Google posted today that it added a little flair to the popular Google Docs application – by allowing you to translate your text into 42 different languages.

The translation process is overwhelmingly easy, after you are finished typing up a document, highlight the area you need translated. Next go to the “Tools” menu select the “Translate document” submenu and select your the new language. Google docs will then open a new document with the translated text and give you the option to save a copy or overwrite the original file.

While this new feature will certainly help a lot of people with friends and family in different parts of the world, it should be noted that it is not a perfect translation. Google also stated that they will be “improving translation quality over time”.

Victoria Richardson 42 of Hove, experienced a robbery like no other, last week according to the Telegraph. The burglar not only stole her iPhone, laptop, Nintendo DS and handbag, but also decided to break into Richardson’s Facebook account- to add insult to injury.

The burglar left several posts taunting Richardson exclaiming that they felt good listening to music on their new iPhone.

One post read “on my new laptop” while another stated “I have the laptop , phones ok but a bit scratched itll do, tv was rubbish so I left it , ds was a bonus, now to the porn shop, thankyou toshiba is my favourite make”.

Richardson went on to tell the reporter that she felt deeply violated, and reading the messages online only made her feel like they were rubbing the whole thing in her face.

Police reported that the case is under investigation and that they take all cases seriously.

Thursday sparked a world wide web storm as attackers focused their efforts on several prominent websites. Twitter apparently suffered the most, during the attack. ..

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As previously blogged about, Twitter is the focus point of an patent infringement suit, where the plaintiff insists Twitter has imposed on its IRIS system…

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News Corporation Posts a Loss on MySpace Charge

News Corporation has reported that only one of the several media outlets they own is doing well. And it is not MySpace or other web related services but rather cable networks…

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Back in 2006 Lori Drew, who was dubbed the MySpace Mom for creating a false entity on the net which attributed to 13 year old girls suicide. Is now back on a computer…

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Is Facebook Ruining Relationships?

A recent study by CyberPsychology & Behavior Suggests that the more time college students in relationships spent on Facebook, the more jealous they become of there partners…

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One of the most highly used and most popular iPhone apps “Facebook”, plans to have a new version up and running soon. The app will feature support for video, news feeds ability for users to “like” content and more…

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What’s on the Pentagon’s mind? Facebook

The Pentagon is in the process of studying social network sites in order to design appropriate policy around the web phenomena…

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The engineers at Google plan on doing routine maintenance on Saturday, August 8. So if you have an AdSense account- don’t be alarmed if you can not access your user interface. Google ensures us that all people running AdSense ads will still get credit for ad clicks and impressions will be recorded.

The planed maintenace schedule is as follows:

United States – 10am to 2pm PDT

London – 6pm Saturday

Athens – 8pm Saturday

Mumbai – 10:30pm Saturday

Kuala Lumpur – 1am Sunday

Melbourne – 3am Sunday

To find out more about scheduled maintenance go here…

Some of you may have attempted to login to your Twitter account earlier this morning, but instead of navigating to the page you requested you were faced with a network error message. According to a recent blog post, the Twitter Guru’s worked on getting the 30 million plus user site, back online from an earlier denial of service attack (DoS or DDos). While the site appears to be okay now, further investigations efforts are being made by the folks at Twitter.

Denial of Service attacks – in there most basic sense- work by sending a large amount of requests to a website via computers that are infected by a trojan or other means. These compromised computers, or zombies, then work together to create a botnet. The botnet then enables attackers to utilize an immense amount of processing power to complete their deeds. Many times the shear size of these botnets, enables attackers to quickly bring a website to it’s knees.

While it has not been stated where the attack came from, similar attacks were made earlier this year on US government and South Korea sites.

Well it’s official the microblogging master of the internet Twitter, is facing patent infringement charges from a Sugar land, Texas Company that specializes in mass notifications systems.

The Texas Based Company, TechRadium , claims to have several patents protecting the concept of mass notification.
Most notably is the Patent for IRIS™ (Immediate Response Information System) that is described on their website as

IRIS™ was developed as an intuitive, ease-to-use system and comes equipped with a comprehensive feature set. The mass communication system is a highly advanced, state-of-the-art program which is consistently updated and upgraded to best accommodate our clients’ needs.

Some of the main features include a web based application, rapid message delivery, conference calling and the ability to send text messages.

The federal suit was filed on Tuesday in Houston, Texas and the Plantiff seeks

… the fullest extent permitted by law, Plaintiff seeks recovery of damages for lost profits, reasonable royalties, unjust enrichment, and benefits received by the Defendant as a result of use the misappropriated technology, and any other damages to which it may be entitled in law or in equity.

(source bizjournals)

The webs largest Online Payment Service, Paypal went down yesterday from the hours of 1:30 EDT to 6:30 EDT missing approximately $36,000,000 in transactions from around the globe. According to the Wall Street Journal, PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar said the cause was from an “internal network hardware issue” but was not sure how to deal with merchants that currently rely on the system.

