Weinberg explains what happened:

“Google Presentations has a chat feature, based on Google Talk technology, that lets people chat while viewing a presentation. I embedded a presentation here, as did Matt Cutts on his blog, and a number of people linked to it. Everyone who went to that Presentation and logged into their Google Account to chat gave their e-mail address to me and to every other visitor to the chat, without even knowing it. The reason is that Presentations logs your chats, just like Google Talk does, and those logs appear in your Gmail Chat folder. While the chat window in the presentation doesn’t list e-mail addresses, the logs do, and almost everyone gets them automatically.”

Apparently, the breach was live for about 15 hours before it was closed, he says.

The GNOME community announced a new release today after six months of development. GNOME is a desktop environment primarily used on Linux and other open-source platforms. GNOME 2.20 includes numerous improvements and new features that benefit users, administrators, and developers.

GNOME’s image viewer features a significantly improved image collection interface and a new Open With menu. The Nautilus file manager can now display a disk usage pie chart in the filesystem properties dialog. Desktop search integration, which first appeared in Nautilus in GNOME 2.14 and can optionally leverage the Beagle and Tracker indexing systems, has now been added to the GNOME file dialog.

GNOME 2.20 also includes significant improvements to power management. The GNOME Power Manager tracks your power consumption over time in order to provide more accurate estimates of remaining power. Encryption support also gets a boost in GNOME 2.20, with new file encryption utilities that integrate with the GNOME keyring.

Will Glu-ray Disc ever make it to market? It’s certainly looking less likely that the Blu-ray and HD DVD single-disc combo product from Warner Home Video (WHV), dubbed TotalHD, is going to happen.

Speaking in an interview trade-oriented website This Week in Consumer Electronics, WHV President Ron Sanders said the format was “kind of on hold right now”.

The problem? “We’re concerned that as the only one publishing on it, it would be hard to make it go.”

Total HD was originally supposed to come to market in the US late this year, but WHV admitted in June that the format would not appear until 2008.

A woman who found a digital camera outside Ohio Stadium located the owner by uploading a picture from it and e-mailing the image to a batch of Ohio State football fans.

Within 48 hours of sending the e-mail to 14 friends, Michelle Montgomery declared her social experiment a success. She was contacted by Kevin John, 45, of Shelby, who learned through a chain of e-mailers in the Buckeye network that Montgomery had his camera.

“It shows the power of the Internet, e-mail and the Buckeye network. It’s amazing how many Buckeye fans are out there,” said John, a 1986 Ohio State University graduate.

Three simply keystrokes gave a college professor his mark in the history books and gave the world a new wave of digital communication.

Multiple sources credit Carnegie Mellon professor Scott E. Fahlman with being the first to put together the colon-hyphen-parenthesis combination to create a “digital smiley face”.

In an online message board at 11:44 AM Eastern Time on September 19, 1982, Fahlman wrote, “I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-). Read it sideways.” In the same post, he also showed what is credited as the first digital frown,

“This convention caught on quickly around Carnegie Mellon, and soon spread to other universities and research labs via the primitive computer networks of the day,” said Fahlman.

Since then, digital expressions known as “emoticons” have evolved to the point of almost becoming their own language. Different grammatical markers are now put together to show everything from laughter to disdain.

Intel and others plan to release a new version of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology in the first half of 2008, a revamp the chipmaker said will make data transfer rates more than 10 times as fast by adding fiber-optic links alongside the traditional copper wires.

Intel is working fellow USB 3.0 Promoters Group members Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, NEC and NXP Semiconductors to release the USB 3.0 specification in the first half of 2008, said Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group, in a speech here at the Intel Developer Forum.

In an interview after the speech, Gelsinger said there’s typically a one- to two-year lag between the release of the specification and the availability of the technology, so USB 3.0 products should likely arrive in 2009 or 2010. A prototype shown at the speech is working now, and USB 3.0 will have optical and copper connections “from day one,” he added.

Microsoft has overhauled the look of its Live.com search page, part of a series of changes expected in the coming weeks.

While the first visible changes are to the user interface, fonts and look of the Live.com search page, the bigger changes are coming to the engine itself, as well as the way Microsoft presents results. (Props to the folks over at Liveside.net for spotting the changes.)

Microsoft has scheduled a press event, dubbed “Searchification,” for September 26 at its Silicon Valley offices, where it is expected to tell all.

Apple Inc has prepared plans to nearly double its iPhone production in the fourth quarter, financial news Web site TheStreet.com reported, citing people familiar with the company.

The plan calls for making 2.7 million iPhones next quarter, up from the 1.54 million originally targeted, the report said. Apple’s plans now call for 4.8 million iPhones to be produced this year, up from the 3.6 million previously targeted, the report said.

IBM starts offering free office suite including word processing spreadsheets and presentations, joining a growing group of companies with free applications challenging a core Microsoft Corp product.

Business, academic, governmental and consumer users alike can download this enterprise-grade office software, known as IBM Lotus Symphony, which is the same tool inside some of IBM’s most popular collaboration products, such as the recently released Lotus Notes 8.

Along with Lotus Symphony, IBM today announced six new products and product upgrades highlighting IBM’s extensive investment in collaboration technologies, along with three new partners who have adopted IBM collaboration technologies: Audi, Federal Aviation Administration and SkyWorks Solutions, Inc.

Mozilla has fixed a critical bug in the way the Firefox browser works with QuickTime media files.

The flaw, which was reported last week by hacker Petko Petkov, gives attackers a way to run unauthorized commands on a victim’s PC. “This could be used to install malware, steal local data, or otherwise corrupt the victim’s computer,” Mozilla said in a security advisory published Tuesday.

A July 2007 patch was supposed to take care of this type of problem, but Petkov showed how attackers could still run commands on a victim’s system by tricking a victim into opening a maliciously coded QuickTime media file.

In fact, until Apple addresses the underlying flaw in QuickTime, there still could be headaches for users, Mozilla said in its security advisory on the issue. “QuickTime Media-link files could still be used to annoy users with popup windows and dialogs until this issue is fixed in QuickTime,” the advisory states.

Google Inc. will try to cash in on the Internet’s latest craze by distributing ads within “widgets” - the interactive capsules designed to bring more pizzaz to Web pages.

The move, scheduled to be announced Wednesday, represents Google’s first attempt to make money off a trend that the online search leader has helped popularize. The Mountain View-based company has for two years offered a platform showcasing small modules, known generally as widgets, that blend data, text, images and software programs.

Google users can now select from more than 14,000 widgets - or, as Google uniquely calls them, “gadgets” - that can be planted on a personalized version of the search engine’s Web site.