Internet & Media- Page 735

Windows 8 aims to take pain out of managing passwords

Juggling passwords for all the Web sites and accounts we use is a neverending challenge, but one that Microsoft hopes to resolve in Windows 8.

Protecting yourself on the Internet typically requires the use of passwords. But that process has never been easy or truly safe. Most people either try to remember too many passwords or simply use the same passwords for all their accounts. Both approaches leave the door open for hackers to access your personal information.

What's needed is a simpler yet still secure approach.

In the latest edition of the Building Windows 8 blog, Dustin Ingalls, … Read more

iPhone 5, Steve Jobs among top Google searches in 2011

A mobile phone that never materialized and the late co-founder of Apple found their way onto the list of the 10 most popular searches at Google this past year.

Revealing the hottest and fastest-growing search terms for 2011, Google found a number of tech-related items in the Top 10.

The company's own Google+ social network took second place, just behind American pop singer Rebecca Black. Battlefield 3, a new first-person combat game from the folks at Electronic Arts, was the fifth most popular search term.

Perhaps most interesting was the item in sixth place--namely the iPhone 5, a device … Read more

Windows 8 activity sinking among early adopters, claims study

Windows 8 activity among developers and other early adopters has fallen over the past three months, says a new study from ad network Chitika.

Looking at ad impressions for the Windows 8 Developer Preview on its own network earlier this month, Chitka found that they were measurably lower than ones seen in September.

Specifically, the new data compared impressions during the week of December 4 with those found toward the end of September, shortly after Microsoft launched the Developer Preview to the public. The stats released on September 26 showed a healthy jump in online activity in just a one-week … Read more

Facebook Timeline goes live--out with old, in with new

Facebook's more than 800 million members will now be able to convert their profiles to the new Timeline design.

The world's largest social network announced Timeline in September, and now it's available worldwide. The feature replaces current user profiles and dramatically overhauls how information is shared on the service.

"It's a way to tell all the important stories from your life on a single page," Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said when he announced the new feature at his company's F8 Conference.

Timeline shows all the updates a person has added to … Read more

For Samsung Vibrant, no 911 means no Android mod

CyanogenMod has decided to drop support for the Samsung Vibrant after discovering that the phone can't dial 911 running the crew's own open-source Android build.

The CyanogenMod team relayed the bad news on its own forum earlier this week:

We are no longer supporting the Vibrant due to the inability to dial 911. We consider the issues related to this unresolvable without source code from Samsung related to the Radio interface layer and its interactions with the Audio layers and have taken the decision to no longer support this. We apologize for the inconvenience and strongly suggest that … Read more

Zynga may have a great IPO, but beyond that--look out

In 2007, people around the globe used the Internet to learn, engage with friends, and entertain themselves. But serial entrepreneur Mark Pincus wanted to add another activity to their daily mix.

"We founded Zynga in 2007 with the vision that play--like search, share and shop--would become one of the core activities on the Internet," Zynga wrote recently in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Mission accomplished! At last count, Zynga's many popular games, including FarmVille, CityVille, and others, have attracted 227 million monthly active users. Each day, 54 million people from 175 countries around … Read more

Moosejaw X-ray app is a catalog peep show

There's no need to mentally undress people when you have an app that can do it for you. Moosejaw decided to take outdoor clothing in a Victoria's Secret direction with the Moosejaw X-Ray App for iPhone, iPad, and Android.

The free app harnesses the power of augmented reality to strip the puffy jackets and pants off of its models. Fire up the app, hold it up to a model in the catalog, and get a view of the unmentionables beneath.… Read more

Twitter Fail Robot heralds an outage for some users

Twitter experienced sporadic outages this afternoon before being resolved a short time later. Some users reported error messages when trying to use the service, although TweetDeck--owned by Twitter--was still working.

Attempts to access Twitter in San Francisco resulted in a message that displayed the Fail Robot and stated: "Something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing--we're going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon.

Others saw the Twitter Fail Whale and a message saying "Twitter is over capacity."

The site was accessible to visitors in other parts of the country, however.

Via email, … Read more

Tech news site ReadWriteWeb acquired by Say Media

ReadWriteWeb, a popular tech news site, has been acquired by San Francisco-based Say Media.

The site's editor, Richard MacManus, announced the deal this morning, explaining that RWW will join Say's Technology channel, giving it access to more than 75 million monthly readers:

ReadWriteWeb is going to get bigger and even better. Our plans include widening ReadWriteWeb's editorial scope and expanding our team. That starts from today, with the addition of SplatF's Dan Frommer to our team as an editor-at-large. We will also be doing a redesign, utilizing the sophisticated designers at SAY Media. With SAY's … Read more

Crave readers' Instagram creations, part 3

For the third installment in our series spotlighting Crave readers' Instagram creations, we're taking in some city sights.

Looking through the 200-plus photo submissions we received was like taking a mini-trip around the world--among others, we got great shots of busy highways in Los Angeles, Arkansas, Korea, and Karachi, Pakistan; a stunning aerial view of the Twin Cities; a sublime look toward the mountains from a balcony in Monterrey, Mexico; and a scene of urban ruins in Shreveport, La. By the time we were done scrolling through the pictures, we were ready to pack our suitcases.

Needless to say, it was tough picking our faves from the many city-related standouts, but we really liked the below photos for their composition, mood, and, in a couple of cases, sense of whimsy. Enjoy today's images, and be sure to check back tomorrow and the next day for the final two galleries in our series. … Read more