found online and today, another list of 20,000 e-mail addresses was found. Google has also said that it has found an additional list, so the number of compromised accounts may be even higher. It is not known whether these lists are the product of one large scam or several smaller scams.

The scam or scams used phishing sites that prompt a person to enter his e-mail account information to get full access to the website. These sites often mimic the look an e-mail provider’s webpage, making it important for people to double check that they are at the correct, encrypted webpage and to check the authenticity of the SSL certificate of the page. When users input their information on these sites, instead of being logged into their e-mail accounts, the information goes to the operators of the fake website. These addresses are then compiled into lists and sold on the black market.

Google has said that only 500 of the affected accounts were Gmail accounts and it has forced password resets on those accounts.

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By Antoniu – October 6, 2009

Verizon to Carry Android Phones

androidrl.jpgVerizon Wireless and Google have announced that Verizon will soon be selling phones that run Google’s Android operating system. The phones will come pre-loaded with software from both Google and Verizon, as well as third-party developers.

Verizon has announced that it will be selling its first Android-based phones in a few weeks. It also announced that it will be the carrier for a new phone from Motorola.

With T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon now all carrying Android-based phones, it leaves AT&T as the last of the four major U.S. mobile carriers not to carry the phones.

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By Antoniu – October 6, 2009

Vonage iPhone and BlackBerry Apps Now Available

vonageiphoneapp.pngVonage’s iPhone and BlackBerry apps are now available. The app allows you to make international calls from your carrier-issued phone number at Vonage’s cheaper rates over. When connected to your carrier’s cellular network, the app uses your minutes when talking, but the iPhone app can also utilize a Wi-Fi connection if one is available, allowing you to save your minutes, a feature which the BlackBerry version is missing, according to Engadget.

There are two versions of the app on the App Store, Vonage Mobile for iPhone and Vonage Mobile for iPod touch. The difference between the two versions is that the iPhone version supports calls over AT&T’s cellular network, while the iPod touch is limited to Wi-Fi. The app currently only supports pay-as-you-go and does not allow customers to use their existing Vonage plan.

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By Antoniu – October 5, 2009

Google Removes The Pirate Bay Homepage From its Index Then Puts it Back

google-tpb-removed.jpgIn response to a complaint received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Google removed The Pirate Bay’s homepage from its index, but has since put it back. The DMCA complaint came from Destined Enterprises and targeted links to specific torrents on The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites (full text of the complaint). Google misinterpreted the complaint and removed The Pirate Bay’s homepage from its index along with the links to the offending torrents.

The page has since been added back to Google’s index. According to TorrentFreak, Google claims that Destined Enterprises’s complaint was at fault because it listed thepiratebay.org amongst the offending links, a claim that Destined Enterprises denies.

[Image from TorrentFreak – CC BY-SA 2.0]

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By Antoniu – October 5, 2009

Flash 10.1 To Support Several Mobile Phones, But Not the iPhone

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 will be available for Windows Mobile, webOS (Palm Pre), Android, Symbian S60 and the Blackberry OS in addition to Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Flash Player 10.1 is a result of Adobe’s Open Screen Project, which includes 50 companies and seeks to create a consistent runtime environment for mobile phones and computers, and will allow developers to reuse code across various platforms. It will include mobile-specific features, including support for multi-touch, accelerometer and screen orientation. It will also make use of a computer’s GPU to save battery life and use less resources.

Missing from this extensive list of supported platforms is the iPhone. Adobe originally announced that it was planning to implement Flash support for the iPhone when Apple released a SDK for the iPhone OS, but retracted its commitment when it realized that the SDK’s restrictions meant that it could not do this without Apple’s cooperation. Apple has thus far refused to be cooperative, with Steve Jobs stating that Flash is “too slow to be useful” and that Flash Lite, the version of Flash that was targeted at mobile platforms before Flash Player 10.1, is “not capable of being used with the Web”, according to CNET.

A public developer beta for Windows Mobile, webOS, Windows, Mac OS X and Linux is slated for later this year, while Android and Symbian OS users will have to wait until early 2010. A beta date for Blackberry OS has not been announced.

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By Antoniu – October 5, 2009

Palm Pre Update Enables iTunes Syncing

palmpre.jpgThe latest update for the Palm Pre enables syncing with iTunes after it was previously broken by the iTunes 9 update. Previously, it was predicted that this would be included in webOS 1.2 and was the reason that Palm decided to delay the update, but it was not. Not only does webOS 1.2.1, the operating system that the Pre runs on, re-enable syncing music libraries with iTunes, it also adds support for syncing photo albums from iTunes, something that was not possible before.

By doing this, Palm has ignored the USB Implementers Forum, which stated that Apple’s actions were not a breach of policy and instead inquired as to the possibility that Palm was instead breaking a policy by issuing more than one Vendor ID for the Pre.

PreCentral reports that Palm has once again made the Pre look even more like an iPod to re-enable syncing with iTunes. It explains that:

“Palm’s webOS 1.0 hack had the Pre mimic an iPod Nano. webOS 1.1 re-enabled it by setting its USB Vendor ID to Apple’s. webOS 1.2.1 re-enables it by settings its Manufacturer to Apple and also perhaps by changing the USB Product ID to the iPod Video’s”

This likely to become an ongoing fight between Apple and Palm, with Apple releasing patches that break iTunes syncing for the Pre and then Palm releasing webOS updates to circumvent those patches.

[Image from flickr.com/photos/28910861@N03]

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By Antoniu – October 4, 2009