Apple is planning a major East Coast data center to boost the capacity of its online operations, and may invest as much as $1 billion in building and operating the huge server farm. The company is considering locations in North Carolina, where officials are rushing to pass enhanced tax breaks to woo Apple to their state rather than neighboring Virginia, which just passed its own incentives for data center projects.

The North Carolina House is expected to vote today on a package that would offer income tax breaks to companies that invest more than $1 billion over nine years in a rural area of the state and pay above-average salaries, according to local media.

The size of the project raises interesting questions about Apple’s ambitions for its online operations. The $1 billion price tag is nearly twice the $500 to $600 million that Microsoft and Google typically invest in the enormous data centers that power their cloud computing platforms.

Google has long been the king of search, dominating rivals including Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. But it increasingly sees social networks such as Facebook as challengers to its search engine, a company official said Monday.

As people search out advice online for everyday, personal decisions, the standard list of links served up by Google is not seen as intimate or trustworthy. For decisions such as choosing a restaurant or a day care provider, social networking sites or known review sites have an advantage, said Google Group Product Manager Ken Tokusei.

Such sites offer information from friends or acquaintances, and Tokusei said users tend to trust that information more. This puts Google’s results at a disadvantage.

“We haven’t gotten to the point where results are seen as if they come from someone you know,” said Tokusei.

A Secret computer program created by Google is helping to track down paedophiles on the internet.

The amazing new technology lets investigators speedily trawl through a suspect’s computer and FIND horrific images - even when hidden in a seemingly innocent video.

They can also match a child’s face shown in a video to similar images discovered around the world.

This often enables cops to rescue the tragic kids and break up secretive paedo networks.

Clues

The system can even recognize background scenes in an abuse clip - such as posters, views from windows, furniture or carpets - to provide clues or evidence against suspects.

Iran’s decision to block access to Facebook - less than three weeks before nationwide elections - drew sharp criticism Sunday from a reformist opposition hoping to mobilize the youth vote and unseat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The decision, critics said, forces Iranians to rely on state-run media and other government sources ahead of the June 12 election.

It also appeared to be a direct strike at the youth vote that could pose challenges to Ahmadinejad’s re-election bid.

More than half of Iran’s population was born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and young voters make up a huge bloc - which helped former reformist President Mohammad Khatami to back-to-back victories in 1997 and 2001 but failed to rally strongly behind Ahmadinejad’s opponent, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, four years ago.

Young voters are now strongly courted by the main reformist candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, as the possible swing factor.

“Every single media outlet that is seen as competition for Ahmadinejad is at risk of being closed,” said Shahab Tabatabaei, a top aide for Mousavi, the leading reformist candidate. “Placing limits on the competition is the top priority of the government.”

Susan Boyle, the frumpy Scottish spinster whose amazing voice has become a global YouTube sensation, stunned audiences again on Sunday as she was voted through to the final of “Britain’s Got Talent.”

Singing “Memory” from the musical “Cats,” the 48-year-old overcame initial nerves to produce another command performance, her soaring rendition winning the telephone vote on the talent show.

“You are one special lady, I have to say, you really are,” Simon Cowell, one of the panel of three judges, said after Boyle’s performance brought the audience to their feet.

OffiSync, founded by former Microsoft Office marketing manager Oudi Antebi, now VP of marketing and strategy at business intelligence company Panorama Software, combines Office and Google Docs with a new toolbar in Office that lets customers OPEN and save Google Apps documents and collaborate on them or define collaborators from within Microsoft Word.

Roger Boyce, CEO of Evident Software, discusses application virtualization. As companies take many servers and make them look like one, Evident provides unique insights into the operation of those new app fabrics. InformationWeek s John Foley speaks with David Selinger, the CEO and Co-Founder of Richrelevance. Richrelevance is a SF based startup that makes a next generation recommendation engine. SocialCast takes many of the social network tools from the consumer world and makes them available in an on-demand service for the enterprise.
SocialCast takes many of the social network tools from the consumer world and makes them available in an on-demand service for the enterprise.
There are any number of reasons people might be slow to jump on the Google Apps bandwagon, including one big one in particular: It s just not Microsoft Office.

Most consumers and companies already have Office installed, and many companies have enterprise licenses that entitle them to free upgrades and additional perks. But Google Apps has fewer features than Office, and it could take a bit of training to turn newbie employees into power users.

Of course, the fact that it isn t Microsoft Office is also a reason Google Apps has gotten traction. Google Apps brings a few important features that Microsoft Office doesn t yet offer, including free Web-based editing and file storage, real-time and asynchronous collaboration, and more granular file search than is available in Windows.

Antebi says he now hears a familiar refrain when he talks to people about OffiSync: I have never used Google Docs because I didn t want it to replace Office, but now I might use it because it just makes Office better.

