Recent Tech articles 4th – 10th July 2011

It’s been another week of Google+ V’s Facebook. With more people gaining access to Google+ by fair means or foul and Facebook making their ‘Awesome’ announcement. The jury seems out whether Google+ will be a mainstream hit or just be a tech haven for geeks. The full global opening of the gates is likely to happen later this month. I finally managed to get my own invite and have been roaming about the site… I do have a limited amount of invites for anyone willing to subscribe to the blog.

Google started the week off a announcing that Blogger and Picasa would Be renamed. They then finished off the week announcement that YouTube, although not being renamed will take on the new design style.

During the early part of last week it seemed that each day was bringing a new security hack. A fresh one for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
Post: https://cbeagrie.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/antisec-attacks-the-gathering-storm/

On Tuesday, a Global team was set up to fight global cybercrime. This has taken a while to set up and through other previous treaties. Recent AntiSec events have promoted a push to get it up and running.

There was a call this week from Google to the UK Government to open previous closed door discussions on the website-blocking debate to the public. In a later post, Ed Vaizey responds to reports of ‘conspiracy’ on industry web-blocking discussions.

Facebook announce that it was introducing video calling as their ‘awesome’ announcement.. Half a week later, Spammers swoop in to try and catch people out.

Apple filed a patent for an Augmented Reality device, so what is it? Plus some examples

Recent Tech articles 4th – 10th July 2011

It’s been another week of Google+ V’s Facebook. With more people gaining access to Google+ by fair means or foul and Facebook making their ‘Awesome’ announcement. The jury seems out whether Google+ will be a mainstream hit or just be a tech haven for geeks. The full global opening of the gates is likely to happen later this month. I finally managed to get my own invite and have been roaming about the site… I do have a limited amount of invites for anyone willing to subscribe to the blog.

Google started the week off a announcing that Blogger and Picasa would Be renamed. They then finished off the week announcement that YouTube, although not being renamed will take on the new design style.

During the early part of last week it seemed that each day was bringing a new security hack. A fresh one for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
Post: https://cbeagrie.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/antisec-attacks-the-gathering-storm/

On Tuesday, a Global team was set up to fight global cybercrime. This has taken a while to set up and through other previous treaties. Recent AntiSec events have promoted a push to get it up and running.

There was a call this week from Google to the UK Government to open previous closed door discussions on the website-blocking debate to the public. In a later post, Ed Vaizey responds to reports of ‘conspiracy’ on industry web-blocking discussions.

Facebook announce that it was introducing video calling as their ‘awesome’ announcement.. Half a week later, Spammers swoop in to try and catch people out.

Apple filed a patent for an Augmented Reality device, so what is it? Plus some examples

Google renaming Blogger and Picasa as part of Google+ unification

Last week it was Search, Mail and Calendar and this week the announcement that Blogger and Picasa will be renamed Google Blogs and Google Photos respectively no doubt with the requisite new look. Several other Google brands are likely to be affected to reports Mashable who broke the story on the web. They also mentioned that YouTube will remain as it is and won’t be rebranded,

It looks like the rebranding is scheduled for the end of July which is rumoured to be the date that Google+ goes public. This date is highly likely to be the day or release as on the same day all private Google Profiles are set to be removed. The idea behind the removal is thought to be to make way for privacy through Circles.

Time will tell…

Blogger goes down for two days – more cloud problems.

At the Google I/O (highlights here) conference in May 2011 Google effectively stood up and said that the time for local computing was dead; let’s store it all in the cloud. Later that week Blogger went down for just over 48 hours. Effectively between 7:37am on May 11th and 11am on May 13th (Pacific time) the service was unavailable to bloggers.

The problem was attributed to a maintenance update that caused a “data corruption” forcing Blogger staff to restore the system back to prior to the update. Some posts and comments from after the date were lost.

After the first 20.5 hours, read access was available for people to read blogs but not to post anything new and then at 10:24 on the 13th there was a posting by Eddie Kessler, Tech Lead/Manager of Blogger apologising for the problems and promising to do everything to ensure it never happened again.

It took until the 16th however to fully restore all the posts and comments that individuals were complaining about being missing.

Blogger is back post: http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/05/blogger-is-back.html
Blogger service disruption postings: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=7b6d0384a4f5fa00&hl=en

As well as blogger, the following companies have been having their own online problems too:

Microsoft would have us all storing our data with them and using software as a service on their Azure Cloud service but users have been complaining about patchy connection service since May 10th.

Recently WordPress was unavailable to bloggers on two separate occasions when the entire wordpress.com hosted blog service suffered a denial of service attack that was aimed at individual blogs.

As I have previously written about, Amazon suffered a catastrophic failure of their EBS service in the US.

As well as the above Sony with their PSN service and Square Enix both had their customer databases hacked with the former still having a big question over whether credit card information was taken too.

Never mind the question “should we put our faith in the cloud?”, companies should be thinking really hard about whether they are ready for it.