Google has overhauled the way it serves up results in response to search queries.

The update is designed to work out whether a person wants up-to-date results or historical data.

The US firm estimated the alterations to its core algorithm would make a difference to about 35% of searches.

The changes try to make results more relevant and beef up features which Google believes set it apart from rivals.

By contrast, Microsoft's Bing search engine emphasises social search.

Fresh spam

"Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven or cool refreshing fruit on a hot summer's day, are best when they're fresh," wrote Google fellow Amit Singhal in a blogpost explaining the changes.

The under-the-hood changes sought to understand whether a searcher wants results "from the last week, day or even minute" said Mr Singhal.

The update is supposed to offer a better guess of how "fresh" the results should be.

For instance, said Mr Singhal, anyone searching for information about the "Occupy Oakland protests" would probably want up to the minute news.

These need to be distinguished from searches for regular events such as sports results or company reports.

Other types of searches could call on older results, he said. Those looking for a recipe to make tomato sauce for pasta quickly would be happy with a page that is a few months or years old.

The update to improve the "freshness" of results builds on the big update made to the underlying infrastructure of Google's core indexing system in August 2010 known as Caffeine. That change made it easier for Google to keep its index up to date and to add new sources of information.

Writing on the Search Engine Land news site, analyst Danny Sullivan described the changes as "huge". The last big update to the Google algorithm, known as Panda, affected only 12% of searches.

The update could have potential disadvantages, warned Mr Sullivan.

"Rewarding freshness potentially introduces huge decreases in relevancy, new avenues for spamming or getting "light" content in," said Mr Sullivan.

Source: 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15590285

By PETER SVENSSON - AP Technology Writer | AP

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. Cellular Corp., the country's sixth-largest cellphone company, on Friday said it had the opportunity to carry the iPhone but turned it down because the phone is too expensive.

It's the first U.S. carrier to acknowledge turning down the phone.

Consumers pay $200 for the base model of the iPhone 4S, but Apple charges carriers about $600 for it. Carriers count on making their money back in service fees over the life of the contract.

U.S. Cellular CEO Mary Dillon told analysts on an earnings conference call Friday that "the terms were unacceptable from a risk and profitability standpoint." She didn't provide any details, but said the added load the iPhone could have placed on its data network was not a big consideration.

Chicago-based U.S. Cellular has 5.9 million subscribers, a number that has been shrinking slowly over the past two and a half years. Only a quarter of its subscribers on contract-based plans have smartphones, compared with half at AT&T Inc.

Carriers see the ability to sell the iPhone as a crucial competitive advantage, though its high price means it's not an easy path to profits. Sprint started selling the phone last month and has said it will take two years for it to pay off.

AT&T was the exclusive U.S. carrier for Apple Inc.'s phone for three and a half years, until Verizon Wireless got it in February. Now, tiny Mississippi-based carrier C Spire Wireless is set to add it too.

T-Mobile USA, the fourth-largest carrier, has a data network that isn't compatible with the iPhone.

Source: 

http://m.yahoo.com/w/news_america/us-cellular-turned-down-iphone-180551297.html?back=%2Fallnews%2F&.ts=1320436091&.intl=us&.lang=en&.tsrc=emul

By John Joyner , TechRepublic

If you host the Domain Name Service (DNS) on your own servers, you need to be aware of the very real threat of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. If your DNS service is subject to a DDoS attack, you can expect, at minimum, a loss of email and web server services. If your DNS host is located on- premises, sharing the Internet connection of your users' web browsing activity, a DDoS attack is equivalent to a complete loss of Internet service to your organization. This could be true even if the DNS service you expose to the Internet is just for testing or other limited purposes.

The rise of this threat means DNS can join File Transfer Protocol (FTP) as a service that you should generally not publish to the Internet directly from your premises. Many administrators know that as soon as you put an FTP server on the Internet, hackers and bots will start hammering away with brute force methods such as user name and password guessing. Even if you have complex passwords or passphrases in use, just the volume of failed FTP accesses can overwhelm networking resources.

A take-away is that there is some degree of hazard involved in hosting your own DNS. In other words, this is a big endorsement of hosted DNS services, and a suggestion that most everyone consider trusting an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or other hosting professional for your DNS publishing if you are not already doing so.

What does a DNS DDoS attack feel like?

A recent experience with an actual attack was the inspiration for this article. The "victim" in this scenario is a small office in North America with a DSL router and a static Internet IP address. An on-premise server publishes public DNS records directly to the Internet. Early indications of something wrong were (1) reduced inbound Internet email volume and (2) slow web browsing. After a couple of days of reduced functionality, the location experienced a stoppage of inbound Internet email, and you could not surf the web any longer. "Ping" requests to Internet hosts either failed or had over a 1,000 millisecond (ms) response time, basically an unusable connection.

Obviously some process was flooding the DSL Internet connection. Each PC in the office was restarted without an effect. Restarting the DSL router also had no effect. However, restarting the server did restore a fast Internet connection for a short while. After a few minutes of a clean connection, quickly the Internet connection became unusable again. Suspecting an email or web-based process was the culprit, Exchange and web services were stopped on the server to no effect. Through trial and error, stopping the DNS Server service produced immediate relief and isolated the issue to the local DNS service.

