Echo Computers Blog

IT Support, Computer Repair and Web Design, Folkestone, Kent

Google tests ‘streaming’ search engine

August 24th, 2010 by admin No comments »

Google is testing a new incarnation of its search engine that rejiggers results pages as you type, according to a video captured by a UK-based SEO Company.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But judging from the video, Google refers to this as “streaming” search. As you key new characters into the search box – or remove characters – the entire search results page changes accordingly. “You don’t even need to hit the ‘Search’ button anymore,” says the SEO, Rob Ousbey. “Google updates the results for you while you’re typing.”

Basically, Google is taking its “Suggest” tool a step further. Rather than just suggesting possible searches as you type, it’s suggesting entire results pages. This is yet another way that Google is trying to give you information before you ask for it. “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” CEO Eric Schmidt recently told The Wall Street Journal. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

But again, “streaming” search is – at this point – only a test. “At any given time we are running between 50-200 search experiments,” a company spokesman told TechCrunch. ®

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Posted in Google, SEO

Tags: Google search engine streaming

First SMS Trojan for Android is in the wild

August 10th, 2010 by admin No comments »

The first text message-based Trojan to infect smartphones running Google’s Android operating system has been detected in the wild.

Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer-A poses as a harmless media player application and has already infected a number of mobile devices, Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab warns. Prospective marks are prompted to install a “media player file” of just over 13 KB with the standard Android .APK extension.

Once installed, the Trojan begins sending SMS messages to premium-rate numbers without the owner’s knowledge or consent. Victims wind up with a huge bill while the cybercrooks behind the scheme earn a slice of the income. There have been isolated cases of devices running Android getting infected with spyware since last year, but this is the first occasion that an SMS-spewing Trojan, common in the world of mobile malware, has affected devices running Google’s operating system.

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Posted in Android, Mobile Phones, Viruses

Tags: android mobile security virus

Problems connecting your HTC HD2 to WMDC

August 10th, 2010 by admin No comments »

Been trying to upgrade my HTC HD2 Phone (currently on Vodafone) to the latest ROM version. The first problem I encountered was that my phone just would not connect to Windows Mobile Device Centre. The phone took charge from the cable and I even tried two different cables.

Finally after a lot of searching on the internet about registry changes, Problems with Windows 7 64bit etc I found a post that solved the problem of connecting your HTC HD2 to active sync.

What worked: on phone, go to: Start -> Tools -> Active Sync -> Menu -> connections and deselect “when in cradle [x] all pcs … and then reselect it.

All started working fine! now just going to try a ROM update then going to load Android.

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Posted in Microsoft, Mobile Phones, Software, Windows 7

Tags: HTC Windows Mobile

Microsoft Street Slide: Street View done properly

July 30th, 2010 by admin No comments »

Street View is one of Google’s most valuable services. The ability to familiarise yourself with somewhere strange, before you arrive, is genuinely useful.

For such a rich trove of information to be presented with such a clunky UI is strange and frustrating, and very un-Googley. Happily, at SIGGRAPH this week Microsoft Research presented a new form of presenting street view imagery, and it’s well worth a look.

The “Street Slide” project presents seamless, uninterrupted perspectives as you navigate. Here’s what it looks like in action:

Microsoft Street Slide: Street View done properly

Take a peep

By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 30th July 2010 16:03 GMT

Leaving aside the creepy privacy aspects, Street View is one of Google’s most valuable services. The ability to familiarise yourself with somewhere strange, before you arrive, is genuinely useful.

Or rather, it is in theory. Unfortunately, unless you’ve got extremely lucky, Street View typically fails to plonk you down right where you want to be. Then you have to use the controls, a really tedious hit-and-miss-affair, and you end up wishing you hadn’t.

For such a rich trove of information to be presented with such a clunky UI is strange and frustrating, and very un-Googley. Happily, at SIGGRAPH this week Microsoft Research presented a new form of presenting street view imagery, and it’s well worth a look.

The “Street Slide” project presents seamless, uninterrupted perspectives as you navigate. Here’s what it looks like in action:

The researchers have combined two approaches – the “bubble” view which simulates a panorama from a fixed viewpoint (the approach used today at Google and Microsoft) with multiperspective “strip panoramas”, which give more information but lack the sense that you’re moving alone.

“Our strip panoramas are created by aligning and overlaying perspective projections of the bubble images oriented towards the street side. Dynamically altering the alignment and visible portions of each image simulates a pseudo-perspective view of the streetside from a distance. Moving along the street thus gives a strong sense of parallax and enhances the sense of immersion.”

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Posted in Uncategorized

Ofcom tires of fantasy broadband speeds

July 28th, 2010 by admin No comments »

Ofcom has called for the way broadband speeds are advertised to be overhauled.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is currently undertaking a review of the way broadband speeds are advertised, and Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards has called for stricter rules.

