Menno Wolvers

Read up on the latest, most important tech news, posts about web development, multimedia design and the techniques behind the magic of web-creation. Keep exploring, keep learning, keep it fun.

[mennowolvers-blog]

Form Element Error Class - Zend Framework

Did you ever wonder, how can I add a css class 'error' to my form elements when the data is invalid?

Today I wrote a little snippet to deal with this problem in a very easy way. Instead of dealing with decorators and what not..

The only thing we want is to add a css class to every element that appears to be invalid, right? Then lets make that happen.

1) Make sure you Form doesn't extend Zend_Form but for example My_Form, which extends Zend_Form.

2) Override the isValid function to add a css class to every invalid Form Element using the code below.

3) You're done

[mennowolvers-blog]

WhatsApp very unsafe. Leaks Telephone numbers, conversations

It's easy to eavesdrop on people using the popular mobile messenger WhatsApp. The application sends user names, telephone numbers and even complete instant messages unencrypted over the internet. Adversaries can intercept this information by using a simple network sniffer like the popular Wireshark.

A reader of the Dutch IDG publication Webwereld discovered this vulnerability. He was able to intercept all unencrypted traffic on a network and Webwereld was able to reproduce his findings. At first sight, it looks like WhatsApp is using an SSL secured HTTPS connection to their servers. But this can be falsified on closer inspection. Although all usernames, telephone numbers and all instant messages are transferred via port 443, which is reserved for encrypted traffic, they are sent to WhatsApp's servers in plain text.

Because of this it's easy to ascertain private information by using a man-in-the-middle attack. The attack can only be carried out when a smartphone using WhatsApp is connected to an unsecured wireless network, like for instance WiFi hotspots offered at train stations or airports.

Adversaries could also setup a wifi access point with a common SSID of an unencrypted wireless network. This is know as an evil twin network. If the malicious user forwards the requests of the app to the internet, it's even easier to capture private information. People using only trusted or secured WiFi networks are probably less vulnerable to this attack.

In a statement, WhatsApp says that it "strongly believes in network freedom and privacy" of their users. The company is studying this issue closely but does not wish to comment at this time.

To the discoverer of the vulnerability the company tells a different story. In this comment, WhatsApp states it trusts on 3G and WiFi to protect the traffic. "We do not save or store address book data or your conversations, so there is nothing to encrypt," a spokeswoman said.

[mennowolvers-blog]

Skype doomed to fail, we loved you.

Microsoft announced that it had bought Skype for $8.56 billion in cash.

 The purchase was Microsoft’s biggest ever, surpassing even the $6 billion acquisition of advertising firm aQuantive in 2007. That alone makes it surprising; the company’s track record with large purchases is decidedly mixed. Danger, the exciting mobile technology company that produced the Hiptop, better known as the T-Mobile Sidekick line, was purchased for an estimated $500 million in 2008; the result of that purchase was the disastrous KIN phone and a complete failure to integrate the bought-in talent. The aQuantive purchase too had mixed outcomes, with Redmond unable to find a role for the Razorfish division before eventually selling it off in 2009, and the company’s continued inability to make a profit from online advertising.

Microsoft has in the last couple of years shied away from similar large acquisitions, sticking to buying smaller, easier-to-manage organizations, leading some to argue that this was a direct result of the digestive difficulties faced with the large purchases. A $7 billion Skype acquisition would show that perhaps Redmond believes it has resolved such problems.

Microsoft’s own software already has considerable overlap with Skype. Windows Live Messenger offers free instant messaging, and voice and video chat. It currently boasts around 330 million active users each month, typically with around 40 million online at any one moment. Microsoft has an equivalent corporate-oriented system, Lync 2010 (formerly Office Communication Server) that allows companies to create private networks that combine the communications capabilities of Live Messenger with corporate manageability. The underlying technology of both platforms is common, allowing interoperability between Live Messenger and Lync. The company also plans to integrate Kinect into Lync to create more natural virtual presences.

Skype, in contrast, has around a third the number of active users — 124 million each month — as well as fewer simultaneous online connections—typically 20-30 million. Its instant messaging and voice and video call features are broadly similar to those found in Windows Live Messenger, though arguably more refined.

Though the Skype userbase is very much smaller than that of Windows Live Messenger, it does have one key difference: about 8 million Skype users pay for the service. Skype integrates telephone connectivity, able to make both outbound and inbound phone calls, and while its online services are all free to use, these phone services cost money. Skype also has points of presence across the globe, making it easy to buy phone numbers in foreign markets to cheaply establish an international telepresence.

