Aviran's Place

Spears and Obama lead Yahoo top 10 searches

Aviran Mordo — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:40:50 +0000

Barack Obama’s presidential victory got more clicks than any other story on yahoo.com this year, but the most searched term was “Britney Spears,” Yahoo Inc reported on Monday. In the top 10 searches, Spears — the most popular search term for seven of the past eight years — was followed by World Wrestling Entertainment and then [...]

Hackers boot Linux on iPhone

Aviran Mordo — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:08:28 +0000

A new front has opened in the ongoing arms race between Apple and iPhone hackers, with one hacker group making the iPhone boot with a Linux 2.6 kernel. The announcement of the successful kernel porting was made on the Linux on the iPhone blog, complete with instructions and source code. Although a bootloader, kernel and a Busybox [...]

Microsoft and Yahoo in talks again on online unit

Aviran Mordo — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 12:51:16 +0000

Microsoft Inc is in talks with Yahoo Inc to buy the U.S. internet company’s online search business for $20 billion, according to a report in Britain’s Sunday Times. The proposal under discussion involves a complex transaction that would see the U.S. software giant support a new management team to take control of Yahoo, but it has [...]

SanDisk flash holds secret flash sauce till after Christmas

Aviran Mordo — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 05:37:03 +0000

SanDisk is soon to announce new technology needed for its solid state drives to take on hard disk drive storage. SSDs are appearing in netbooks and notebooks and in enterprise storage arrays where they provide accelerated I/O, either as a separate tier of flash storage or as a flash cache accelerating the array controller’s operations. But [...]

Joost gets back on our radar with iPhone app

Aviran Mordo — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 05:31:58 +0000

Friday, Joost released an iPhone app for its service that might be a game changer. Joost’s iPhone app lets users stream and watch any of Joost’s 46,000-plus videos for free. Say what you will about Joost’s library of content, the concept behind this app is fantastic. The ability to stream a movie, TV show, or other [...]

Black Friday traffic takes down Sears.com

Aviran Mordo — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 05:20:24 +0000

Sears.com was inaccessible to U.S. shoppers for two hours on Friday in what was the most notable Web hiccup of the holiday gift-buying season’s official start. Other sites, including Amazon.com Inc., experienced minor slowdowns, according to Shawn White, director of external operations at Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based research group. Starting a week and a [...]

Apple to slash prices by up to 15% on Black Friday?

Aviran Mordo — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 09:40:21 +0000

Apple is holding a one-day sale for turkey-tired customers in the US on Black Friday, traditionally one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Some reports have suggested that the company could be slashing prices by 15 per cent to lure cash-strapped Americans to buy their goods tomorrow. Black Friday comes the day after Thanksgiving and [...]

Restaurateur tracks down bill dodgers on Facebook

Aviran Mordo — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 05:40:15 +0000

An Australian restaurateur left holding a hefty unpaid bill when five young diners bolted used the popular social network website Facebook to track them down. Peter Leary from seafood restaurant Seagrass on Melbourne’s Southbank was fuming when the diners ate their way through the menu, pairing oysters, trout and red emperor with some expensive wines, slipped [...]

Massive botnet returns from the dead, starts spamming

Aviran Mordo — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 05:46:11 +0000

A big spam-spewing botnet shut down two weeks ago has been resurrected, security researchers said today, and is again under the control of criminals. The “Srizbi” botnet returned from the dead late Tuesday, said Fengmin Gong, chief security content officer at FireEye Inc., when the infected PCs were able to successfully reconnect with new command-and-control servers, [...]

Sling.com like video site Hulu with a twist

Aviran Mordo — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 05:37:59 +0000

Since its launch in March, video-streaming site Hulu has become a popular place to catch TV shows, video clips and movies for free on the Web. Apparently, the folks behind Hulu - which is a joint venture between General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal and News Corp. - aren’t the only ones that think this is a [...]

Woman cleared of felonies in MySpace suicide case

Aviran Mordo — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 05:36:02 +0000

A suburban mother who prosecutors say drove a love-struck 13-year-old girl to suicide by tormenting her with a fake MySpace persona was acquitted on Wednesday of the most serious charges against her. Lori Drew was found guilty of three misdemeanor counts in the high-profile case, which made worldwide headlines and prompted calls for social networking sites [...]

iPhone 2.2 Update Gets Jailbroken

Aviran Mordo — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 20:11:25 +0000

If you’re into iPhone gimmicks and unsupported Apple applications, DevTeam released PwnageTool 2.2 to help you jailbreak the latest 2.2 iPhone software update available from Apple since Friday. Two free software tools are available from the DevTeam to help you jailbreak your iPhone, namely QuickPwn and PwnageTool. However, only the latter preserves the iPhone’s baseband firmware, [...]

Lycos Europe admits defeat in search for investor

Aviran Mordo — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 20:08:54 +0000

Loss-making Lycos Europe plans to sell some of its assets and close the rest after failing to find an investor, the company said on Wednesday. Lycos Europe — which provides Internet search, Web hosting, email, social networking and online shopping tools — said its management and supervisory boards had concluded that the best available option was [...]

Israelis develop software to improve your looks

Aviran Mordo — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:47:02 +0000

Want to optimize your looks without radically altering them? An Israeli team of computer scientists may have the answer. They have developed a computer software model based on the innate preferences that studies show we have for human faces. “This technology could become a product where for example there’s a web service where people upload their photographs [...]

Facebook targeted Twitter: report

Aviran Mordo — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:44:15 +0000

Social networking company Facebook recently held acquisition talks with Twitter, the micro-blogging company, the Financial Times said. The negotiations, put a valuation of as much as $500 million on Twitter, which has become one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched start-ups, the paper said. The talks, which were first reported by the AllThingsD blog, were confirmed to [...]