Our Google Announcement

Google have recently announced that they are also entering the web-font market – with the same free, hosted model as ours.

Although we have put 100′s of hours into the design, development and readying of 150+ fonts (x4 formats = 600!), with only weeks before font-face.com was ready to go live, we have decided to bow out now. A bitter blow to the team.

Our decision has not been easy. Although we feel we would offer a better service, we would after all be competing with Google. A massive might to compete with.

The last thing we would want is to host fonts for everyone to link to, only to at some point (after google have beaten us) be forced to turn them off – destroying your website designs.

So as not do disappoint you in the future, we have decided to stop now. Have no fear though – we will be back! We are hatching a new plan for font-face.com – stay tuned!

font-face.com will still be the home of everything font-face, just not in the original way it was intended.

Thanks

The font-face.com Team x x

My first reaction was “Dang. I was so looking forward to this service. Darn Google. I have only just recently received requests from google to donate fonts to a new project Font Directory. It will probably take forever”.

The very next day, today, I discovered that Google has come out with Font Previewer that makes adding  new fonts to your site as simple as copy/pasting a few lines of code.

Google added an option to preview the fonts from the Google Font Directory. Before embedding the code, you can edit the sample text, change text size and spacing, capitalize the text, add underlines and shadows.

“The Google Font Directory lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Font API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and are served by Google servers,” explains Google.

Amazon will soon release it’s competition for Barnes and Noble’s  Nook WiFi version. The newest Kindle costs only $139 ($10 less than the Noook WiFi) and is an appeal to those who do  casual reading.

Rather than accessing books through a cellphone network like Kindles do the Kindle Wi-Fi will use the less expensive wireless internet to download books and magazines and blogs. I assume that, like the nook, you can still hook up to various hotspots to download books when away from home.

According to engadget, who of course, actually got their hands on a model:

The new handheld — slated to be released on August 27th — is 21 percent smaller and 15 percent lighter than the previous model, has a 20 percent faster refresh rate on its E Ink (yep, still E Ink) screen, and will now come in two colors (graphite, like its big brother the DX, and the original white). In addition to the color changes, there will be two radio configurations available: a $139 WiFi only version, and a $189 3G version (utilizing AT&T’s network, just like the last model). The screen will remain the same 6-inch size as the last two Kindles, though the company claims page turns are faster and contrast is improved. The internal storage on the device has been cranked to 4GB, and the battery life is now rated at a month with no wireless, and 10 days with wireless switched on. The company also announced plans for a UK-localized version at £109 and £149, respectively, as well as a UK e-book store.

Other noticeable upgrades to the Kindle have been added. The keyboard and five-way controls have been streamlined and altered slightly. The rocker is now more compact and flush with the device, and the side buttons have been modified in length to emphasize the forward paddles, while the back buttons have been downsized. Software wise, there are some interesting new features, the most notable being the inclusion of an “experimental” Webkit-based browser. of course Nook beat them to these things so it was expected that Kindle would roll out these upgrades in their newest e-reader.

1. NEW LOOK for TABS

-New Tab Location

Tabs are given top visual priority for more efficient and intuitive browsing.

-Switch to Tab

Navigate more easily by switching to open tabs from your Awesome Bar.

-Apps Tab

Take sites you always keep open—like Web mail–off your tab bar and give them a permanent home in your browser.

Apple on Tuesday released new iMacs, adding faster processors and new graphics cards. The company also introduced what it calls the Magic Trackpad, allowing users to have the same type of gesture control that they use on the iPhone and iPad.

The iMacs now use Intel’s newest processors, the Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7. David Moody, Apple’s vice president of worldwide Mac product marketing, told us that the processors provide up to a 50 percent increase in processing power over the previous generation.

The 21.5-inch iMac starts with a 3.06GHz i3 processor and the ATI Radeon HD 4670 discrete graphics with 256MB GDDR3. The high-end 27-inch 2560×1440 resolution iMac comes with a 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor and ATI Radeon HD 5750 discrete graphics with 1GB GDDR5, and costs $1,999.

There are build-to-order options available, including a 2.93GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, a 2TB hard drive, 256GB solid-state drive (SSD), and up to 16GB of RAM.

Apple said the SD slot on the iMac now supports the SDXC format, giving it access to even larger storage cards.