Skype certainly has some things of value. The telephony infrastructure would make a valuable addition to the Messenger/Lync platform. It could also tie-in well with Exchange 2010, which offers voicemail integration. Adding telephony to Lync, Exchange, and Live Messenger is certainly a logical way to extend those products.

Perhaps more adventurous, integrating Skype-like functionality into Windows Phone would be something of a game-changer. Integrated multinational VoIP support would potentially be enormously disruptive to the cellphone market. However, as good as this might be to end-users, it would probably serve only to kill Windows Phone stone dead for carriers.

As much as telephony integration into Microsoft’s communications products and VoIP integration into its telephony product makes sense, it’s hard to make sense of the deal. The purchase price is a phenomenal amount of money to spend on a company that has long struggled for profitability, and it’s hard to believe that it’s truly the most cost-effective way of getting access to telephony and VoIP technology. Microsoft could build equivalent telephony infrastructure for much less, just as Google is doing for Google Voice.

Similarly, although Skype is in many ways a better instant messaging and voice/video calling client than Live Messenger, it’s hard to believe that it’s $7 billion better. The Skype client itself is written almost as if it were a piece of malware, using complex obfuscation and anti-reverse engineering techniques, and it would be disquieting for Microsoft to release something that behaved in such a shady way; at the very least, the client would surely have to be rewritten to avoid the obfuscation and outright hostility to managed networks that Skype currently has.

Even the access to paying customers is hard to justify. The terms of the deal mean that for each Skype customer, Microsoft is paying about $1,000. And on average, those customers are worth a profit of about $30, presuming most of Skype’s income comes from subscriptions and call charges. That’s a huge disparity.

Windows Live Messenger users have shown no propensity towards paying money, unlike Skype’s 8 million paying users, and it may be a challenge to convert them from non-paying to paying. However, since at the moment they have essentially nothing to pay for, it’s difficult to use that as evidence that they wouldn’t pay if there were services worth paying for. Especially as there’s likely to be quite a bit of overlap between the customer bases; people aren’t giving Skype the money instead of Microsoft because they prefer paying Skype, they’re doing it because Microsoft simply doesn’t sell Skype-like telephony facilities. And Lync customers are already on the payment treadmill, so it should be far easier to extract further payments from them for additional services.

Ultimately, it’s hard to see how the Skype purchase is worthwhile from a technology or user access perspective. The technology isn’t good enough and the users aren’t lucrative enough or plentiful enough to justify it. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen — and the prospect of keeping the company out of reach of Google and Facebook may just make the purchase irresistible.

[mennowolvers-blog]

Chrome PWNED on Windows 7, exploit leaps over sandbox/ASLR/DEP

If you’ve been using Google Chrome and feeling smug that you’re browser is immune to being attacked, think again.

Here’s an interesting hack attack on the browser than not only bypasses the Google Chrome sandbox, but also Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP) on Windows 7 SP1.

All that is required it to trick a user into visiting a specially crafted web page hosting the exploit and a number of payloads will be executed silently with no user interaction.

Here’s a video that shows the sophisticated exploit in action:

Scary stuff, not just because it bypasses the Chrome sandbox, but because it walks through two Windows defense systems to do so.

It’s obvious that there are a number of zero-day vulnerabilities at work here.

More details over on VUPEN.

[mennowolvers-blog]

My Experience as a Female Software Engineer

Today I read a rather interesting article about a female engineer. Makes me wonder if we will ever see a rise in the number of female software engineers. I sure hope so. So far I met two and they are always a lot of fun and nice to work with.

Article: It's no secret that females in Computer Science, both in academia and industry, are scarce. While the percentage of females in other male-dominated fields has been on the rise, that of females majoring in computer science has been on a downward spiral in the past few decades, currently sitting at about 12% to 20%. When I was at Princeton, it was on the lower end, with the class of 2007 having 2 women out of about 20, and the class of 2008 having about 5 out of 50. I don't claim to know why the numbers are so low, though I think much of it has to do with the culture of Computer Science and the type of people that go into the field. I thought I'd share some of my experiences both in school and in industry.

In high school, I took two computer science courses-- Intro to Computer Science using C++, and AP Computer Science. Had it not been for these courses and the confidence they instilled in me (due largely in part to my excellent teachers), I doubt I would have had the guts to major in Computer Science in college. I had some female friends that took the standard intro course in college, and liked programming, but never really considered majoring in it. I can understand why--if you've never programmed before, that course is really very difficult. It is also very intimidating to take classes where it seems like most people know all the material already and have been programming since middle school or earlier, especially when they are very vocal about their technical knowledge.

