Microsoft’s new social networking site Socl

Microsoft’s new social networking site Socl

We can see a rise in the social networking site after the success and liking of Facebook. There have been many websites in the past too but not all have been able to cope up and interest the users.

Recently Microsoft had also asked The Verge to have an experience of its new social networking site called Socl which is planned to be launched soon. It has also provided a small review of the new site which we are also discussing below.

The Socl has a plain and three column UI design which consists of basic navigation options on the left panel. The middle section comprises of the news feed and the section that asks “what are you searching for”. You can update your status or even search for a content from there which will be automatically updated as your update too.

The search is powered by its very own Microsoft Bing search engine. Your friends would also be able to comment, like or tag your search. Tagging your update or comment will put it in your tag list from where you would be able to access it later.

Socl also includes a video party feature, complete with chat, for watching YouTube clips together. It is designed using the HTML5 so it won’t have to switch to this technology when Flash is discontinued. The right side of the website contains invites and video party features.

Microsoft is planning to launch it soon, however nothing can be said about the exact date as of now. So how much, are you waiting for it?

Three Anonymous hackers busted in Spain

Three Anonymous hackers busted in Spain

Three suspected members of the Anonymous hacking group have been arrested in Spain. The trio are said to have been involved in co-ordinating the group’s activity in that country. The arrests were made simultaneously in three Spanish cities – Barcelona, Valencia and Almeria. Anonymous has claimed responsibility for attacks on Sony, Spanish banks and co-ordinated action in defence of whistle-blowing site Wikileaks. A statement from the Spanish national police force said that a computer seized in the home of one person it arrested was used in the hacks. The arrests were the culmination of an investigation that began in October 2010. It involved Spanish cyber police combing through millions of lines of chat logs to identify who was behind the group’s activities.

Some of the attacks made by Anonymous members used a web-based tool called Loic to bombard target sites with data. The websites of PayPal, Mastercard and Amazon were all targeted using this tool. It seems that Loic did a poor job of hiding the identity of the people using it. It is believed that some police forces have already moved against the group based on this information. Arrests have been made in the US, UK and Holland of Anonymous members, prior to the raids in Spain. Anonymous grew out of the online picture sharing site 4Chan and describes itself as a group of concerned internet citizens. As well as attacking sites that it perceives as not supporting Wikileaks, the loosely organised collective has also attacked government sites in Tunisia and Egypt to aid popular protest movements.

Source: BBC

Spammers’ latest target: ebooks on Amazon

Spammers’ latest target: ebooks on Amazon

Spam has hit the Kindle, clogging the online bookstore of the top-selling eReader with material that is far from being book worthy and threatening to undermine Amazon.com Inc's publishing foray. Thousands of digital books, called ebooks, are being published through Amazon's self-publishing system each month. Many are not written in the traditional sense. Instead, they are built using something known as Private Label Rights, or PLR content, which is information that can be bought very cheaply online then reformatted into a digital book. These ebooks are listed for sale -- often at 99 cents -- alongside more traditional books on Amazon's website, forcing readers to plow through many more titles to find what they want.

Aspiring spammers can even buy a DVD box set called Autopilot Kindle Cash that claims to teach people how to publish 10 to 20 new Kindle books a day without writing a word. This new phenomenon represents the dark side of an online revolution that's turning the traditional publishing industry on its head by giving authors new ways to access readers directly. In 2010, almost 2.8 million nontraditional books, including ebooks, were published in the United States, while just more than 316,000 traditional books came out. That compares with 1.33 million nontraditional books and 302,000 conventional books in 2009, according to Albert Greco, a publishing-industry expert at Fordham University's business school. In 2002, fewer than 33,000 nontraditional books were published, while over 215,000 traditional books came out in the United States, Greco noted.

"This is a staggering increase. It's mind boggling," Greco said. "On the positive side, this is helping an awful lot of people who wrote books and could not get them published in the traditional way through agents," Greco added. But Greco listed downsides. One problem is that authors must compete for readers with a lot more books -- many of which "probably never should have seen the light of day," he said. Some of these books appear to be outright copies of other work. Earlier this year, Shayne Parkinson, a New Zealander who writes historical novels, discovered her debut "Sentence of Marriage" was on sale on Amazon under another author's name.

Source: Reuters