The outside of the iMac remains unchanged. “It’s a real simple approach that provides a complete computing experience. Those are the things that really set the iMac apart,” said Moody.

Presto! Magic Trackpad

In addition to the iMac, Apple also introduced the Magic Trackpad, a new peripheral intended to bring the power of gestures to the Mac.

Users of the iPhone and iPad are already accustomed to making gestures with their fingers on the screens of the devices–swiping, pinching to zoom a photo, scrolling, and so on. The Magic Trackpad allows the same action on the Mac’s larger screen.

The Magic Trackpad is a Bluetooth device that has over four months of battery life and costs $69. Apple is also selling a rechargeable battery pack for $29 that comes with six batteries and will let users change out the batteries in Bluetooth devices like the Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad, and keyboard.

Moody said the batteries were engineered to have a longer shelf life than other rechargeable batteries on the market.

Compared to older iMacs

Apple’s last-generation iMac came in two screen sizes: 21.5-inch and 27-inch. There were a variety of options available for the for each of the four available iMac models.

The 21.5-inch iMacs came with a 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, 1920 x 1080 resolution, and a SuperDrive. The low-end model came with a 500GB hard drive and the Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics card, while the midrange model had the ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics with 256MB and a 1TB hard drive. These iMacs cost $1,199 and $1,499, respectively.

The 27-inch iMac came with a 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2560 x 1440 resolution, 4GB of RAM, 1TB hard drive and a SuperDrive. This model also came with the ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics with 256MB. This iMac was priced at $1,699.

The high-end iMac was a quad-core that had a 2.66GHz Intel Core i5 processor. It also had 2560×1440 resolution, 4GB RAM, 1TB hard drive, a SuperDrive and the ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics with 512MB. This high-end iMac cost $1,999.

This wouldn’t be the first time something like this happened. One person got a 70 inch TV in their bag of crap, and another got almost a ton of car wax in their “bag” of crap. Their videos are below, from YouTube.

Woot says that they don’t know anything about how the envelope got there. It’s easy to believe them, since this is a very poor business model. What would you do?

I was able to score a bag of crap on woot.com during the last woot-off. Yay, right?

It arrived yesterday and I gleefully opened it up. I got some pretty good crap this time — mostly the usual stuff, and one thing that wasn’t so usual. It was an envelope with $609 in cash, mostly $20′s, one $5 bill and two $2 bills. You could have knocked me over with a feather! I was shaking. Instead of Bag of Crap, I got Bag of Cash. I know this is hard to believe, but I’m not kidding and I’m not making this up.

Now, obviously this is a mistake. For one thing, the envelope had been folded up like it was in someone’s pocket and I knew Woot isn’t in the habit of sending out cash. The envelope has writing on it, it says “For _____.” This money is someone’s personal property and not sent from woot itself.

I know some people would think “Just KEEP IT” — but I could not sleep at night knowing I had taken someone’s money that didn’t belong to me.

So I wrote to customer service about an hour after receiving the package and asked them about it. I told them that if some poor woot warehouse worker missing their cash, I’d happily return it if they identified who or what the money was for as written on the outside of the envelope.

Woot disavows any knowledge of the money, and while they haven’t out and out called me a liar, it’s not hard to read between the lines.

Today I received a short, curt reply from woot customer service, “Woot does not/would not send out cash in a Bowl of Cereal. Evan”

I received a reply on the forum from a moderator a bit later who said, “Ok, looked into it and have been told that our guy has said our response is the only comment we want to make on the subject, i.e.: we do not send out money at all and this is not from us. No one in the warehouse/anywhere is missing any cash and we have no idea why there would be money in your Bowl of Cereal if indeed there was as we did not put it there.”

And by “If indeed there was” we mean “we think you are lying.”

I don’t think anyone purposefully put it there, I think it was an accident of some kind. I have absolutely no reason to lie, but I can see how they would be skeptical. I would be too if it hadn’t happened to ME. All I can say is that this absolutely not a hoax; I honestly received $609 in cash in my Bag of Crap box that does not belong to me. I don’t know how it happened, I just know I got it.

