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Anonymous Takes Down India's Supreme Court and Congress Websites
Hacker collective Anonymous has announced it has taken down India's Supreme Court and All India Congress websites.
Archive for the ‘Education’ category
Google Upgrades Search with Knowledge Graph
On the heels of major revisions to Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Google is revamping its own. On Wednesday, the tech giant announced the launch of its Knowledge Graph, which is intended to help users quickly and easily discover new information. In a posting on the Google Official Blog, Senior Vice President of Engineering Amit Singhal wrote that, instead of primarily focusing on matching keywords to queries, the enhancement enables the search engine to use an intelligent model that “understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.” ‘Critical First Step’ Singhal said the Knowledge Graph “knows about” a variety of things, people, and places, such as landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art, and other subjects. The Graph’s current inventory of knowledge, he said, is only the “critical first step” toward creating the next generation of search, which understands the world in ways closer to how people do. The Graph is more than just calling up data in Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook, and other supplies of knowledge. It’s been populated with more than 500 million knowledge objects, with more than 3.5 billion facts about the relationships between those objects. The first step in this new kind of search, Google said, is understanding the differences in meaning for a given query. For instance, is the search for “Taj Mahal” about the monument or the musician? The Graph will give choices. Next, the Graph provides summaries containing key facts that a user might want about a particular subject. The example given by Singhal is Marie Curie. The Graph will deliver birth and death dates, as well as information on her education and scientific discoveries. There’s also knowledge about her relationship with other entities, such as her Nobel-prize-winning relatives. ‘People Also Search for’ The Graph’s ability to determine what is…
Anonymous denies it is behind The Pirate Bay DDoS attack
The hacktivist group Anonymous has denied allegations that it is behind the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against The Pirate Bay. Update: The Pirate Bay has confirmed the denial.
GM Drops Paid Facebook Ads, Will Still Use Free Pages
With some 900 million user accounts, Facebook would seem to be the perfect venue for advertisers. The question is, despite the amount of time people spend logged on, posting updates, chatting with friends and sharing pictures, how much does the advertising that has made Facebook a multibillion-dollar concern in a short eight years really move products? Not enough, the nation’s leading automobile manufacturer has apparently concluded. In its case, paid advertising on the world’s biggest social network hasn’t justified the cost. $10 Million Campaign The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that General Motors was pulling its ads for cars on Facebook, while continuing to use free pages to publicize its products. The paid advertising had reportedly amounted to $10 million. The decision may reflect a mindset of “why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” That could be troubling on some level for the Mark Zuckerberg-founded company as it heads toward an initial public stock offering Friday that hinges on future profitability and revenue growth. The company could be valued as high as $100 billion. “GM’s move is certainly likely to give other advertisers pause, especially given the company’s heft, its reputation for advertising savvy and its remarkable return from the grave,” Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, told us. “There have also been numerous similar situations in the past, where an initially hot Internet property cooled swiftly — in some cases, by Antarctic proportions — when exposed to close scrutiny.” One example, King said, was Second Life, the virtual world created by Linden Research in 2003 that allows users to interact through avatars. Virtual Showrooms Didn’t Pay “At one point, the site’s fast growth and its popularity among the technology elite made it a go-to venue for numerous vendors and manufacturers, many of which built virtual ‘showrooms’ to market and advertise their goods,” King…
Senate Staff To Probe Windows RT Antitrust Claim
Senate Judiciary Committee staff have launched a preliminary probe into whether Windows RT, the coming version of Windows 8 for ARM processors, is anticompetitive because it gives preferential treatment to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser. Mozilla, maker of the Firefox Web browser, alleged last week that Microsoft intentionally is building advantages for IE into Windows RT over other browsers. An aide to Judiciary antitrust subcommittee Chairman Herb Kohl, D-Wis., told reporters that Mozilla’s charges will be examined by subcommittee staff. The initial efforts will be exploratory rather than a full-blown official inquiry involving hearings, the aide said. Microsoft refuses to give Mozilla and other third-party software developers access to the requisite APIs for building browsers that can fully access Windows RT’s complete set of capabilities when running in Metro mode. The rival browser maker claims that this violates a 2006 antitrust settlement between Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Justice. Google is also wary concerning how Microsoft’s Windows RT strategy may affect Google’s Chrome browser. “We share the concerns Mozilla has raised regarding the Windows 8 environment restricting user choice and innovation,” a Google spokesperson said in an e-mail. Locking Out Competitors Google noted that it has always welcomed innovation in the browser space across all platforms and strongly believes that having great competitors makes everyone work harder. “In the end, consumers and developers benefit the most from robust competition,” Google’s spokesperson said. However, that won’t happen if Microsoft succeeds in locking out competing browsers when it comes to Windows running on mobile computing devices such as laptops as well as media tablets equipped with ARM-based chips. “Microsoft made legally binding commitments around antitrust [which doesn't] go away because Microsoft wishes them away,” said Asa Dotzler, the community coordinator for Firefox marketing projects. “None of the commitments talk about hardware — tablet or laptop, ARM or x86…
Not guilty plea in NYC Anonymous hacking case
A Chicago man facing computer hacking charges in a federal investigation targeting the worldwide group Anonymous is entertaining himself behind bars the old fashioned way: by reading books.