Microsoft on Thursday took the wraps off Bing, the rebranded and rebuilt search engine formerly code-named Kumo, designed to replace Live Search. It's a solid improvement over the previous search product, and it beats Google in important areas. It will help Microsoft gain share in the search business. It's surprisingly competitive with Google.

In search presentation, Bing wins. It uses technology from Powerset (a search technology company Microsoft acquired) to display refined versions of your query down the left side of the page. For example, I searched for the game "Fallout 3" on Google and Bing. While Google gave me good results, Bing gave me a menu of "related searches," that included Walkthrough, News, and so on. 

I planned to write this story with the headline, "Bing isn't Better," but the new engine won me over. 

The new game in search is parsing information and displaying it in the engine itself (see Wolfram Alpha for the extreme example of this). Both Google and Bing, and other search products, have areas where they will collate and format information for you, instead of just linking you to external pages where the data reside. Bing does an extremely good job at this in several popular areas -- like product reviews, movie listings, weather, travel, and stock prices. 

While the service doesn't reveal all its riches at once, it rewards exploration and yields pleasant surprises to users who poke around. 

Google keeps improving in the area of in-search collation and display as well, but Bing makes Google look complacent, and that's not good for Google. For the moment, Bing's on top in this game. Try this search engine. I do not think you will regret it.

 Related Links

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=2929

 

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We've been on the trail of the Verizon Hub since way back when it was called the Verizon One, in fact, but it's just been officially announced, and there are plenty of details to report now. The system boasts a 7-inch touchscreen display, and will work with Verizon wireless subscribers handset(s) to eliminate the need for a landline (people still have those!?) The idea here is that the hub can sync to your calendar, contacts, maps, traffic and weather reports via broadband. It can also send and receive text messages, and do all kinds of cute little tasks like send driving directions to your phone. Subscribers have to live in an E911-capable area, and will be able to bring any phone number with them if they want to sign up for new service. The hardware's going to cost $200 (after a $50 mail-in rebate) with a subscription fee of $35 per month -- which comes with unlimited minutes and texts to and from the device. It'll be available starting February 1st. Get ready.

In the CE world, success is all about timing. Verizon debuted its Verizon One gadget years ago, but that was before the widget craze, before FiOS was a household word, and before streaming radio and digital photo frames raised the profile of non-computer, Internet-connected devices.

In its latest form, the Verizon One is now called the Verizon Hub, and we got a chance to see it during our recent visit to Verizon HQ. I love this thing. In brief, it’s a cordless-phone-plus-widget-station that lets you make calls, get news, weather and traffic, share photos and control your FiOS TV (Motorola) set-tops. There are plenty of things it doesn’t do, like let you surf the Web, but that’s what your computer is for. And with the Verizon Hub you won’t get distracted by all of the unread emails in your inbox when you just want to check traffic.

The Verizon Hub has a gorgeous display, a POTS connection (no VoIP), Wi-Fi and an Ethernet port. I’m drooling over the device, but ultimately I think its success will depend on cost. This is a whole new gadget category and it will take a reasonable price point to get the unwashed masses to try it out. That said, if there was ever a time when the Verizon Hub could be successful, it’s now. Lots of people use widgets and RSS feeds, and lots of people like to show off photo slideshows. This isn’t a complete paradigm shift anymore.

 

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"My friend got a call from her friend at Facebook, asking why she kept looking at his profile," says a privacy-conscious source at a major tech company. Turns out Facebook employees can (and do) check out anyone's profile. Not only that, but they also see which profiles a user has viewed — a major privacy violation. If you've been obsessed with a workmate or classmate, Facebook employees know. If Barack Obama's intern has been using the campaign account to troll for hotties, Facebook employees know. Within the company, it's considered a job perk, and employees check this data for fun.

Facebook has a history of protecting profiles from outsiders. The site once sent cease-and-desist letters to two of Valleywag's sister blogs for publishing certain student profiles.

The site does not allow regular users to see which profiles other users have seen. While one third-party application lets users voluntarily make their profile-visiting known, no application allows one to "spy" on the activity of an unknowing user.