My questions:

Regardless if they (or anyone) believes me or not, I have elected to wait 30 days just in case someone at Woot discovers they are indeed missing money. Is that all I’m legally/morally required to do? Is that the appropriate length of time to wait? Is there anything else I could/should do to try to discover the owner? The “For _______” on the outside of the envelope isn’t enough information to go on, but I’m not publishing that part in case someone come forward in the next 30 days. I live in California if that matters.

And hey, if it turns out I that I get to keep the money, I’m totally buying myself a new TV with some of it (my current TV is almost 20 years old) and putting the rest into savings.

Thanks for any advice.

What do you think that she should do?  Take our poll and let us know what you think.

These two technology giants already compete to win contracts from private businesses as well as state and local governments by attracting customers who hope to cut costs by switching to Web-based software from programs installed on their own computers.

Now Google and Microsoft are vying to take over the job of providing email to the General Services Administration, the U.S. agency that oversees government procurement and manages federal property.

The contract’s size is substantial incentive enough––15,000 + employee email accounts. However, according to the Wall Street Journal who notes that the bidding is being closely watched because the GSA assists in shaping how other agencies acquire new technology. “The GSA is in a unique position as an influencer,” says Curt Kolcun, vice president of Microsoft’s public-sector business.

Security is perhaps the biggest factor in deciding whether or not to adopt cloud mail.The cloud-based vendors, are responsible for storing and securing personal and confidential information for its users.

On Thursday the GSA certified that Google’s email and word-processing service, known as Google Apps, meets security requirements to qualify for use by the agency, a GSA spokeswoman said.

Microsoft says it is close to obtaining the same certification for a Web-based version of Exchange, a widely used program for managing email that most organizations run on their own server systems.

As an aside, the GSA now uses Lotus Notes from International Business Machines and says it  expects to award the new contract before the end of this fiscal year.it does not put a dollar amount on this contract.

More than 90% of the U.S. Federal Government uses Microsoft Exchange for email at present. One of the complaints of email users in the past has been the limited email space offered them on their company servers. The cloud solution seems, at least  at this time to offer less storage space constraint. If Goolge attains this contract it could be a coup if the GSA ‘s example influence reaches some of these govenment agencies as well.

We reported months ago that the group The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF )acts as the champions of tech users. Its recent goals include going to battle for us against the evil arch enemies of fair use. Well the EFF
prevailed this time when it petitioned the Copyright Office and the Library of congress on our behalf.

Today, in a historical move, the Library of Congress released a statement that floored us all but I will bet it especially hit Apple.

SInce 1998, The Digital Millenium Copyright Act  has made it illegal for us to crack the DRM placed on most all of our digitized media . It has a stipulation that it be reviewed every three years but has changed little over the past twelve. In the past very limited exemptions have been made but today, the 6 exemptions added are monumental. Here they are in a nutshell:

1.We can now rip your own, legally owned DVDs. Now everyone (not just film and media studies majors!) has the right to break DRM for the purposes of “short” use in both “documentary filmmaking” and original “noncommercial videos.” For now we still can’t appropriate the whole film. As long as we aren’t charging money for it or profiting off it, it’s considered noncommercial.

2. We may now jailbreak our iphones-legally! Sorry Apple. How did this get through? Well, you see, computer code is classified as a literary work under copyright law, and, as the Library of Congress pointed out, jailbroken firmware alters “fewer than 50 bytes of code out of more than 8 million bytes, or approximately 1/160,000 of the copyrighted work as a whole,” So Apple, your claims of infringement of copyright law are a fail.

3. Sorry, again Apple and AT&T. We can now legally unlock our phones to be used on another network. (Even though Apple will still keep putting blocking software on your iPhones against jailbreakers).

4. When we get a little curious(and who doesn’t from time to time), we now have the right to crack video or computer game DRM (such as SecuROM) for the purposes of research or “investigation.”

5. We are now able to bypass software protected by a hardware dongle that is either broken or no longer manufactured.

6. We can crack the DRM on encrypted eBooks to have the text read aloud, even if this function is explicitly prohibited by copy protection.

So Hurray for the decisions made today by the Library of Congress. In two more years they will meet again to review DRM restrictions and perhaps give us more and better exemptions in the future.

Let us know what you think about this breakthrough!

