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Picture of Ashley Biden, Joe Biden's Daughter
Ashley Biden, 27-year old daughter of Vice-President Joe Biden has been shown snorting cocaine at a house party in Delaware. On 28th March 2009, The New York Post declined to pay for the footage that claimed Ashley Blazer Biden was snorting cocaine.
Ashley Biden is a Social Worker. She works for?the?Delaware?Department of Children, Youth and Families. In 2002, she was arrested for obstructing a police officer.
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Google Chrome is the safest browser
Software companies like Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, Opera and Google have gotten into a battle to gain the web browser market share.?
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First it was Internet Explorer and Mozilla as the 2 strong contenders in the market but now theres Chrome and theres Safari ever since its release for Windows.?
In the past few days Microsoft took Internet Explorer out of beta after almost a year while Google once again released a beta version of Chrome, its free, open-source browser. This only shows how lucrative the browser market is for software vendors!?
While Internet Explorer is still the strongest player coupled with the fact that Microsoft Windows still comes pre-installed with IE, Firefox has been taking a cut from Microsoft’s browser pie ever since.
Where there is a market there is Google!
We all know the search giant – wherever there is a market to penetrate Google will do its best to be there. And this has become pretty clear from Google’s open-source. Everyone seems to boast about how fast their browser is or how feature rich it is compared to other browsers. But has anyone ever compared about the security of these browsers? Nope. Until now.
Web Browser Security Faceoff
CanSecWest conducted a contest called Pwn2Own in Vancouver, Canada. In this 4 day long contest which took place from 16th March through 20th March hackers tried bringing the browsers to their knees by uncovering security flaws.
This was the 3rd year of the competition and focused on 2 of the hottest technologies among the big players -
1. Web browsers
2. Mobile devices
The intention of the competition was to uncover security vulnerabilities that were yet to be found in these browsers and mobile devices. The reward for finding a single bug in the browser was worth $5000 and $10,000 if the bug was found in a mobile device.
The Results of the Pwn2Own Contest
The contest revealed very interesting results. The browsers that were up for faceoff were -
1. Microsoft Internet Explorer
3. Apple Safari
Among the browsers Apple’s Safari was the MOST Vulnerable and was exploited in…ahem…about 10 seconds! A total of 4 flaws were found and almost all the browsers were affected but Google’s Chrome was found to be the MOST Secure. It was impacted by the flaw but the hackers said that it couldn’t be exploited by any of the known techniques. The actual exploits were not made public for the very obvious reasons. The exploits will be handed over to the respective vendors to patch them and release as soon as possible.
One of the most surprising result that has come forward is that NO vulnerability was found for mobile devices!
Youtube now makes it easy to preview your comments through audio
Youtube has introduced Audio Preview in comments. You can type your comment in the comment box and click the button to read the comment aloud for you. While I don’t find any use for audio preview other than it just adds a new feature.
Hours before the much awaited Model S from Tesla Motors was to be unveiled at an exclusive invitation only party in LA, Digg founder Kevin Rose leaked the pics on Twitter!?
Kevin Rose’s tweet – “someone leaked me some tesla model s (electric car) pics, seems to have a huge touch screen display:http://bit.ly/O8bzt”
Seems that Kevin had some insider contacts at Tesla whose new release may set the owner back by about $50,000! It seems that the pics at Kevin’s Flickr page have been deleted.?
Nevertheless, Model S is too cool for an electric car! Here is a picture I managed to get -
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Tesla Motor S - leaked picture
Have you noticed anything different today while searching on Google? Google has apparently increased the description to upto 4 lines. It was 2 lines before. Google calls it as a “snippet“. It is nothing but the meta description of your website. If Google doesn’t find any particular meta description on a page it might show the snippet based on what its algorithms deem to be relevant. Or alternatively it fetches it from the Open Directory Project. I had noticed the change way before Google announced what it calls as imporvements. ?Personally, I don’t like the increase in the description line as it gets too cluttered too soon. But maybe its just that I am used to 2 lines of text that Google has been showing for years. Note: Not all search queries will return longer snippets.
The second improvement is refreshing – Google now shows more related search queries for any given search. This can be a lot of help specially when you know very little about the topic and want to know the related aspects of the subject. You type a query into the search bar and Google shows you the related queries to that term. Is this Google’s step towards semantic search? Surely. I always wanted Google to show more related queries and now we have it. It seems Google wants to increase the number of searches performed.
I almost forgot this but today is Ada Lovelace Day. It is meant to empower women in technology and in general. It is not very unusual for women in technology to be treated inferior to their male counterparts – be it salary or promotion.
Even when they work the same [most of the time it is MORE] they’re underappreciated. It is very rare to find people and companies that really appreciate the work of the women working for them. Nothing justifies this more than this statement from the FindingAda blog -
?You will never be taken seriously, but we might take notice of you if you?re hot.?
