Down Time

Facebook update its security setting on almost daily basis to prevent its users from any kind of hacking and tracking. So now Facebook has launched a new security feature that will let users log out from any device remotely. This is designed to protect users who access Facebook from multiple devices, but will also help safeguard users against hacking.

According to Facebook;
“Have you ever borrowed a friend’s phone to use Facebook and then forgotten to log out before you handed it back? Maybe you logged in from a public computer, but accidentally walked away with your Facebook session still active. Now, you can see if you’re still logged in on other devices and immediately log out on those devices from one central control in your account.”

The upgrade is rolling out gradually to all users. Once it’s live for you, access is via the “Account Security” section of your Account Settings page. You should be able to all your active sessions along with information such as the login time, device name if you’ve previously named it through the login notifications feature, the approximate location of the login based on IP address, and browser and operating system.

The blog post notes that if someone has accessed your account without your permission, you should be able to shut down the unauthorized log-in before resetting your password and taking other steps to secure your account and computer.

This update makes a lot of sense. In the mobile age, people are increasingly accessing Facebook from multiple locations and devices, and a central way to manage that would be very handy. Also, while the blog post describes the example of unauthorized access as “unlikely”, I know several friends who have had their accounts hacked or accessed in some way and their status updates filled with spam. While some less technically minded users might find using this feature a bit daunting, there are quite a lot of people who have enough technical savvy to make good use of it.

Facebook has now become worlds most used Social Networking website by almost every age and type of people around the world. So do you know that the average age of a Facebook user is 38 years old? That information comes from the team at Flow town, who has compiled the latest demographic statistics about Facebook users and social network usage in general. Perhaps more surprising was that the vast majority of users are now older than 38 years old, illustrating that the company has come a long way since first launching exclusively to college students.

One other interesting statistic found in the data was that users who are 18 to 29 use social networks almost as much as they use email. Other reports have recently suggested that the younger users (younger than 18) use social networks more than email. Check out all the details in the chart below!

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Hot on the heels of Microsoft starting to advertise Internet Explorer 9 there is now a leaked video (first picked up by Softpedia) of the browser demoing the user interface and speed. Despite looking like a fake video, We understands the video is of an old, internal build of Internet Explorer 9 which was given to employees to test.

In the video, it can be seen that the user interface bears a resemblance to the leaked image of Internet Explorer 9 from last month but features older icons, gradients and buttons. Neowin has been informed that the leaked image is how Internet Explorer 9 will look when released as a beta next week. Therefore, the video above doesn’t display an accurate image of how Internet Explorer 9 will appear.

The rendering engine used for this build of Internet Explorer 9 appears to be the same as the most recent version of the developer platform preview of Internet Explorer 9. The speed at which the browser loads and functions in the video is expected to be similar to how quick the beta version will be.

Long Zheng has just spotted that Microsoft is already starting to advertise Internet Explorer 9 Beta ahead of its official launch next Wednesday. The banner advert was spotted on TechCrunch and it’s likely to be found on many other sites across the web.

The advert features a few quotes from people and web sites that who played with previous versions of Internet Explorer 9. The advert focuses on how Internet Explorer 9 will allow for a different kind of internet than the one we are used too telling readers to “get ready for a more beautiful web”. This has been the tag line used with Internet Explorer 9 ever since Microsoft announced they would be holding a special event for the launch of the beta.


Microsoft announced back in August that they would be holding an event in San Francisco on September 15th where Internet Explorer 9 Beta would be announced. It is unusual for a company to put so much emphasis on a beta version of a piece of software which suggests either Microsoft have got a lot planned for Internet Explorer 9 or have more to announce than just a browser.

An image leaked in late August that is rumored to be of Internet Explorer 9 but there have been many who have questioned the image’s authenticity.

