Apple denies battery problem with iPhone

Technology giant Apple rejected reports Friday that overheated batteries had caused some of its iPhone devices to explode in users' hands, blaming incidents in France on "external pressure".

French authorities have opened an investigation into the safety of the cult smartphone, following claims by several users in France and elsewhere that their iPhone screens had shattered in a dangerous manner during use.

"As of today, there has been no confirmed incident linked to battery overheating in the iPhone 3GS, and the number of cases we are investigating amounts to less than a dozen," the firm said in a statement to AFP.

"The iPhones with broken screens that we have been able to analyse so far show, in all cases, that the cracks were caused by an external pressure upon the iPhone," the company added.

Apple's commercial director in France, Michel Coulomb, was due to meet the country's consumer affairs minister Herve Novelli later in the day to discuss the probe launched by a state safety agency following consumer complaints.

Apple has sold 26 million iPhones and 200 million iPods around the world.

Ten French consumers have come forward to say their iPhone screens exploded or cracked without explanation, according to an AFP tally, including a case in mid-August in which a teenager was said to have suffered an eye injury.

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Facebook buys social media start-up FriendFeed

Facebook, the world's largest social networking site, said it will buy FriendFeed, netting a group of prized ex-Google engineers in the fast-growing Internet business.

FriendFeed, an up-and-coming social media startup, lets people share content online in real time across various social networks and blogs. The service is similar to, though less popular than Twitter, the microblogging site that Facebook tried to buy for $500 mn in 2008, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed on Monday, but Facebook said FriendFeed would operate as it has for the time being as the teams determine long-term plans.

Facebook's big gain in the acquisition is the engineering talent at FriendFeed, rather than the actual product, which has won critical praise, but lagged in popularity compared to Twitter, said Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang.

"These guys now how to build scalable, social applications," said Owyang.

In a statement, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he admired the FriendFeed team for having created a service he described as simple and elegant.

"As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use," said Zuckerberg.

FriendFeed's four founders are former Google Inc employees who count well known products like Gmail and Google Maps among their accomplishments.

Facebook said the founders will hold senior roles on its engineering and product teams.

FriendFeed had talked with Facebook "casually" for a couple of months, and that it became clear that the teams were "cut from the same cloths," FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor told Reuters in an interview.

He declined to say whether FriendFeed had been in talks with other companies.

One bridge between Facebook and FriendFeed might have been Matt Cohler, Facebook's former management vice president. He joined FriendFeed backer Benchmark Capital last year.

Asked what role the connection played in the deal, FriendFeed's Taylor said the decision to be acquired by Facebook was made entirely by the team at FriendFeed.

Facebook has more than 250 million registered users. In May, the social networking company announced a $200 million investment from Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies that pegged the value of its preferred shares at $10 billion.

Facebook has said its revenue is on track to rise 70 percent this year, and board member Mark Andreessen has said the company will bring in more than $500 million in revenue in 2009.

But Forrester's Owyang said that Facebook must make the content generated within the site more accessible to the public instead of only to closed networks of Facebook friends, so that the company can sell more ads.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced changes to its privacy controls to allow people to make their status messages and posts viewable to a broader Internet audience.

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Facebook is world's fourth most trafficked website

Social networking website Facebook continues its rapid rise and has already become the fourth most trafficked website in the world, technology blog TechCrunch has reported.

In June this year, Facebook attracted a total of 340 million unique visitors globally, trailing only Google, Microsoft and Yahoo sites, the report said, citing latest results from market research firm comScore.

According to the report, Facebook grew 157 percent in the past year alone, gaining 208 million visitors. The social networking website surged past Amazon in August last year in terms of worldwide unique visitors. In the first half of this year, it beat eBay, AOL and Wikimedia Foundation sites.

Facebook still has some way to go before it catches up to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, each of which has between 240 million and 500 million more monthly global unique visitors.

Facebook itself officially acknowledged in July that it now has 250 million active registered users worldwide.

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5 tips for blogging your way to success

Chances are, your blog is not going to land you a book or movie deal like Julie Powell or make you a superstar like
Perez Hilton.

But it can bring you personal satisfaction, give you an outlet for expression, help you connect with others and even assist you with leveraging a business. Along the way, you may even come across a little fame. Here's how:

• Blog about what you are passionate about, said Jennifer McLean of blog search engine Technorati. Coming up with fresh and interesting content is easier. And if you're only blogging for money or fame, readers will pick up on it, she said.

• Make sure you post frequently, said Gretchen Rubin, who blogs about happiness. "That is a sign of vitality on a blog." And have a clear idea of what you are blogging about. Blogs do better when you have a focus.

• If you are an aspiring author, show that you have a loyal following, said Brooke Warner, senior editor at Seal Press. "When someone says I get 25,000 unique visitors a month, we pay attention," she said. "They have readers and either their story or writing is really good."

• Develop your unique voice. Powell, who blogged about cooking all the recipes in a Julia Child cookbook, had a "unique hook — nobody else had done that," said Ellen Gerstein, vice president of marketing for John Wiley & Sons. She also brought a lot of humor to her blog.

• Spend time on marketing, said Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net, a blog with tips for bloggers. With millions of blogs afloat on the Web, writing posts isn't enough to attract followers, he said. Focus on writing guest posts for other blogs or networking, for example.

