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November 30th, 2007

Nvidia about to launch 780i and 3SLI

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Nvidia is going to launch a bunch of parts in the near future. It will be talking about 3SLI and 780i in short order.

The usual caveat is that it tends to change the dates when word leaks, and so with that in mind, we have the following somewhat tentative dates.

3SLI is set for December 10 at 6am PST, and 780i is a week later December 17 also at 6am. For now.

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November 30th, 2007

Dell moves 40,000 Ubuntu PCs

Dell Logo

Dell agreed to ship PCs and laptops with the Ubuntu operating system after more than 130,000 people promoted the notion on the company’s IdeaStorm web site. It would seem, however, that only a fraction of these zealots were willing to back their votes with cash.

Dell has shipped close to 40,000 systems pre-installed with the Ubuntu flavor of Linux, according to multiple sources. By most accounts, that’s a heck of a total for what remains more or less a fringe operating system. Ubuntu fans are urged to hold back their virtual quills of vitriol following that last sentence and remember that the OS trails major desktop and notebook OSes by quite a margin.

David Lord, a spokesman at Dell, declined to discuss the 40,000 figure, saying the company “does not break out” those types of numbers. Lord was, of course, willing to say that, “Adoption has been very good” and the IdeaStorm push where Dell asks customers to promote things they would like to see represents “a two-way street” where Dell hopes users “will vote with their minds and wallets.”

The Ubuntu experiment marks the second time Dell has flirted with letting any old customer order a Linux PC off its web site. Grizzled open source warriors will remember CEO Michael Dell telling the 2000 LinuxWorld that “the only thing growing faster than Linux is the number of Linux systems Dell is shipping” after Dell revealed that Red Hat Linux would appear across its entire computer and server line.

Dell quickly gave up on a broad Linux desktop push, citing a lack of demand. More inquisitive types came up with other reasons for Dell’s Linux abandonment.

Is 40,000 units over a number of months enough to keep Dell interested?

Your guess is as good as ours. The company sells about 10m machines per quarter.

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November 30th, 2007

Another $60 Million For Facebook

Facebook

When Facebook took a $240 million investment from Microsoft last month at a $15 billion valuation, they became, in theory, one of the most valuable Internet-only companies on the planet.

But that valuation was tenuous at best. Microsoft and Facebook expanded their year-old advertising relationship as part of the deal. And Facebook was unable to get a third party to pony up cash to justify the valuation. Only a single (conflicted) entity willing to say Facebook was worth $15 billion - that wasn’t good enough supporting evidence for the masses.

Until now, that is. Kara Swisher is reporting that Facebook has grabbed another investor - $60 million from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing.

Facebook has now raised just shy of $340 million in capital. That’s enough to keep them going as a private entity for years, if they choose to do so.

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November 30th, 2007

AdBrite Takes In Another $23 Million

AdBrite logo

Ad networks are still catching money like rain. AdBrite raised $23 million from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Hedge fund Artis Management, reports Dan Primack. This is on top of $12 million, the company has already raised. In October, comScore ranked AdBrite as the 26th largest ad network after MySpace. Its ads reached 71 million people that month, representing a 39 percent reach of U.S. Internet traffic.

AdBrite, which was founded by Philip “Pud” Kaplan of FuckedCompany.com fame, targets ads based on demographics. It also offers an embeddable video player that incorporates ads as clickable watermarks.

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November 30th, 2007

Google To Announce Wireless Spectrum Bid Friday

Google small logo

The Wall Street Journal is quoting “people familiar with the matter” saying that Google will announce a bid for the 700 MHz wireless spectrum Friday.

Google first expressed interesting in bidding in July, when it sent a letter to the FCC demanding that the new bandwidth have four requirements: open applications, open devices, open services and open networks. The FCC only adopted two of Google’s recommendations when it released the terms for the auction July 31, with support for open applications and open devices, but with no requirement for open services or open networks.

With the auction due in January and bidders having to declare their intentions to bid by December 3, there has been no shortage of speculation as to whether Google would or wouldn’t participate.

The ongoing mystery is exactly what Google plans to do with the spectrum. Since we last wrote about the auction Google has announced the Open Handset Alliance (Android) which includes T-Mobile and Sprint Nextel; in effect Google has an existing partnership with two of the four major existing mobile players in the United States. If Google is seeking to become a cellphone operator in its own right, this wouldn’t be well received by T-Mobile or Sprint Nextel; unless of course Google is already talking about partnerships where by one (or both) of their partners provides the towers and service provision whilst Google maintains spectrum ownership, whilst presumably dictating access terms that would favor open access and/ or Android itself.

From a consumer viewpoint Google entering the auction process is a positive step forward, even if we don’t know Google’s intentions yet. Competition is always good, and Google owned spectrum would provide downward pressure on cell phone rates that will benefit users on all networks, not just those using a Google owned service.

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November 30th, 2007

Use Your iPhone’s Internet Connection On Your Laptop

Connect via iPhone 1

It’s great that your iPhone has a data plan and a killer mobile browser, but when you’re sitting at the airport waiting to catch a plane with your laptop right next to you, wouldn’t it be nice to use your full-on desktop browser? Out of the box your iPhone won’t allow you to tether your EDGE data connection to another computer wirelessly, but with a little ingenuity on your part you’ll be browsing the net on your laptop through your iPhone’s data service in no time.