The media has done a poor job of bringing this fact in front of the public. But what do we do? Just site there and complain? No. as bloggers we’re the media of the Web and the people and it is our duty to bring this fact to everybody’s attention.
This is the Ada Lovelace pledge -
?I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.?
? Suw Charman-Anderson (contact)
Deadline to sign up by: 24th March 2009
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women?s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.
It doesn?t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited to take part. All you need to do is sign up to this pledge and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009. If you?re going to be away that day, feel free to write your post in advance and set your blogging system to publish it that day.
And so?Suw Charman-Anderson pledged -
I will?publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if?1,000 other people will do the same.
And so here it is – my little bit to empower women in technology.
I dedicate this blog post to my sister, a Software Developer who goes up and beyond the call of duty to get her work done, even when the corporate monkeys make her work 10 times of what she is paid! ?Hats off to her and other women in technology. The war has started.
Comparison of increased market share of IE 8 and Firefox 3.0 within the 3 days of launch
Google and Sony team up to provide half-million books for free!
To? combat the growing market share of Kindle 2.0, Amazon’s answer to Sony’s E-Book reader Google and Sony have joined forces to offer 5,00,000 books for free through Sony’s bookstore.
Google Books has already scanned all the public domain book?and makes it available for full-viewing as well as PDF downloads. And now it plans to checkmate the online retailing giant while boosting the size of Sony books to 6,00,00 – 5 times more than it currently has!
Google will make these available as EPUB downloads which will make it easier to adapt the ebooks to different screen sizes.
Sony Reader has 2 versions and they compete directly with Kindle which is sleeker than Sony’s Reader. But the design of Sony Reader is better than that of Kindle. While Kindle offers 2,45,ooo best-selling titles for Kindle for $9.99, Sony users will be able to get the public domain books for free – and there are many many classics in public domain which include books from Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy and many more!
The books can be accessed online at http://books.google.com
Tata Nano - The People's Car
Indians rejoiced when Tata Motors unveiled the world’s smallest and cheapest car – Tata Nano at the 9th annual Auto Expo at Pragati Maidan in Delhi.
Since then the Nano has been the center of attention. Tata Nano has been praised by media outlets saying that the Nano urges a new era of transportation for the Indian families.
The idea for Nano was conceived back in 2003, when Mr. Ratan Tata, the Chairman of Tata Industries wanted to change the face of automobiles on the Indian landscape where only 8 people in a 1000 own a passanger car!
The Nano is also priced just right for the Indian consumer – a reasonable Rs. 100,000 [$2000]! While unveiling the car Mr Tata said that it will be the cheapest car the world has ever seen.
Although Tata aimed it to be the least expensive car, the cost of raw materials have increased considerably [approx 13% to 23%] and the challenge remains to keep the cost of the car from increasing.
The Nano has already made it to the Guinness Book of World Records when it comes to being the cheapest car!
Protesters burning Nanos effigy
While Tata has been the pioneer of industrial revolution in India it has faced serious opposition from within the?country over its manufacturing plant in Singur, West Bengal. The plant that provided employment to the locals was constantly attacked by Trinamool Congress under Mamata Banerjee who threatened stalling the manufacturing plant. Protesters near Kolkata, the nearest city to the then manufacuring plant burnt effigy of the Nano in protest.
Troubled by the constant agitations and closed plant Mr Tata announced that he’ll be pulling the plant from Singur. He was evaluating between 3 states – Maharashtra, Gujarat and Karnataka. But then finally he chose Narendra Modi’s business-friendly Gujarat as Maharashtra continues to have acute electricity problems.
Mr Narendra Modi welcomed Tata Nano and said that he’d [Modi] make sure that Tatas get what they want.
“It is stupid if you are not in?Gujarat?” – Tata
In a country where it is a dream come true to own a car, Tatas have made sure that the common man can finally afford a car. The Nano is fuel-efficient, confirms to the highest norms, cheapest car in the world and People’s Car as Tatas love to call it – what more would you expect for $2ooo?
The media has whole-heartedly praised Tata’s efforts in successfully launching the car inspite of all the turbulance it had to go through. Here are some of them -
I can say that alike other nations, entire?Europe?is also eagerly awaiting the commercial launch of Nano -?European Commission?s Director General for Energy and Transport,?Matthias Ruete.
Tata Nano?s launch could expand the Indian car market by 65%, according to rating agency CRISIL – Economic Times
Seldom does a single product introduction challenge the received wisdom in the industry so radically – CK Prahalad, Times of India
Adamo Side-View
Dell unveiled its Adamo range of ultra-thin, exclusive laptops on 17th March. Actually it was unveiled at the CES in January, it was only a demo. Now, you can preorder the Macbook Air-killer. The word Adamo comes from Latin and literally means “to fall in love”. And the name just seems to suit it perfectly because once you see Adamo you’re going to completely fall in love with it! The Adamo starts from $1999 and is targeted towards the upper end of ?laptops from Dell.