Time

NYT's TimesPeople feature enters public beta

The New York Times has started rolling out TimesPeople, a sharing-and-recommending tool that the publication first announced earlier this year. It's essentially an extension of the free user accounts that are already required to read the Times' Web site: You can now build up a friends list, recommend stories to people you know, and see what they've been recommending or commenting on.

In other words, it's a social news feed for Times readers. You can also sync it up with your Facebook account to push your feed--stories you've commented on or recommended--to your profile on the … Read more

QuickTime and iTunes DoS exploit released

A serious new flaw was disclosed on Thursday that affects the latest versions of Apple's QuickTime and iTunes applications.

The National Vulnerability Database entry CVE-2008-4116 describes a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability within Apple's QuickTime 7.5.5 and iTunes 8.0 programs.

To infect a computer, a maliciously coded long-type attribute within a QuickTime tag might be placed on a Web page, or within a .mp4 or .mov file. This could allow remote attackers to crash the applications (known as a denial of service) or possibly execute arbitrary code on a compromised computer.

The announcement comes one week … Read more

Yes, Zune does support iTunes libraries

A column by Saul Hansell on the New York Times "Bits" blog caught my eye today because it makes a completely unfounded assertion about the Zune versus the iPod.

Hansell writes, "But now many iPods are replacements by people who already have substantial music collections in iTunes. For those people, the choice is between buying an iPod that will simply work with all their music or investing the time and effort to try to convert everything into Zune's formats."

This is totally wrong. Microsoft knew it was coming from behind (way behind) and it took … Read more

E-mail is as addictive as gambling

Just when you finally came to terms with your e-mail addiction, blogs came along, then IM, then Twitter, and now we are all zombies. As it turns out, e-mail is a dangerous distraction.

In a study last year, Dr. Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by e-mail. So people who check their e-mail every five minutes waste 8 1/2 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.

I would suspect that Twitter and random IMs must double the wasted … Read more

AOL rolls out one-stop e-mail service

AOL on Wednesday unveiled a new e-mail feature designed to allow users to access multiple e-mail services from one location on the site.

The e-mail service is part of AOL's plans to debut new features to the site over the coming weeks; the features aim to provide customization and give users more control, such as adding Web links to the main navigation bar and accessing custom feeds from a variety of sites from AOL.com's main page.

The new features follow efforts earlier this year to shore up the company's user traffic by revamping the design of its Web sites, … Read more

Verizon customers to get NYTimes.com to go

Verizon Wireless and The New York Times have just announced a joint effort to offer mobile access to NYTimes.com (which is at mobile.nytimes.com) via several of Verizon's own feature phones. As long as you have a Mobile Web subscription (Unlimited Mobile Web is included with a $15 monthly V Cast VPak package) and a compatible phone, you will get access to the content without an additional charge. The NYTimes.com mobile site includes news of the election coverage, opinion pieces, sports news, and more.

Microsoft's desktop prowess: Blessing or curse?

"The die is cast," declared Julius Caesar, anticipating Microsoft's fateful decision to protect its Windows cash cow at all costs.

Years later, as Joe Nocera eloquently opines in The New York Times, Microsoft has tethered itself to its Windows operating system and almost certainly lost its way on the Internet as a result:

Windows is already dying a death by a thousand cuts. Yes, Microsoft still makes billions by selling pre-installed Windows via computer manufacturers. But ever-so-gradually, the Internet is upending its business model just as surely as it has upended models for the music, television and … Read more

Multiverse touts extensible virtual-world effort

The Multiverse Network, a developer of virtual world platform software, announced Wednesday that it was unveiling what it calls Places, two related social elements that tie Multiverse users together.

Essentially connective tissue for users of the Multiverse platform, Places has two separate components.

The first is a social networks application that automatically connects people using Multiverse virtual worlds together with others who are also friends in social networks like Facebook.

The second part of Places is a new virtual world centered around a digital representation of Manhattan's Times Square. Now anyone who installs Multiverse's World Browser--the basic Multiverse … Read more

Green gambling, but don't let this guy run your numbers

Thomas Friedman visited a wind farm near the East Asian gambling capital, Macao. But his rhetoric outsizes his quantitative skills in setting up another "dichotomy" in a "flat" world.

The column is a dizzying and logically disjointed ramble through some well-worn tropes on China's economy that have developed during the media's concurrent green awakening and Olympic China craze in recent months.

This is not so surprising from a columnist specialists love to lambaste, but this opening left me more confused than usual:

[T]he Chinese engineers showed me their control room, which has a … Read more