Microsoft has been providing developer access to the much improved Internet Explorer 9 rendering engine on a regular basis. The company has been stressing that developers shouldn’t have to worry about which browser will be rendering a web page but should be able to just write code for all browsers. To that end Internet Explorer 9 will be far more standards compliant than any other Microsoft browser to date and appears to far faster than any previous versions of the browser, its now almost as fast as Google Chrome and Apple Safari.

Everybody is quite exciting about Microsoft Windows 7 Service Pack 1, Now the wait is over Microsoft has released a beta refresh of its Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack (SP) 1 to selected PC and Technology Adoption Program (TAP) partners, company officials confirmed on August 30.

Microsoft made the refresh build — the build number of which is said to be Build No. 7601.17077 — available to a select group of testers on August 27. There’s no word (so far) on whether there is anything new in that refresh.

The spokesperson said Microsoft would not comment on whether the company will release to the public another interim SP1 build before the first service pack is released to manufacturing. Microsoft officials said earlier this summer that the company is planning to deliver the final SP1 code in the first half of 2011, and the spokesperson said on August 30 that Microsoft is still on track with that stated release date.

The server version of SP1 includes two new virtualization-focused features: RemoteFX and a dynamic-memory adjustor for Hyper-V. I’ve heard speculation that the server version of SP1 is what’s holding back the delivery of the client version, but have not heard this from any Microsoft officials.

Microsoft released a public beta of SP1 in mid-July.

Microsoft officials have been adamant that consumers and business customers don’t need to wait for SP1 to deploy Windows 7 and/or Windows Server 2008 R2. Still, a number of business customers use the release of SP1 as a milestone in terms of planning their deployments of a new operating system.

Google has fixed an issue with Gmail that caused a small percentage of its accounts to repeatedly send email messages over and over.

The bug, which affected less than 2.5 percent of the Gmail userbase, according to Google, involved odd behavior including the repeated messages. The bug was resolved Thursday night, according to Google's Google Apps dashboard.

"The problem with Google Mail should be resolved," Google's tech support staff wrote. "We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better."

The bug affected at least two writers for PCMag.com, who initially dismissed thoughts of a bug, suspecting that their PCs may have become infected with malware. The repeated messages also resulted in several Gmail users being added to spam lists, including www.Backscatterer.org and www.SORBS.net, according to WgtnDan, a user who posted to the Google Gmail support thread describing the problem.

At a press conference announcing the integration of Google Voice and Gmail this week, Google executives were asked about the number of Gmail users. Executives declined to provide an exact number, although comScore numbers cited by The Wall Street Journal put the number at over 160 million, putting the maximum number of users affected by the bug at about 4 million users.

Hijacked accounts, promises of free iPads, IQ quizzes, and ring tones - these are all part of a massive spam attack hitting Facebook right now.

I’ve received a Facebook private message that appeared to be from a friend inviting me to an event titled “Get @iPad_ for Free Event!!”. (See below). Other users have reported wall messages and status updates with phrases like “u have to check out this website its glitchin right now and sending out ipads to everyone for free!”. Similar spam messages have appeared on Twitter, via hacked accounts.



A Facebook spokesman told IDG the iPad scam was affecting “an extremely small percentage of people on Facebook” but they took the threat seriously.
Meanwhile, Facebook users have also reported spammy chat messages touting IQ quizzes and mobile ring tones.

The messages say "LOL is this you?" and are accompanied by a link that looks like it leads to a video on Facebook, one victim told CNET. In his case, clicking the link directed to a Web page with a "404-Page Not Found" error message and his account sent the spam out to at least one of his friends, he said.
The spam was also reported on Twitter, but at this point the outbreak seems to be minor.

As we know Windows 7 is now become one of the most usage and successful windows after Windows XP. Everybody is now thinking When Will Windows 7 Overtake Windows XP ? And people are now really considering Windows 7 as compare to windows xp in many ways. I have noticed very strong evidence that Windows 7 has succeeded in a big way among early adopters and enthusiasts, who dominate the readership of a website like this one. I also see clear indications that businesses are adopting Windows 7 at a faster pace than in earlier Windows versions.