The call comes after Ofcom’s latest research found that customers typically receive less than half the headline speed.

Richards wants ISPs to be banned from advertising “up to” speeds that are based on theoretical maximums rather than the actual speed customers can receive. BT, for example, caps “up to 8Mbits/sec” lines at 7.2Mbits/sec to ensure connections are stable.

“We want to see clearer advertising,” Richards told journalists. “Speeds should only be advertised if they’re actually achievable by some customers.”

Ofcom is also calling for ISPs to include a “typical speed range” in their adverts, so that customers receive a more realistic picture of the speeds they’re likely to receive.

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Posted in Broadband

Tags: braodband speed Broadband Ofcom

Intel’s underhand payouts made up 76% of Dell’s income

July 27th, 2010 by admin No comments »

Court documents released after a $100 million antitrust settlement have shown how Dell’s operating income was propped up by Intel for years.

Dell is one of a few PC makers that received payouts from Intel to keep them from using chips from AMD. Intel has since offered its smaller rival $1.25 billion, after being fined $1.45 billion by the European Union.

According to documents from the US Security and Exchange Commission, Dell received payments to “remain monogamous” with Intel. Part of its so-called Meet Competition Programme (MCP), those payments were used to set up “cookie jar” reserves and make up for shortfalls in quarterly results.

“Dell would often seek additional rebates from Intel in order to close a gap between its forecasted results and its earnings targets,” the SEC said. “Dell was quite open with Intel about the reasons it was requesting additional money.”

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Posted in Computer Sales, Technology

Tags: dell Intel

Google Street View Cars Back On The Road

July 12th, 2010 by admin 1 comment »

Google has given its Street View cars the green light to hit the streets and start snapping photos again, after spending the past few months parked over the Wi-Fi data debacle.

In May, Google admitted its camera cars were collecting Wi-Fi data as they drove around cities taking snaps for the Street View photo service in Google Maps. Along with that Wi-Fi data, Google also picked up personal information from unsecured connections, which the firm claims was unintentional.

The Street View cars are now back in business, but without any Wi-Fi detection equipment on board. “Our cars will no longer collect any Wi-Fi information at all, but will continue to collect photos and 3D imagery as they did before,” said Brian McClendon, vice president of engineering for Google Geo, in a blog post, taking care to stress that Microsoft’s Bing is also collecting such photos for its mapping service.

“We recognise that serious mistakes were made in the collection of Wi-Fi payload data, and we have worked to quickly rectify them,” he added.

Starting next week, the cars will first head to Ireland, Norway, South Africa and Sweden.

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Posted in Google

Government ditches broadband tax!

June 23rd, 2010 by admin No comments »

Alongside an increase in VAT to 20% in today’s budget, Chancellor George Osborne ditched the proposed 50p broadband tax, calling it “archaic”.

Proposed by Labour last year, the tax would have charged everyone with a landline an extra 50p a month to help fund the roll out of universal broadband across the UK.

Keeping with previously made promises to scrap the tax, Osborne said the “landline duty is an archaic way of doing this”.

Instead, the coalition government will look to support private firms in their broadband deployments, and use funds from the BBC licence fee where necessary.

Osborne also said the Government would not go ahead with £1 billion in “poorly targeted” tax relief for the video games industry.

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Posted in Broadband, Technology

Two years later, Apple Safari still open to Malicious Code

May 24th, 2010 by admin No comments »

After more than two years, Apple’s Safari browser for Macs remains vulnerable to attacks that allow websites to litter a user’s hard drive with thousands of malicious files.

The “carpet bomb” vulnerability was publicly disclosed in May 2008 after members of Apple’s security team said they didn’t consider the quirk a security issue. After Microsoft took the unusual step of advising its customers to stop using Safari, Apple issued a patch Windows versions but not for OS X.

Dhanjani said he discovered a separate, high-risk vulnerability that can be used to remotely steal local files from the user’s hard drive, and the company has acknowledged the bug and promised to fix it.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Microsoft warns of Windows 7 graphics flaw

May 20th, 2010 by admin No comments »

A flaw with the graphics driver in Windows 7 could compromise the stability and security of Windows 7 PCs, Microsoft has warned.

The vulnerability lies in the Windows Canonical Display Driver (cdd.dll) for the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

“If exploited, it would likely cause the affected system to stop responding and restart,” Jerry Bryant, group manager of response communications warns on the Microsoft Security Response Center blog.

Microsoft claims that the vulnerability only affects machines running the Aero graphics interface, and advises that customers “may choose to disable Windows Aero as a workaround to protect against potential threats” until the company releases a fix.

Microsoft also claims that the chances of the flaw being exploited in the wild are low, and have awarded the bug the lowest possible score on its Exploitability Index.