Alexander Yusupov may get Blogetery's data returned to him, but he is also looking for a lawyer. (Credit: Lora Vertue)

Blogetery.com, a small blogging platform based in Toronto, was abruptly shut down on July 9 by Burst.net, its Web host, after FBI agents alleged Blogetery was home to links that led to bomb-making tips and the names of Americans targeted for assassination by al-Qaeda. Joe Marr, Burst.net’s chief technology officer, said Wednesday that the company is considering its options and there’s a chance executives there could hand over a copy of most of the information found on Blogetery’s server–it won’t be returning anything created by al-Qaeda. That means the service’s users could see their blogs again. What they won’t see is Burst.net hosting Blogetery in the future, said Marr. That relationship is severed.

After the FBI requested information about Blogetery, Scranton, Pa.-based Burst.net cut off Internet access for the service. The decision to shut down Blogeter was made due to its history of violating Burst.net’s terms of service, Marr said. He added that the blogging platform failed to respond fast enough to “abuse claims” on two of five occasions in the past. This led to a prior suspension, Marr said.

Burst.net considers an abuse to be material banned by the TOS, which can include pirated music or movie files, child pornography, as well as primers on how to blow people up.

All Burst.net clients are responsible for removing TOS violations within 24 hours of notification. If not, a customer risks a fine followed by a suspension. Those with multiple offenses can have their service terminated, according to Marr. He added that most customers who oversee similar operations as Blogetery’s employ multiple people to monitor blogs and they typically respond within the allotted time. Alexander Yusupov, Blogetery’s owner and sole employee, said in an interview with CNET that he “moderated the blogs on my server every day.” But he also acknowledged in a message board post last week that he wasn’t aware his site had been taken offline by Burst.net until two days later (So, how closely could he have been watching?). Yusupov, a 34-year-old Canadian citizen, has not been accused of any wrongdoing by the FBI.

“You may wish on your own to terminate the links.”

–FBI to Burst.net

The case underscores how difficult it is for authorities to protect free speech on the Web at the same time they fight terrorism. It also raises questions about the risks involved when trusting third-party service providers with data. From Burst.net’s point of view, if Blogetery users don’t get their data back, the person responsible is the owner.

Not so fast, says Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for tech companies and Internet users. Opsahl notes that regardless of whether Yusupov was diligent enough in maintaining his service, it’s unfair to penalize thousands of Blogetery users. They’re innocent.

“It would be a shame and unfair to all the people using Blogetery for ordinary blogging services,” Opsahl said.

Opsahl wants to know what part, if any, the FBI played in the shut down of Blogetery. Initially, Burst.net informed Yusupov and members of the media that it cut off Blogetery’s service at the request of law enforcement. Marr says now that the employee who issued that statement erred and the FBI had nothing to do with it. What Opsahl worries about is the FBI’s request for information to Burst.net.

In what are known as exigent letters or requests for voluntary information, the FBI has the authority under the Patriot Act to ask for reports from Internet service providers without a court order, but only when agents believe American lives are at risk.

The FBI, however, has an extensive history of misusing these requests, records show. The Justice Department Inspector General said in January that an audit of the FBI showed the agency had worked for years with ISPs to violate federal wiretapping laws. On numerous occasions the FBI asked ISPs for reports on U.S. citizens and journalists when no legitimate risk to human life existed. An FBI spokesman did not respond to an interview request.

“The FBI’s use of exigent letters became so casual, routine and unsupervised that employees of…communication service providers told us that they, the company employees, sometimes generated the exigent letters for (FBI) personnel to sign and return,” the inspector general reported.

Even if the FBI’s relationship with Burst.net was nowhere near as cozy, Opsahl said a sentence the FBI includes in its written requests to ISPs in these situations could be perceived as a subtle prompt to shut down sites. The FBI tells ISPs: “You may wish on your own to terminate the links.”

Meanwhile, Yusupov said he’s preparing to defend himself. He said he’s looking for a copyright and Internet attorney. He denies ever seeing any terrorist content on his platform.

So, how does he think Burst.net should have handled the situation?

“The normal practice is to suspend the server and contact the owner to resolve the situation,” Yusupov said. “Not simply ‘kill’ the service without any prior warning or notification.”

Typically in software development, there comes a point when programmers have to turn their attention from adding the fun new technology to making sure what’s going to ship actually works. This point, called the code freeze, just happened for Chrome’s sixth “milestone.”