Despite my own pre-college experience with Computer Science, it was not an obvious choice for me. During my sophomore year, I was struggling to decide between majoring in Chemistry, Evolutionary Biology, and International Affairs and Public Policy, none of which I was particularly passionate about, when I realized one evening that I could still major in CS if I loaded up on prerequisites that semester. It was a sort of revelation for me--I was pretty good at most subjects, but here was the thing I could stand to work on (and enjoy) for 10 hours straight, forgetting to eat and losing track of time into the wee hours of the night.

Something that frustrates me about the field of computer science is that there are a lot of jerks who think that just because they've "mastered" some programming language or know some obscure unix commands, they are gods and you are nothing. My worst CS experience was when I was working briefly with someone like this. He blew up in the middle of a computer lab after I asked a very reasonable question: "This isn't some 200 level course, you know!" he screamed at me. Those few minutes made me seriously question my abilities, until I realized he was just an asshole who probably wouldn't get too far in life anyways.

Most of my classmates were not that extreme, and from my experience, most mean well but are just socially awkward. They can say something so simple as "Oh don't you know that command?" but in an inadvertently condescending voice that makes you feel like you're the only person who doesn't know it. As someone just testing out the CS waters, that type of experience in every class can be very daunting. I think women are more susceptible to these feelings of inadequacy, and it can deter some potential CS concentrators from the department. From my limited experience, the ones that stayed with it were pretty strong-willed and generally kept to themselves.

One of my professors, Kai Li, had a profoundly positive impact on me. There were only 4 girls in my Operating Systems class, and at first we were pretty quiet. Professor Li would ask questions about the reading material every day in class, but would often say "Let's hear from some of the girls" and wait for one of us to answer. I can't speak for the other females in the class and how they felt about being "singled" out like that, but for me, it was very encouraging. He once told me that even though the females are fairly quiet, and the boys in the class showed off a lot, when it came down to projects and exams, the female average was often higher. When I walked by a departmental career fair, I paused to look at some of the companies I might want to apply for next semester, and he told me to sign up for some interviews for that day. I said I didn't feel prepared and wanted to wait a semester until I felt like I had more of a basic foundation. He turned to a professor next to him and said "Jean doesn't know how good she is." He probably would not remember that exchange, but for me his support was eye-opening. I realized that while I did decide to major in CS fairly late in the game, I really was good at it, and my harshest critic was really myself.

My experience in industry has been very positive in that I have never felt any discrimination or judgment based on my gender, and people seem to be less condescending (I don't know where those people ended up...) in general. One of the challenges for me while I was at Google was to speak up when I didn't understand something, as I often assumed it was common technical knowledge and that people would pass judgment. Up until recently, I could strongly relate to the Impostor Syndrome, a psychological phenomenon in which you feel like an impostor, and that despite concrete accomplishments, your success is just based on luck. As I grow as a developer, I realize that hey, I am really good at what I do and I've gotten to where I am because of that.

I do wish more women would go into Computer Science though, since all the women I have worked directly with are freaking good at their jobs and are really nice to work with in general. I went to a DevDays conference a year or so ago, and of the 200 some people in the room, I think 5 were women. The numbers seem to be even lower in the startup world than at Google--when I tell people I work on the Android app for Pulse, a few have said "Oh as an engineer?" I suppose it is pretty unusual, since I personally know only a handful of women developers at startups. Despite the condescending culture that currently pervades some of the field (I really only experienced this firsthand in college and secondhand on online forums), it is a really fulfilling career, especially since there are so many opportunities to choose from. I don't quite know what is the best way to increase the number of women in CS, but if anyone has suggestions, please let me know. It can be challenging at times, but I hate to think so many young girls and women are missing out on something they could really love to do as a career.

Source: http://www.jeanhsu.com/2011/01/17/my-experiences-as-a-female-software-engineer/

[mennowolvers-blog]

Best job of 2011: software engineer

CareerCast.com has just published its list of the best and worst jobs of 2011, and software engineer comes out on top of a list of 200 professions. Way to go, people.

According to the placement firm’s “Jobs Rated” report, software engineers’ jobs cover everything from the design and creation of software for everything from operating systems to cell phone apps to interactive games.

The rankings were based on five core criteria: work environment, physical demands, outlook, income and stress.

