Hack Blogspot

Image via CrunchBase Another day, another set of high-profile worries about how Google is going to persuade its best and brightest people from leaving the company to join newer outfits or launch companies of their own. A few weeks ago, Silicon Valley was abuzz with reports that Google had granted across-the-board raises of 10 % to all 23,000 or so of its employees--a bracing reminder of just how much money Google makes, and of its willingness to share the spoils of success with its people. Just yesterday, on the front page of the New York Times , came a report about how "low-level engineers, product managers and prominent managers" from the executive ranks are leaving the company for high-profile companies such as Facebook as well as venture-funded startups of the sort that dot the technology landscape.

They say history is written by the victors, but the reality is that Hollywood prefers a sexy story. The upcoming movie, “ The Social Network ,” is based on the semi-fictionalized accounts of those jilted during the founding of Facebook. Starring Justin Timberlake and Andrew Garfield (who’s about to be the next Spider-Man), written by Andrew Sorkin, directed by David Fincher, produced by Kevin Spacey, scored by Trent Reznor, and about a massive cultural phenomenon, there’s a good chance people are actually going to pay attention to this movie. “ The Social Network ,” due in theaters October 1, was inspired by “The Accidental Billionaires,” an unauthorized, dramatized account billed as a non-fiction work by Ben Mezrich, who popularized the (similarly embellished) story of MIT students taking over Vegas in “Bringing Down the House.” Mezrich’s book is told from the perspective of three early influences on Facebook who were screwed out of their roles in the company by founde...

Facebook deserves plenty of blame for messing too much with its privacy settings, but no amount of fixing will stop people from embarrassing themselves on the Internet. An interesting thing happened in the time since Facebook's privacy fiasco began: The debate moved away from the most recent changes to Facebook's privacy -- allowing select Web sites to automatically tell your Facebook friends what you've been doing on those sites -- and now focuses on changes that are almost six months old . Suddenly, it seems, users are upset that Facebook wants status updates and friends lists shared with the world. By default, new Facebook users' profiles are set to "everyone," making life on the Internet an open book. Enter, well, Openbook , the site that exposes just how much people expose on Facebook. PCWorld has covered this site before , making note of the too-much-information that (I hope) users think was kept private. NPR played a different trick...

IBM researcher Matt McKeon has illustrated in a few brief slides quite how far Facebook has shifted in its treatment of users' personal data. Facebook has two issues here. One is making sure its technology delivers; that wasn't the case last week when, as TechCrunch reported, someone found a security hole that exposed private video chats . That latest problem was grist to the mill of people concerned with the bigger issue of how Facebook deals with private data through a perpetual balance of how it thinks data could be used and what users will accept. The level of openness that users will accept has shifted very fast since Facebook became mainstream, but the site continues to push that boundary forward. Since the first high-profile controversy around publishing data in news feeds back in September 2006, a string of redesigns and re-configurations have pushed users' informa...

Mukesh Ambani is ranked fourth among the World's top 10 billionaires by the Forbes Magazine with total assets worth $29 billion followed by another Indian, steel tycoon L N Mittal, who ranked fifth with a total value of $28.7 billion. The Forbes Billionaires list for 2010 has witnessed Mexican Carlo Slim surpassing Bill Gates and Warrant Buffett to be the richest man on the earth. Slim's total worth rose $18.5 billion during the year to an estimated $53.5 billion, the Forbes Magazine said. Gates remained second with a fortune of $53 billion. Apart from Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani and Head of ArcelorMittal L N Mittal, there were four other Indian tycoons in the top 50 list and 49 others in the complete list of 1,011 billionaires. The four Indian businessmen, besides Ambani and Mittal, in the top 50 list are Azim Premji (ranked: 28, worth: $17 billion), Sashi Ruia and Ravi Ruia (ranked: 40, worth: $13 billion), and Savitri Jindal (ranked: 44, worth: $12.2 billi...

MySpace hopes its move to allow users to share online content from other social networks will drive people back to their site. The social networking site said more similar features would soon be introduced Once the world's most popular social networking site, MySpace has fallen behind the likes of Facebook and Twitter. But a new MySpace service lets people connect all their web accounts, rather than having to choose between using one or the other.

CASES of syphilis have increased four-fold in Britain's Facebook capital as users meet up for unprotected sex, it was revealed yesterday. Figures released last month showed that people in Sunderland, Durham and Teesside were 25 per cent more likely to log on regularly. And an NHS trust chief said Facebook and similar sites were to blame for a shocking rise in cases of potentially-lethal syphilis in the region. Professor Peter Kelly, director of Public Health for NHS Tees, said: "There has been a four-fold increase in the number of syphilis cases detected, with more young women being affected."

