You’re already used to using Google to know what a new location looks like before you even get there, and now you might be able to see what it actually looks like inside your final destination.
The apparent idea is to ask store and restaurant owners to allow Google to post 360-degree views of inside their locations, allowing users to click on specific buildings within Street View to get an up-close-and-personal look at what’s inside those buildings.
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Facebook on Thursday continued to beef up its security features, adding the option for app passwords as well as “trusted friends.”
With Trusted Friends, Facebook will allow users to choose three to five friends who can help if you’re ever locked out of your account. “We’ll send codes to the friends you have selected, then you can log back into your account using these codes after your friends have passed them along to you,” Facebook said.
The social network likened the feature to giving a friend a key to your house when you go out of town.
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YouTube will start rolling out next month a set of new channels with original programs next month, as the video site beefs up its offering of exclusive, professionally-produced content.
These new channels are meant to complement YouTube’s core user-generated amateur videos and the non-exclusive, professional movies and TV shows it redistributes.
The strategy is intended to attract more viewers to YouTube, already the web’s most popular video site, and offer advertisers new opportunities for marketing their products.
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Samsung Electronics said Friday that it is aiming to launch mobile phones with flexible displays next year, with tablets and other portable devices to have these displays soon after.
The company said it was aiming to follow on the success of its Galaxy S II smartphone, which has now sold 10 million units in five months.
The comments came as the company discussed its earnings for the three-month period through September. Samsung said its overall profit fell 23 percent from a year ago to 3.44 trillion Korean won (US$3.1 billion), dragged down by its chip and display operations, but operating profit at its mobile unit more than doubled in the period.
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Security researchers have identified a new backdoor trojan targeting systems running Mac OS X.
Interestingly enough, Tsunami appears to be a port of Troj/Kaiten, a Linux Trojan that embeds itself on a computer system and monitors an IRC channel for further instructions.
As Sophos Security researcher Graham Cluley notes, trojans like Tsunami/Kaiten are typically used to drag infected computers into coordinated DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, which flood a targeted website server with a massive amount of traffic.
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Google paid out a record $26,511 in bug bounties to researchers who reported some of the 18 Chrome vulnerabilities patched today.
The company also upgraded the stable version of the browser to version 15, which sports a revamped New Tab page.
Google last refreshed Chrome on Sept. 16, just over five weeks ago. Google produces an update to its “stable” channel about every six weeks, a practice that rival Mozilla copied with the debut of Firefox 5 last June.
Eleven of the 18 vulnerabilities were rated “high,” the second-most-serious ranking in Google’s scoring system, while three were tagged “medium” and another four were marked “low.”
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In the first integration between the Google+ social networking site and the Blogger blog publishing platform, users will be able to replace their Blogger profiles with their Google+ profiles, the company announced on Monday.
The benefits for Blogger publishers of using the Google+ profile include giving their readers “a more robust and familiar sense of who you are” as well as having their posts surface with an annotation in the search results of their social connections, Google said.
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