Software engineers are in the catbird seat thanks to two emerging industries: Web applications and cloud computing:

“A proliferation of companies making applications for smartphones and tablets, along with the push to develop ‘cloud’ software hosted entirely online, has made the job market for software engineers broader and more diverse. And a diverse job market brings improvements in stress factors such as growth potential and competitiveness, as workers become less beholden to employers or vulnerable to outsourcing. In fact, the stress ranking for software engineer improved 10 spots this year, jumping from 25th to 15th place overall.”

Readers, do you agree that you have less stress than the average working stiff? Given more than your fair share of tight project deadlines, demanding and fickle end users, and endless changes in technology, software engineers have plenty of headaches. Certainly more stressful than the second-ranked favorable job of mathematician. They don’t have to deal with people all day, just crunch their numbers.

Statistician made number 4 on the list of hot jobs, perhaps in large part a reflection of the growth in business intelligence and analytics as a strategic imperative at many companies. In fifth place is computer systems analyst, also driven by the growth in Web and cloud computing.

Just to keep things in perspective: consider the working conditions of the number 1 toughest job identified in the report, that of “roustabout” (also referred to as “roughneck”), those people that work on oil pipelines.

[mennowolvers-blog]

Google gives Eric Schmidt 124,999,900% salary increase

Google has rewarded Eric Schmidt for shifting from the CEO's office to exec chairman by bumping up his salary from $1 to $1.25m.

The company's latest filing at the SEC shows that Schmidt will also qualify for a bonus of 400 per cent of that salary.

The filing also details the move of Alan Eustace from senior VP of engineering and research to senior VP knowledge, and Shona Brown from senior VP business operations to senior VP of Google.org.

The filing adds that "Alan and Shona were among Google's named executive officers as of December 31, 2010, but will not have executive officer responsibilities in their new positions."

Schmidt's responsibilities, on the other hand, are already reflecting his newly engorged salary.

Today he tweeted that he will be interviewing Saturday Night Live alumnus, comedy giant and Geek pinup Tina Fey.

Actually, the salary figure is pretty inconsequential compared to the value of his Google stock. As the WSJ points out, Schmidt is perched on a mountain of shares worth just shy of $6bn.

You'd think he'd be able to pay Fey to interview him.

[mennowolvers-blog]

Facebook open sources its server, data center designs: Hardware fallout to follow

Facebook on Thursday launched an initiative it calls the Open Compute Project, an effort to share the specs and designs of the custom servers in its data center in Prineville, Ore. In other words, Facebook is going to open source its hardware designs just like the software industry largely has.

In many respects, Facebook is open sourcing its data center and server designs. Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations, said the Open Compute Project is a way of giving back. It’s also a way to get vendors with more scale to incorporate Facebook’s designs to meet its needs with cheaper systems.

The big question is what tech vendors—all pitching their own designs—will make of Facebook’s effort. The move to rid servers of vanity plastic would mean no branding. Facebook went completely barebones. That works for efficient computing, but leaves little for vendors to differentiate with. The figures, however, lean toward Facebook’s favor.

While the fallout remains to be seen, the fact Facebook is detailing all of its specifications for servers and its data center—including the CAD drawings—is going to be disruptive.

Facebook’s PUE rating, the power used for data center compute, came in at 1.07. The industry average is 1.5 PUE and Facebook’s leased data center is 1.4 to 1.6 PUE.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, said:

" You can build servers and design them or get the products that the mass manufacturers put out. A lot of the stuff put out wasn’t in line with what we needed. We’re not the only ones that need the hardware we’re building out."

Among the key points:

On the server designs, Facebook went lightweight and ditched any screws and “vanity plastic.” The chassis is simple and has 22 percent fewer materials. Indeed, Facebook’s servers weigh 6 pounds less. Facebook also went with custom Intel and AMD motherboard. Expansion slots were ditched. Power supplies were simplified and included with a backup. Power supply efficiency exceeds 94 percent. Racks are in triplets for easy deployment and swaps.

Facebook aimed to cut the energy loss from the grid to the motherboard. There’s a 480 volt electrical system through the data center and 277 volts go directly to each server.

Facebook’s data center has no air conditioning system. It is cooled with outside air. Walls eliminate water particles to only get the cool air. There is no duct work in the data center.

Facebook uses localized uninteruptable power supplies serving six racks of servers.

The upshot here is that many IT buyers will look at Facebook designs and incorporate them into what they do. It’s highly likely that technology vendors will have to respond.

A few thoughts:

Facebook’s move will change the intellectual property dynamics in the hardware industry. How many IT buyers and vendors are already working to solve the same problems Facebook has?

Smaller companies such as Zynga will simply adopt Facebook designs.

