matsoccumbria.org

Google is extracting quotations for politicians and celebrities from news sources and featuring them at the top of the Google News results page for certain searches.

For instance, a search on “Barack Obama” brings up a quotation by the Democratic presidential hopeful, and clicking on his name under the quote takes you to more pages of his quotations. You can then search within just the quotations from there.

“As part of Google’s mission to organize the world’s information, we’ve been hard at work making quotations in news articles easy to search and browse,” the Google News blog says. “You can now more easily keep track of what your favorite politician, actor, or sports star is saying. You can even search within their quotes for specific topics.”

I could find quotations for Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, President Bush, and Vladimir Putin, but not for Bill Clinton or some major actors. As for sports stars, this is what Tiger Woods had to say: “I learned my lesson there with the press. I’m not going to say anything.”

Google News offers quotations for politicians, sports stars, and celebrities at the top of the results page.

(Credit:
Google)

This is a screenshot of the quotations page for Barack Obama. Note the search box on the left for searching just within the pages of quotes.

(Credit:
Google)

According to Google News, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have offered contradictory views on sociology.

(Credit:
Google)

Nik's Viveza will ship later this quarter for about $250.

(Credit:
Nik Software)

LAS VEGAS–Nik Software on Wednesday announced a new variant of its photo-editing software that will run as a plug-in to Adobe Systems’ Photoshop.

The company’s Viveza plug-in brings the “U Point” editing method, already available in Nik’s Capture NX software, to Photoshop. The software functions as a Photoshop smart filter, which means it can be applied nondestructively and updated later.

Viveza will ship in the first quarter for Windows and
Mac OS X and cost about $250, Nik said at the Photo Marketing Association trade show here.

The U Point system is an attempt to simplify photo-editing tasks that often require complicated selection and masking operations. Placing control points on an image gives users sliders to adjust color, saturation, lighting, and other parameters, and those adjustments also affect other parts of the image similar to where the control point is located.

Once installed, the infected files do various things to the compromised desktop, such as attempt to gain your Orkut account log-in information, or displaying a browser image of a man identifying himself as the “Trickster.”

In this screenshot from Facetime, clicking the link for a photo album could get your computer infected.

(Credit:
Facetime)

The messages, written in Portuguese, attempt to get visitors to download a photo album. In order to view the album, you’ll need to download a Flash update, which is really the infection files themselves. Boyd and his team have identified the infection as Orkon.

Orkut has been targeted in the past. Here, the infection itself is not so interesting, as is use of Twitter as a vector. Boyd recommends that even if you don’t use Orkut, if you see a Twitter page referencing an Orkut photo album, stay away.

In a blog, Chris Boyd, director of malware research for Facetime, explained how a Twitter page is being used to lure victims. To lend credibility to his discovery, the Twitter page lists 17 followers, however each appeared to be fraudulent. Boyd said Twitter had been notified.

In yet another new way to infect people, criminal hackers are using a Twitter page, according to one security researcher.

The carrier and Palm on Monday unveiled the Palm Treo 800w, a Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphone targeted at business users. Now, we’ll admit that we’ve given Palm its fair share of criticism over the years for being behind the times and lacking innovation, but while the Treo 800w doesn’t offer anything earth-shattering, it offers enough to stifle some of our complaints.

The world may still be all abuzz with iPhone 3G talk, but believe it or not, there are other smartphones out there, and Sprint just happened to land a pretty good one.

CNET review: Palm Treo 800w

Pique your interest? Then head on over to our hands-on review to see how it fares. After rebates and discounts, the Treo 800w is available for $249.99 with a two-year contract.

We’re talking integrated Wi-Fi, GPS, EV-DO Revision A, and a slimmer design.

Of course, not all the features from Office map to Google, so users may experience some hiccups in the transition, especially when using Google’s very limited spreadsheet and presenter applications. I was not very pleased when I tried the product last night and it immediately started syncing all my documents to Google. I’d like more control. CEO Cliff Shaw says that’s coming.

After taking a closer look at this business, I think there’s something very valuable here, at least for the short term. Businesses that don’t want to install Office on all employees’ machines can, with this tool, still give them easy access to the files that the high-zoot Office users are working on. Of course, you could do something similar with an Office alternative such as Open Office or Zoho, but then you wouldn’t get Google’s real-time collaboration features, plus there’s no easy sync with people who prefer to use Office. Even Microsoft’s own new Office Live Workspace doesn’t offer live collaboration (see Extend your Office apps via Live Workspace), and it requires a change in user behavior. DocSyncer just takes existing Office docs and makes them available via Google Docs. The product also offers versioning on Office documents, which Office doesn’t do natively.

In my preview of the Under the Radar conference I questioned the business viability of the document management product DocSyncer, which, among other things, takes users’
Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and synchronizes them into a Google Docs or Google Apps account.

