Binarycse Blog

Experts predict the world will run out of internet addresses in less than a year, the Sydney Morning Herald reported Monday.

The internet protocol used by the majority of web users, IPv4, provides for about four billion IP addresses — the unique 32-digit number used to identify each computer, website or internet-connected device.

There are currently only 232 million IP addresses left — enough for about 340 days — thanks to the explosion in smartphones and other web-enabled devices.

“When the IPv4 protocol was developed 30 years ago, it seemed to be a reasonable attempt at providing enough addresses,” carrier relations manager at Australian internet service provider (ISP) Internode John Lindsay told the Herald.

“Bearing in mind that at that point personal computers didn’t really exist, the idea that mobile phones might want an IP address hadn’t occurred to anybody because mobile phones hadn’t been invented the idea that air-conditioners and refrigerators might want them was utterly ludicrous.”
The solution to the problem is IPv6, which uses a 128-digit address. It would give everyone in the world more than four billion addresses each, but most of the internet industry has so far been reluctant to introduce it.

It would require each device that connects to the internet to be reconfigured or upgraded, with some users even being forced to buy new hardware, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Google announced today that users can add a picture to the background of Google.com if they want.Adding a picture to the background makes Google look exactly like Bing, which has big colorful pictures in the background.In its official blog Google revealed ;
“Today, we’re introducing a new feature that brings a whole new level of personalization to Google by letting you add a favorite photo or image to the background of the Google homepage. You can choose a photo from your computer, your own Picasa Web Album or a public gallery hosted by Picasa which includes a selection of beautiful photos.

Whether you choose a photo of a loved one, a picture of your favorite vacation destination or even a design you created yourself, Google.com is now yours to customize. For those of you who want to enjoy the clean, simple look of Google as well as your personalized view, we’ve made it easy to switch between your customized search page and classic Google.

We are beginning to roll out this new feature to users in the U.S. over the next few days, so if you don’t see a link in the lower left-hand corner of Google.com now, check back soon. For those of you outside of the U.S., you can expect to see this new feature in the coming days as we roll it out internationally to offer similar, consistent experiences globally.

And if you’ve customized your look with a fun personal photo we’d love to see what your new homepage looks like. Tweet a picture of your page with the hashtag #myGooglepage and share it with us! “.

Internet major Google is phasing out its internal use of Microsoft Windows operating system due to security concerns, which arose mainly after its operations were hacked recently.The directive to move to other operating systems had begun in January at Google, after its Chinese operations were hacked.

The move could effectively end the use of Windows at Google, which employs more than 10,000 workers internationally, the report added.

“We’re not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,” FT quoted a Google employee as saying.

Another google employee said that many people have been moved away from [Windows] PCs, mostly towards Mac OS, following the attacks.

New people hired at Google are now given the option of using Apple’s Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating system.

In early January, some new employees were still being allowed to install Windows on their laptops, but it was not an option for their desktop computers, the report added.
The May 31 Financial Times article quotes only anonymous Google sources, identifying them as several of Google’s 10,000 employees. FT reporters David Gelles and Richard Waters write: “Employees wanting to stay on Windows required clearance from ‘quite senior levels’, one employee said. ‘Getting a new Windows machine now requires CIO approval,’ said another employee.”

Google officials have not tacitly denied the Windows ban on work computers, issuing the following statement to the Reuters news agency: “We’re always working to improve the efficiency of our business, but we do not comment on specific operational matters.”

The FT calls Google’s anti-Windows policy “semi-formal” and said that some laptops of “new hires” were still being outfitted with Windows, but all internal desktop PCs for these employees would run non-Windows based operating systems.
Microsoft’s dominant operating system Windows and its leading Web browser Internet Explorer have a reputation for being vulnerable to attacks. Security experts point out that Microsoft’s market share dominance promises malware developers a significantly higher return on investment than the Mac OS platform, which owns 5 percent of the OS market. Other operating systems (including Mac OS) and Web browsers — including Google’s own Chrome Web browser — have also suffered from security vulnerabilities.

