Posts tagged after
So Yeon Ryu leads after 2nd round – ESPN
Feb 10th
 SuperSport.com |
So Yeon Ryu leads after 2nd round
ESPN AP MELBOURNE, Australia — US Women's Open champion So Yeon Ryu shot a 4-under 69 on Friday to take a one-stroke lead over fellow South Korean player Hee Kyung Seo after the second round of the LPGA Tour's season-opening Women's Australian Open. Ryu, Seo take charge at Australian Open Ryu leads Women's Australian Open Korean Ryu leads Women's Aust Open golf |
View full post on SEO – Google News
People Are Actually Paying For Spotify After All
Jan 27th
When Spotify first launched in the U.S. over the summer, few doubted that the service would be popular among music fans. The real question has always been whether the company’s freemium business model would manage to convert enough users to paying subscribers. It’s still relatively early, but so far things look promising.
More than 3 million people are now paying to use Spotify, according to the Financial Times. That’s a conversion rate of more than 20%, a figure that has reportedly increased by 5% since the service hit 1 million users last year. In other words, not only is Spotify itself growing, but the rate at which people sign up for a premium or unlimited account is also increasing.
Sponsor
This overall growth has been fueled in no small part by the company’s partnership with Facebook, which enables the kind of super-tight, frictionless integration that the social networking giant has been pushing since f8 last March. The flood of “so-and-so listened to such-and-such” news ticker updates may be too much for some people, but the partnership has succeeded in putting Spotify’s brand and functionality in front of millions of potential new users.
It also doesn’t hurt that the six-month window of unlimited, free streaming music for new users has begun coming to a close for the service’s earliest U.S. adopters. As that happens, those who are truly hooked on the service are forced to either put up with listening caps or cough up $5 per month to remove them. The company hasn’t said what percentage of those paid users have opted for the pricier “Premium” account, which allows for mobile streaming in addition to stripping out ads and listening caps.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t still major, outstanding questions about Spotify and the viability of the all-you-can-stream model it shares with the likes of Rdio and MOG. The music labels are evidently happy enough with the arrangement to stay on board for now, but the artists are a different story.
The streaming services pay out notoriously low royalty fees to artists, some of which have begun to question the value in being on the service. Sure, it’s a great way to promote one’s music, but it may not be economically advantageous for artists, especially if it ends up hurting record sales.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
After SOPA’s Death, Anti-Piracy Advocates Scramble for a Way Forward
Jan 23rd
The effective success of grass-roots efforts to stall anti-piracy legislation in the U.S. Congress now has people whose lives and careers are impacted by piracy worried about their futures. With Congress unable to launch a successful dialog about proper methods to combat piracy; the entertainment industry having tried out for, and landed, the role of the villain; and with “Anonymous” launching somewhat successful attacks against U.S., Polish, and other governments’ Web sites in defense of the “right to piracy,” content creators appear worried that any effort to resume a positive dialog might make them targets of public criticism.
At the moment, it’s hard to have been anti-SOPA and yet appear proactive against piracy.
Sponsor
“Phantom issues”
Making some of the first public statements in favor of restarting a pro-active dialog are individuals speaking out on behalf of artists and musicians, including one group whose members were already instrumental in the anti-SOPA protests last Wednesday.
The American Association of Independent Music (A2IM) is continuing to advance this statement, released last week, concerning Web sites that led Wednesday’s protest: “They are taking a unilateral action to make their content unavailable. However, under current law, A2IM members whose copyrights are infringed upon cannot take similar action. Our independent labels and their artists have no practical way of taking down illegal links to their music from rogue foreign Web sites accessed via U.S. search engines.
“The media has portrayed the issue as that of two giant industries (movies/music and technology) in conflict, as though this was a battle solely between very rich businesses,” the A2IM statement goes on. “In fact, our members are small- and medium-sized independent businesses that invest in the creation of music and whose very existence is being threatened by the availability of illegal content on line. We look forward to solution-oriented discussions among all parties.”
The public stance of the Association did not stop individual A2IM members such as indie group Wye Oak from signing a letter of opposition to SOPA/PIPA last week.
A2IM’s statement echoed the sentiments of Brian Philips, CEO of Viacom-owned cable music channel CMT. Over the weekend, Philips’ pro-SOPA/PIPA sentiments appeared in The Tennessean – too late, of course, to keep PIPA from being indefinitely tabled.
