Internet

The company is inviting Windows users to sample its Safari Web browser and urging third-party developers to try their hand at the iPhone. A beta version of Safari for Windows is available now, CEO Steve Jobs announced during his keynote speech at the company’s 2007 Worldwide Developers Conference. Safari will also allow Web developers to …

I was so excited when Google Analytics was released to the public. At that time, I was a regular reader of ProBlogger.net – helping bloggers earn money. Darren Rowse broke the news to the blogging community that Google Analytics was offering free accounts on a first-come-first served basis. When I finally received my invitation from Google, I immediately added all of my websites to be tracked and painstakingly followed each and every instruction -that is, every instruction except for this one: “It [the source code] should be immediately before the [ending] body tag of your page, and should look exactly as it was provided to you.” Server Slowdowns Why was that important. When I learned JavaScript, I understood that most code belongs in the starting “head” tag so that you can be sure that the code is executed – and I wanted to make sure that this code was executed …

Google recently announced a new policy to anonymize google server logs after 18–24 months. Google the only leading search company to have taken this step publicly. Google believe it’s an important part of our commitment to respect user privacy while balancing a number of important factors. In developing this policy, we spoke with various privacy advocates, regulators and others about how long they think the period should be. There is a wide spectrum of views on this – some think data should be preserved for longer, others think it should be anonymized almost immediately. We spent a great deal of time sorting this out and thought we’d explain some of the things that prompted us to decide on 18-24 months. Three factors were critical. One was maintaining our ability to continue to improve the quality of our search services. Another was to protect our systems and our users from fraud …

It’s a brave new world for mobile phones as many tasks such as e-mails and web surfing that used to be the exclusive realm of computers have now shifted to phones. Unfortunately, that means viruses and Trojan horse programs have also made the transition. These new viruses with names like “CommWarrior,” usually runs unnoticed in the background, and sends itself out as an MMS (a text message that includes data files) to numbers in the telephone book. CommWarrior can only be activated if a user accepts and installs it, which is why it’s generally disguised as an update program. Still, the danger is minimal compared to the kind of havoc viruses can wreak in computers. “There’s a lot of unnecessary panic,” said Christoph Hardy, a spokesman for Sophos, a company that designs security software. An owner of an ordinary mobile phones, who uses it mainly for telephoning, has no need …

Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, launched at the NAB conference two weeks ago and pitched hard to developers at the Mix ’07 conference this week, is being taken as a competitor to Adobe’s Flash. Since it is a framework for providing rich applications to the Internet browser, it is indeed that. But though Silverlight and Flash are competing technologies, Microsoft’s offering is different from Adobe’s in key ways. More than just a platform Silverlight is being pushed side-by-side with Microsoft’s Live services for developers. Microsoft is opening up APIs (application program interfaces) for its search engine, for Virtual Earth, for its instant messaging service, and for other services, under generous, but not unlimited, licensing terms. These services will allow the creation of interesting online applications that take advantage of existing Microsoft networks and resources. For example, Match.com today demoed a new version of its service that can connect directly to other Match.com …

Microsoft will continue to prioritize security and ease of use in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 and will seek to improve Web development with current standards compatibility, according to the company. At Microsoft’s Mix ’07 conference in Las Vegas this week, IE platform architect Chris Wilson recapped Microsoft’s development priorities in the making of Internet Explorer (IE) 7 and outlined some of its goals for the next version of its browser. Wilson said Microsoft intends to create a follow-on version, IE 8, within two years of IE 7’s release, which came out in October. The priorities Microsoft set for IE 7, Wilson said, are the same for IE 8: strong security, ease of use and Web development improvements. “It’s clear we have a lot to do with the Web developer platform,” he said addressing an audience of mostly Web developers at Mix. Specifically, he said Microsoft will invest more in …

A San Diego company says ordinary Web sites are becoming greater targets for Internet criminals looking to corrupt users’ computers. Dan Hubbard, vice president of security research at Websense, said Web sites “from top-tier names to mom-and-pop bakery shops” are being targeted by advertisements that take advantage of the holes in the Internet Explorer browser to implant a tiny program that communicates with a “mother ship” server, often in Russia or China, USA Today reported Wednesday. The programs implanted by the tainted Web sites save secure form information — such as names, social security numbers and credit card information — and connects the infected computers to networks of similarly contaminated machines to produce and distribute Internet spam. A recent study by security firm Cyveillance uncovered 50,000 corrupted pages, and Websense estimates the number could be up to 10 times that many. “It speaks to the level of cunning and sophistication …

Yahoo recently announced that its popular IM client Yahoo Messenger will run inside the usual browsers most of the people use to surf the Web. The new feature of YM should eliminate the inconvenience of having to install, configure and personalize a separate software application, making the IM client more useful for the non-tech-savvy and for elderly people. The first step Yahoo took to make communication easier came along with the company’s other popular service, the Yahoo Mail. The IM client was introduced inside Yahoo Mail earlier this year, and is currently in beta version, with a full availability for all Yahoo Mail subscribers expected for later this year. By making Yahoo Messenger available for use inside browsers like Mozilla, Safari, Opera or IE, Yahoo is also targeting travelers, business professionals on the go and office workers whose companies block IM software downloads on their internal networks for security reasons. …

For a while now, we Googlers have used a bit of shorthand to refer to the Personalized Homepage — a name that connotes interactivity, the Internet, and personalization all at once. Please meet iGoogle, the new name for the Google Personalized Homepage. Developers around the world have been working hard to make more and more of the world’s content available for iGoogle. Can you get, oh, some of the world’s most beautiful pictures, updated daily? Check. Thousands and thousands of gadgets to choose from? Check. A personal note and picture from your sweetie? Now you can make your own, because starting today, without having any programming or web design experience at all, anyone can create Google Gadgets for iGoogle and send them to friends. Simple gadget templates include a photo gadget, a “GoogleGram” greeting card-style gadget, a YouTube video channel gadget, and a free-form gadget. To make yours, choose the …