Snapchat seen overmatched in fight with Facebook

Social startup Snapchat may be batting out of its league if it plans to take on social behemoth Facebook. Snapchat, a photo messaging app that pioneered self-destructing messages and became a teen phenom, announced on Thursday that it's updating the app with a new feature dubbed Stories that lets users share photos and videos for a day before they disappear. The company released the updates for iOS- and Android-based devices. With the new feature, called Stories, users can choose which photos and videos they want to add to that day's Story and to whom the package should be sent. It's the first time the two-year-old company has veered away from its trademark of having content disappear in 10 seconds or less. By focusing on pictures and video that self-destruct in a matter of seconds, users have felt free to share images they wouldn't want to remain permanently on a friend's device. The new Stories feature lets Snapchat users share the experiences of their days with friends a bit longer. Analysts say the update gives Snapchat a very Facebook-like quality, comparing the Stories feature to Facebook's News Feed. The popular Facebook feature lets users keep up to date on what friends are doing with their day. The question for Snapchat is whether it has the muscle to worm in on some of Facebook's vast territory. "Snapchat is a phenomenon with teenagers, who incessantly send short videos and pictures to their friends," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. "Now Snapchat is attempting to out-Facebook Facebook. This is a neat test, but Snapchat is getting into dangerous territory muddying their core value proposition, which is immediacy and privacy," Moorhead added. "If your claim to fame is pictures that have very limited shelf life, you'd think extending that shelf life would be counter strategic," said Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group. Thus, the company is in dangerous territory taking on Facebook, he said. "[Snapchat is] a very specialized service going after a more comprehensive and powerful offering. That switches them from being unique to being overmatched. In their own area they were unmatched. In Facebook's they are insignificant," Enderle said.roulette bot plus 2 microsoft richcopy windows 7 marvell lan driver v6 30 whql minolta di350 driver lego digital designer 5 free skype for sony ericsson w995 skype sony ericsson zylo post air quality checker brazilian v gear mobidtv drivers compaq presario sr1000 video drivers

Irish High Court to review Facebook Prism complaint

The Irish High Court is going to review whether the Irish Data Protection Commissioner's refusal to investigate Facebook's involvement with the U.S. government surveillance program Prism was lawful. In June, the Austrian student group Europe-v-Facebook filed a complaint with the Irish DPC against Facebook Ireland, which is responsible for the data of the company's users outside the U.S. and Canada. When Facebook collects user data, exports it to the U.S. and by doing this giving the National Security Agency (NSA) the opportunity to use it for massive surveillance of personal information without probable cause, Facebook is violating European privacy laws, according to the group. The Irish DPC however argued that there were no grounds to start an investigation under the Irish Data Protection Act because "safe harbor" requirements have been met. Europe-v-Facebook maintained that the Irish privacy regulator should start an investigation and applied for a judicial review of this refusal with the Irish High Court in late August. The High Court decided to start such a review on Monday, according to a court document that was published by Europe-v-Facebook on Thursday. In Ireland, a judicial review can be used to supervise lower courts, tribunals and other administrative bodies to ensure that they make their decisions properly and in accordance with the law. If such a decision was unconstitutional or illegal the High Court can choose to quash the decision. If Europe-v-Facebook's complaint is successful, Facebook could eventually "be forced to limit the access of the NSA to Europeans' data or would otherwise need to keep Europeans' data within the E.U.," the group said in a news release. Europe-v-Facebook filed a similar complaint against Apple in Ireland which was denied on the same grounds. Currently, the group is only pursuing the case against Facebook in Ireland. While the Irish privacy regulator appears reluctant to investigate Facebook and Apple, other European privacy regulators did start investigations on the basis of similar complaints filed by Europe-v-Facebook and others. The Luxembourg data protection authority, for instance, is investigating Microsoft-owned Skype for its alleged links to the Prism spying program. It will probably publish its findings before the end of next week, said a spokesman for the authority. Meanwhile, Yahoo is under investigation by the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, said Juliane Heinrich, a spokeswoman for the Commissioner, in an email on Tuesday. "Yahoo has submitted a first statement that raised further questions," she said, adding that she could not share Yahoo's statement or give more detailed information during the examination phase. She expects the investigation to be finished in December.amplitube metal full registry reviver license key alaris wee cam driver 003400 ip1880 driver windows skype for samsung star 3 duos net framework 2 0 offline airport mania 2 hd apk hp laserjet 1536dnf mfp driver for linux nvidia geforce 4 mx420 driver facebook hacking software for windows 7