Checking who's viewed a profile may be how Facebook found the tipster who violated their terms of service by sending Valleywag Steve Ballmer's profile. But were they violating their own terms?

Well, Facebook's privacy policy doesn't explicitly reserve or waive employees' right to check out your profile for any reason. Of course, the practice still reeks of skunkery — it's one thing to check profiles in the course of business, but these people are looking up records for kicks. This is a company with $150 million in projected revenues this year and a gigantic ad deal with Microsoft, not a corner video store. The privacy of millions is at stake. Google clearly promises not to crawl through mail or search records with anything but a computer program, and even AOL apologized for releasing semi-anonymous search data and violating its privacy policy.

We have no idea what else employees can see. Do they look at your messages? Your private gifts? Who knows? (Really, who knows? Email me or the tipline. Unlike some, we'll protect your identity.)

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At least that's what the company claims. The most private search engine on the web that does not store IP addresses or tracks your searches like Google. 

http://www.ixquick.com/ 

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Thursday, The Wall Street Journal issued a report concerning Dell’s new smartphone, about which the media have been speculating for a while, revealing that the company had had a team of engineers working on the gadgets for over a year from a Chicago office.

The paper, quoting sources with knowledge in the matter, said that the team had developed prototypes modeled on Google's Android operating system and Microsoft Windows Mobile.

One of the models has a touch screen but no physical keyboard, similar to Apple Incorporated’s iPhone, whereas the other is fitted with a keypad that slides out from underneath the screen, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Nevertheless, a Dell representative stated that the company had not offered any information regarding plans to develop a smartphone, adding that they had not made any commitment to anything.

Despite this, The Wall Street Journal informed that the team of engineers had spent the best part of the previous year meeting with suppliers of phone components, phone software companies, along with Asian phone manufacturers.

Even though Dell has taken a leave of absence from the handheld business more than a year and a half ago, there are events indicating that it is planning a return, among which purchasing of streaming-audio software maker Zing Systems back in August.

Currently, given that the demand for PC has been weakening, turning to the development of smartphones seems like a good idea, especially since the handheld market is still a growing one, according to Jeff Kagan, a wireless and telecommunications industry analyst.


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Google Incorporated has recently announced a new application called Google PowerMeter, a feature that aims at helping users with their electric bill by tracking their home electricity usage.

The app, which is a a widget on iGoogle, communicates with the 40 million smart meters all throughout the United States and afterwards shows consumers their home energy information on their computer screens, and all this in almost real time.

In a blog post, Ed Lu of Google's engineering team stated that the detailed information concerning personal energy use should be made available in an open standard, non-proprietary format, adding that users should get to decide who can see their data.

Moreover, Lu said that consumers should have the opportunity to choose from a wide range of services capable of helping them understand and benefit from the data.

For the time being, Google PowerMeter is still undergoing testing, but the company said that it planned to expand the app’s user-base and make it more widely available in the near future.

Lu asked federal and state governments, utilities, device manufacturers, and software engineers to join Google’s efforts, saying that consumers would be urged to use electricity more wisely by virtue of the fact that they would be provided access to their energy information.

This week-end, Google filed comments with the California Public Utility Commission urging it to update its smart grid policy so as to include principles enabling free, standardized and direct access to real-time electricity usage information.

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Without his input, Bryan Rutberg's Facebook status update -- the way friends track each other -- suddenly changed on January 21 to this frightening alert:

"Bryan NEEDS HELP URGENTLY!!!"

His online friends saw the message and came to his aid. Some posted concerned messages on his public profile -- "What's happening????? What do you need?" one wrote. Another friend, Beny Rubinstein, got a direct message saying Rutberg had been robbed at gunpoint in London and needed money to get back to the United States.

So, trying to be a good friend, Rubinstein wired $1,143 to London in two installments, according to police in Bellevue, Washington.

Meanwhile, Rutberg was safe at home in Seattle.

Rubinstein told CNN he misses the money, but it's perhaps more upsetting to feel tricked by someone who impersonated his friend on Facebook, a social-networking site where millions of friends converse freely online.