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Clean cause: Now, Twitter for shitters in India

Shit is not a dirty word. After all, we spend six months to three years on the toilet seat in a lifetime . It is about time we cut through the crap and give 2.6 billion people on the planet a chance do the same. That’s exactly the aim of Twitter for Sh-tters , which is using the power of the current darling of social networking , Twitter, to raise money for building toilets in India.

The idea is simple. Every day, Twitter users like you and me around the world, are asked to spend the day tweeting to try and get their followers to donate. With every $400 raised, Wherever The Need, an NGO based in the US, UK and India, builds an eco-sanitation toilet for Indians, 660 million of whom still defecate in the open.

Apart from the money raised, the bigger purpose of Twitter for Sh-tters (T4S) is to make people, especially the youth, talk about sanitation, says David Crosweller, UK director of Wherever The Need (WTN). T4S has ‘‘ daily dumpers’ ’ who can tweet about ‘‘ whatever crap they want’ ’ to take this long-avoided topic and, pardon the expression, step right into it.

‘‘ The thinking behind the T4S campaign was that if we could start young people talking about the benefits of sanitation then, in the midterm , it may become less of a taboo subject and we may actually be able to start having a sensible debate,’’ explains Crosweller.

And it is more than just talking about toilets. There are 16 different aspects that sanitation and water affect . One of the main concerns is mortality from intestinal illness — Unicef says 1,000 Indian children under five die of diarrhoea and other sanitation-related diseases every day. Sanitation brings other benefits too like general improvement in health, better agricultural output and a massive saving — ‘‘ India could save at least $3 billion per year by installing eco-sanitation toilets’ ’ — in national balance of payments.

Shit, it seems, is really serious business. Which is why Dave Prager started blogging about it. What started with Poop Report, ‘‘ your number one source for your number two business’’ , ended as a book published two years ago. And Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh International, made an award-winning career by building more than 1.2 million household toilets and 6,500 community toilet blocks that serve 15 million people in India since 1973.

Despite these efforts, according to the 2001 Census, only 18% Indians use toilets. About 78.4% of the rural and 13.6% of the urban population still practices open defecation. Remember the famous scene in ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ where the young protagonist jumps into a swamp of shit? To avoid such scenes in reel and real life, the UN has set a millennium development goal of halving the number of people who currently have no access to basic sanitation facilities by 2015. Will you give a shit?

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Hacker attacks silence Twitter, slow Facebook

Twitter and Facebook said they suffered service problems from hacker attacks on Thursday, raising speculation of a coordinated campaign against the world's most popular online social networks.

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, was knocked down by a malicious attack that prevented people from accessing its website for several hours on Thursday.

Facebook members saw delays logging in and posting to their online profiles, which the social networking site said was related to an "apparent distributed denial of service attack."

Facebook was working with Twitter and Internet search company Google Inc to investigate further, said a person familiar with Facebook but who was not authorized to speak to the press.

Speculation swirled on the Internet that other social networking sites had also come under attack, after relatively lesser-known site LiveJournal said it too had been targeted by hackers on Thursday. But those rumors could not be confirmed.

The incidents follow a wave of similar cyber attacks in July that disrupted access to several high-profile U.S. and South Korean websites, including the White House site. South Korea's spy agency said at the time that North Korea might have been behind the attacks.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said on Twitter's blog that the site was the victim of a denial-of-service attack, a technique in which hackers overwhelm a website's servers with communications requests.

"We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate," Stone wrote.

A separate Twitter status Web page said later on Thursday that the site was back up, but that Twitter was continuing to recover from the attack.

Google said in an emailed statement that it was in contact with some non-Google sites that were impacted by Thursday's attacks to help investigate.

"Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services," the statement said.


ANTISOCIAL ATTACKS

Motives for denial-of-service attacks range from political to rabble-rousing to extortion, with criminal groups increasingly threatening to hobble popular websites that don't pay demanded fees, according to security experts.

Twitter's newfound fame makes it an easy target for hackers, said Steve Gibson, the president of Internet security research firm Gibson Research Corp.

Twitter, which lets users publish short, 140-character messages to groups of online "followers," is one of the fastest-growing Internet companies.

The number of worldwide unique visitors to the Twitter website reached 44.5 million in June, up 15-fold year-over- year, according to comScore data.

Security experts said a single group could have been behind the problems on Twitter, Facebook and the other sites as hackers evolve their ability to attack multiple sites at once.

"History would tell us that it's probably the same attacker or group of attackers that is launching both attacks," said Kevin Prince, the chief technology officer of security services provider Perimeter eSecurity.

A representative for blogging website LiveJournal said the site was also affected by a cyber attack for about one hour on Thursday morning.

While the company "can't be 100 percent sure that it was the same attacks as on Twitter, Facebook, et al, it would be a huge coincidence if they

aren't tied to one another," said LiveJournal representative Tim Smith.

A denial-of-service attack on Twitter would be particularly effective since "it's going to be very visible to a huge population of people who have now, to some degree, become dependent on this next-generation, real-time service," said Gibson.

Some Twitter users appeared to be taking the incident in stride.

"It's just an annoyance. Remember Twitter was down in 2007 and 2008 all the time," said Robert Scobble, a commentator on the technology industry who boasts 93,000 "followers" on Twitter, referring to a period when Twitter's rapid traffic growth occasionally led to several service disruptions.

For lawyer Zabi Nowald, it was just another day -- Twitter or no Twitter -- as he headed to work in downtown Los Angeles with a laptop in one hand and a Blackberry in the other.

"None of my friends do Twitter; none of my employers do," said Nowald, 27. "It affects my life zero. I lost something I never had."

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