CEO Durov disses Zuckerberg, but loves Edward Snowden

Pavel Durov, the CEO of the Russian social networking site VK, does not think very highly of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Edward Snowden instead is his personal hero. "Mark underestimates VK," Durov said Tuesday, addressing dismissive remarks Zuckerberg previously made about VK. "He doesn't use it very much," Durov said. "VK is faster, easier to use, and has more functionality," he said. VK is a giant site in Russia -- offering many features similar to Facebook -- and is regarded as the second-largest social network in Europe after Facebook. Durov made his comments at the GMIC mobile Internet conference in San Francisco, an event that drew multiple thousands of attendees from across the world. The Russian social networking site gained some attention this past summer for offering a job to Edward Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor responsible for numerous leaks concerning government surveillance programs such as Prism. Russia has given asylum to Snowden, who is evading capture by U.S. authorities. At GMIC, Durov spoke out on the issue of privacy, and why it's important that more companies, like Facebook, think harder about strategies like encryption and keeping their users' data safe. In this area, VK has been developing its Telegram messaging service, which it claims is more secure than rival WhatsApp's messaging, partly because it offers end-to-end encryption and also self-destructing messages. During a discussion with TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Tsotsisv, Durov called Snowden a personal hero for helping to bring more attention to privacy. "He's had to sacrifice a big part of his life to let us know that we're being spied on," Durov said. Some conservative or patriotic Americans may see Snowden as a traitor, Durov said. But Durov pointed out that he knows what it feels like to be spied on. Durov was at the center of an alleged hit and run incident earlier this year and is no stranger to government investigations. "I'm not happy that my rights were violated without me knowing it," he said Tuesday. When asked about whether Zuckerberg should incorporate more encryption into Facebook, Durov said that would be great, "but he might have other priorities."skype 5 beta sniper elite v2 binkw32 dll durlabh jain kundli pro software full version talking tom cat for blackberry 9900 angry birds bad piggies pc ich10 dos driver si 70027 driver sutherland st70 driver board minolta bizhub c253 driver via s3g unichrome pro igp driver win7

Facebook goes open source with query engine for big data

Potentially raising the bar on SQL scalability, Facebook has released as open source a SQL query engine it developed called Presto that was built to work with petabyte-sized data warehouses. Currently, more than 1,000 Facebook employees use Presto daily to run 30,000 interactive queries, involving over a petabyte of processing, according to a post authored by Facebook software engineer Martin Traverso. The company has scaled the software to run on a 1,000 node cluster. Now, Facebook wants other data-driven organizations to use, and it hopes, refine Presto. The company has posted the software's source code and is encouraging contributions from other parties. The software is already being tested by a number of other large Internet services, namely AirBnB and Dropbox. Standard data warehouses would be hard-pressed to offer the responsiveness of Presto given the amount of data Facebook collects, according to engineers at the company. Facebook's data warehouse has over 300 petabytes worth of material from its users, stored on Hadoop clusters. Presto interacts with this data through interactive analysis, as well as through machine-learning algorithms and standard batch processing. To analyze this data, Facebook originally used Hadoop MapReduce along with Hive. But as the data warehouse grew, this approach proved to be far too slow. The Facebook Data Infrastructure group first looked for other software for running faster queries, but didn't find anything that was both mature enough and capable of scaling to the required levels. Instead, the group built its own distributed SQL query engine, using Java. Presto can do many of the tasks that standard SQL engines can, including complex queries, aggregations, left/right outer joins, subqueries, and most of the common aggregate and scalar functions. It lacks the ability to write results back to data tables and cannot create table joins beyond a certain size.. . . . . . . . . . Unlike Hive, Presto does not use MapReduce, which involves writing results back to disk. Instead, Presto compiles parts of the query on the fly and does all of its processing in memory. As a result, Facebook claims Presto is 10 times better in terms of CPU efficiency and latency than the Hive and MapReduce combo. Presto is one of a number of newly emerging SQL query engines that tackle the problem of offering speedy results for queries run against large Hadoop data sets. Hadoop distributor Pivotal has developed Hawq for this purpose, and fellow Hadoop distributor Cloudera is working on its own software called Impala.