While reports of extortion and false impersonation have been common in phony phone calls and fake e-mails, similar fraud hasn't been reported on Facebook until recently. Now a number of complaints are surfacing.

In response to the trend, the Better Business Bureau in late January issued a warning on its Web site, intended for Facebook's 150 million users: know who your friends are and keep your sensitive information private.

In the Seattle case, a hacker appeared to steal Rutberg's identity to get money from his friends by toying with their emotions.

In Wisconsin, police accuse an 18-year-old man of posing as a woman on Facebook to get high school boys to send him naked photos of themselves.

Anthony Stancl, of New Berlin, Wisconsin, allegedly used the naked photos he had solicited to force the young men into sex acts with him, according to a criminal complaint.

Stancl was arrested on 12 felony complaints, including sexual assault of a child younger than 16 and possession of child pornography, the complaint says.

CNN left multiple messages for Stancl's attorney but did not receive a response.

Stancl is being held in lieu of $250,000 bail and has no previous criminal record, according to CNN affiliate WISN.

There are primarily two ways to stay safe on Facebook, said Jim Lewis, director of the technology and policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. First, make sure your computer anti-virus programs are up to date; and tell online companies you want better privacy protection, he said.

In a statement, Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told CNN that impersonation schemes affect fewer than 1 percent of Facebook's 150 million users. He would not comment on whether the rate of such incidents is increasing, but said any increase in the total number of impersonations could be due to the fact that the site is growing by 600,000 users per day.

"In many cases, the scammer has added a new contact e-mail to attempt to maintain control of the account," Schnitt said in a prepared statement. "To combat this, we're instituting changes that will better notify users when their account is modified and empowering them to reverse these changes."

Rutberg, the Seattle man who had his Facebook page hacked, said he worked with the site to shut down his profile within a day. It was back up in a week, he said.

All Internet users should be aware their identities can be compromised, and "every user of the Web should be better educated," Rutberg said.

Like other types of Internet fraud, Facebook impersonation cases are difficult to solve and costly to pursue, said Officer Greg Grannis, spokesman for the Bellevue Police Department in Washington.

"We are not investigating this case," he said, noting that a report on the case had been filed with his office. "It is pretty much at a dead end."

Because the money went to London, it would be nearly impossible to send officers out to investigate the case, he said.

Facebook says it is taking measures to reduce impersonations. The popular site also offers these preventative tips for those who want to take the security of their online profile into their own hands:

• Be suspicious of anyone -- even friends -- who ask for money over the Internet. Verify their circumstances independently, either by calling them directly, or checking with mutual friends.

• Choose a strong password and use unique credentials for each of your Web accounts. Facebook says hackers tap into one site and then try to reuse passwords on others.

• Use an up-to-date browser that features an anti-phishing blacklist.

• Use and run anti-virus software on your computer.

• Reset your Facebook password if you suspect your account has been compromised.
• Have more than one contact e-mail address. This will help if one of them is hacked.

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When Debbie Gordon and her fellow health-care mission workers go to Belize, there's just so much they can do to treat people in the remote village of Gales Point.

Her group, which includes two or three doctors, can only treat the town's 300 villagers based on the symptoms patients describe or what the doctors observe.

"If we had the ability to take a device that could do field tests and get back the results in a few days, that would be very helpful," said Gordon, a health educator based in North Carolina, who teaches doctors and nurses about care for sick newborns.

How about in a few seconds? Such a device may be available in the near future, and it could turn a cell phone into a mobile medical lab -- and change the way doctors treat patients in rural areas far from hospitals.

Professor Aydogan Ozcan of UCLA has taken a typical Sony Ericsson phone, and by adding a few off-the-shelf parts that cost less than $50, he can get it to produce a remarkable image that shows the thousands of cells in a small fluid sample such as human blood.

"It is a new way of doing images of cells and bacteria," said Ozcan, an assistant professor in UCLA's electrical engineering department. While other small imaging systems use bulky optics, his group's invention offers "true miniaturization of a laboratory" because there are no lenses and the results are quick and accurate, he said.

