Internet

Google has introduced an advanced opt-in security feature called 2-step verification that makes your Google Account more secure by helping to verify that you’re the real owner of your account.

2-step verification requires two independent factors for authentication, much like you might see on your banking website: your password, plus a code obtained using your phone. Over the next few days, you’ll see a new link on your Account Settings page.

Getting started with 2-step verification: http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/static.py?page=guide.cs&guide=1056283&topic=1056284

humans.txt is a file placed in website files that makes people aware of the people behind a website. It contains information about the different people who have contributed to building the website.

It is located in the site root, next to the robots.txt file. You can also add an author tag to the head file.

The aim of this initiative is to make site visitors aware who the authors of the sites are. You can include the name of the developer, the designer, the copywriter, the webmaster, anyone who has taken part in the creation of a site.

More info at: http://humanstxt.org/

Hotmail has introduced aliases a new feature aimed at “e-mail enthusiasts,” which lets anyone create multiple e-mail accounts that can be read, replied to, and managed from their everyday e-mail inbox
Hotmail will let you add up to link up five email aliases a year that are completely different from your main hotmail address.

The new service is free, and will roll out to all Hotmail users shortly.

Google’s Chrome Browser now supports WebGL 3D Hardware Acceleration. The update will also allows users to download applications that run within the browser from the app store. It also features Chrome Instant, when enabled, Chrome will start to load the user’s most frequent websites as the URL is typed in the address bar.

Google also released a new extension for its Chrome browser that will make it easier to avoid ads on the Web.

Chrome recently recorded a 10% browser market share for the first time.

Integrated with GoogleDocs and DropBox

rollApp Inc. announced the release of a free beta service http://rollApp.com that provides users with online editions of Open Office, integrated with GoogleDocs and DropBox. It offers SMBs and independent professionals a turn-key solution that combines rich functionality of the traditional office suites with all the benefits of cutting-edge cloud platforms: on-demand scalability, anywhere access, no install/support pain, and reduced cost.

rollApp is developing a technology which allows instant conversion of virtually any traditional software into online SaaS. Software publishers will only need to upload their existing installation packages to http://rollApp.com , to make them available for anybody to use via any standard web browser, without any installs or downloads. The look and feel and the functionality of the software running through rollApp will mirror the original.

Today rollApp’s beta program offers 10+ popular software packages, including Open Office tools for editing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. rollApp plans to gradually add more applications and, once the platform is tested with the top-100 apps, http://rollApp.com will allow open submission of applications by third-party vendors (see http://rollApp.com/beta for details).

Schematic, a WPP Digital company, announced it was chosen by Google to work on an exciting new site, the Art Project, powered by Google, an innovative platform bringing the world’s great museums and artworks to the Internet. Schematic supported the design and development of the Art Project’s user experience, bringing to life Google’s vision for first-of-its-kind access to the world of art through an interactive digital environment.

To put the emphasis on each museum and its artwork, Schematic worked with Google’s team to design and co-develop a deceptively simple, immersive interface design. The project uses a number of Google APIs, including Street View, Picasa, YouTube, Google Docs, Goo.gl, Account and Google Scholar in a Java-based web application.

“We’re honored to have been chosen to work with Google,” said Trevor Kaufman, CEO of Schematic. “Art Project is going to change the way we experience art, bringing Florence’s Uffizi Gallery to students in the US, or bringing Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie to art lovers in Africa. We used Google’s best tools to bring users closer to the art here than they can get at the actual museums.” Behind the scenes video of the creative and development process for Art Project, powered by Google, are available on YouTube.

About Schematic
Schematic, a WPP company, creates powerful interactive experiences for the world’s largest brands. Servicing Fortune 1000 companies including Target, Nokia, Comcast, NBC, Dell, and Microsoft, the firm develops user-focused digital marketing and innovation solutions that help clients build brands and delight customers across channels. Recognized by both Advertising Age and AdWeek as one of the industry’s most innovative firms, Schematic is headquartered in New York. For more information, please visit http://www.schematic.com

The last few day when we look at Twitter, most visits we get an error page which hangs, sometimes if you click on the home button it then goes to where you wanted to be.

The “Twitter is over capacity error page” pictures a whale being lifted by birds, I wonder if the whale represents the bloated beast Twitter has become!

We have also been trying to make adjustments to twitter pages and that seems to be hit or miss, Twitter also seems to use a lot of caching, so it is hard to see if changes have really (if any) been made. Twitter API’s we use seem to have a mind of their own as well.

Price of a successful free service I guess!

Microsoft has announced a Windows Media Player HTML5 Extension for Chrome, which will let users of the Google browser play H.264 video on HTML5 pages by using the built-in capabilities found in Windows 7.

Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president of Internet Explorer, also released a lengthy blog post in which he criticized Google’s control over the WebM project and said IE9 will support both H.264 and WebM.

The Windows Media Player HTML5 Extension for Chrome uses Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin code from the April 2007 release according to the release notes.

Comcast has successfully activated our first group of trial users for IPv6 Native Dual Stack operation. These are the first Native Dual-Stack users activated in a production DOCSIS network in North America. Leveraging our state-of-the-art, production DOCSIS 3.0 network, these users can now access content and services natively over both IPv6 and IPv4. This means users do not need to use any IPv6 or IPv4 tunneling, translating, or NAT solutions; they can access IPv6 and IPv4 directly at high-speed, in an unencumbered fashion. This is a tremendous milestone for Comcast, cable operators, and the Internet community at large, and it is a critical milestone in our many years of work to prepare IPv6 to work seamlessly in a residential broadband Internet network. Each user has been delegated a /64 block of approximately 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (18 quintillion) unique IPv6 addresses. We anticipate expanding our IPv6 Native Dual Stack trial in Colorado and in other areas in the coming weeks and months.