Google believes in continuously updating its browser, and given its steady encroachment on the turf of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox and its rapid ascension beyond Opera and Apple’s Safari, it’s hard to argue too hard with the approach. In June, Chrome climbed to 7.2 percent of worldwide browser usage from to 7.0 percent in May.

When trains leave the station frequently, you don’t have to wait as long to catch one. But you still have to wait if you miss a train, and that’s what’s happened to some Chrome features.

Printing support has been one of Chrome’s relatively weak points compared to other browsers that have been in the market for years longer, but Google’s been working to catch up. Indeed, Chrome slipped a notch when an earlier change broke one feature, the ability to print only a selected portion of text.

For Chrome users on Windows, print selection is fixed in version 6. But for Mac and Linux users, print selection was bumped back to Chrome 7 because “printing is being reworked.”

Print preview, a longstanding feature request, is getting closer. Although it was punted out of Chrome 6, work is under way…

“UX [user experience] mocks for print preview have been created and approved internally. Implementation is in progress. Will not make M6 [Chrome milestone, or version, 6]…Targeting M7 now,” according to the issue tracker.

Some features set for delivery include:

• Extensions sync, so extensions on one machine are the same as on another used by the same person.

• A bug fix to speed up display of some Scalable Vector Graphics, an older graphics format seeing new life with efforts to improve Web standards.

• A consolidated menu button that merges Chrome’s two earlier tool and page buttons into a single button.

• Synchronization of browsing history across multiple browsers so that, for example, Web pages visited once can be more easily revisited.

• Background image resampling to take better advantage of multicore processors and speed up page rendering when resizing images.

What’s not inside Chrome 6?

Also on many wish lists is the ability to put tabs along the side of the browser rather than across the top. This interface style devotes more vertical real estate to the job of showing a Web page while using the relatively abundant horizontal space of wide-screen displays.

But “side tabs” were pushed back to Chrome’s 7. Again, though, the feature is under development. “You can try out side tabs on Windows by way of–enable-vertical-tabs [an extra command option that must be invoked when Chrome is launched], right-click on a tab and choose ‘Use side tabs.’ On Chrome OS go into the experimental menu,” the issue tracker said.

Next on the list of bumped features slipping from version 6 to 7 is support for full-screen HTML5 video. The headline feature of the new version of Hypertext Markup Language is video that’s built into Web pages themselves rather than relying on a plug-in such as Adobe Systems’ Flash, and Google hopes to break the HTML5 video logjam with its WebM technology.

But Chrome can’t yet play HTML5 video in a full-screen mode, a popular option for immersive entertainment. One complication with the user interface: avoiding something that enable password-stealing interface. Here work has begun, but “there are many, many more patches” to be applied to Chrome before it’s done, according to the tracker.

One of Google’s most ambitious efforts to make the Web a more powerful foundation for applications is a project called Native Client that lets programs downloaded from the Web run securely and fast on a computer. Key to Native Client, or NaCl for short, is a process called sandboxing that restricts executing programs to a walled-off region of memory.

But Native Client apparently won’t make Chrome 6 unless people specifically enable it with the present “–enable-nacl” launch option. One issue is making sure the sandbox works well not just on Mac OS X 10.6, but the older 10.5 as well.

“The new code allows for removal of the hole in the sandbox on Mac OS X 10.6. However, the hole is still required on 10.5. I am currently in the process of debugging everything on 10.5,” according to an issue tracker post Tuesday. “I believe the decision was made to keep Native Client behind the –enable-nacl flag for M6. Since the M6 deadline was yesterday, I’m moving this issue out to M7.”

Apple's earnings are the highest ever, surpassing 15.7 billion dollars in revenue for the third quarter.

Propelled by sales of the iPhone and iPad, Apple earned $3.25 billion in profit on $15.7 billion in revenue, its highest quarterly revenue ever.

The company reported its fiscal third-quarter results on Tuesday. Its reported earnings for the quarter represent an 88 percent increase in revenue over the same quarter a year ago, when Apple recorded revenue of $8.34 billion. The $15.7 billion figure is also on the high side of what Wall Street had been expecting: Analysts were anticipating between $13.82 billion and $15.74 billion in revenue, and earnings between $2.65 and $3.74 per share. Apple had offered a typically conservative forecast of third-quarter 2010 revenues between $13 billion and $13.4 billion, and earnings per share between $2.28 and $2.39.