House passes bill to curb patent trolls

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill meant to discourage so-called patent trolls from filing multiple infringement lawsuits or demanding licensing deals over the objections of some groups representing small inventors. The Innovation Act, which passed Thursday by a 325-91 vote, has the support of several large U.S. technology companies as well as advocacy groups Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The bill now heads to the U.S. Senate for action. Despite the lopsided vote, some lawmakers said the bill favors large companies at the expense of small inventors. "This is a gift to the giant conglomerates that can already push you down," said Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat. With the bill, Congress is "attacking the little guy," added Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican. Still, several tech groups applauded the bill's passage. The legislation "should send a powerful message to patent trolls that their continued abuse of the patent system and extortion of American businesses will not be tolerated," the Internet Association, representing Google, Facebook, Amazon.com, eBay and Yahoo, said in a statement. The Innovation Act, sponsored by Representative Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, targets businesses that use patent licensing and lawsuits as their primary source of revenue. Critics blame these patent assertion entities (PAEs), often called patent trolls, for a growing number of patent infringement lawsuits in U.S. courts and a flood of patent settlement demand letters. The bill would require plaintiffs in patent infringement lawsuits to identify the patents and claims infringed in initial court filings, in an effort to reduce complaints about PAEs filing lawsuits with vague patent claims. The bill would also allow judges to require that losing plaintiffs pay defendants' court fees. In addition, the bill would allow courts to delay massive discovery requests from patent infringement plaintiffs until the patent claims have been interpreted by the court, and it would allow manufacturers and suppliers to intervene in patent litigation against their customers. In recent years, some PAEs have targeted end users of technologies that allegedly infringe their patents in an effort to collect more patent license fees or court awards. Several groups representing inventors, venture capitalists and U.S. colleges have opposed the bill, with some saying that it has been rushed through Congress in about a month. This week, inventor Dean Kamen, founder of Deka Research and Development, spoke out against the bill. "The patent system has been a main driver of keeping the U.S. economy ahead of the rest of the world since this country was formed," he said during a press briefing. "Any bill that tinkers with the main engine of innovation ought be looked at very, very carefully and not whipped along." The bill would "dramatically increase the barriers" for small inventors to protect their intellectual property, he added.. . . . . . . . . . . .

Developers slowly rising to Microsoft's Surface

Microsoft's Surface touch computer may be generating more oohs and ahs than some of the company's other recent technologies, but the product has yet to generate rabid interest among programmers. A year and half after Microsoft released Surface, just 250 companies are developing applications for the touch system, Microsoft officials revealed during its Professional Developers Conference 2009 (PDC09) held here this week. Some 5,000 copies of its free Software Development Kit (SDK) for Surface have been downloaded, they added. Compare that with the 100,000 iPhone SDKs that were downloaded in the four days after its launch on March 6, 2008.. . . . . . . . . . Some observers question whether such a comparison is valid -- deployment of the $12,500 to $15,000 Surface tabletop PC is limited mostly to hotels, health clinics, banks and other customer-facing businesses looking for a new spin on the computerized kiosk. The Surface's April 2008 launch came amid a massive economic downturn that still has businesses shy about investing in new technology, leading to a chicken-and-egg situation where developers are holding off developing Surface apps until the economy improves. Brad Carpenter, general manager of Microsoft's Surface team, said he remains patient. "For interest to scale out takes time," he said in an interview at PDC this week. "There are more and more apps every day. So we feel like we are making progress." He pointed out that Microsoft now has 250 Surface partner companies, up from 180 six months ago and 60 a year ago. Similarly, the 5,000 SDK downloads is more than 3 times the 1,500 six months ago, and up sixteenfold from 300 a year ago. To accelerate development of applications for Surface, Microsoft announced that the Surface SDK is now available without charge to all developers. The SDK was previously available free only to members of the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN). Microsoft noted that the SDK includes a simulator that lets developers see how their programs would run on a conventional PC. It lets users plug in multiple USB mice to simulate how multi-touch technologies work. The SDK runs on Vista today, but Microsoft said the next version will be based on Windows 7. With adequate hardware, Windows 7 offers multi-touch capabilities. Carpenter declined to say when the next version will be available. Microsoft disclosed that it is also integrating the touch and object-recognition controls for Surface into the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) version 4. That version of the WPF graphics subsystem is due in 2010. WPF support should help developers more easily create Surface-enabled apps, Carpenter said, as well as make Surface applications run similarly to Windows 7 touch-enabled software. Carpenter said that the Surface is now available in 18 countries, including 16 in Europe. New customers include Hard Rock Cafe, Barclays Bank and mobile operator Vodafone, which has deployed Surfaces in 62 retail stores to provide customer service. Surface's stumbling blocks also continue to be its high price and bulkiness. Microsoft is working on a less-expensive version of Surface which will likely be thinner and wall-mountable, like an LCD television, said Carpenter. The technical difficulty would be packing cameras behind the touchscreen to enable object recognition capabilities, as well as the PC hardware -- an Intel Core 2 Duo processor mounted on a desktop motherboard. But, Carpenter said, "I definitely believe it's do-able." However, when asked whether future Surface versions would enable in-air gestures like the Xbox 360's Project Natal, Carpenter sounded less optimistic. "We are mostly focused on touch. In-air gestures is not something we are enabling yet," he said. Carpenter wouldn't talk about the cost of new Surface versions, but did say a new version should be coming soon. "Our goal was to have a consumer version of the Surface in two to four years. We are on track for that," he said.