“Opponents of this legislation… are raising phantom issues, through vague threats of censorship and other unspecified dangers,” Philips wrote. “Unfortunately, their arguments are based more in fear than in truth. No domestic Web sites would be shut down by this legislation. Plain and simple: The target is overseas piracy Web sites. Creative endeavors are not alone as targets of piracy.”
A fate worse than SOPA
An examination of the Justice Dept.’s indictment of the proprietors of cyberlocker site Megaupload led the CTO of Sydney, Australia-based Web advertising firm Pinion to wonder whether squashing the SOPA bill could spark the creation of a worse alternative that could do even more damage than had been feared. David Banham was inspired by having used Megaupload to distribute files to clients, only to find the site taken down last week.
It is easy to generalize, in the vein of SOPA, that all these smart people working in tech should just make sure that no-one uploads copyrighted material to their services. It’s easy right? If someone uploads a Hollywood movie just delete it! In reality, though, every time any file was uploaded, an extensive search would need to be conducted to determine whether, where, how, and by whom it was copyrighted. The rights holder would then need to be contacted to determine whether or not the use was permitted. In the case of transformative or derivative works, the decision would have to be made (and the associated risk assumed!) by the service.
That burden can never be placed on those shoulders. It would be crippling for Google. It would be completely impossible for any startup out there and would stifle a massive amount of innovation.
SOPA merely (merely!) required that every link be checked against a blacklist provided by the US Government. If the allegations in this indictment are allowed to stand, industry will not only have to enforce that blacklist, but create and curate it.
“Knowledge shall be increased”
Last Friday, the CEO of cable arts channel Ovation, Charles Segars, issued an outright pro-SOPA statement that echoed the expressed sentiment of Vice President Biden back before the entire SOPA debate began. “They’re calling the SOPA bill ‘censorship’ and an infringement of our First Amendment rights. And the entertainment industry is painted as ‘greedy’ for supporting this legislation,” Segars wrote.
“But I wonder… What would happen if all the movie theaters, cable and broadcast channels, book stores and radio stations did the same thing – went completely dark, off the air, closed their doors? Would you miss Wikipedia more than, say, being able to watch ‘American Idol’ or go to AMC theaters and see the latest movie in 3D? Would it take a total shutdown to make the point that entertainment content is something of value and therefore needs protecting?”
Despite Segars’ and Ovation’s public stance, some of the artists participating in Ovation’s own forum ended up supporting the protests instead. “One thing I don’t want to see happen is the old farts in Congress deciding what sites and material are appropriate!” wrote Mark Sean Orr, in response to another member’s request for clarity as to where they should stand as artists. “The Internet is not a corporation or government agency and should never be. What it is, is a network of citizens world-wide sharing and connecting through this awesome new technology.”
That led another member, named Cheryl, to share her view that precisely because the Web is beyond the control of any one government, some government somewhere will see that as a challenge and try to control it anyway. “The Internet and the World Wide Web are not owned by anyone. How do you control something that is a cloud?” she wrote. “How do you tax and fee something if the players involved refuse to participate or if your own dependence can be hacked?”
Perhaps inspired, perhaps depressed, and perhaps both by the prospect of blacklists and whitelists appearing on the Internet in one form or another eventually, another Ovation member closed the thread by citing the Book of Daniel, Chapter 12: “And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book… But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Red Hat Goes After VMware Hard with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0
Jan 18th
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 has been in the works for some time. Today Red Hat took the wraps off the release. Red Hat boasts more than 1,000 new features with RHEV 3.0, including a new user portal for self-provisioning, local storage and converting the management application to a Java application that runs on JBoss. With RHEV 3.0, Red Hat is going straight after VMware for customers.
Sponsor
RHEV 3.0 has been in beta since last August, and an open beta since September of last year to anyone with a Red Hat Network account.
If you look at many of the major features in RHEV 3.0, you’ll see many come directly from improvements to the Linux kernel and KVM. RHEV 3.0 now has support for up to 160 logical CPUs and 2TB of RAM. The KVM networking stack has moved into the Linux kernel itself and out of userspace for better performance. RHEV 3.0 now supports memory overcommitment, which allows allocation of more RAM to VMs than is present to physical host.
Red Hat has also beefed up its scheduler, live migration, desktop management, storage management, reports and migration tools. But where Red Hat is really getting aggressive is pricing and messaging targeted at VMware’s vSphere Enterprise and VMware View.