NOTE: You’re probably asking yourself: “Isn’t the EDGE data network that the iPhone uses SLOW?” Well, yes it is. But if you’re at all like me, sometimes a slow full-screen browsing session is better than slow browsing on the small screen.

I’ve only tested this method on my MacBook Pro, but since SSH is platform independent, this should be a workable solution on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

What You’ll Need

For this guide, you’ll need:

  • A computer with Wi-Fi capable of creating an ad-hoc computer-to-computer connection (yours is)
  • A jailbroken iPhone (If you don’t know how to jailbreak your iPhone, the easiest way is to make sure you’re running     1.1.1 firmware and then start here.
  • The OpenSSH iPhone application (I’ll show you how to get this below)
  • An SSH client on the computer you’re using. If you’re on a Mac or *nix machine, you should be fine. Windows users should check out how to install OpenSHH with Cygwin.

Prepare Your iPhone

Assuming you’ve already got Installer.app installed on your iPhone (which you will have installed if you’ve gone through the jailbreak mentioned above), the first thing you need to do is install OpenSSH. So head to your iPhone’s home screen and fire up Installer.app. Now go to the Install tab and tap on System -> OpenSSH and tap the Install button. Once it installs, exit Installer.app.

Connect via iPhone 2

Start Up Your Ad-Hoc Network

This process differs depending on what operating system you’re using. As I said above, I’ve only tested this on a Mac, but I’ll point to instructions on how to do the same on Windows as well.

f you are using a Mac, just click the Airport icon in your menu bar and click on Create Network. Then just give your network a name and—if you like—a password.

On a Windows PC you’ll need to set up Internet Connection Sharing. You can find instructions for doing so here. Good luck!

Once you create your network, your computer won’t be able to connect wirelessly to any Wi-Fi hotspot, just other devices.

Connect via iPhone 3

Connect Your iPhone to Your Computer

To get your computer and iPhone talking, you’ll need to connect your iPhone to the ad-hoc network we created above. To do so, go to the Settings application, tap Wi-Fi, and select your ad-hoc network from the list of available networks.

Once you’re connected, tap the blue arrow next to your new network to get info on your connections—namely your IP address. Write that puppy down because you’ll need it in a second.

Connect Your Computer to Your iPhone’s Internet

Now it’s time to make use of the SSH server we installed on our iPhone. From this point on, we’re basically following our previous guide to encrypting your web browsing with an SSH SOCKS proxy. Open up your command line application of choice and enter the following:

ssh -ND 9999 root@YourIPAddress

…where YourIPAddress is replaced with whatever you wrote down above.

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November 30th, 2007

Google removes thousands of malware sites

Google small logo

On Monday, Sunbelt Software’s security blog revealed that thousands of malware redirects were showing up in search engine results. Network bots designed to post relevant keywords and spam links in various online forms (think forum posts or blog comments) helped attackers claim high-ranking search engine positions for various obscure and seemingly innocuous search terms. According to Sunbelt, two of the thousands of terms were “infinity” and “hospice.” Yeah, that’s cool. Search for hospice information for a sick friend or family member, potentially get your system infected with nasty malware.

On Tuesday, Sunbelt revealed more information about the ill-effects clicking on these fake links could have on a vulnerable system (as a reminder - ALWAYS keep your browser and Internet security tools up to date). Best case scenario - you might end up with one of those annoying toolbars and pop-up ads for fake security software. Worst case? Your computer could be used to generate false-clicks for the attacker’s pay-per click programs (so they infect your system so that you can make them money), or worse still, that bot could load other malware/worms/trojans onto the unprotected system. Further investigation also revealed that these SEO-poisoning attacks were targeted at Google, although other search engines may have also been victim to the attacks.

Google has cleansed more than 40,000 of these hosting sites from their index, so for now - it looks like the biggest source of this sort of attack has been taken offline.OK - you might be thinking, spam search results show up everyday - why is this a big deal? It’s a big deal because the techniques used for these attacks was more clever and thought out than the typical SEO-poisoning. It’s also a big deal just based on the sheer scale of sites and domains dedicated to hosting these links and because of the malware involved.

It’s great the Google stepped up and cleansed the index so quickly after being made aware of the problem, but this should be a big (or continuing) wake-up call to users who don’t stay up to date with security updates or don’t have some sort of Internet security solution. And while Windows users are obviously the users who are most directly affected by these types of attacks, having these kinds of search results show up as relevant, even if the link can’t harm your system, is bad for the Internet community as a whole.

There’s lots of talk within the tech community, especially the blogosphere about using SEO and how it’s GOOD for bloggers and doesn’t negatively affect readers/searchers/regular users. This is a lie. Instead of Search Engine Optimization, SEO should really stand for Search Engine Opportunism, because that’s what it really is. Look, we certainly don’t object to gaining revenue from ads or page-views on a web site, that’s why we are able to do what we do; we do object to gaming the system and using loopholes to insert web sites into search queries that really have nothing to do with the content. Techniques to make sure your relevant content shows up in corresponding searches is one thing — inserting back-door code that is aimed at getting higher page ranks and more page views, regardless if the targets are actually correct, is another. To us, the type of SEO attacks revealed this week are only a few steps away from what tons of bloggers/websites do every day: purposely try to game search engines just so they can get more hits to their site, and by extension, maybe make a few extra dollars. Unless you are running a straight-up scam link-farm or very, very lucky — the highest search engine rank in the world is not going to have lasting benefits if the content is nonexistent.

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