iPhone users aren’t the only ones to get cool apps
September 10th, 2009 | 
Author: The long awaited flood of Google Android devices is about to hit the market, which should help bring more cool applications to new Android phones.
Motorola will be the next big manufacturer to announce its Android phone. The company plans to formally unveil it at an event on Thursday in San Francisco. Motorola has already been reaching out to developers to get them on board to create new applications that it hopes will drive demand for the new phones.
Mobile applications for smartphones are hot. The fact that Apple’s App Store has had more than one billion downloads after only being around for a year means that smartphone users are hungry for applications that make their phones more useful and fun. But developers, whether they are large or small, have limited resources and time, and they must choose which platforms to develop applications for first.
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http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10348863-266.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Recurring problems with Google Checkout
An important feature in Google Checkout has now been unavailable for almost a month, and some merchants are getting fed up with Google’s automated approach to their concerns.
Google’s ability to handle recurring payments, such as monthly subscriptions to a service that are automatically billed once a month, has been impaired since around the middle of August with little notice by the outside world. A customer first reported the issue in a Google Checkout forum in August, and others, such as Katie Braband, sales director at storage company Datto, are still unable to rely on Google to process anything other than one-time payments.
Braband went into Datto’s offices on September 2 to a nightmare for any small business owner: the monthly revenue from subscriptions to Datto’s off-site data backup services did not arrive as scheduled in its Google Checkout merchant account. Making matters worse, there was no way to contact a live human being at Google directly; Datto was directed to an online forum and support page where they received this response: “Our engineering team is working to resolve this as quickly as possible, though I’m not able to provide a specific timeline at the moment.”
Full story :
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10348805-265.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in Google, Google Checkout | 
Tags: automation, Google, Google Checkout, recurring payments | 
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Google Voice and Gmail are sort of merging
Two new little Google Voice features just made their way into Gmail. A new option lets text messages sent to Google Voice show up as e-mail messages in Gmail. You can reply to messages from Gmail, too, which makes it a nice platform for carrying on a text message conversation.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-10349110-250.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in Communication, e-mail, Google |
Tags: e-mail, Gmail, Google Voice, text messages |
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Finding your friends on YouTube:
YouTube has always been a place for you to share and enjoy videos with family and friends. Soon, we’ll be making it even easier for you to find people you know on the site. We’ll start by launching a “You may know these people” suggestions box on the homepage over the next few weeks that shows you the YouTube channels of people who might be your acquaintances, and lets you easily connect and subscribe to them.
How will we make the suggestions? If you’ve logged in to YouTube and sent a video to a friend’s email address, or if you have your YouTube account linked to a Gmail account, we will use this information to help identify your friends who already have YouTube channels. You’ll only see channels whose owners have allowed themselves to be found by others who have their email address.
Want to see if you’ve previously allowed your channel to be found by others who have your email address, or want to change your settings? Just log in and visit the “Privacy” section of My Account. Look for the checkbox at the top that says “Let others find my channel on YouTube if they have my email address.”
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/coming-soon-finding-your-friends-on.html
Posted in Entertainment, Internet, YouTube |
Tags: e-mail, friends, privacy, social networking, YouTube |
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Microsoft issues critical Windows patches
Microsoft on Tuesday issued five critical Windows-related updates as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday release.
The five bulletins address eight vulnerabilities. According to Symantec Security Response research manager Ben Greenbaum, the two vulnerabilities most likely to be used by attackers involve the way Windows handles ASF and MP3 media files. “We’ve seen similar exploits in the past and all a user would have to do is visit a compromised Web site hosting one of these malicious files, which could be an MP3, WMA or WMV file, and they could become infected.”
In addition, Microsoft said it is re-releasing a bulletin from last month to address an additional control found to be vulnerable to an issue with the Microsoft Active Template Library.
Greenbaum noted that Microsoft has yet to issue a patch for a zero-day flaw in Internet Information Services that was made public last week. “Until a patch for this is issued, as a temporary workaround we suggest IT administrators using IIS 5.0 and 6.0 turn off anonymous write access immediately,” Greenbaum said. “We also recommend using a firewall and restricting access to creating directories. Those using IIS 7.0 with FTP Service version 6.0 installed should upgrade to FTP Service version 7.5.”
There are already some attacks being seen based on that flaw.
“While the company will not release an update this month, it will do so once it has reached an appropriate level of quality for broad distribution,” Microsoft said.
Meanwhile, Microsoft said Tuesday that it is investigating another zero-day issue, this one a reported flaw in Windows Vista and Windows 7.
As for the patches Microsoft did release on Tuesday, Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek noted that some of the bulletins are interesting in that they either affect only newer operating systems or are more critical on later versions–the reverse of what is normally the case. Overall, he said, five Windows patches should keep IT workers busy.
“Due to the criticality of the patches and wide coverage of the operating system, this will be a busy day for IT administrators,” Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek said in an e-mail.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10346665-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in Microsoft, Vista, Windows, Windows 7 |
Tags: critical updates, Microsoft, Monthly Patch Tuesday |
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