Yesterday I have informed you about the Chinese government's stand point regarding Google. Google was asked either to maintain Chinese laws and regulations, or retreat. Some Chinese media even went on accusing Google of being linked to US intelligence agencies. Today Google has taken a massive step towards closing its business in China. It has shut down it's Chinese search site at Google.cn and redirecting visitors to Google.com.hk (Google Hong Kong) It is still unknown whether Google will still be operating in China with its R&D office and sales office. Loads of complains are reported from both the Chinese and American users, unhappy with the change being made. There are people in China, who want to access Google, but are also redirected to Google.com.hk. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing access to Google.com.hk.

Well, that’s quite easy. Since Twitter is free to use and available in every country in the world, you can just register and post tweets, engage in superficial internet relationships which require little or no investment. However, there’s more than that in Twitter. In this article, we’ll try to have some insight on how to use the famous 140-character micro blogging service correctly, as well as introduce you to basic vocabulary every Twitter should know. Before you start Tweeting, here’s the basic vocabulary of Twitter: To ‘follow’ someone means to subscribe to another users’ tweets, or follow to subscribe from them. You may want to follow only followorthy users as they give you more valuable content than the others. To Retweet or RT means to re-tweet tweets tweeted by other twitters, this can help you a lot, as it shows that you don’t care to put yourself in front of others. You can also send Direct Messages (DM) to other users; they can only be seen by the users you send them to....

Incredible set of crazy in pictures stories happens to people when they are traveling in the car.

As more and more people use Facebook from locations around the world with poor internet and mobile data connections, the company has been trying to customize its products to better reach them. The latest move is a not-yet-launched mobile site called Zero, that Facebook plans to fully introduce in the coming weeks. Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya mentioned a little about it at the Mobile World Congress happening now in Barcelona, Spain. While he didn’t provide many details, TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters gleaned a few, and took the top screenshot: “it’s basically a text-only version of the Facebook service that carriers can offer to their subscribers at no charge. If a user then decides to switch from text-only to multimedia (e.g. view photos from their friends), mobile operators can start charging them for ‘premium’ data service.”

There is a huge privacy flaw in Google's new Twitter/Facebook competitor, Google Buzz. When you first go into Google Buzz, it automatically sets you up with followers and people to follow. A Google spokesperson tells us these people are chosen based on whom the users emails and chats with most using Gmail. That's fine. The problem is that -- by default -- the people you follow and the people that follow you are made public to anyone who looks at your profile. In other words, before you change any settings in Google Buzz, someone could go into your profile and see the people you email and chat with most. A Google spokesperson asked us to phrase this claim differently. Like this: "In other words, after you create your profile in Buzz, if you don't edit any of the default settings, someone could visit your profile and see the people you email and chat with most (provided you didn't edit this list during profile creation)." (Freaking out already? Here...

It’s no secret that Ashley Tisdale got a nose job a little while back and before it I would say she was a cute girl. Rarely do nose jobs work out well for people, but seeing this side angle of Ashley makes me think she made the right decision. Sure she is going against the thing God created, but isn’t that how it works? We are all gods in our heads and therefore we like to think we can make our own decisions about the bodies that we believe our own.

Shower Cap

Johan Lorbeer became famous in the past years particularly because of his spectacular “Still-Life” Performances, which took place frequently in the public area. His installations like “Proletarian Mural” and “Tarzan” are famous in Germany, but still unknown internationally. This artist was pointed to us, by our fan Simon, who sent us the original article. I have no idea how these performances were done, it bugs me /a lot) quite frankly! So if you have some knowledge or ideas, be sure to post them under comments! This is what Simon sent us:

Groovle - Your GROOVY Custom Homepage - was created so people can customize their Internet homepage with images ranging from favorite celebrities or sports teams to more personal images of friends and family etc. Users of Groovle can either:

Being bored can inspire. Some bored people are inspired to pick up a hobby. Some bored people volunteer for the greater good of the community. Some bored people spend every free night thinking of ridiculous things to do and videotape. The Hi5 falls mainly into the second catergory... oh wait, I mean the one about ridiculous things. It's all about doing something that will cause a laugh and hopefully not be too boring to watch on video later. The ideas usually start off simple... for instance, one day we decided to go to the park and feed the ducks. We ended up duct taping slices of white bread onto every visible spot on Scottys body and sent him to mingle with the ducks.

Whil­e adults have joined online social networks that have been previously dominated by teens like MySpace and Facebook, adult users are also joining online social networks targeted at adult members. Adult social networks don't specialize in "adult" content (although those certainly exist), instead they're social networks for professionals rather than purely for friends. With over 15 million members, LinkedIn is the largest online social network for business professionals. On LinkedIn, profile pages read more like resumes, citing professional experience and education and leaving out personal tidbits like favorite books and bands. Not until recently did LinkedIn even allow users to post a profile picture for fear that it would turn the strictly business site into yet another excuse for online dating.