Apple said it sold 3.27 million iPads during the quarter, the first quarter they were on sale. It also sold 3.47 million Macs, a 33 percent increase over a year ago, and 8.4 million iPhones, or 61 percent more than a year ago. iPod sales were down again–Apple sold 9.41 million during the third quarter, 8 percent fewer than a year ago.

“It was a phenomenal quarter that exceeded our expectations all around, including the most successful product launch in Apple’s history, with iPhone 4,” CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement.

The record-breaking earnings for Apple came at a fortuitous time, as Apple has been trying to shift the focus from the iPhone 4′s antenna-related issues to the successful sales of the device.

Jobs also hinted that there would be more new devices in store between now and December, saying, “We have amazing new products still to come this year.”

The iPad is off to a successful start: there are 3.2 million iPads in 10 countries, bringing in $2.17 billion in revenue both from iPads and related accessories, CFO Peter Oppenheimer said during the analyst call Tuesday afternoon. He declined to disclose how many 3G models versus Wi-Fi only models of the iPad the company has sold.

Apple is still experiencing very high demand for the iPad and the iPhone, according to COO Tim Cook.

“Both (the iPad) and the iPhone 4, we had backlogged at end of last quarter…We are selling both of those products as fast as we can make them. We are still quoting longer lead times than we’d like,” he said. “In the scheme of things, it’s a good problem to have.”

iPhone 4 was only on sale for three days before the quarter ended on June 27. Apple announced at the time it had sold 1.7 million during that period. On Friday at a special press conference called to clear the air on iPhone 4′s antenna problems, Jobs said Apple has sold 3 million iPhone 4s to date.

On Tuesday, Cook indicated that the company had not seen any drop-off in demand for the iPhone since news spread about potential problems with the device when held in a way that blocks its antenna. “We’re selling every unit we can make,” he said.

He added that Apple is still ramping up production on the iPhone 4, and there’s nothing preventing the company from eventually catching up to demand.

The 3.47 million Mac sales were Apple’s highest ever for a quarter. The company’s 33 percent growth indicates that the iPad is not noticeably cannibalizing Mac sales.

This is a screenshot of what Blogetry used to look like before its webhost, Burst.net, took the server down. Click to enlarge. Submitted / webhostingsecretrevealed.com

Did a Web hosting company go too far when it terminated service to Blogetery, a free blogging platform that authorities allege was being used by al-Qaeda to recruit and pass information, including names of Americans targeted for assassination?

That’s the opinion of some Internet watchdog groups and the service’s proprietor. On Tuesday, The New York Times interviewed Alexander Yusupov, who told the paper he is Blogetery’s owner and sole employee.

Over the weekend, news outlets had begun reporting that the blogging platform had closed. Blogetery had claimed to service more than 70,000 blogs, although that number is now being disputed by Burst.net and others.

Yusupov, who has apparently not been accused of any wrongdoing himself, told the Times that executives from Burst.net, Blogetery’s Web host, didn’t show him any documentation to prove the FBI’s claims. “They just took it down,” he said.

And when the service was taken down, other people who had blogged via Blogetery, and were presumably unconnected to the al-Qaeda, lost their pages. Yusupov told the Times that while he backed up some of the information, some users’ materials are gone forever.

Joe Marr, Burst.net’s chief technology officer, made no apologies in an interview on Monday. Marr acknowledged that an employee goofed when the person originally informed Yusupov and members of the media that the FBI had ordered Blogetery be shut down. The FBI had nothing to do with it, Marr said. Blogetery was cut off because it hosted material that violated its terms of service.

Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Times: the “tragedy is that thousands of blogs will be taken offline for no good reason.”

What do you think?  Should this have been handled in a different way, or do you feel that Burst.net had every right to tear down the entire website?  Let us know in the comments below.

There will likely be a lot of talk about Facebook’s roots as a phenomenon among college students in U.S. universities and how, thanks to its incremental spread through schools and offices and communities, there are now half a billion people that have joined. But, looking to the future: who will the next half billion Facebook users be?

“We should expect that mainstream adoption of Facebook users in countries outside of the North America will continue to grow,” Altimeter Group analyst Jeremiah Owyang said. “Facebook even threatens domination in niche countries where social networks at a regional level are present.”

