One of the best things about Facebook is that virtually anyone can create applications for it, but this can also be considered to be a problem, as it always happens with third party developers - while some Facebook applications are great, others are not that great, with a few being nothing else but abysmal.<-125×125 Button - right->

The good news is that today, Mark Zuckerberg, the mastermind behind Facebook, said he’s expecting for programmers outside Facebook to play a key role in making information and entertainment easier for everyone to access and share. In the last 14 months, since Facebook opened itself to third parties, more than 30,000 applications have been designed, with the most successful of them being used by millions of users.

Obviously, those behind these applications are not starving, since Facebook estimates the creators of the most used applications raised no less than $200 million from venture capitalists.

Now, the main problem is to remove abusive applications and keep Facebook clean of any malitious code that may be launched into the wild using it. There is also a plan of rating the applications, so “Every developer involved with Facebook is going to either walk out of here elated or scared to death,” as Sean Parker says.

While today’s decision may cause additional Xbox 360 problems for a lot of people, including those Microsoft, “democracy” is the keyword in the software industry these days, and opening the Xbox 360 to third parties is expected to expand the number of games for the platform, making it more attractive than it is now. Since it would be nothing new under the sun to see a platform with more games going higher than its (usually better) competitors, I guess it’s only a matter of time and luck now, <-120×240 Vertical Banner - right->because third parties can make things better, but sometimes they can also create a big mess.

According to Chris Satchell, chief technology officer for Microsoft’s interactive entertainment business group, “Not only are we democratizing game development with Xbox LIVE Community Games later this year, but we’re creating an opportunity for aspiring developers to start their careers on the world stage.”

Do I really have to point out that Microsoft decided to offer independently produced Xbox games via the Xbox Live Community just in time for the holiday shopping season? Don’t get me wrong - it’s just marketing, and I have nothing against it, as long as users also have a benefit, and this winter may be probably one of the best ever for Xbox users, if not the best so far!

The tools behind this initiative are already available, and the XNA Game Studio was downloaded over 1 million times, but has also seen adoption in “more than 700 universities,” according to XNA General Manager Boyd Multerer. “For some perspective, the incredible creative community we’ve unleashed worldwide is more than 25 times the number of professional developers in the industry,” he concluded.

So, Microsoft is dreaming to get support from entire legions of passionate game programmers, and the idea of having a “YouTube for games” starts to get a shape.  For now, I wouldn’t bet on Xbox yet, but today may become a day to remember, either as a spark for a brilliant future, or the spark for a big fire, one to top all Xbox 360 problems we had to face so far…

The long story made short looks like this: E-Gold decided that its transactions management approach, by using the price of gold as a reference, does not make them a financial institution. The bad part is that the US prosecutors didn’t buy that, and filed charges of conspiracy to engage in money laundering, as well as conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business, indicting three of the company’s directors last year, and now the guilty pleas, submitted yesterday, could prove to be extremely expensive for them, and E-Gold’s users.<-180×150 Small Rectangle - right->

While Douglas Jackson, E-Gold’s principle director, could end up in prison for 20 years, the two others can go as bad as 5 years in prison and $25,000 fines, but the worst part is that the company could get $3.7 million in fines, possibly leading the entire online payment service to a sudden end, but let’s hope it doesn’t get that far…

On the 21st of July, Douglas Jackson posted on the E-Gold site an article entitled “A New Beginning,” explaining some things, but it seems this may be too little, too late, at least for him. For those that were used to use E-Gold for not-so-clean deals, here’s the most relevant part:”we acknowledge that e-gold is indeed a Financial Institution or Agency as defined in US law and should be regulated as a Financial Institution. E-gold Ltd. has submitted an application to FinCEN to be registered as a Money Services Business and will be seeking licensure in all states that require it. Most importantly, working in conjunction with US government agencies, we will be exerting every effort to bring e-gold into compliance with US law and regulation as quickly as possible.”

Need I say more? “No matter where you are, who you are, we’re watching you. Beware!”

Developed by a computer science graduate student at the University of Washington, Jeffrey Bigham, WebAnywhere “requires no special software to be installed on the client machine and, therefore, enables blind people to access the web from any computer they happen to have access to that has a sound card.”