RHEV Pricing
Red Hat offers pricing guides for its RHEV for Servers and RHEV for Desktops that compare the pricing between RHEV and VMwares products. According to Red Hat’s guides, its pricing scenario for 100 virtual guests, using six servers (each with two sockets and 400GB of RAM) will cost nearly $50,000 the first year for VMware vSphere Enterprise Edition. The same setup for RHEV 3.0 for Servers runs just less than $9,000.
The big difference in pricing, of course, is licensing. Red Hat doesn’t charge for licensing – it charges for annual subscriptions and support. The licensing cost for VMware vSphere is nearly $40,000. The annual support/subscription costs for Red Hat and VMware are fairly close: $8,988 for Red Hat, and $9,877 for VMware. Red Hat’s still cheaper than VMware on that, but not by much.
Another scenario with 11 servers for 250 guests is priced at $16,478 (Red Hat) versus $189,742 (VMware) for the first year. Red Hat continues to close the gap in features between RHEV and vSphere, but has a very wide gap in price. The question is, who’s buying? Is RHEV good enough to start displacing VMware vSphere and VMware View?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
AllTrails Partners With NatGeo Maps After Google’s “Fall From Grace”
Jan 18th
National Geographic Maps has partnered with AllTrails, an online network for outdoor enthusiasts, to launch a co-branded service at alltrails.com. The site aims to be a comprehensive destination for people planning hikes or other backcountry outings. Its 200,000 users can browse nearby or search for trails, post reviews and photos and share trails with friends. Users who have completed a trail are listed on its page.
Trail profiles give time and distance measurements, weather forecasts and routes overlaid on topographic maps. AllTrails initially used Google Maps data but found it to be too inaccurate for safe planning of wilderness trips. After Google began to charge for access to the Google Maps SDK, AllTrails began to explore other partnerships. Today’s announcement with National Geographic is the beginning of an integration that will move AllTrails away from Google.
Sponsor
After Google announced they would charge for developer access to Maps, AllTrails founder/CEO Russell Cook says that “a handful of projects were kicked off to improve the open source alternatives but there wasn’t nearly as much activity as I expected.”
After Google revealed the pricing in Q4 of 2011, Cook says “things kicked into high gear.” The pricing was “significantly higher than I think anyone anticipated,” Cook says. “Most publishers are lucky to consistently monetize their site traffic at $1 CPM, let alone be able to build profitable business models while paying Google $4 CPM for mapping.”
“Deep down I think the developer community knew that at some point the Google APIs they were using would stop being free,” Cook says, “but I don’t think they ever expected the price gouging. My personal opinion is that Google has every right to charge for the services they are providing but their recent actions have been very short sighted.”
Even before Google announced it would charge for access, AllTrails was reevaluating its mapping tools. “We found Google Maps to at times be wildly inaccurate,” Cook says, “which is something our audience can’t afford when out in the wilderness.” By licensing mapping content from National Geographic, AllTrails has begun to move away from Google.
National Geographic’s TOPO! allows AllTrails to overlay detailed topographic maps of terrain. Currently, AllTrails still uses Google Maps for its core services, but Cook looks forward to “some of the very exciting projects the Bing team will be releasing this year.”
AllTrails is available on the Web at alltrails.com. Its smartphone app is also available on the iTunes App Store and Android Market.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
After Being Banned, Grooveshark Returns to iOS and Android With HTML5 App
Jan 13th
Grooveshark may have been booted from both the iTunes App Store and Android Market, but that’s not stopping the controversial music streaming startup from forging ahead with its mobile strategy. Rather than going back and forth with Apple and Google, the company has taken matters into its own hands by launching a Web app that forgoes Flash in favor of HTML5.
The Grooveshark HTML5 app can stream music from any modern mobile browser, including Safari on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Until now, the service wouldn’t work on (non-jailbroken) iOS devices, since the desktop Web app for Grooveshark utilizes Flash for playback.
Sponsor
Like any good mobile Web app, Grooveshark’s has the feel of a native application, albeit a visually stripped-down one. Users can search for music, listen to pre-built stations or stream what’s trending under the “Popular” tab. It borrows a few UI conventions from native mobile apps, such as sliding down and releasing to load more content. On the iPad, the app’s interface scales up nicely and plays back without any major problems. You can even minimize Safari and let it stream in the background while you do other things.