IT buyers may start asking for Facebook’s data center approach. Dell is already offering systems based on Facebook’s designs.

Existing hardware vendors may see more commodity pricing.

Open standards are going to make it more difficult for hardware giants pitching proprietary stacks.

Forrester said in a blog post:

"Even more valuable is Facebook’s decision to publish its server, rack and power specifications as part of the “Open Compute Project”, an initiative they are promoting to make these specifications available to users and vendors in the hopes of creating an ecosystem around these stripped down cost optimized servers and associated infrastructure. Facebook claims it is to encourage the development of new web companies by making it easier for them to build world-class infrastructure. Even if their true motivations are also weighted by a less altruistic goal of further lowering their costs by creating a community of multiple competing suppliers, Facebook deserves credit for sharing their IP with a wider and in some cases potentially competitive world."

[mennowolvers-blog]

Amazon Introduces Online Music-Streaming Service Ahead of Google, Apple

Amazon.com joined the ranks of music-streaming services today by unveiling Cloud Player, allowing users to buy tracks, store them on the company’s servers and play them on computers and Android smartphones.

Music libraries can be uploaded to Amazon’s so-called Cloud Drive, with memory starting for free at 5 gigabytes, the company said in a statement today. Users who purchase an album from Amazon.com will be upgraded to 20 gigabytes of Cloud Drive space, which can be used to store music, photos, videos and other files.

“Our customers have told us they don’t want to download music to their work computer or phones because they find it hard to move music around to different devices,” Bill Carr, vice president of movies and music, said in the statement.

The move by Amazon places it a step ahead of rivals including Google Inc. (GOOG) and Apple Inc. (AAPL), both of which are reportedly aiming to start similar services. Record companies have struck licensing deals with existing music-streaming services, such as Spotify, Rdio and Music Unlimited, to help offset the effects of rampant piracy and drops in purchases of compact discs.

Cloud Player, which is bundled into the latest version of Amazon’s MP3 application, lets users listen to tracks on Android smartphones, as well as on personal computers utilizing Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari for Mac or Chrome Internet browsers.

[mennowolvers-blog]

Study: Streaming music use to explode in five years

If you think music-streaming services are big now, just wait five years.

According to data compiled by ABI Research, music-streaming services are set for rapid expansion in the coming half-decade, and they have mobile phones to thank for it. By the end of this year, ABI said, subscribers to paid music services who access them from a mobile phone will number about 5.9 million worldwide, and by 2016, that figure will grow to more than 161 million subscribers. That amounts to an annual growth rate of about 95 percent, the research firm said.

The growth of streaming services comes as digital sales remain relatively stagnant.

In a report released earlier this year by Nielsen SoundScan, the definitive source on the state of the music industry, overall U.S. music sales were down 2.4 percent in 2010. Digital sales were up just 1 percent.

Part of the significant growth of streaming services will be attributable to the sheer number of people using mobile handsets. As more people opt for smartphones, they will increasingly turn to streaming options to find the content they want to hear, ABI said

The Asia-Pacific area will become the largest regional market for mobile music streaming at some point in 2012, according to ABI. Once it hits the top, that market's consumption of streaming services will continue to expand and help lead the explosion in streaming services.

Looking ahead, ABI Research believes that Rhapsody and Spotify, which offer paid access to their music tracks to mobile devices, will benefit most from the growth of streaming music.

For now, it would seem that Apple, which offers the top pay-per-download digital-music marketplace in the industry, could stand to lose quite a bit as streaming services expand.

Then again, it might not.

Last month, a report in the Wall Street Journal claimed that Apple is working on turning its MobileMe online-storage service into a cloud-based entertainment platform that would allow users to stream digital content over the Web. That report followed a similar story in which music and film sources told CNET last year about Apple's intentions to deliver a cloud-based music and movie platform.

[mennowolvers-blog]

Young workers want to work for Google, Apple

Tech companies make a strong showing in a study released today on the firms young professionals most want to work with.

Google topped the list of most-desired employers, employer-branding company Universum found.

Apple and Walt Disney Co. were next in line. Amazon.com was the fifth-most-desirable employer. Microsoft came in seventh place, according to the survey, which polled 10,000 college graduates with one to eight years of professional experience. .

Those tech firms were surrounded mostly by government agencies. The Department of State was the fourth-most-desired employer, while the Federal Bureau of Investigation came in sixth. The Central Intelligence Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration took the eighth and ninth places, respectively. Teach For America, an organization that places young college graduates in rural and urban schools to teach for two years, came in tenth place.