A group protesting Facebook’s privacy policies said Monday more than 30,000 people had heeded its call to quit the social networking giant.
“For us it comes down to two things: fair choices and best intentions. In our view, Facebook doesn’t do a good job in either department,” the organizers, who did not identify themselves, said on their website for Monday’s “Quit Facebook Day.”
“Facebook gives you choices about how to manage your data, but they aren’t fair choices.”
The group said at 2300 GMT that 32,749 had dropped out of the Facebook universe.
Facebook.com is visited monthly by 540 million people, or slightly more than 35 percent of the Internet population, according to Google data.
Facebook is overhauling privacy controls in the face of a barrage of criticism that it is betraying the trust which has made it the world’s biggest social network.
Facebook redesigned its privacy settings page to provide a single control for content and “significantly reduce” the amount of information that is always visible to everyone.
Facebook also said it is giving users more control over how outside applications or websites access information at the service.
In India, though, hardly any of the 16.8 million Facebook users appear to be perturbed over the development, with most of them either unaware, or not particularly disturbed over the lack of privacy issue.
QuitFacebookday.com claims: “Facebook gives you choices about how to manage your data, but they aren’t fair choices, and while the onus is on the individual to manage these choices, Facebook makes it damn difficult for the average user to understand or manage this. We also don’t think Facebook has much respect for you or your data, especially in the context of the future.”

Websites like www.quitfacebookday.com, where users have indicated their intent to delete Facebook accounts, claim users could consider alternatives such as Twitter, Flickr, Orkut, and the yet-to-be-released Diaspora project for social networking.

Google has decided to permanently offer the multiplayer version of Pac Man game for free on Google doodle. The company decided to offer it permanently after it received good response to the game on doodle on Friday and Saturday when it was offered for free to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Pac-Man’s video game.

The users who clicked on the doodle that appeared on the search page were able to play the game for free. Tweeter users have also noticed the free gift form Google and it woalso works on new devices like iPhone.

The game was very popular on the video game and the Google game works in a similar way. The computer screens display classic Atari box with the 8-bit cartridge. The doodle includes the game’s original game logic, graphics and sounds and the bugs.Recently, Google celebrated the classic arcade game Pac-Man as; it featured a playable version of the game on its homepage as its logo. As we all know Google’s custom logos are famous for their creativity and always have a special meaning following them, but this one had an unexpected impact on the US economy. Projected figure suggest that Google received an additional 4.82 million hours of attention on Pac-Man day than it would usually have received on a Friday, totaling $120,483,800 in lost wages. With such a figure, one can hire all Google staff for six weeks approximately.

Google has taken the rare step of asking a California judge to declare that by linking to copyright-infringing works on Rapidshare, the search giant is not facilitating the illegal distribution of copyrighted songs.Blue Destiny Records, a small blues-oriented music label, sued Google, Microsoft and Rapidshare in Florida. The label claimed that Rapidshare was running “a distribution center for unlawful copies of copyrighted works,” and that Google and Microsoft’s Bing search engine were helping to prop up the company. The label argued that users can easily find copyrighted songs on file-hosting websites by doing a simple search query.

But in late March, Blue Destiny voluntarily withdrew its lawsuit. Google then asked the company to waive the right to pursue its copyright allegations. According to Google, the label refused, preserving its option to refile its claims.

Now Google has decided that it wants the court battle. The company has filed a 96-page complaint with the California district court, asking for a declaratory judgment that it’s not infringing Blue Destiny’s copyrights.

Google is showing a bit of hubris in its latest move. By going on the offensive, Google gets to do battle with a much smaller company in the inevitable fight over whether search engines facilitate copyright infringement. Plus, Google gets a more favorable jurisdiction than a Florida court. The Ninth Circuit has been friendly to Google in similar litigation with Perfect 10, an adult entertainment publisher that tried to punish search engines for indexing copyrighted photos.
Google has now sued the indie, asking a more friendly Californian court to provide a declaratory judgement whether links to cyberlockers constitute infringement. Victory would ensure a significant area of liability for Google would be removed. But even Reuters is moved to describe Google’s response as “hubristic”.