That’s been one of Facebook’s biggest growth obstacles overseas: the fact that while it was spreading in the U.S., other social networks were growing fast in other countries. In many countries overseas, Facebook didn’t start to catch on until it was available in the native language, and Facebook’s translations rolled out relatively slowly. These started about two and a half years ago with a handful of European languages.

“Penetration (of Facebook into regional Internet markets) is highest in North America, at 69 percent, and Middle East-Africa, at 67 percent, and still pretty high in Latin America (58 percent) and Europe (57 percent),” explained Andrew Lipsman, senior director of industry analysis at traffic firm ComScore. “But there is still a lot of room for growth in Asia-Pacific, which currently has just 17 percent market penetration.”

In Facebook’s original U.S. market, reports have started to indicate that growth may be plateauing, particularly among young adults. But there are some surprisingly big, well-connected countries where Facebook still has a lot of work to do. Take a country like Germany, where Facebook has only 39 percent market penetration. A regional social network called StudiVZ has proven a formidable rival to Facebook, and German authorities’ relative hostility toward Facebook’s very U.S.-grown privacy policies may make things tougher. Then there’s Brazil, where ComScore charts Facebook’s market penetration at just over 22 percent; the Google-owned social network Orkut never caught on in the U.S., but Brazilians love it, and still haven’t been completely sold on Facebook as a result.

Some of the countries that ComScore has flagged as potential areas for growth–possibly in tune with strategic efforts on Facebook’s part–are Japan, with a 7 percent market penetration; Russia, with 6 percent; and South Korea, with 8 percent. There’s also China, where government censors have cracked down on access to Facebook along with other social-networking sites.

We’re starting to see some of the growth strategies in place already. Earlier this month, Facebook inked a deal with MOL Global, the Malaysian e-commerce company that owns would-be social-net rival Friendster, to make its Credits virtual currency more accessible in some Southeast Asian countries.

“There is definitely a path to a billion users for Facebook, but how long it takes will depend a great deal on its strategy to spur adoption in some of the larger, low-penetration markets,” Lipsman said Wednesday. “Making a push in India right now is an example of going after what is still relatively low-hanging fruit as a large and growing market with room for continued penetration that does not have significant cultural barrier to adoption.”

Get it while it’s hot, because this sneaky tethering iPhone app is certain to be yanked out of the App Store  very, very soon.

A new app, Handy Light, seems harmless enough: it turns your iPhone into a flashlight with 5 different color settings. On the surface, it’s just a simple $0.99 app.

Under the hood though, the app is actually a SOCKS Proxy tethering app, capable of turning your iPhone into an Internet tethering device. It takes a few minutes to set up, but after you’ve followed the instructions in the YouTube  video above, you will be tethering like a pro without having to pay AT&T any monthly fees.

Of course, Apple and AT&T might not be too thrilled with you. In any case, we’re pretty sure that this app is going to be out of the app store momentarily.

An iPhone 4 Bumper Case in Green

In response to the uproar over spotty reception for new iPhone 4, Apple CEO Steve Jobs spoke Friday to defend the company’s handling of the matter.

One takeaway: Buyers of the iPhone 4 will be getting free cases to help prevent users’ grip on the phone from weakening the signals carrying conversations. Jobs said Apple cannot make enough of the bumpers that some people have been buying, so it is working with third parties to get the cases for users.

If you’re still not happy, Jobs said, “you can bring your iPhone back within 30 days for a full refund.”

Apple was holding an invite-only press conference to talk about its fast-selling iPhone, which has also been the most controversial, given what many believe to be an engineering flaw that leaves its users with dropped calls.

“We’re not perfect, phones aren’t perfect. But we want to make all our users happy,” Jobs said.

Jobs said Apple can’t make enough bumpers for of all 3 million iPhone 4 customers, so it’s contracting with third-party manufacturers and will offer customers a choice of cases.

Apple plans to continue offering these free cases until September 30, at which point Apple will re-evaluate whether or not that’s still the best solution. Jobs admitted that Apple’s internal iPhone 4 testing showed the phone dropped more calls than the iPhone 3GS, but said the number of additional dropped calls was extremely small and that competitive smartphones such as the BlackBerry and the Droid suffer from similar problems.

Apple has a website dedicated to this issue at http://www.apple.com/antenna/.