The best part is that, according to its creator, this application is able to run on “on any machine, even heavily locked-down public terminals, regardless of what operating system it is running and regardless of what browsers are installed.”<-125×125 Button - right->

In the end, this program may be only the beginning, but I found it extremely handy that, with its help, virtually all computers connected to the Internet can be turned into computers for the blind, and since WebAnywhere is open source, everything looks great, don’t you think?

For now, there are still some keystrokes required to move around Web pages, but Jeffrey Bigham made a big step for the blind with his application. All I can hope is that others will step in and give him a hand, since professor Richard Ladner, his faculty adviser, is hoping for a commercial search engine to use WebAnywhere as a module.

All in all, we may move from computers for the blind to “webpages for the blind,” and I must repeat this is simply great, making information easier for everyone to find. After all, computers can do so much, but interaction with those with visual impairments is still far from being perfect just yet.

Earlier this summer, London Transport’s Oyster Card was hacked by Dutch researchers, who turned a laptop into a mobile card lab, and scored a day’s worth of free rides. So far, so good. They did it for the sake of science, of course, and now, a Dutch court gave them permission to publish details on how they did it, disregarding the protests of the chipmaker involved, although this wasn’t just some small company, but a Philips spinoff, called NXP.<-336×280 Large Rectangle - right->

The tragicomical part of the story is that these cards are used around the world for both public transit and building security, and I am sure somebody will have to spend a lot of money to make things right, and that must happen really soon. “Driven by a sense of social responsibility, the University immediately and confidentially informed the Dutch Government as well as the manufacturer (NXP) of the results of the independent research on the Mifare Classic Chip. Since March, the researchers have deliberately withheld further details of the imperfections of the chip in order to give those involved, including NXP, the opportunity to take the necessary steps. Publication of the scientific article was anticipated in October 2008 and in June the article was sent confidentially to NXP so that NXP could ask for a legal opinion,” said the University behind the researchers involved in the whole deal.

Well, at least they did it for “the greater good,” and now NXP has enough time to solve its security issues, I guess. Since even the Dutch government’s buildings were protected by the smartcards system hacked earlier, I guess Netherlands could be used as a description of heaven for hackers…as long as they don’t do it with bad intentions!

As it was recently reported by Prevx, some evil genius out there has put his wicked synapses to work, and the result is a new “uberTrojan,” MOAT(think about the MOAB, to figure out what this means!), “ultimate Trojan,” “Ghost Trojan…” just call it whatever you want, but the idea is that this evil piece of code is for sale, guaranteed to evade any detection method - or you will get your money back. How much money? Well, “just” $1300, and nothing more…a piece of cake, don’t you think?<-336×280 Large Rectangle - right->

The Trojan is known as Limbo 2, and can be easily customized, so those that created it are selling custom versions to various customers, according to their requests, so if a variant is being detected after a while, the changed one won’t be… at least for a while, of course. Now, here comes the interesting part…

Apart from doing what most keyloggers do, Limbo 2 also displays spoofed information boxes, so you may be asked to enter credit card data, email addresses, your T-shirt size, and the favorite beer brand. Oh, no, wait - I was kidding with the last two! Even worse, any personal information on your hard drive will be packed up and sent away. Not good, not good at all!

No, I don’t know where can this Trojan be purchased, and I don’t even want to know. Just…be sure to stay away from such things, and pay extra attention to the incoming and outgoing traffic stats on your firewall, all right? Good luck, and stay safe!

I guess Google made a little mistake here, since nothing’s perfect, but their misfortune was to happen exaactly with a client that’s an attorney…so now they have a class-action lawsuit opened in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, California. According to the complaint filed by Levitte’s lawyers, his ad campaign ran between the 1st of June and the 18th of August, 2007, receiving no less than 202,528 impressions from parked domain pages. While this seems pretty impressive, our attorney here got only 668 clicks and no conversions, so he spent those money on nothing!<-250x250 Square - right->

Wait, this is not everything - he also got 1,009 impressions, 25 clicks and zero conversions from various error pages, thank’s to Google’s AdSense for Errors… In the complaint, it is said that “Google includes millions of parked domains and error pages that have little or no content, and that result in practically zero conversions, in both its Content Network and its Search Network. Given the low quality of these parked domain and error pages, advertisers would not want to spend their advertising budgets on these distribution networks. However, Google designed its network in such a way that it was virtually impossible to opt out of the AdSense for Domains and/or AdSense for Errors programs.”