As well as drawing attention to the disparity in the resources available to Google and companies who depend on copyright – Google’s annual revenue is larger than the entire global record industry – the aggressive litigation also sends out a message to copyright businesses that they should not dare to antagonise the internet giant.

The mood has changed significantly in recent months. While Google may win this court battle, it may be losing the longer, bigger war.

The trade unions have swung behind the creators, in the shape of the TUC-backed Creative Coalition Campaign in the UK, and the AFL-CIO in the US. The release of emails in the Viacom litigation showed Google executives burying their ethical reservations and buying YouTube anyway – so much for “Do no evil”.

Less than seven months after its release, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows 7 operating system now has more users than its much maligned predecessor, Windows VistaJanco Assocoiates, a management consulting firm, has released data regarding Browser and Operating System Market Share. While the tale regarding the browsers looks familiar, when it comes to the Operating Systems, there is a major revelation.

Windows 7, in just seven months since its release, holds 14.8 percent of the OS market. This takes the number of people using Windows 7 more than the number of people using Vista, the older OS from Microsoft.

Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis quips, “There are now more users of Windows 7 than Vista. That is a major factor in their improved record earnings. The last OS that was accepted as quickly in the market was XP. Vista’s market share has peaked and is in the process of being decommissioned in most enterprises.” Janulaitis added, “The last six months have been a mixed bag for Microsoft. While they have good news on the OS front, their browser market share has fallen to the level that it was in 1998.”
Microsoft controls almost 94% of the PC operating systems market with versions of Windows, including Windows XP, which still has 61.6% of the market 8.5 years after its release.

Apple’s (AAPL) Macintosh operating system has 4.2% of the market, according to Janco.

While Microsoft has a hit with Windows 7, its Internet Explorer Web browser continues to lose ground. Internet Explorer is still No. 1 with 67.3% of the Web browser market in April, but that’s down from 71.4% a year earlier, Janco says.

Panda Security has analyzed nearly five million spam messages generated in January and February 2010, sent from one million different IP addresses

- The ranking of spam sources by city is led by Seoul, Hanoi, New Delhi and Bogota

Brazil, India, Korea, Vietnam and USA head the ranking of countries from which most spam was sent during the first two months of the year, according to a study by Panda Security, The Cloud Security Company. The 5 million emails analyzed by PandaLabs came from a total of almost one million different IP addresses, meaning that on average each address was responsible for five spam messages (each IP could identify one or more computers).

Brazil has topped the global spam ranking for January and February. The spam messages themselves are used primarily either to distribute threats or sell illicit products, and the main lure used as part of the social engineering techniques employed is the promise of videos or photos of Brazilian girls.

The ranking for January and February is as follows:

Country                                     % Spam                                    % IPs

BRAZIL                                         13.76                                      8.60

INDIA                                           10.98                                       8.60

KOREA, REPUBLIC OF             6.32                                       4.00

VIETNAM                                     5.71                                        6.01

UNITED STATES                        5.46                                         7.17

RUSSIAN FEDERATION         2.85                                         2.90

ROMANIA                                    2.53                                         3.42

COLOMBIA                                  2.37                                          1.82

UNITED KINGDOM                  2.34                                          3.06

POLAND                                       2.31                                           3.05

CHINA                                           2.26                                          2.20

GERMANY                                   2.17                                          4.48

ARGENTINA                              1.86                                            1.72

Microsoft has released a “Test Drive” version of the forthcoming Internet Explorer (IE) 9 browser, featuring improved CSS3 and HTML5 support.

The IE9 preview seems aimed mostly at the developer community—it has no user interface to speak of—and may be an attempt to earn back fans. IE has been losing market share among all Internet users for more than four years, but these losses are particularly acute in the developer community.

There is even a debugger that lets you compare how IE9 renders a page versus earlier versions.

The IE9 preview supports some HTML5, including video and audio tags and supports CSS3 selectors. IE9 also promises better SVG support than earlier versions of the browser. And it does, in fact, include more complete support for the CSS border-radius attribute than either Firefox 3.6 or Safari 4.0.