So, why did Google and Apple win? Easy, says Universum: their brands.

"Companies that have appealing consumer brands generally also succeed in being perceived as attractive employers," Universum Employer Branding specialist Kortney Kutsop said in a statement. "People nowadays love to work for companies that produce their favorite products and services. Also, market success is an important factor: the company needs to be generally seen as innovative and best-in-class in whatever they do--that's the winning formula."

Even though some employers are more desirable than others, even Google might have a hard time getting young professionals in a single job for an extended amount of time, Universum said. The company found that 25 percent of young professionals want to change their jobs within the next six months, while 28 percent plan to do so in one to two years. Half of all the respondents "have applied for a new job either externally or internally in the past year."

[mennowolvers-blog]

Algorithm used for world record pi calculations

The following algorithm is based on work of Ramanujan and has been used in several world-record calculations of pi.

Initialize a0 = 6 – 4 √2 and y0 = √2 – 1. Then compute

and

The terms an form a sequence of approximations to 1/π. The error in each approximation is given by

This says that the number of correct digits roughly quadruples after each step. To see this, note that the number of correct decimal places after the nth step is the negative of the logarithm base 10 of the error:

[The error term goes to zero so quickly that you cannot (in ordinary precision) compute the error bound and then take logarithms; the exp(-2 π 4n) term will underflow to zero for n larger than 3. (See why here.) You have to take the log of the error term directly before evaluating numerically.]

The number of correct digits quadruples at each step because the leading term in the numerator above is 4n.

To give a few specifics, a1 is accurate to 9 digits, a2 is accurate to 41 digits, and a3 is accurate to 171 digits. After 10 steps, a10 is accurate to over 2.8 million digits.

The algorithm given here was state of the art as of 1989. It was used to set world records in 1986. I don’t know whether it has been used more recently. See morehere.

According to this page, π has been calculated to 6.4 billion digits. You can beat this record if you can carry out 16 steps of the method described here. a16 would be accurate to over 11 billion digits.

[mennowolvers-blog]

Chrome's no-so-shiny new logo

Google gave its browser a new logo yesterday, a design that drops the bubbly 3D look for a flatter, more geometric look.

The new design is no surprise: an all-blue version of the new logo showed up for Chromium, the open-source foundation of Chrome, a week ago.

It's just a cosmetic change, of course, but people often care about such skin-deep matters. That's why the ability to reskin Chrome and Firefox were deemed important features even if they don't do much for loading Web pages faster or enabling new Web applications.

The new logo first surfaced with Chrome 11.0.696.12, a developer-channel release launched yesterday to fix a number of bugs, including one that really annoyed me, a failure to show Web addresses in a pop-up status bar when I hovered over links.

Google is working on more substantive changes, too. Peter Beverloo noticed a few, including the ability to select multiple tabs, which is handy for managing the tab chaos some of us suffer, and abbreviated tab titles to better distinguish similar pages. Also, a feature that can preload pages so they appear faster when a person clicks their link will show up with more testers: Google is expanding it to 5 percent of browser users.

The current chrome logo, for reference

[mennowolvers-blog]

Google Circles Could Be As Fake Crop Circles, Or Is It?

Rumors swirled around the launching of Google's social platform at SXSW last weekend, but ultimately the product now supposedly named 'Google Circles' was a no show and the launch is now possibly slated for May, the Next Web reported.

The former 'Google Me' has been hotly awaited and the social interactive South By Southwest seemed like a great place to launch, but rumors were nixed by Google. As ReadWriteWeb posted: "We believe that Google will preview a major new social service called Google Circles at South by Southwest Interactive today. Update: Google has now officially denied that Circles will launch here, but not that it exists. Others, including Tim O'Reilly, have also now confirmed that they've seen it and that it's awesome."

O'Reilly later clarified his comments in an email to Next Web. ""It's not a product, per se, and it's not a new social network. Just some research-y thinking about how you could better manage social data. Exactly what Chris said. I got fooled by the RWW story into thinking that they'd turned it into something they were going to announce. There's no story here. Just some labs stuff," the Wall Street Journal reported.

Meanwhile one of Google's Chris Messina told Liz Gannes at the Wall Street Journal: "While the search giant is thinking about how to better understand the subtleties of social relationships and may build such functionality into its various products, as it makes them more social, said Messina and others, Circles is not a product currently in development."

But Google has been known to contradict their public statements. And the speculation is always a good read.

The Next Web "heard word ... that it's scheduled to launch at this year's I/O developers' conference on 10 and 11 May".