Since Google says they didn’t get to see the complaint yet, they made no official statement yet. What do you think…is Google the ripper, or is it being ripped off? I guess it’s none of the above, but only a misunderstanding, and a lawsuit started for only $136 by someone who’s not dying of starvation, anyway.

…by booting up Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit and getting to know the hardware and software setup I’ll use for the test, and also choosing the sites I’ll load with Firefox each time I’ll install new plugin sets. These being said, let’s start with the hardware setup, shall we?

The parts that could have an impact on the speed of our beloved Firefox and those - hopefully - 500 plugins we’ll have in the end are the following:<-120×240 Vertical Banner - right->

- MSI K9N Neo v2/v3(MS-7369) mainboard, usually known as MSI NEO-F V3, using revision 2.5 of the BIOS(there were some problems with memory performance in earlier versions, at least for me and some other guys using this board, now it works like a charm)
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ Brisbane(BH-G1) processor, slighlty pushed up, from 2.1GHz to 2.4GHz(approximate rating 4600+ now), with stock cooling and default voltage
- A-Data Extreme Edition DDR2 800+ 2X1GB memory kit, running at 800MHz and 4-4-4-11 timings
- Asus EAX1950 Pro PCI Express video card with 256MB of GDDR3 memory, just great for running Vista without any problems
- Seagate ST3320620AS 320GB S-ATA drive, with 16MB of cache memory and spinning at 7200rpm

The above should be enough, since I don’t think that my speakers, monitor or mouse could help Firefox load faster those sites I have in the list, but before getting there, let me tell you what I am usually running when I use Vista. Obviously, I have more stuff installed, but since we are trying to reproduce a real-world situation here, I won’t close everything else and run Firefox alone, so here’s what will compete with it to get the most out of my hardware:

- XMPlay, a brilliant audio player, because I can’t live without music. Just as a side note, I have to tell you that I’ll listen to my music collection from a different partition than the one used by Firefox, so that shouldn’t have any impact on the loading speed.
- MirandaIM, simply because it offers me all I need, and I hate Yahoo’s Messenger software, although I love Yahoo as a whole(I know it may sound strange, but that’s the truth). “Smaller, Faster, Easier” is finally more than just a headline!
- Unreal Commander, a very good (and free!) alternative to the notorious Total Commander that’s getting better with each new version, and still has to reach version 1.0!
- avast! 4 Professional and Spyware Doctor, both pretty good antivirus and antispyware solutions, perfectly compatible with Vista.
- Firefox 2.0.0.16, just updated, followed by a manual update to Firefox 3, of course, but there’s still some time and a lot of things to do, until then.

I know there’s still a tool for measuring startup time needed, but I’ll get it until next time. For now, there’s still one big thing to do - give you the list of sites I’ll be using for the test. Are you ready? Here we go…

- The list of notorious sites contains Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Apple, PC Magazine, Wikipedia(theEnglish Wikipedia, in my case), Alexa, About.com, Mozilla, IMDB, AMD and CNet. 12 so far…
- Next, there are some of the sites from our network - TechPin, BindApple, Cool Gadget Concept, HQ Speakers, Laptops Arena, PlayerzBlog and Pets Funky.
- In the “heavyweight category,” we have the following: 2Advanced Studios, probably the best Flash site I have ever seen, the Short Movies section on Pixar.com, Discovery Channel, and Vida Guerra’s Official Site(she’s not really my type, but the site is well done, and seems to load a pretty serious amount of data, that being the main reason for me to include it in the list).

This is it - 23 sites, if I didn’t count them wrong… After loading all of them, Firefox 2.0.0.16 eats around 210MB of memory, and I only have a few plugins installed now. These being said, we’ll check back in a few days, when I’ll make the final preparations for the big test! Stay close - subscribe to our news by email, bookmark us, set this site to open with your browser, that’s not important, just be sure to be by our side, and if you have any ideas until then, don’t hesitate to drop a comment below!

