Groupon has acquired Ditto.me, a startup that has been offering a location-focused mobile app. Terms were not disclosed.
Ditto is a sort of combination check-in service, recommendation engine and chat app. “See what your friends are doing, when they’re looking for a friend to join them for coffee, what movie they’re going to see, and what their evening plans are,” the company explains on its website.
Tinychat Now Has 20 Million Registered Users, Hits Profitability
Tinychat, the web-based video chat service, just surpassed 20 million users. Founded in 2009, the company has been on a roll lately and is showing some impressive momentum. Just about a year and a half ago, after all, Tinychat only had about one million users. The company’s co-founder Dan Blake also tells us that the site currently sees about 400,000 daily users and signs up about 50,000 new users every day. The average user now spends a good 22 minutes on the site per session.
via Tinychat Now Has 20 Million Registered Users, Hits Profitability | TechCrunch.
Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google’s Sergey Brin
The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry’s attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of “restrictive” walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.
via Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google’s Sergey Brin | Technology | The Guardian.
He said he was most concerned by the efforts of countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran to censor and restrict use of the internet, but warned that the rise of Facebook and Apple, which have their own proprietary platforms and control access to their users, risked stifling innovation and balkanising the web.
Iraq Emerges From Isolation as Telecommunications Hub
The new cable will speed Internet and telephone traffic to India in the East and Sicily in the West. From there, traffic moves onto other networks to connect to the rest of the world.
Much of the world takes lightning-fast broadband service for granted, but any kind of Internet access remains a rarity in Iraq, where fewer than 3 percent of households are online. The new capacity could help bring Internet connections to 50 percent within two years, said Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi, the Iraqi communications minister.
via Iraq Emerges From Isolation as Telecommunications Hub – NYTimes.com.
All-Optical Networks: The Last Piece of the Puzzle
The functionality of an optical diode is simple to understand, as explained by MIT’s Caroline Ross, whose lab recently published a paper on the diode: “It lets light go one-way, but blocks it from going the other way.” In that sense, it’s no different from electrical diodes that have existed for decades. (While the electronics term is “diode,” the preferred term in photonics is “optical isolator.”)
But controlling photons presents challenges far more complex than controlling electrons. “You need to have a material where light propagating in one direction behaves differently from light propagating in the opposite direction,” says Ross. In order to achieve that, you need a transparent material that when magnetized creates an asymmetrical medium, which allows you to control the light’s direction.
via All-Optical Networks: The Last Piece of the Puzzle – Input Output.
Boeing prepares an ultra-secure smartphone
Earlier this week, it was revealed that aerospace firm Boeing was working on a high security mobile device for the various intelligence departments. This device will most likely be released later this year, and at a lower price point than other mobile phones targeted at the same communities. Typically, phones in this range cost about $15,000-$20,000 per phone, and use custom hardware and software to get the job done. This phone will most likely use Android as its main operating system of choice, which lowers the cost per phone, since Boeing’s developers don’t have to write their own operating system from scratch
via Boeing prepares an ultra-secure smartphone – Denver Computers | Examiner.com.
New targeted Mac OS X Trojan requires no user interaction
After infecting a given Mac, this Trojan is like most: it connects to a remote website using HTTP in typical command and control C&C fashion to fetch instructions from remote hackers telling it what to do. The backdoor contains functionality to take screenshots of the user’s current session, upload and download files, as well as execute commands remotely on the infected machine. Encrypted logs are sent back to the control server, so the hackers can monitor activity.
via New targeted Mac OS X Trojan requires no user interaction | ZDNet.
The New Grabio Lets You Grab Classified Deals On The Go
Essentially it’s a mobile Craigslist with notifications and location-based searches for classified listings. You can enter any neighborhood, do a quick search, and pick up a broken girls bicycle seat or a gently used full body cast for a few bucks
via The New Grabio Lets You Grab Classified Deals On The Go | TechCrunch.
There are a few similar services out there, most notably EggDrop and Zaarly, but Grabio uses a location aware API notifies you when you’re near deals.
Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Approaches Stable State
The Nouveau driver has had a long and challenging journey to get where’s it at today where the developers are now comfortable with the Nouveau driver leaving the Linux kernel’s staging area and thus also fully committing to a stable ABI for their kernel driver (their DRM version is also now marked as v1.0). Nouveau began more than a half-decade ago; I first wrote about the project in 2006 and it wasn’t until 2007 that OpenGL began to sort of work on this free software driver that was started by Stephane Marchesin (he’s no longer directly involved with Nouveau as for a while now he’s been off working for Google on Chrome OS). Nouveau’s journey has been quite interesting and in the past six years has earned itself 450 news posts where I have written about this open-source NVIDIA driver and over 60 featured articles that have included benchmarks or more extensive information on this Linux driver.
via [Phoronix] Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Approaches Stable State.
Facebook advertisers lose bid for class status
Facebook Inc., which runs the world’s largest social networking website, won a court ruling on Friday rejecting a bid by advertisers to sue the company as a group for overcharging them.
via Facebook advertisers lose bid for class status – chicagotribune.com.