The possible product was eluded to by CEO Eric Schmidt late last year at a Google Zeitgeist event in Arizona - a platform that will provide social layers and connections between all of Google products.

People from a number of products Google has acquired over the past couple of years could be combining to work on this project, according to ReadWriteWeb.

"The service has been developed with extensive participation by Chris Messina, the co-creator of numerous successful social and software phenomena online, from BarCamp to Hashtags and much more. Messina declined to comment for this story. Jonathan Sposato, CEO of the photo editing service Piknik that Google acquired last year, is working on Circles as well. Sposato may be the only entrepreneur to have sold not one but two startups to Google - having founded Phatbits, a service that was acquired by Google in 2005 and became Google Gadgets. These are heavy hitting tech leaders and the service should be very interesting."

The fact that Messina then spoke with the Wall Street Journal could be an effort to stop speculation and as the article states "Facebook can relax." No sense giving Facebook advanced warning - Google still wants access to their information and stories like this could create problems.

PC World reported "Google's site will be unique, the speculation goes, because it will seek to understand how we relate to our various social networking friends, determine how truly close to them we are, then adjust the amount of content we share with those people."

Interesting - so we will be able to optimize our friends. One has to wonder if there will be an ability to hit them with any of the recent algorithm updates. If one of your friends gets to chatty or starts posting too much can I "Panda" them? If I find one has been paid to get me to sign up to a coupon program can I penalize them?

Paul Adams who worked on social technology at Google, but is now at Facebook, has a book coming out called "Social Circles." Now that could be the sequel to The Social Network - the battle between Facebook and Google with Adams being offered huge amounts of money to jump ship and help Zuckerberg.

Adams also did a large powerpoint presentation called The Real Life Social Network (see below) where he noted the lack of context and understanding of personas impacted true social networking. He was hired by Facebook shortly after the presentation was made public.

The Real Life Social Network v2

View more documents from Paul Adams

[mennowolvers-blog]

Hacker Group Anonymous Releases Claimed Bank of America Unit Emails

A hacker organization known as Anonymous released a series of e-mails on Monday provided by a former Bank of America employee who claims they show how a division of the bank sought to hide information on foreclosures.

The bank unit, Balboa Insurance, was acquired by Bank of America when it bought the mortgage lender Countrywide Financial in 2008. Balboa deals in so-called force-placed insurance coverage on mortgages. The e-mail messages concern the removal of information linking loans to other documentation.

A Bank of America spokesman told Reuters on Sunday that the documents had been stolen by a former Balboa employee, and were not tied to foreclosures. “We are confident that his extravagant assertions are untrue,” the spokesman said.

The e-mails dating from November 2010 concern correspondence among Balboa employees in which they discuss taking steps to alter the record about certain documents “that went out in error.” The documents were related to loans by GMAC, a Bank of America client, according to the e-mails.

“The following GMAC DTN’s need to have the images removed from Tracksource/Rembrandt,” an operations team manager at Balboa wrote. DTN refers to document tracking number, and Tracksource/Rembrandt is an insurance tracking system.

The response he receives: “I have spoken to my developer and she stated that we cannot remove the DTNs from Rembrandt, but she can remove the loan numbers, so the documents will not show as matched to those loans.”

According to the e-mails, approval was given to remove the loan numbers from the documents.

A member of Anonymous told DealBook on Monday that the purpose of his Web site was to bring attention to the wrongdoing of banks. “The way the system is, it’s made to cheat the average person,” he said.

He had set up a Web site to post bank data that WikiLeaks has said it would release, and was subsequently contacted this month by the former Balboa employee. It has been speculated that the documents, which have yet to be released, would focus on Bank of America. The spokesman for Anonymous said he had no direct ties to WikiLeaks, which is run by Julian Assange.

Balboa describes itself as providing “mortgage and auto lender-placed insurance tracking services.” Lender-paced insurance is another term for force-placed coverage.

Mortgage lenders require that homes be insured. In the event that mortgage holders let insurance lapse, lenders may take out their own insurance on the property, which protects the lender’s interest but is paid for by the mortgage holder.

Bank of America agreed last month to sell Balboa to QBE of Australia, which is set to pay $700 million up front and take on $1.2 billion in liabilities. A representative of QBE was not immediately available for comment.

[mennowolvers-blog]

Happy Pi Day! Is a holiday commemorating the mathematical constant π (pi)

Happy Pi Day!