All about Windows RT, the OS behind a Microsoft tablet

The Internet began boisterously buzzing last week that Microsoft will unveil its own tablet later today, perhaps one powered by Windows RT, the offshoot of Windows 8. On Monday, the speculation grew even more adamant, with the New York Times claiming that Microsoft sources told it that the company will indeed introduce its own tablet, and that the device would run Windows RT. While Microsoft has aggressively touted Windows 8 with scores of blog posts spelling out often picayune details of the upcoming operating system, the company has been relatively quiet about Windows RT, the all-mobile OS destined for tablets. How is Windows RT different from its better-known cousin? Why did Microsoft create two versions when Windows 8 also boasts some of the same features and relies, at least in part, on the same design motif and user interface (UI)? Questions, questions, questions. And because there's a growing chance Microsoft will make a landmark move -- it's never directly competed with its PC- or tablet-making partners -- we have some answers. Where do I buy Windows RT? You don't. Not separately, anyway, as Windows has been sold for decades. Windows RT is OEM-only -- OEM, for "original equipment manufacturer" is simply a computer maker, like Dell or Hewlett-Packard or Lenovo -- and the OS can't be purchased by individuals or Microsoft's corporate customers. Instead, it is pre-installed on devices, most likely tablets, although Microsoft has been trumpeting a claim that at some point, low-cost, power-miserly notebooks will also run the OS. The rumored tablet that Microsoft is to unveil later today would run Windows RT, making Microsoft its own OEM for the first time ever for a computer or computer-like device. So Windows RT is the same as Windows 8? No, it's not. They're two separate lines of Windows, and to delve into family history, cousins at best -- maybe once removed. Think of it this way: Windows RT is to Windows 8 as Apple's iOS is to OS X. The two within each pair clearly have a shared history, some shared code, but are distinct operating systems designed for different classes of devices, and run on completely different, and incompatible, processor platforms.. . . . . . . . . . Both OS X and Windows 8 run on Intel's x86/64 processor architecture, while iOS and Windows RT work only on devices with ARM-licensed CPUs. So I'm guessing that apps designed for Windows 8 -- or older version of Windows -- won't run in Windows RT. You are correct. Programs designed for Windows 8, the operating system that runs on devices powered by Intel's x86/64 processors, will not only not run on Windows RT, they're not even allowed to try. With a few exceptions..., because there are always exceptions. Analyst credits Surface sell-out to Microsoft swinging conservative Best Buy does what Microsoft won't: Takes Surface tablets in trade Deja vu all over again: Microsoft warns of Surface 2 sell-out Microsoft steers same strategic course in Surface do-over Dumping a Surface? eBay averages double the return of a buyback vendor Microsoft's Surface to be under revenue microscope Microsoft's most loyal users ask for Surface trade-in program Microsoft takes second swing at tablets with new Surface 2 lineup Microsoft sticks to guns, will unveil refreshed Surface on Sept. 23 Surface channel distribution tempo shows Microsoft lacks Plan B after sales debacle More on Surface