A British Council Successfully Forces Twitter to Hand over User Data after A Court Battle in California

A local authority in Britain had demanded Twitter to provide them with some users' details as it made the request to the the US microblogging site in the court of California. This step was taken for the first time ever, in a case from Britain. South Tyneside Council of northeast England has taken all necessary steps required to lodge an official application in the legal boundaries to investigate and acquire the identity of an anonymous blogger, entitled with the cyber name "My Monkey", who has apparently passed slanderous statements against the councilors.

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The spokesperson, Paul Robinson, declared on behalf of the council that "Twitter has released information to our lawyers and this is currently being analyzed by technical experts." The information required was delivered to the council after it had dragged Twitter in to a court in California, the hometown of the service.

Analysts are suspecting that this ruling could be the result of footballer Ryan Giggs’s case, whose lawyers had previously insisted in front of the British courts that Twitter should disclose the identity of the user which has allegedly defied the court orders.

ARM Is Going To "Take Seriously" Any Plan That Intel Has Regarding Make Chips for Rivals; Executives

An executive of famous Britain-based chip maker, ARM Holdings Plc, which itself licenses many chips to other makers, stated on Monday that it is going to take all the plans of Intel Corp. to start making chips for rivals "very seriously." Intel declared just last week that it is considering to start making chips for its rivals, as it interprets this decision to be helpful in making the chipmaker gain better access in the mobile device kingdom. This will in turn be a major threat for ARM, as it is currently leading the chip making market of tablets and smartphones.

Image via Wikipedia"It's important that Intel makes a change in their business model. Intel has never done this before, so we have to take it very seriously," declared the V.P. of marketing at ARM, Ian Drew. Intel hopes that its unparallel lead in manufacturing techniques, due to computer chip manufacturing, will be extremely helpful in opening new factories to compete with its rivals.

Study Shows That Social Media and Other Technological Distractions Cost Large Businesses Huge Losses

It has been reveled from the results of a survey conducted by harmon.ie, a social email software provider that most of the employees loose almost around $10,375 in productivity each year. The reason behind this huge loss in productivity is tracked back to the uneasy feeling while disconnecting or being stuck chatting with someone online and not signing off, or being constantly bugged by an overflowing email inbox, or the deep attractive and addictive trench of Facebook with glamorous photos, updates and messages. The survey was based on the evaluation of around 500 employees of different United States businesses ranging from smaller companies to large corporations.  harmon.ie discovered that the larger companies, which have employed more than 1,000 workers are the ones which suffer most from these digital distractions among the employees, as the loss could be even more than $10 million each year.

Lockheed says frequent cyber target from around world

Lockheed Martin Corp. is the primary information provider and aeronautical manufacturer of the U.S. government, and it announced this Sunday that it has faced a very "tenacious" cyber attack at its network last weekend. It declared that this attack is just a recent part of a recurring pattern of attacks it has been facing from worldwide hackers. The chief information officer of Lockheed Martin Corp., Sondra Barbour, stated that "The fact is, in this new reality, we are a frequent target of adversaries around the world," as she was addressing the employees in a memorandum.

These "significant and tenacious" cyber attacks precisely took place on May 21^st, and were instantly detected and countered, though the public announcement is being made eight days later. Bethesda, the Maryland-based facility of Lockheed is still working hard consistently to restore all the consequential affects of the hack attack, keeping the employees’ access to the network still at the maximum level of intact security, declared Barbour. She further informed that the internal immediate reaction of Lockheed was to quickly and "proactively" shut down the virtual private network, or VPN, of the company. VPN is actually a secure method of connecting through to a private network by using either the Internet or any public network in order to transfer the data of the network privately with encryption. Some other counter measures to the hack attack included resetting the passwords of all the users, upgrading the tokens for remote access SecurID and also the addition of a new height of security to the remote access network log-on procedure, revealed Barbour.

Honda Canada Faces a Major Data Breach, Warns Its Customers to Stay Careful

After one of the world’s largest data breach in Sony’s Network, now Honda Canada has fell victim to similar crime as its customers’ personal information gets compromised from their database. Honda made the public declaration on Friday announcing that the data of almost 283,000 customers was stolen, which included the customers’ names, addresses, vehicle ID’s. It was also further notified that financing account numbers of few accounts might also have been leaked during the data breach.

The company has reassured its customers that the stolen data is not of the kind which would let the criminals to commit identity theft or fraud easily. It could have been possible to forge and cheat the users if the stolen data included details like birth dates, telephone numbers, email addresses, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, driver's license numbers, social insurance numbers, or dollar amounts of financing or payments.

The company explained that this stolen data was initially collected in a campaign in 2009; the campaign included multiple mailing programs for the owners of Honda and Acura to register at the myHonda and myAcura websites. Toronto Star reports that Honda initially identified mysterious activities in its e-commerce websites in late February, after which it immediately sent an e-mail to all the possible affected customers, on 13^th May, informing them about the unusual activity they are witnessing on their website and instructing them to remain cautious. The official warning e-mail stated declared that there has been “some unauthorized attempts to access account information.” Honda has remained very protective of the details regarding the breach and does not confirm or deny the detailed information about the breach being published in reports of local newspapers.