But IE9 still only scores a 55 on the Acid3 test, which measures how well a browser manages certain web standards. This, however, is a huge improvement for Microsoft. IE 8 only manages to score a 12 on the Acid3 test, and IE7 cannot even load the test page. But IE9 still has a long way to go compared to Firefox 3.6 which scores a 94 on the test, and Google Chrome and Opera 10.10 which both score a perfect 100.

Viacom, in 108 pages of court documents, portrays YouTube’s founders as reckless copyright violators who were far more concerned with increasing traffic to their site than obeying the law. Even executives at Google, which acquired YouTube for $1.7 billion in October 2006, questioned the ethics of building a site through questionable copyright practices, according to the Viacom filings. But in the 100-page document filed by Google, perhaps not surprisingly, the search engine tells a different story. Viacom is painted as a media giant trying to play it both ways: demanding that YouTube take down videos even while third parties were uploading Viacom content on the entertainment giant’s behalf. More intriguingly, the parent company of MTV and Paramount Pictures was at one point interested in acquiring the video-sharing site, according to the documents.

“We believe YouTube would make a transformative acquisition for MTV Networks/Viacom that would immediately make us the leading deliverer of video online, globally,” according to an internal Viacom slide that Google filed with the court.

Interesting as the documents may be, it’s not clear which side will benefit most from the disclosures. Google argues that it is protected by the safe-harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which says, in short, that if a Web site acts in good faith to take down copyrighted content as soon as it learns of it, and it has not benefited financially through advertising or other means, it is protected from a lawsuit. Viacom is attempting to pierce that protection by proving that YouTube employees, at the very least, knew of rampant copyright violations on their site and did little about it. U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton, in the Southern District of New York, set March 5 as the deadline for filing for summary judgment and gave the parties until April 30 to file opposing arguments to each other’s motions. All the arguments should be completed sometime in June. If the case proceeds to trial, it should occur sometime this year.

Legal scholars believe that the outcome of this landmark suit could well determine who gets to profit the most from content: the people who pay for its creation, or the people who help disseminate it over the Web. It could also determine whether YouTube, by far the most popular video site, suffers from an original sin of rampant copyright violation before Google took over.

Ill-gotten rewards, destroyed e-mail?
While there are still questions as to how much money Google is or is not making from YouTube, there is little doubt that YouTube’s founders profited handsomely from selling their company less than two years after building the site. According to court records, YouTube founders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim walked away with $334 million, $301 million, and $66 million, respectively.

According to Viacom, those were ill-gotten rewards. The three young men had already planned to look the other way, as far as copyright violations were concerned, court documents claim. Their intent was to create the online-video equivalent of Napster and then sell it. To do that, Viacom claims that the team sought ways “to avoid the copyright bastards.”

Viacom said in one e-mail that Chen urged associates to “concentrate all our efforts in building up our numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil.”

Viacom suggests that it may not have been given the benefit of finding out the whole story at YouTube, whose managers did not turn over some e-mails belonging to Hurley. The reason Google gave for any missing correspondence was that Hurley’s e-mails were accidentally destroyed when his computer suffered a malfunction sometime before the Google acquisition. Viacom said, however, that it was able to retrieve some of Hurley’s e-mails from Karim.Those e-mails show that YouTube managers knew that employees uploaded unauthorized content and applauded such moves, Viacom claimed.

Google argues that Viacom has distorted and taken out of context many of the statements from YouTube’s e-mails while doing a sloppy cut-and-paste job on some of the YouTube e-mails. In one e-mail from Chen to Karim, it said, Viacom omitted the word “stop” from this passage: “In other news, Jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site.”

Google provides several e-mails showing that from the earliest days of YouTube’s existence, the founders sought to protect copyright. In one April 25, 2005, e-mail, Chen tells the other co-founders that videos would be rejected that violated one of the following rules: “video must be about you, must be appropriate for all audiences, cannot contain contact information, no copyrighted material.”

In an apparent attempt to underscore YouTube’s usefulness and to suggest that Viacom is being hypocritical, Google noted that Viacom continues to do business on YouTube.