Several Microsoft enthusiast sites have posted what appear to be some early details on the next version of Microsoft’s  operating system.

On his Microsoft Journal Web site, Francisco Martin Garcia posted several slides stamped “Microsoft Confidential” that discuss key features of the still hush-hush operating system, including a focus on facial recognition as a means of authentication as well as improving boot-up times. The goal, according to the information, is that slates and laptops would be able to resume from sleep in less than a second.

The slides also suggest that the new operating system will support features such as 3D displays, wireless connection to televisions, as well as for things like USB 3.0 and Bluetooth 3.0.
Among the other features said to be under consideration for Windows 8 is an ambient light feature that would allow the display to automatically adjust to changes in lighting. Microsoft is also said to be considering a new mechanism for resetting a PC to its default state, while keeping a user’s files, settings, and applications.
Another enthusiast site, Microsoft Kitchen, has a bunch more slides, including a discussion of Apple; plans to focus on slates, laptops, and all-in-ones; as well as a focus on improved energy efficiency. Many of those slides are also dated April 20, 2010.
The software maker has not talked about its plans beyond Windows 7. Microsoft has said that it is working on a minor “service pack” update to Windows 7 and will start testing it next month. That update, however, consists largely of bug fixes and doesn’t add significant features. Much of the company’s plans for this year center around touting the popularity of Windows 7 and pitching updates being made to the free, downloadable Windows Live Essentials programs, including Photo Gallery and Movie Maker. The company issued a public beta version of the updated Essentials tools last week, also noting that Microsoft has now sold 150 million Windows 7 licenses.
The slides do appear to continue along some of the messaging themes that Microsoft started with Windows 7, both in terms of how it markets Windows to consumers as well as its efforts to improve collaboration with PC makers. The slides make reference to designing Windows 8 with the goal that PC makers will have more opportunities to make their systems unique.

Microsoft has been holding a regular series of meetings, known as forums, with hardware makers to improve relations post-Windows Vista. Several computer makers said there were significant improvements in communication during both the design and testing of Windows 7.

The Microsoft Journal document also makes reference to Forum II, while the April Microsoft Kitchen documents have Forum II highlighted, suggesting that perhaps they came from that meeting with computer makers. There is also reference to a Forum I with a December date. Future events are listed as to be determined in the slides.

Sony pointed to a Web page that contains an official statement on the problem (though it doesn’t use the word “recall”) and lists the model numbers affected by the flaw. The company is advising customers to download the software update to fix the issue.

An iOS 4.0.1 software fix is in the works and may arrive as early as Monday, according to AppleInsider. Users of Apple’s tech support forums reported seeing comments from Apple reps confirming that an iOS 4.0.1 update fix would ship early this week, though those comments and related discussions have since been removed.

When the iPhone launched, people began complaining about reception issues on the iPhone when holding it in their left hand.  Issues included dropped calls ad failed internet browsing.

Late Thursday, Apple acknowledged the issue but explained it as a fact of life for every wireless phone. The company suggested that iPhone 4 users either buy a case or hold the phone a different way, which of course further upset customers who had already paid $199 or $299 for one of the new models. Apple reported on Monday that it sold 1.7 million iPhone 4 units in the first three days.

Though users may have been caught by surprise, some experts had already foreseen the antenna issue. Two weeks before the iPhone 4′s debut, Gert Frolund Pedersen, an antenna expert and professor at Aalborg University in Denmark, warned about the placement of the antenna on the iPhone 4.

In an interview with a Danish IT publication (and roughly translated by Google Translate), Pederson said the antenna’s design provides a special challenge because a portion of it will be affected by the user’s hand. He explained that human tissue has an inhibitory effect on the antenna, rendering it less efficient, and suggested that a better design would employ two antennae, one of which could take over for the other.

Some debate has also centered on whether the signal loss is due more to hardware or software design. Users of the iPhone 3G ran into reception issues when that phone hit the market two years ago. And iPhone 3GS owners also reported signal loss after upgrading to iOS 4. As a result, the opinion seems to be that the trouble lies in both the hardware and software. If that’s the case, then an iOS 4.0.1 bug fix may not eliminate the problem but could certainly alleviate it.

Have you looked at your Video on your web site?

Engadget has 20 screen shots from Apple’s own video showing everyone holding this phone in the bottom left corner.