Twitter Reinstalls A Feature to Its Service, Which It Suspended Two Years Back

This Thursday, Twitter has once again rolled out a feature it had suspended

 earlier. Basically, the feature lets the users see the timeline of other users, like the home twitter feed. It was previously suspended by Twitter two years back. The suspension of this small feature was followed by an official blog post which justified the removal, dated on 4^th June of 2009. The Twitter Status blog stated: “Recently we made a change to remove the With Friends tab from user profiles. We did this after finding out that this tab was both a relatively rarely accessed as well as computationally expensive page for us to serve.”

Image via CrunchBaseNot only was the feature “relatively rarely accessed” but it was also accumulating many costly cycles on their taxed servers at that time. Now the question in mind of many users is that why is Twitter returning this feature now. It’s clearly visible that Twitter is past its limitation of main scaling issues, since its downtime is way too less than before. Even though there is considerable time when the service is unavailable even today, but it has still increased tremendously compared to the situation two years ago. The features like “With Friends,” tweet-to-IM, auto timeline updates were among the main reason behind the downtime of mainstream functions of Twitter.

So to eradicate the problems, these features were discontinued back then since keeping a healthy social graph was not as important concern of that time. But now that it has improved it’s functionally and has no problem in having more users, its primary concerns is to make Twitter more useful and keep the users addicted to the service. Hence these features like “Who To Follow” and “See What I See” are very helpful in that regard. Especially the “See What I See” features can be used as a self-tutorial to show new users about how to use Twitter in full capacity.

Founders of Cliqset Give another Personal Attempt to Publishing and Social Conversations Website with New ‘Glow’

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The founders of Cliqset, Darren Bounds and Charlie Cauthen, announced just last year that their website was going to be shut down. Cliqset offered social syndication in high potential and aggregation service that was first launched in 2009. It gave users the facility to be able to post and syndicate all their online content on Cliqset, from other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz along with almost eighty other social or business sites and networks.

Louis Gray, a technology writer, published in November last year, that that ‘startup’ feature of Cliqset was very unique to start networks to implement ‘Pubsubhubbub’ for real-time updates, similarly he asserted that ‘Salmon’ was again a unique method of cross-network comment posting. Though even after having such distinguishing features, the service was still not able to gain considerable audience or active users. Consequently the founders of the website had to announce that it was going to shut down. Now, apparently Bounds has quickly moved on to his next project—Glow.

Bounds has written on his personal blog that Glow is his “personal attempt at building a social network that doesn’t sacrifice simplicity, features or user-experience in an effort to promote decentralization, user privacy and data ownership.” This new website, about which we only have vague information, is going to join both personal publishing and social conversation.

Facebook Users Constantly Fall For Fake News Articles Spreading Virally

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Many Facebook users were utterly stunned to read the news telling them that the last four minutes of the famed Harry Potter’s movie series is going to be divided and played in seven different movies.  It was obviously a fake prank by the notorious website, The Onion, which is popular for its fallacious headlines. The blog has been getting some very intense comments as the readers fall for the prank and believe the unbelievable news. Hudson Hongo, 24, is the humor writer who actually penned down this publication. Previously he wrote a humor article, titled ‘Planned Parenthood’ and was pretty surprised to see that many Facebook users were not able to recognize it as a joke. Hence he began poking around last week, and realized that there were a lot of public Facebook pages which were full of "Onion"-related confusions. He wrote on his personal blog that "When I found out that people were reacting the same way to many other Onion articles, I felt the phenomenon was worth documenting and put it up my blog."

One of the reader of his article commented: "Wow ... really? I guess it's one way to milk a franchise,” while another complained that "Eh, I've enjoyed the last few, but paying around $70 to basically see the end of one movie is a little sad." While responding to another such fake blog post titled "Abortionplex,” one user wrote "This is unbelievable," and another claimed that "THIS IS SICK ... really unbelievable that our taxes are paying for this!”

Nvidia Declares Its New Processor Core, Kal-El, To Be More Compatible With Quad-Core Mobile Graphics

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The Tegra graphics processor of Nvidia is perhaps technologically the most advance processor in the market of graphics today, especially the Android devices. Recently Nvidia has made the announcement that it is planning to upgrade its already dominant processer for mobile graphics, which will lead the market in future. It was in February, that the initial announcement of the upcoming Kal-El quad-core mobile graphics chip was made publically. Nvidia has released new upgrade regarding the progress of its processor, publishing a demo video displaying the most excellent technology behind Kal-El, allowing it to perform in real-time lighting and physics capabilities on a HoneyComb Android table. This promo video is titled as “GlowBall,” and it shows the features a glowing ball lighting up and moving through a 3D “creepy funhouse” environment.

According to the official blog website of Nvidia, its writer, Matt Wuebbling wrote that “this shows off the power of true dynamic lighting, rendered in real-time with physics (no canned animations here, folks),” adding that “this marks the first time this type of lighting is feasible on a mobile device.”

Nvidia has measured that its new Kal-El gives almost five times better graphic performance than the preceding Tegra 2 processor, which is already housed in devices like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Motorola Xoom at this time. In contrary to Tegra 2, the Kal-El works on the quad-core processor in the Android device, supplemented by a 12-core graphics processor. The video promo displayed by Nvidia allegedly only shows the GlowBall, but does not reveals whether the chip will be working in real-time: shutting down two of the device’s main processor cores has a dramatic impact on Glowball’s overall performance.