For math geeks everywhere, March 14 represents the approximated value of the mathematical symbol, pi, - pronounced 'pie' - or 3.14. Pi is the circumference of any circle, divided by its diameter. The exact value of pi remains unknown because no matter how many places past the decimal is calculated, a remainder still exists.

The math department began celebrating the honorary holiday 11 years ago with pie throwing contests and the event has grown every year.

"It's a celebration of mathematics, a celebration of the coming of spring and a celebration of making it halfway through the second semester," Dr. Keary Howard, professor of mathematics education at SUNY Fredonia, said.

It is the role of the mathematics graduate students to organize outreach and thus their job to come up with a theme for Pi Day at Fredonia State. This year, the theme was Pi School Prom, a play on high school prom.

Those participating in Pi Day activities were given extra points for wearing prom attire, making Pi School Prom T-shirts, bringing in a photograph of their own high school prom picture or bringing in a pre-1990s prom picture of their parents or grandparents.

Because March 14 falls during SUNY Fredonia's spring break this year, the celebration took place on Thursday, the last day before the campus closed down for the break. Starting at noon, participants spent the day on a scavenger hunt, looking for all things pi related - a barcode that has as many consecutive digits from pi, proof of a cell phone call or text message at 3:14 p.m., a person whose birthday is March 14, a receipt that has consecutive digits from pi, one to three vintage prom songs from 1970-1990 with "PI" consecutively in the title or band/artist's name, a license plate with 314 or PI on it and more.

Then, starting at 6:15, the prom began, complete with a balloon arc and refreshments. However, the mathematical fun had only just begun. The 11 teams competing for the Pi Cup, with names like Students Against Drunk Deriving and E-MC Hammer, were cut to eight after the PI-dometer challenge, four after the Pi-tonic Solids challenge, two after Face the Cookie and a winner was determined by the Balloon Pop.

"We don't see mathematics as a single entity that can be done in isolation," Howard said, noting that all the challenges were team challenges where students had to work together. "We emphasize group work and teamwork."

[mennowolvers-blog]

First browser maker to fix a flaw exploited at last week's hacking contest

Google patches Pwn2Own WebKit bug in Chrome

Google has patched a WebKit flaw in its Chrome browser that was exploited by a multinational team to hack the BlackBerry Torch smartphone at Pwn2Own.

Although Chrome was unchallenged at Pwn2Own, the browser relies on the open-source WebKit browser engine, and so needed to be patched.

Friday's Chrome update made Google the first browser developer to patch a vulnerability used at Pwn2Own, the hacking contest sponsored by HP TippingPoint and its Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) bug bounty program. Pwn2Own ran Wednesday through Friday and handed out $60,000 in prize money to four individuals or teams.

Last Thursday, Vincenzo Iozzo, Willem Pinckaers and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann won $15,000 by hacking Research in Motion's BlackBerry Torch with an exploit of a WebKit vulnerability in the BlackBerry's browser. The same day, Dion Blazakis and four-time winner Charlie Miller exploited a different WebKit flaw in Apple's Safari browser on the iPhone 4.

According to Google, the WebKit bug exploited by Iozzo, Pinckaers and Weinmann was a "memory corruption in style handling." Google rated the threat to users as "high," its second-most-dire ranking.

As is Google's practice, it locked access to its bug tracker to bar outsiders from viewing the technical details of the just-patched vulnerability. The company blocks public access to flaws for weeks or even months to give users time to update.

Apple, which will need to patch the same WebKit bug that Google addressed, as well as the one that Blazakis and Miller exploited, does not comment on its security update process.

Google also awarded Iozzo, Pinckaers and Weinmann $1,337 from its own bug bounty program, adding to their cash take for the Pwn2Own hack.

Neither Chrome nor Mozilla's Firefox were challenged at last week's Pwn2Own: Researchers who had earlier signed up to take on the browsers didn't show or withdrew because they had failed to come up with reliable exploits in time for the contest.

Employees of both Mozilla and Google touted the browsers' survival skills.

"Whew, Firefox survived #pwn2own 2011. This is not a laurel we are resting on, but I'm still happy about it," said Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO, in a tweet last week. "Congrats to Chrome surviving, too."

"Both surviving browsers: open source, have bounty programs, have embedded security teams, better at faster fixes. Coincidence?" tweeted Chris Evans, an engineer on the Chrome security team.

Smartphones running Google's Android and Microsoft Windows Phone 7 operating systems also escaped Pwn2Own unscathed.

Last week's contest was the third consecutive Pwn2Own that Chrome was not exploited by researchers. It was the first time for Firefox since browsers were designated as targets in 2009.