Digital Trends
A new controversy is swirling around technology giant Microsoft, and it has nothing to do with its Windows operating system, browser software, antitrust investigations, anti-piracy measures, video games, portable media players, or its stance towards patents and open source software. Instead, the company is quickly trying to apologize for intentionally altering a photo used on its business productivity Web sites to change a man’s race.
The English language may not be the most common language on Earth—Mandarin Chinese and Spanish beat it out, for instance—but English has always been willing to expand its boundaries and adopt (and co-opt) new words and phrases to expand its lexicon. The Global Language Monitor estimates that almost 15 words a day get added to the English language, and today the organization announced what it claims to be the one-millionth word or phrase in English: Web 2.0. The phrase beat out “cloud computing,” “slumdog,” “noob” (no word on whether “n00b” was considered), and “Jai Ho!,” which landed in the 999,996th, 999,997th, 999,998th, and 999,999th slots, respectively.
The Wikimedia Foundation has signed its first major corporate partnership deal with European mobile operator Orange. Under the agreement, Orange customers in France, Span, Poland, and the UK will get co-branded access to Wikimedia Foundation content, including a specific Wikipedia channel and both mobile and Web-based widgets to pull Wikipedia content to their mobile devices or Web pages. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Orange will be sharing some revenue with the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation currently gets most of its operating capital from user donations.
You’ve seen their cars, you might even drive one. Yet you’ve probably never considered using a Hyundai mobile phone. But the company is entering the UK mobile phone market, and plans to have between 3-5% of it within five years – some high ambitions for an already crowded field.
The company’s plan is to initially use the Advantage Cellular hub. Advantage is a company that spans the entire telecoms chain, so Hyundai can be up and running quickly.
There are plenty of Polish people living and working in Britain, some permanently, some temporarily, and they send £1 billion a year home. Now, those who have a NatWest Polish Welcome account can send money back to Poland to accounts run by Polish bank PKO BP using mobile phone transfers, says silicon.com.
NatWest claims to be the first UK bank to allow international money transfers via mobile. Customers don’t pay any commission for the service, and the bank hopes to have more countries and banks available soon.
Internet search giant Google has released its 2008 End-of-Year Zeitgeist, noting what was hot worldwide in Internet searches for the year. Unlike search engines like AOL and Yahoo who base their end-of-year summaries mostly on the frequency of terms—hence allowing Britney Spears to rule the search engine listings for years on end—Google bases its Zeitgeist both on frequency and on the novelty of terms. In other words, 2008’s zeitgeist is more about what users searched for in 2008 that they were not searching for in 2007. Google claims their method is more indicative of the “spirit of the times”…and it definitely produces some different results.
Google has announced the availability of a SIM-unlocked and hardware-unlocked Android phone explicitly aimed at Android developers in the U.S. and some 18 international markets. The Android Dev Phone 1 is available for $399 to registered Android developers—about the same price as an unlocked T-Mobile G1—although developers would need to pay an additional $25 to join the Android Marketplace to purchase the device.
Google warns that these devices are meant for developers only, not everyday phone users, and users operate them at their own risk. The units can be used with any SIM card and features an unlocked bootloader that enables developers to flash the phone with custom Android builds.
The Sinowal Trojan, also known as Torpig and Mebroot, isn’t new. It was first detected by RSA’s Fraud Action Research Lab in February 2006. But it’s one of the most effective Trojans out there. RSA estimates the Sinowal Trojan has taken the details of 270,000 online bank accounts and 240,000 debit and credit cards from financial institutions in a number of countries, including the US, UK, Australia and Poland. Interestingly, however, RSA has no data on any Russian accounts being hit.
Users are often infected by drive-bys – visiting a site infected with the Sinowal malicious code. Sean Brady of RSA’s security division told the BBC:
The US likes to be a world leader, but this is one area where it would rather not get a gold medal – computer attacks. But a new study from SecureWorks shows that the country is way out front of the rest of the world in the field, with 20.6 million attempted attacks, far outpacing China, which had 7.7 million.
That doesn’t mean the US is packed with malicious hackers. It simply means that a lot of computers have very weak security.
Hunter King, security researcher for SecureWorks, said:
Apple continues to sign agreements with international mobile operators to bring the company’s iPhone to a larger market, just as the company is reportedly prepping to launch a new 3G-enabled version of the device, along with version 2.0 iPhone software. Today’s announcement come’s from France’s Orange, which issued a one-sentence statement saying it has reached an agreement with Apple to distribute the iPhone in Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Switzerland later in 2008, as well as Orange’s African markets.
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