There’s a Cross-Platform Compatible HTML5 Mobile Web App For That
Grooveshark isn’t the first company to use the power of HTML5 to circumvent proprietary app store restrictions. The Financial Times launched a Web app of its own last year to get around Apple’s steep subscription revenue share requirements. The browser-based version functioned as well as any basic native app and even led to an increase in mobile traffic for the Financial Times, thanks to its cross-platform compatibility.
Amazon has made HTML5 an increasingly central part of its mobile strategy as well, launching the Web-based Kindle Cloud Reader and more recently unveiling an iPad-optimized Kindle e-book store.
Grooveshark’s reasons for having to go around Apple and Google are a bit different than Amazon’s. The music startup isn’t so much concerned about subscription revenue share terms, but rather has been ejected from native app stores because of the legally-questionable nature of its functionality and business model. The company is currently being sued by every major music label, with EMI recently piling on despite being the only one with which Grooveshark has a formal deal in place. The company allegedly hasn’t been forthcoming with royalty payments to EMI, so the label has taken Grooveshark to court. Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner were already litigating against the company, accusing it of permitting widespread copyright infringement.
Grooveshark’s longterm viability in the face of these lawsuits may be unclear, but for now the company is pushing forward and making its service available to more smartphone and tablet users.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
2 Years After Censorship Battle, Google Is Going Back To China
Jan 12th
The Wall Street Journal reports today that Google is going back to China. Two years ago, facing censorship from the Chinese government, Google pulled out of mainland China, redirecting users to uncensored results from Hong Kong. Google took a stand against China’s authoritarian regime, but it did so reluctantly. China is too tempting a market for Google to write off.
Nevertheless, the WSJ reports that Google is hiring more engineers, salespeople and product managers and building new consumer Web services. As China’s mobile market booms, Google is pushing Android there, and opening a Chinese Android Market for mobile apps is one of the top priorities.
Sponsor
Google’s Troubled Past In China
Google’s trouble in China all started in 2010, when it claimed that Chinese hackers had attempted to break into its services and committed malware attacks on Gmail accounts. Prior to that day, Google willingly censored its services at the government’s request. But after tracing these attacks to China, and probably to official agents, Google said it was “no longer willing to continue censoring” its results.
China thought those allegations were “irresponsible.” It led to some tough talk, but it took a while for Google to work up the courage to leave the mainland. The redirect to Hong Kong was an imperfect solution, since the government’s filters caused frequent disruptions.
Changing Its Tune
Google’s business is ads, and there are apparently just too many eyeballs in China for Google to give them up on principle. The WSJ reports that Google is working on commerce services and product search that will not require official censorship.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin grew up in the Soviet Union, and at the time of the censorship row, he told the WSJ that China’s repression reminded him of that past. “I see the same earmarks of totalitarianism,” Brin said, “and I find that personally quite troubling.”
“Pragmatic” Reasons
But now, two years later, China has 500 million Internet users, more than twice as many as the U.S. As Google Asia executive Daniel Alegre told the WSJ, Google is changing its tune on China for “pragmatic” reasons.
Nearly 60% of Chinese smartphones run Android, but they don’t have official Google services on board. That’s a massive install base just lying there dormant, not even able to access the Android Market for apps. However, assuming Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility clears, Google will be making money on much of the hardware, anyway.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
After the SEO Audit: When SEO Gets Strangled – Business Insider
Jan 10th
|
After the SEO Audit: When SEO Gets Strangled
Business Insider The SEO audit is a beautiful phase in any relationship. Someone has their hands all up in your site as they diagnose what issues exists, what's lacking and then gets to work creating a plan for how you can build the most kickass site the Internet has … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Oracle: Firewalls Against SQL Injection Are a Good Idea After All
Jan 9th
Years ago, Oracle’s responses to reports of SQL injection attacks against its database servers literally were focused on media damage control – ensuring that not too many customers get scared by them. (To be fair, Microsoft had the same policy.) The basic concept of SQL injection is all too simple: Feed intentionally malformed instructions into the system in such a way that the server responds with clues that could enable you to obtain unprivileged data – or sometimes, with the data itself.
How hard could it be, security engineers and college professors argued for over a decade, for a company like Oracle to deploy a ZoneAlarm-like firewall that could independently analyze incoming SQL instructions, parse them, and only permit those that meet specific criteria? For years, well-minded engineers were told in response that yet another firewall would render networks too slow and inoperative. Then in May 2010, Oracle learned it could just simply acquire Secerno, an emerging database firewall company.