The monthly reports on operating system versions provide an ideal snapshot for my purposes, with data that goes back far enough to see meaningful trends. Using Excel, I plotted data from December 2008 (a month before the Windows 7 beta was made public) to July 2010 and then made some simple projections. Here’s what the chart looks like; actual Net Market Share data is to the left of the line in the center of the chart, and my projections are to the right:

Click to Enlarge Image

Yes, you can make a case for a hockey-stick growth curve with even a slight increase in the Windows 7 adoption rate. You could also argue for a slowdown, although I think that scenario is unlikely based on the overwhelmingly positive reception of Windows 7 in the market and where we are in the PC replacement cycle. The most likely scenario, in my opinion, is that the pace of migration from XP to Windows 7 will accelerate over the next two years as XP gets closer to its end-of-life date.

In the Net Market Share data, the percentage of Mac OS X use has remained in a very narrow range for that entire period. In December 2008, the total for Mac Intel and Mac OS was 4.45%. For July 2010, the Net Market Share report breaks usage by OS X version rather than hardware platform, but the total for OS X 10.6 and 10.5 is nearly identical at 4.42%. In between, the percentage of users never rose above 4.45% and never dropped below 4%.

As someone who’s watched every Windows release since the early 1990s, I find it remarkable that Windows 7 usage has overtaken Vista so quickly, roughly nine months after it was released. NetMarketShare noted that trend with its July 2010 report. That same crossover appears in the ZDNet visitor data I posted yesterday, except that it happened about 8-10 months earlier. If the broad PC market is still lagging early adopters by that same gap, then I expect Net Applications will report that Windows 7 has passed XP in usage sometime next summer.

Mozilla has released the latest beta for Firefox 4, making this is the 3rd beta in the Firefox 4 development cycle. Beta 3 is available in more than 30 languages, 10 more than the last update. The beta also enables Windows 7 multi-touch support, which allows users the ability to interact with the browser without the need of a mouse. Several JavaScript tweaks have also been implemented to give the user a more streamlined and faster experience.

Beta 3 also changes to the C++ representation of JavaScript, which enables Firefox to execute numeric code more efficiently, allowing for more streamlined graphics in web applications.

As with the past betas, the Mozilla Labs feedback add-on is included, giving a user the chance to submit any bugs or errors they find using Beta 3. Mozilla recommends users keep the feedback add-on enabled, as it gives Mozilla the ability to better track bugs and errors found within the browser. Mozilla states the feedback addition has allowed for more than a half-million testers to submit approximately 3,500 pieces of feedback every day. Additional statistics show that the majority of people using the Firefox 4 Beta are males, who use the web between 2-6 hours every day, and use Firefox for communication and entertainment.

Readers looking for the latest Firefox 4 beta can find it here.

Multitouch capabilities might be all the rage on portable devices, and Windows 7 had made much of the gesture and touch capabilities built into the operating system, but for now desktop Linux users have largely been left out in the cold. However, Canonical—the company behind the Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution—has announced that multitouch support will be included in Ubuntu 10.0 (codenamed Maverick Meerkat). The technology will add multitouch support and gesture interaction with applications, and although many applications will have to receive substantial interface makeovers to be multitouch-friendly, Canonical is working on folding multitouch into Unity, it’s lightweight netbook environment.

“The world’s expectations of software experience are being raised by advances in mobile computing. We are bringing that revolution to the Linux desktop: for window management and applications,” Canonical wrote in a blog post. “Though our work at the application level has only just started, we are certain that multi-touch and gestures will be central to the way we use Linux applications in future.”

Canonical is distributing GPL-licensed libraries so applications can develop multitouch interfaces, and has also posted a set of guidelines for building consistent multitouch interfaces.

For now, the multitouch effort is concentrating on high-end convertible tablet PCs; however, broader hardware support is expected, including support for 3M and N-Trig hardware, and eventually touchpads and input devices like Apple’s new Magic Trackpad.