A new Web Safety Technical Task Force will be led by the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Net & Society. The task force includes World Wide Web businesses, identity-authentication experts, nonprofit organizations, academics and technology companies. Among the members are AOL, AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, Google, the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI), Second Life’s Linden Lab, Microsoft, Symantec, Verizon and Yahoo.

The task force will prepare quarterly reports and submit a final report at the end of the year. It intends to focus on identifying effective online safety tools and technologies, said Berkman Executive Director John Palfrey.

“The safety concerns posed by the Web are part and parcel of the safety concerns that arise in human interactions in the physical world,” Palfrey said. “These concerns are not strange to any one service or technology platform; they are shared by the companies that supply Net services and the individuals who use these services.”

An Industry Challenge

The group is charged with the implementation of safety principles for social-networking sites that MySpace and the attorneys general of 49 states and the District of Columbia posed in a joint statement in January.

“The principles we have adopted set forth what the industry needs to strive toward to supply a safer online experience for teens,” said MySpace Chief shield Officer Hemanshu Nigam. “The Berkman Center’s past research on the challenges and opportunities offered by the World Wide Web makes it the ideal leader.”

The task force will review some of the authentication tools available for verifying age requirements “alongside whatever other techniques they can come up with, both things that exist right now and what they can hypothesize,” a spokesperson said.

Since few minors have credit cards or driver’s licenses, new identity-authentication tools must be developed. “We hope to see technology like that implemented on all social-networking sites,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Martha…

Original post by Top Tech News

As whether Microsoft’s takeover bid wasn’t abundant, Yahoo now faces two more lawsuits from Chinese dissidents. In November Yahoo settled with the families of journalists Wang Xiaoning and Shi Tao, who were jailed on knowledge provided by Yahoo China.

Zheng Cunzhu and Guo Quan filed the suits in federal court in California, although neither has been arrested by Chinese authorities.

Business Interests Lost

Zheng alleges he lost control of his business investments in China that included factories and a trading company. He was a member of the China Democracy Party, as was dissident Li Zhi, and Zheng moved to the U.S. in early 2006 after Li Zhi’s arrest on data provided by Yahoo.

Since Zheng used a Yahoo e-mail history to join the CDP, he was afraid to return to China and lost “the real control of the two factories, and his investment and property were under danger of being defrauded by others,” his suit says.

Guo Quan, on the other hand, isn’t complaining about Yahoo’s e-mail policies. Guo, a former associate professor at Nanjing Normal University, lost his job after calling on Chinese leaders to allow multiparty democracy. Guo complains that Yahoo blocked his name and his company’s name from the Net — or as much of it as is available in China.

Aiding Torture

Li Zhi is plus part of the suit, which claims that at least 60 other folks were “arbitrarily imprisoned” in China for advocating free elections, democracy and human rights, and they were possibly identified when Yahoo turned by user data. Li has served four years of an eight-year sentence for working on behalf of the CDP.

“By providing Web user identification knowledge to the People’s Republic of China, [the] Defendants deliberately and willfully aided and abetted in the commission of torture and other major abuses violating universal law that caused Plaintiffs severe…

Original post by Top Tech News

When you sign up for an e-mail explanation at Google’s Gmail, you have to navigate past a CAPTCHA — squiggly words and letters that need to be typed into a box to prove you’re human and not an automated system looking to send spam. But in the war against spammers, CAPTCHAs are not holding up well and the latest attacks let spambots into Gmail.

CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing pop quiz to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Typically image files, the challenge-and-response system has been fairly successful in preventing spammers from opening e-mail accounts on popular Web domains like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. Those accounts are prized by spammers considering Web administrators can’t simply blacklist the popular domains.

Spammers have found ways to break CAPTCHAs, according to Stephan Chenette, manager of Websense protection Labs. “What we’re seeing is the technology on the hacker side has surpassed the simple CAPTCHAs,” Chenette told us. “In the public domain there are several tools available right now for everyone to use to break simple CAPTCHAs.”