Sponsor
That acquisition became, naturally enough, Oracle Database Firewall. This morning, Oracle announced its latest revision to the tool, which now covers MySQL Enterprise Edition.
What Secerno discovered was something that every punch-card operator and IBM job specialist had known since the 1960s: If you have a stack full of equivalent jobs, stated the same way and with the same size, then when they stack up, you should see a simple order. Looking down the list, you should see perfect stripes where all the like digits in the similar parts of the job line up with one another. Get one out of order and the whole thing looks wrong. A SQL injection attack should throw off the order of things in such a way that anything parsing the entire stack from a distance should notice something’s wrong, and should estimate where it’s gone wrong.
This is what SANS Institute learned last year (PDF available here) in its evaluation of the first edition of Oracle Database Firewall, produced following its Secerno acquisition. The pattern of so many similar instructions should produce a signature, a kind of common geometry. If something gets thrown off, the fracturing of that geometry should be noticeable no matter how small or large the instruction stack may be.
In other words, produce a signature for what an orderly database looks like, and keep an eye out for that. Instead of, for example, relying on some external researcher to produce a signature for a specific breed of SQL injection attack, and rely on antivirus-derived scanning to spot it when it comes down the pike. In a new white paper released today (PDF available here), Oracle finally admits the old way of doing things was not as “impenetrable” as first stated.
“Oracle Database Firewall examines the grammar of the SQL statements being sent to the database, analyzes their meaning, and determines the appropriate security policy to apply,” the white paper reads. “Grammatical classification and session-factor profiling provide a powerful method for tracking database access, and enables the Oracle Database Firewall to recognize changes in normal behavior, such as SQL injection attacks on applications, and block them before they reach the database. This highly accurate approach provides a significantly higher degree of protection than first-generation database monitoring technologies that rely on recognizing the signature of known security threats.”
A blacklist (for those still debating the technical meaning) is any published list of exclusions. Slides from a recent presentation at Oracle OpenWorld (a href=”http://www.oracle.com/openworld/lad-en/session-presentations/database/13440-enok-1436892.pdf”>PDF available here) indicate that this new version of the Database Firewall aims to encourage administrators to create whitelists – policies that state exactly how SQL instructions should be formed, and how exceptions are to be treated. This way, whitelisted (passed) instructions create patterns whose disruptions are easier to spot.
What’s more, asserted Oracle’s senior principal product manager, Kamal Tbeileh, the policy-based firewall lets the administrator declare rules that pertain to the meaning and intent of the instructions, including when they’re grouped together as a procedure. The result is the elimination of false negatives – instructions that are accidentally excluded, with results that could be as destructive as a genuine SQL injection would have been.
In addition to the MySQL EE support announced today, Database Firewall will continue to support IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and Sybase’s Adaptive Server Enterprise and SQL Anywhere, in addition to Oracle Database 11g.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
CES 2012: Kodak Launches 2 Facebook-Integrated Cameras After Filing For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection
Jan 9th
Last week, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after a long battle with digital photography and photo-sharing apps on the iPhone4. Lest it be defeated, today at CES Kodak announced two new cameras that integrate with Facebook for easy photo sharing. The cameras also have two anti-social media applications for printing images from Facebook profiles. Kodak is banking on the idea that Facebook users may have a secret desire to print hardcopy photos from their Facebook profiles. Judging by digital-to-print image app Postagram, among others, they might be right.
Sponsor
Kodak offers two Facebook-integrated cameras. The first is the Easyshare Wireless Camera M750, which is Wi-Fi-enabled and works with an app for Apple, Android or Blackberry devices. With this app, users can email images either to an account or directly to the Kodak All-in-One Printers, to the Kodak Gallery or to Facebook. The Playfull Dual Camera is a combo 1080p/60-frame-per-second HD video camera and digital camera. Using the Kodak Share button, users can upload photos to Facebook, email and YouTube.
Kodak also announced two Facebook apps: With My Kodak Moments you can create photo books from Facebook albums. Kodak Photo Collage Print is an app for creating print collages out of Facebook photos.
With iPhone apps like Postcards on the Run and Cards for the iPhone4S, users snap a photo with their iPhones and send out a real paper card.
This suggests that there’s still a market for smaller collectibles like postcards from friends.
The same could apply to intimate Facebook photos of friends – online or offline, a picture is still worth a thousand words. But do you really want to take that Facebook photo offline?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