The 8-MB download plug-in also allows users to manage their Google Docs file libraries as if they were local file stores. Users can search from within the OPEN and save document dialogues built into OffiSync and send e-mail notifications to collaborators. Antebi plans to offer two versions, one for individuals and a paid version for enterprises that includes management and deployment features.

Biofuels continue to steal the spotlight when it comes to the search for a renewable, environmentally friendly replacement for crude oil. While that’s understandable when considering the transport industry, but crude oil is also used in the production of conventional plastics and chemical products such as fertilizers and solvents. Now chemists have learned how to convert plant biomass directly into a chemical building block that can not only be used to produce fuel, but also plastics, polyester and industrial chemicals cheaply and efficiently.

Earlier work by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) saw the development of a process to convert glucose and fructose derived from cellulose, into a primary building block for fuel and polyesters known as hydroxymethylfurfural, or HMF. Although it is a fairly simple process to convert HMF into plastics or biofuel, it is seldom used because HMF is costly to make. Other researchers had previously converted fructose into HMF, but the PNNL research group made a series of improvements that raised the HMF output, and also made the HMF easier to extract.

Using a chemical and solvent known as an ionic liquid, the PNNL team was able to convert the simple sugars into HMF. The chemical, a metal chloride known as chromium chloride, converted sugar into highly pure HMF, but the team still needed to break down cellulose into simple sugars – a step they wanted to skip.

Safari 4 comes with a slew of cool new features, but extensive data generation combined with poor cleanup make for a data trail that’s a privacy nightmare.

Hidden files with screenshots of your history, files that point back to Web pages you’ve visited and cleared from your history, and thousands of XML files that track the changes in the pages in your Top Sites can add up to gigabytes of information you didn’t know was kept about you.” Some of Safari’s bloat is kept in quite obscure locations; it takes a fairly knowledgeable user to find it and clean it up. You can avoid some of the worst of it by disabling Top Sites.

TechCrunch ran a story that generated a lot of controversy a few months back, “Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?”

Now we’ve located another source for the story, someone who’s very close to Last.fm. And it turns out Last.fm was telling the truth, sorta…

Last.fm didn’t hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it. Here’s what we believe happened: CBS requested user data from Last.fm, including user name and IP address. CBS wanted the data to comply with a RIAA request but told Last.fm the data was going to be used for ‘internal use only.’

It was only after the data was sent to CBS that Last.fm discovered the real reason for the request. Last.fm staffers were outraged, say our sources, but the data had already been sent to the RIAA. We believe CBS lied to us when they denied sending the data to the RIAA, and that they subsequently asked us to attribute the quote to Last.fm to make the statement defensible.

Last.fm’s denials were strictly speaking correct, but they ignored the underlying truth of the situation, that their parent company supplied user data to the RIAA, and that the data could possibly be used in civil and criminal actions against those users.

Law enforcement computers were struck by a mystery computer virus Thursday, forcing the FBI and the U.S. Marshals to shut down part of their networks as a precaution.

The U.S. Marshals confirmed it disconnected from the Justice Department’s computers as a protective measure after being hit by the virus; an FBI official said only that that agency was experiencing similar issues and was working on the problem.

“We too are evaluating a network issue on our external, unclassified network that’s affecting several government agencies,” said FBI spokesman Mike Kortan. He did not elaborate or identify the other agencies.

Marshals spokeswoman Nikki Credic said the agency’s computer problem began Thursday morning. The FBI began experiencing similar problems earlier.

“At no time was data compromised,” said Credic. The type of virus and its origin were not determined.

You won’t get an email saying Pope Benedict added you as a friend and you can’t “poke” him or write on his wall, but the Vatican is still keen to use the networking site Facebook to woo young people back to church.

A new Vatican website, www.pope2you.net, has gone live, offering an application called “The pope meets you on Facebook,” and another allowing the faithful to see the Pope’s speeches and messages on their iPhones or iPods.

YouTube is the latest target for pranksters looking to amuse themselves. Today, May 20, has been deemed “Porn Day” by denizens of 4chan and eBaum’s World, with an organized group of users from the sites uploading video clips of explicit, adult content en masse in an attempt to overwhelm the search results. In actuality, it appears that content was prematurely uploaded on the afternoon of the 19th. YouTube has already taken some steps to fight back, but it’s disturbingly easy to find stuff you really don’t want to see, and the uploaders are changing tactics.

As one might expect, the pornographic clips are being uploaded without any indication that they’re for adult eyes only, making them easy to happen upon by casual searchers. As the upload-fest has progressed, users are also uploading what seems to be legitimate content, but is in fact a porn video that simply has 20-30 seconds of non-porn content (a newscast, an interview) at the beginning.