While the issue appears to be resolved, there was no mention if PayPal plans to update their contingency plan to reduce another lengthy outage in the future.

(source Wall Street Journal)

Twitter the popular online microblogging site has begun to block links that contain references to malicious sites. F-secure Security Labs first reported this activity on their blog sometime after suggesting to Twitter that filtering traffic will help to reduce the spread of malware.

Since links are the majority capital on Twitter some misaligned users, will send out a tweet(s) that contains a URL reference to a malicious site. This message can then be quickly spread to other users unsuspectedly through retweets and false accounts.

When the unsuspecting user clicks on one of these malicious links they are taken to a site that attempts to elicit the user to purchase false virus protection software, place a trojan on the users computer, place a virus on the users computer, and much more.

Twitter has not publicly announced these efforts, and it is my guess that they are still in the alpha phases of the rolling this filter completely out. The is largely due to the fact that, at the time of this post, Twitter currently does not filter out shortened links.

Shorten links are usually created from a third party service such as is.gd or TinyURL. Shortened URLs basically mask larger link with a new shorter version. Theses url shorting services allow Twitter users to get more bang for their buck from twitter. Which as most of you know only allows 140 charaters per micro post.

While Twitter’s plans are not completely known at this time, it is good to know that Twitter is making some effort to getting rid of these negative types of URLs.

Well its official now, Apple has released an update to patch the iPhone SMS vulnerability that was demonstrated at the Black Hat Security conference in Los Vegas on July 30, 2009. This update was pretty fast considering the security expert Charlie Miller just demonstrated the flaw yesterday. Although I still have to wonder if Apple had planned to release this update a while ago – considering Miller brought the security flaw to Apple’s attention approximately 6 weeks ago.

According to sources Apple’s Rep Tom Neumayr released this statement.

We appreciate the information provided to us about SMS vulnerabilities which affect several mobile phone platforms. This morning, less than 24 hours after a demonstration of this exploit, we’ve issued a free software update that eliminates the vulnerability from the iPhone. Contrary to what’s been reported, no one has been able to take control of the iPhone to gain access to personal information using this exploit.

The iPhone OS 3.0.1 update is, of course, free and can be downloaded by connecting your iPhone to your computer and firing up the iTunes application. Depending on your settings you may have to click the update button on your iPhone connectivity screen to begin the download. At just over 230 MB be prepared to spent quite a few minutes completing this process.

If you have Twitter and Facebook accounts some of you may have noticed something a little strange going on with your Facebook page yesterday. The problem? Facebook had some technical difficulties that did allow, in what they call a “handful” of apps, to post your twitter stream onto your Facebook page.

Some of the problem apps included Friendfeed and Twitter.

In response to the mayhem, Facebook has confirmed the issue and released the following statement.

Earlier this evening, a small Facebook bug allowed a handful of apps to publish to the stream on behalf of users who had previously authorized the app. The situation has now been resolved, and all application settings will remain intact for users.

As of today the issue has been resolved and does not seem to effect your profile posts on Facebook.

(Source TechCrunch)

A new report has surfaced about the dangers of driving and texting from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. While most of us feel that this is a no-brainer – VTTI decided to take it a step further and get some numbers for us to ponder.

Their rational:

Given recent catastrophic crash events and disturbing trends, there is an alarming amount of misinformation and confusion regarding cell phone and texting use while behind the wheel of a vehicle,” said Dr. Tom Dingus, director of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, in a statement. “The finding from our research at VTTI can help begin to clear up these misconceptions, as it is based on real-world driving data.

VTTI found that users driving heavy vehicles and trucks were at a 23.2 times higher risk of crashing or near crashing than those drivers paying full attention to the road.

Heavy Vehicle/ truck drivers were also at a 5.9 times higher risk of crashing while dialing a cell phone – but only 1 times higher when talking or listening on a cell phone.

Drivers in light vehicles or cars were at a 2.8 times higher risk of crashing while dialing a cell phone but only 1.4 times as high while reaching for an object that took there eyes off the road.

VTTI went on to recommend that:

• Texting should be banned for all drivers in while in or attempting to move a vehicle.
• That anything that takes the eyes away from the visual context of driving should be avoided
• That headsets are not really safer than “hand-held” devices, because they both require the operator to complete visual tasks such as dialing and answering. That only “true hands-free” phone systems pose a lesser risk – where the user can dial and answer the phone via voice commands.
• That all texting and cell phone usage should be completely banned for newly licensed teens.

Again while most of us guessed that cell phone usage and texting can lead to serious and even fatal consequences. Many times a report of this nature has to come to light in order for some sort of action to be taken by the powers that be.

My suggestion is simple, if you don’t have a voice activated cell phone system in your vehicle – stay off the phone! If it is an emergency and you absolutely have to use the phone – pull your vehicle over to a safe area.