Human and Computer Attacks

Chenette said organized attackers are using automated tools to sign up for Gmail and other Web-mail accounts. When the CAPTCHA image appears, it’s automatically sent off to a large and low-paid workforce, typically in another country, where a worker enters the cipher and sends it back so the detail can be created.

that type of attack has been used against other Web-mail sites, Chenette said, but in the attacks on Gmail there’s a new wrinkle. “One of the more interesting things about the Gmail CAPTCHA breaking is that we believe that that might be happening through an automated process, which is the next step to breaking CAPTCHAs as opposed to hiring a large workforce to break them,” he said.

In fact, Chenette believes these are two-pronged attacks. The…

Original post by Top Tech News

Worldwide sales of mobile phones skyrocketed to 1.5 billion in 2007, according to research firm Gartner, a 16 percent increase from 2006 sales of 990.9 million. Sales at the end of the year matched a trend that has demand spiking in the fourth quarter. Fourth-quarter sales reached 330 million.

“Emerging markets, particularly China and India, provided much of the growth as many humans bought their first phone,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director for mobile devices at Gartner. “In mature markets, such as Japan and Western Europe, consumers’ appetite for feature-laden phones was met with new models packed with TV tuners, global positioning satellite functions, touch screens and high-resolution cameras.”

Nokia is the Global Leader

Nokia continues its global leadership with a 40 percent market share in the fourth quarter, when it sold slightly more than 133 million phones. Samsung maintained second place and, although its market share slipped slightly, the gap widened within Samsung and third-place Motorola.

The problems that beset Motorola in the third quarter continued in the fourth quarter. The company recorded global sales of 39 million for the quarter, taking 11.9 percent of the market.

Motorola retained second place in annual sales, Gartner reported, largely thanks to the stock it disposed of in the first half of the year. Nevertheless, the extent of Motorola’s troubles can be seen in the 9.7 percent drop in its market share in the fourth quarter from the same period in 2006.

Sony Ericsson ended 2007 with another positive performance, growing its market share on a quarterly basis to nine percent from 8.7 percent. And LG’s mobile-phone sales totaled 23.5 million in the fourth quarter, maintaining its 7.1 percent market share despite a sales increase of more than 3 million..

The Ones to Watch

The market saw three new players in the top 10 for the fourth quarter…

Original post by Top Tech News

Clarion’s NAX973HD is one satellite navigation system that you can consider should you want to upgrade your car to cater for drivers who can’t seem to find their way around without help from an electronic apparatus of some sort. Features include the following :p

• 30GB hard drive
• 400MHz processor
• RDS-TMC tuner
• 12-channel GPS receiver
• On-board gyroscope
• Voice recognition and text-to-speech in 6 European languages

The Clarion NAX973HD won’t be easy on your pocket though as it retails for £795.

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Original post by Ubergizmo

No, Inkel is no typo as it is a Korean-based company that rolls out a wide range of consumer electronic goods such as TVs and audio systems. What they have on offer today is the MU-D Multimedia Dictionary that merges both a portable media player and DMB TV tuner functionalities together, throwing in an electronic dictionary as well. Features include a 4.3″ LCD display at 480 x 272 resolution, 4GB of internal memory and a microSDHC memory card slot. The MU-D is powered by Windows CE 5.0. There is no word on pricing, but we do know that that will be a Korea-only exclusive.

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Original post by Ubergizmo

Say you’ve always wanted a parrot but could not be bothered to take proper care of it – here’s a solution staring right at you in the face. Thanks to the wonders of a USB port, that USB Parrot is capable of speaking up a bunch of random phrases which are picked up in passing whenever a positive phrase is repeated often suitable. Those wings aren’t just for show, they are mechanical in order to add to the reality. All you need to do is plug in the USB Parrot and you’re good to go. that nifty little gadget retails for approximately $39 and will probably get too irritating after a while that you might force it to walk the plank.

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Original post by Ubergizmo