Microsoft could squash this company by releasing a true online product suite, not just the shared Web file store that Office Live Workspace offers. DocSyncer’s CEO says his product offers business a “gentle transition” to online productivity application. I buy that, but I will worry for the business when Microsoft ultimately decides to provide its own transition.

Limitations notwithstanding, the $40 per user per year fee is extremely reasonable for a business application, and certainly provides a better revenue steam to the company than free.

The letter, dated September 26, is signed by 11 people, including Reps. Anna Eshoo, Ellen Tauscher, Zoe Lofgren, and George Miller.

Yahoo has stepped up its efforts to defend the deal with a blog post from President Sue Decker following opposition from a newspaper group and news that European anti-competition officials are investigating the deal.

A Google representative said the company had no comment on letter. A Yahoo spokeswoman provided this comment: “We believe strongly that this agreement will strengthen Yahoo’s competitive position in online advertising and will help to drive a more robust, higher quality Yahoo marketplace for our advertisers, publishers and users.”

In a letter addressed to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the lawmakers point out that the agreement is not exclusive and warned that blocking it with a lawsuit as the DOJ is considering could stifle online ad market growth and innovation.

“Similar agreements are commonplace in many industries and standard among Internet companies,” the letter says. “In fact, Microsoft had a similar agreement with Yahoo and Google has similar arrangements with tens of thousands of companies.”

“We believe that robust competition serves the public interest but if the DOJ blocks this agreement we fear that the threat of additional scrutiny may chill future agreements,” the letter says.

Under the deal signed in June, Google will provide Yahoo with ads that will run on Yahoo’s search site.

A group of Democratic congressional members from California have sent a letter to the U.S. Justice Department urging officials not to block the proposed online advertising agreement reached between Google and Yahoo.

Listen now:

Download today’s podcast

SANTA CLARA, Calif–It’s early morning in California, and so far there are no reports of problems due to the much-anticipated
Conficker worm. In Asia, where it’s already evening, the worm hasn’t done any noticeable damage, according to McAfee’s Hong Kong-based security expert, Vu Nguyen.

I’m here at the headquarters of security company McAfee, where I spoke by phone with Nguyen and in person with McAfee spokesman (and former CNET News security reporter) Joris Evers.

The organizations involved were the Digital Media Association, the Nashville Songwriters Association International, the National Music Publishers Association, Recording Industry Association of America, and the Songwriters Guild of America.

The groups, which represent record labels, music publishers, songwriters, and music Web sites, say their proposal would resolve what has been a source of strife between the music industry and Web sites that offer on-demand streaming services.

Five music industry trade groups have reached what they call a breakthrough agreement on how royalties should be handled for streaming music online.

They have submitted their plan to the Copyright Royalty Judges, a panel of copyright judges, for approval.

Under the agreement, sites like Napster and Imeem would have to begin paying royalties of about 10.5 percent of revenue. Download services like Amazon MP3 and iTunes already pay such fees. And online radio sites saw a major royalty hike last year. Pandora, one such site, may be on the brink of going out of business due to that rate increase, according to its founder, Tim Westergren.

Some of what the new package offers is improved work flow for media companies, a video player that is easier to customize and greater bandwidth delivery, the company said in a statement.

Brightcove, the maker of online-video tools, released its new Brightcove 3 video publishing platform on Monday.

Among the companies using Brightcove 3 are Showtime, Lifetime and FearNet. The platform serves 135 million visitors per month.

The lawsuit revolves around customers’ complaints that PCs they bought had been advertised as “Windows Vista capable,” but turned out to be capable of running only the Home Basic version of Vista, which lacks the fancypants Aero graphics technology. It turns out computers needed to be “Vista Premium Ready” to run the full-blown versions of Vista. The court will need to determine whether Microsoft knowingly created confusion over the capabilities of PCs sold with these labels just before the release of Vista.

Over the course of the suit, a few salacious details have trickled out. First came an e-mail by Microsoft executive Mike Nash complaining about his own confusion over buying a laptop labeled as “Vista capable” and feeling burned when he found it couldn’t run the multimedia programs he wanted. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he wrote. The lawsuit also led to the embarrassing revelation that Intel had pressured Microsoft into creating the two-tiered marketing campaign so Intel could sell its lower-end chipsets.

A lawsuit against Microsoft that’s already unveiled several juicy tidbits about the company is on hold, according to Ars Technica.

In late February, a U.S. District judge in Seattle ruled that consumers could move forward with a class-action lawsuit over the manner in which Microsoft advertised computers leading up to the release of its
Windows Vista operating system. Microsoft is appealing that decision, and any further disclosures will be on hold pending the review by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, according to the report.