The device is called LUCAS, which stands for lensless ultra-wide-field cell monitoring array platform based on shadow imaging. It uses a short wavelength blue light to illuminate a sample of liquid -- blood, saliva or another fluid -- on a laboratory slide. 

LUCAS captures the image to a chip in the cell phone. If the phone is loaded with an algorithm program, it then counts the microparticles much faster than a human can. The image also can be transmitted wirelessly to a computer, which analyzes it and sends back a text message with the results.

For instance, CD4 counts -- or the measure of T cells in a person's blood -- can determine if an HIV patient has AIDS. Or a red cell count can help determine if a patient is anemic or might have malaria.

Ozcan compares the images to the shadows you see when you walk down the street on a sunny day.

"These cells also have a shadow, but their shadows are not like our black shadows, they are much more rich," he said.

The holograms produced by the camera are fuzzy and cannot be read by the human eye. Doctors still need microscopes to examine a sample from a patient.

The cells are different in shape by type, so the LUCAS system counts the cells using an algorithm developed by the UCLA team. Ozcan said the report generated is 90 percent accurate.

The test is not meant to replace sophisticated optics. But the device could offer a fast, preliminary diagnosis in hard-to-reach areas such as remote villages in sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV rates are the highest in the world.

"What makes it quite valuable is that it is small and inexpensive," said Skip Garner, professor of Biochemistry and Internal Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. "It's also the scientific proof of a principle in its very early stages. Once the group puts more and more work into it there are going to be a huge number of applications that are going to come out."

Ozcan said he came up with the initial concept about two years ago. Major improvements have come in the past 18 months, but the system is still considered a prototype, he said. In the future if the LUCAS is built into a smart phone or similar hand-held device, it would add only a few dollars to the cost, he said.

Ozcan also wants to further develop LUCAS' imaging capability to record events at the molecular level.

"We want to go now from microscale to nanoscale," he said. "We want to detect DNA fragments or protein."

Garner wonders whether the device could differentiate between similar-looking bacteria. There is good E. coli and bad E. coli, for example, and they are almost identical in structure. 

Ozcan's team is also still trying to understand the density limits of LUCAS. When there are many cells in a sample, it becomes harder to count them all, Ozcan said.

"But if you are looking for a diseased person, it's not usually the count [that is important] but the morphology of the cells," he said.

Another potential pitfall is the lack of cell-phone coverage in remote areas. But many Third World countries are developing cellular networks, Ozcan said.

Gordon, who has made several mission trips to Belize, says a device with the LUCAS system would be ideal for her team. There are no doctors in Gales Point, so her group's visit is one of the few times medical professionals come to the village. 

The nearest hospital is more than 90 minutes away.
"To get results right away would be phenomenal," she said. "I'd want to test every villager on my next trip."

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For anyone even slightly optimistic about thwarting the never-ending crush of spam I have two words: Don’t bother.

At the Information Security Best Practices conference at Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania I’ve learned the following from the first panel.

Comcast’s Gerard Lewis, senior counsel and chief privacy officer, noted that the CAN-SPAM act of 2003 “hasn’t done anything to curb spam,” but is “a well intentioned law.” Indeed, almost all email is classified as spam.

Lewis should know since Comcast moves millions of emails a day–450 million on average to be exact. Lewis walked through the evolution of spam and how defenses have moved from generic filtering to a more sophisticated model. The rub: The fancy stuff doesn’t work too well either. 

Lewis said that giving consumers more control and tools to prevent spam helps a bit. But plenty still fall for social engineering tricks. 

What’s the solution?

I haven’t heard one yet. Chris Marsden, a professor at the University of Essex, said there are a bevy of regulation schemes being cooked up across the pond. But it didn’t sound like there were any spam killers coming from the UK. 

Marsden said ISPs will likely see more regulation, but giving consumers more tools isn’t the answer per se. 

“ISPs have made it clear that consumers will not implement filters,” said Marsden. Australia has even sent CDs to citizens to prod them to implement filters. One outcome may be required filtering for spam and content on all PCs as a regulatory requirement. 

Think of these efforts as mandatory seat belt laws for Web surfing.

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