OK, so we know all that mumbo-jumbo, but what about a free Visual Studio, like in “freedom?” I know it may sound like a dream, but some people are trying to make this dream come true, shaped as a open-source tool, all being started by two new members of the Eclipse Foundation.

The idea is simple - Sonatype is planning to offer a Java environment to fight Visual Studio, expected to drop by in mid-September. This company has been founded by the same team that built the Apache Maven Java build and release framework and repository, and they are going to lead the m2eclipse project, an Eclipse plug-in combining Maven and Eclipse.

According to Jason van Zyl, CTO and co-founder of Sonatype and developer of Maven, “Maven combined with the Eclipse IDE is, we think, a solution that is starting to approach the usability of Visual Studio.” Unfortunately, there’s a pretty long road from “thinking” and “turning a dream into reality” but, as ambitious as it seems to be the entire roadmap of the Eclipse Foundation, we may have the free Visual Studio closer than we think, although its developer and basics are completely different from Microsoft’s product…

Although the open letter to the Yahoo! Shareholders is available on Carl Icahn’s blog, and you can easily view it by using the link in the previous paragraph, I want to help you spare some of your precious time, so I’ll quote the most interesting(or simply outrageous, for some) parts. Here we go…

“Dear Fellow Yahoo! Shareholders:

Over the years I have attempted to make changes at many companies but I have yet to see a company distort, omit and twist events and facts in the manner that Yahoo! has done in their press release issued Saturday night, July 12th,” started Carl Icahn his open letter. Oh, well, as if Yahoo is the big bad wolf here, and Mr. Icahn, the poor little girl…

Now, here’s the interesting part. It may be a bit long, but it’s worth your time, believe me!

“During the last week, Goldman Sachs called me a number of times asking me to relate to them any transaction that Microsoft might be interested in transacting with Yahoo! I discussed with them the possibility of doing a “Search only” deal wherein Microsoft would purchase “Search” from Yahoo! and pay Yahoo! for any searches that would originate from a Yahoo! content page. Yahoo! felt that a deal of this nature would be very interesting, but only if Microsoft would guarantee the revenue that Yahoo! now received. This would obviously be a great deal for Yahoo! because Yahoo! would, for five years, receive a minimum of the $2.3 billion they are currently receiving as long as they continued to supply the page views and affiliate traffic they now had. Heretofore, Microsoft had been unwilling to even come close to making this guarantee. However, after I negotiated with Steve Ballmer for the better part of a week, he agreed to the guarantee. He also agreed to commit $7.7 billion dollars to the transaction (consisting of a $1 billion payment for “Search”, a $2.8 billion loan and a $3.9 billion tender offer to Yahoo! shareholders). Under the transaction, Yahoo! shareholders would receive $16.25 per share in distributions (consisting of cash and securities) and be left with a content company which would have a minimum guarantee of $2.3 billion per year of “Search” revenue from Microsoft and cost saving synergies from exiting the “Search” business that <-336×280 Large Rectangle - right->
Yahoo! has publicly stated would be $750 million per year (excluding the benefits from reduction of stock compensation and other non-cash items). However, Microsoft believes the synergies from Yahoo! exiting “Search” would be far superior and that Yahoo!’s 2009 GAAP operating income would exceed $2 billion. Microsoft would be making a substantial equity investment in the remaining company at a valuation of $19.50 per share. Furthermore, Yahoo! would be spared the great expense of maintaining “Search” as well as having to spend billions in developing new technology to compete with Google and Microsoft - which it is highly doubtful they would be able to do successfully. Additionally, Yahoo! would be able to avoid the great risk of seeing “Search” continue to lose market share and eventually melt away.”

So, Carl Icahn is saving Yahoo? Come on! Who said Yahoo needs to be saved, and how is it possible to say such things like Yahoo Search “melting away??!” I wonder, and I have no answer to that yet, but I think the game is getting uglier with each day.

As a Yahoo user, I still think they have much to offer, and I don’t think they’ll ever “melt away,” but I would really like to hear the opinion of some small Yahoo shareholder, so if you’re one of them, please drop your comment below. What do you think? Would you like to see this company becoming a puppet in Icahn’s and Ballmer’s hands?