More: http://blog.comcast.com/2011/01/comcast-activates-first-users-with-ipv6-native-dual-stack-over-docsis.html

Google’s Chrome browser ended 2010 with 10.70% of the browser market share, according to Net Applications. Microsoft’s internet Explorer continues to lose market share. Firefox, the world’s second most popular browser, currently has a 22% share.

Apple’s Safari climbed four-tenths of a percentage point to 6.3%.

The upcoming launch of Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 may change usage, or so Mozilla and Microsoft are hoping.

Top browser market share at: http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1

The TYPO3 Core Team and the TYPO3 Community are proud to announce TYPO3 Version 4.5 LTS – the first “Long Term Support” release of TYPO3. This release will be maintained for the next 3 years and guarantees maximum compatibility and a long lifespan for your website.

TYPO3 Version 4.5 LTS focuses on:
* Long Term Support
* Compatibility
* Usability
* Enterprise Features
*Easy Development

TYPO3 Version 4.5 LTS in detail:

Long Term Support
The suffix “LTS” in TYPO3 Version 4.5 LTS stands for “Long Term Support”. For the first time a TYPO3 version will be maintained significantly longer than the usual release cycle would suggest. In 2010 TYPO3 has switched to a fixed 6-month release cycle, making new features and improvements available a lot faster. On the other hand the lifetime of a version now expires faster since only the latest three versions are actively maintained.

LTS versions will be supported for at least 3 years thus offering a good option for users that don’t need or don’t want to update every 6 months.
TYPO3 Version 4.5 LTS is the last release to support Internet Explorer 6 for the Backend.

Compatibility
TYPO3 is used for a great variety of websites ranging from the smallest private homepage up to large multi-server, multi-language enterprise portals. Upgrading for everyone is easy, since the development team focused on maximum backwards compatibility with older releases. This provides a very easy and stable migration path to TYPO3 Version 4.5 LTS.
Older features are still supported and the use of deprecated features can be easily tracked in a log file.

Usability
The TYPO3 Usability Week 2009 (T3UXW09) started several usability projects on TYPO3. Some results were already included in TYPO3 Version 4.4. All remaining projects have now been finished and integrated in the current release.
This includes a blazing fast and flexible pagetree based on ExJS, configurable Backend layout and rearranged editing forms for pages and content elements.
The new LiveSearch box is a highlight: it provides instant auto-completion. A similar technology empowers input fields to find connected records in a snap.
Additionally the whole Backend got an optical facelift. Icons, colors and the general arrangement of elements were streamlined. Many details were fixed to provide a more consistent appearance and workflow.

Enterprise features
When working in an Enterprise environment workflows are an important instrument to organize team work. The Workspaces Team and the Usability Team rebuilt the whole workspaces management interface from scratch, using latest technologies (Extbase, ExtJS).
Besides the new interface, additional features like custom workflow stages were added, offering great flexibility while still assuring highly improved usability.
A new library for sending mails was added to ensure RFC-compatibility on outgoing e-mails. Plenty of other features will make sure 4.5 stays competitive for the next 3 years: UTF-8 by default, HTML5 support, ExtJS based Backend, etc..

More new Features
The new Extension Manager is a lot more comfortable using ExtJS and a grid view for extension listing.
A new Linkvalidator module was integrated as a system extension. It can check all kinds of links inside the content managed by TYPO3: internal, external, mail and file links.

Download TYPO3 Version 4.5 LTS now!
TYPO3 Version 4.5 LTS can be downloaded directly from www.typo3.org/download/. Technical documentation and the detailed release notes can be found at typo3.org/download/release-notes/typo3-45/

TYPO3 – The Enterprise CMS
TYPO3 is an Open Source Enterprise Web Content Management System released under the GPL. It currently runs more than 500,000 websites worldwide. The application has been translated into 42 languages and is being actively developed by a community of over 500 active developers in over 60 countries. Some of its end users include Lufthansa, Daimler, Cisco Systems, General Electric, the United Nations and Harvard University, as well as numerous other companies, universities, government agencies and non-profit organizations.
For additional information about TYPO3, please visit www.typo3.org.

About the TYPO3 Association
The TYPO3 Association is an association under Swiss law (as defined in Articles 60 et seq of the Swiss Civil Code), which was founded in November 2004 by members of the TYPO3 community, including Kasper Skårhøj. The TYPO3 Association is headquartered in Baar, Switzerland (Switzerland).

According to its statutes, the TYPO3 Association is promoting the free TYPO3 project under the GNU General Public License. The TYPO3 Association is a non profit organization, making software development by third parties publicly available. To finance the development and hire qualified developers, the association collects membership-fees and donations for development projects.

The TYPO3 Association is politically and religiously neutral.

The association consists of members and sponsors, whose names can be found on its website (association.typo3.org).

TYPO3 Association
Sihlbruggstrasse 105
6340 Baar
Switzerland
Phone: +41 (0)41 511 00 35
Fax: +41 (0)41 551 00 39
E-Mail: [email protected]

Google has added an unread message icon to Gmail.

“When you’re visiting sites other than Gmail, it’s easy to find out how many unread messages are in your inbox by glancing at the title of your Gmail tab or window. However, if you have a ton of tabs open, or if you use Chrome’s “Pin Tab” feature that hides everything except the tab’s icon, it can be tricky to figure out without switching tabs.”

Google says that this feature will only work Chrome 6 and above and Firefox 2 and above. In other words, everyone who will care about such a thing should be able to use it. To enable it, go to the Labs area in Settings and turn it on and save.