12 - 2010 | Lcolm Net

BitNami Stacks for Moodle 2.0 Announced

News

BitNami Stacks have been announced for Moodle 2.0, the latest stable release of Moodle. This new release has several major new features:

Community hubs, a directory of courses for public use or private communities.
Repository support which allows Moodle to integrate with external repositories of content like Alfresco, Amazon S3, YouTube among others.
Portofio support, so now modules can export their data to external systems.
Course completion and prerequisites.
Conditional activites.
Web services support for administrative systems or mobile clients.
Integration with plagiarism prevention tool such as Turnitin.

You can download a simple native installer for your machine, use a Virtual Appliance to deploy it in your favourite virtualization platform or deploy it in the Amazon cloud.

More: http://bitnami.org/stack/moodle

Google Launches Google Message Continuity

Internet

Google Postini Services has introduced Google Message Continuity, “a hosted continuity solution for your on-premise email server. Ensure rapid email failover in the event of a server outage with complete and constant email replication – all accessible at any time through Gmail.”

The service is said to safeguard Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 messages through Gmail. Message Continuity synchronizes on-premises Exchange accounts with Google’s cloud

Google Message Continuity will cost US$25 per user per year for new customers or an additional $13 per user per year for current Postini customers.

More info: http://www.google.com/postini/continuity.html

Amazon S3 Announces 5TB Storage

Internet

Amazon’s S3 service has announced in a blog post, customers can now have up to 5TB Storage.

“We’ve raised the limit by three orders of magnitude. Individual Amazon S3 objects can now range in size from 1 byte all the way to 5 terabytes (TB). Now customers can store extremely large files as single objects, which greatly simplifies their storage experience. Amazon S3 does the bookkeeping behind the scenes for our customers, so you can now GET that large object just like you would any other Amazon S3 object.”

More info: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/12/amazon-s3-object-size-limit.html

Google Opens Chrome Web Store

Internet

Google has today opened the Chrome Web Store.

Google said ” Developers have already started uploading apps, and we expect the number to grow over time. Right now the store is only available in the U.S., but will expand to many countries and currencies early next year. The store will be featured prominently in Chrome, helping people discover great apps and developers reach millions of users around the world.”

More: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/12/update-on-chrome-web-store-and-chrome.html

Facebook Update User Profile Pages

News

Facebook has updated it’s user profile pages according to The Facebook Blog and is already being rolled out to Facebook users.
The profile begins with a quick overview of basic information such as where you’re from, where you went to school, and where you work—?the kinds of conversation starters you share with people you’ve just met or exchange with old friends as you get reacquainted.

Features include Featured Friends and Improved Photos and Friends Pages,

More Info: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=462201327130

Amazon Route 53 DNS Service Announced

Internet

Amazon Web Services has announced Route 53 DNS Service.

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating human readable names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in Amazon Web Services (AWS) – such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, or an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket – and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS.

More info: http://aws.amazon.com/route53/

PayPal Restricts WikiLeaks Donation Account

Internet

PayPal the online banking service has restricted WikiLeaks fund raising account.

PayPal statement regarding WikiLeaks
DECEMBER 3, 2010
PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We’ve notified the account holder of this action.

Wikileaks, has removed the PayPal option from it’s website.

Google to Release Chrome OS Netbook

Technology

Google will unveil a Chrome OS netbook Dec. 7 reports eWeek.

“Google is hosting an event Dec. 7 where it will likely demonstrate a netbook based on its long-awaited Chrome Operating System.

Google late Dec. 3 e-mailed eWEEK a media invitation to a Chrome-related event, sating simply: “On December 7, we will host an event in San Francisco where we plan to share some exciting news about Chrome.”

Full article: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Google-Chrome-OS-Netbook-Set-for-Dec-7-Unveiling-251346/

Microsoft Research Announces Zozzle JavaScript Malware Detection Tool

Technology

Microsoft Research has developed a new browser tool called Zozzle that can detect JavaScript-based malware.

Microsoft Research said:
“JavaScript malware-based attacks now account for a large fraction of successful mass-scale exploitation happening today. From the standpoint of the attacker, the attraction is that these drive-by attacks that can be mounted against an unsuspecting user visiting a seemingly innocent web page. While several techniques for addressing these types of exploits have been proposed, in-browser adoption has been slow, in part because of the performance overhead these methods tend to incur.”

There are no current plans to release Zozzle to the public.

Microsoft Research’s motto is “Turning Ideas Into Reality”

Google Buying 111 8th Avenue

Internet

Google is buying 111 8th Avenue in Manhattan for $1.9 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“The 2.9 million square foot building, which occupies the entire city block between 15th & 16th Streets from Eighth to Ninth Avenues, was placed for sale in September by an ownership group including Taconic Investment Partners, the New York State Common Retirement Fund and the German investment group Jamestown.”

Full Story: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704377004575651380545769418.html

Google Cloud Picker

Technology

Google are testing a new online storage tool; Cloud Picker according to techcrunch.

The tool is connected somehow to Google Apps, Docs, and Sites, and was presented to users when they tried to insert a file or image into a Google site. When they tried to embed the file, a “Google Cloud Picker” window opened and asked users to log-in to their Google Accounts.

Read more at: http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/02/meet-cloud-picker-googles-stealthy-new-storage-product/

Chrome Web Store Delayed for Chrome 8

Technology

Google had hoped to launch the Chrome Web Store in October, but is reported to be delayed as Chrome 8 is needed to support the web store.

“Chrome 8 is the first version that supports the Chrome Web Store,” mentions a Google Chrome engineer. There’s already a new icon for the store in Chromium and this should be the final icon.

Google say “Google Chrome 7 was launched on October 21, almost 6 weeks ago, so Chrome 8 and Chrome Web Store should be available this week.”