There were no warning events in the DNS Server service log, and the server itself was confirmed to have all current updates installed, in particular all updates involving the DNS service and DoS exploits. The next place to look for clues was the firewall. Although the firewall did not have a historical logging feature, you could enable a real-time log for selected protocols. Live log review for DNS traffic through the firewall showed that there were two Internet IP addresses sending continuous DNS traffic to the local server. The two servers were located overseas, in different European countries, both sending the flood of traffic to the same local DNS server. The fact that there were two or more simultaneous remote sources of the directed traffic classifies the attack as a Distributed DoS.

Protecting against DNS DDoS 
Once you know the IP addresses of the offenders, it is a simple matter to put rules in your firewall that block traffic from those addresses. Blocking the first IP address reduced "ping" response time to about 300ms. Blocking the second IP reduced response time to a nominal 30ms and all service was restored. This small office was fortunate that its DNS service was only being attacked from two sites with static addresses. If the attack had been from dozens or hundreds of sources (or if the source IP addresses were changing), the small office might have had a more serious and business-impacting problem.

As mentioned at the top of this article, the best defense is to move any DNS services to a DNS service provider, such as your ISP, DNS registrar, or another hosting professional. While this won't eliminate the threat of DoS against your DNS records at the service provider, it will remove the threat of a DoS attack also impacting your on-premise users' ability to surf the web. To directly reduce the threat of any DoS impacting your business, consider a package like AT&T offers its enterprise customers: Denial of Service - DDoS Protection.

If you must host your own DNS for whatever reasons, you need to plan for defense against DNS DoS, such as deploying multiple DNS servers at different sites and/or using hardened and dedicated DNS servers or appliances with their own Internet connections. Verisign released aState of DNS Availability Report in May 2011, confirming that DNS availability was a problem for even the top ranked e-commerce sites, and was especially difficult to manage for organizations that host their own DNS service.

Source: 

http://www.zdnetasia.com/detect-and-mitigate-a-ddos-attack-against-your-dns-server-62302707.htm

Where is the rest of the car?

Just about everyone asked this question when they saw Scion's newest car, the iQ.

New for 2012, the three-door Scion iQ hatchback is 10 feet long from bumper to bumper — that's almost 2 feet shorter than a Fiat 500 — and has a rear end that seems abruptly cut off aft of the rear wheels.

Classified as a minicompact and weighing only 2,172 pounds with a 94-horsepower engine, the iQ also is the top gasoline-powered, non-hybrid, 2012 small car in federal government fuel economy rankings.

Specifically, the iQ, which comes with a continuously variable transmission, is rated at 36 miles per gallon in city driving and 37 mpg on the highway.

And while the iQ interior is rather Spartan, add-on accessories galore promise imaginative customizing of this little car by young, urban hipsters.

Starting manufacturer's suggested retail price, including destination charge, for the 2012 iQ is $15,995.

This is $820 more than the starting retail price for a 2012 Honda Fit and $300 less than the starting retail price for a 2012 Ford Fiesta hatchback. Both competitors are larger than the iQ, provide more space for cargo and rear-seat passengers, offer more than one transmission and have more powerful engines.

Even the diminutive and arguably cuter 2012 Fiat 500 hatchback, with $16,000 starting retail price, is bigger in interior volume and has a more powerful engine than the iQ.

The first new Scion model since 2004, the iQ is new to the United States. But Toyota has sold it for years overseas where extremely small cars are popular and the iQ blends in.

Still, on American roads, amidst pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, the iQ is an anomaly.

I drove it defensively, because the first few times on the road, other drivers cut me off, and I wasn't sure they saw the iQ coming up in the lane next to them.

Even knowing the iQ comes standard with 11 air bags — one is the world's first rear window air bag — and meets U.S. crash requirements, I remained aware that the iQ was lightweight. It can be buffeted by winds on stormy days, and there's not a lot of sound insulation, so I could hear noisy trucks and motorcycles as they approached, even with all the windows of the test iQ closed.

There's an odd sensation sitting behind the wheel because there's so little of the iQ behind the driver's seat, I sometimes felt like I was following the front of the car around the turns.

The iQ needs only 12.9 feet to do a U-turn. In making my first U-turn in the iQ, I was so used to needing to turn more, I nearly did a "donut" instead of a U-turn. But I easily turned around on narrow city streets to nab parking spaces.

Wider and longer than the Smart cars but similar in overall shape, the iQ is perfect for slipping effortlessly into tiny parking spots in the city that bigger vehicles can't claim. Anyone with a small garage at home will love the way the iQ fits inside. In my traditional two-car garage, I figure I could fit four iQs.

But the "get up and go" of the iQ powertrain can be disappointing, and most small cars in this country have at least 100 horsepower.

In contrast, the iQ's 1.3-liter, double overhead cam four cylinder puts out 94, and it can sound like it's straining at 55 miles an hour, especially if the highway has some elevation changes.

Some of this is the transmission, which seeks to maximize fuel economy by operating in the optimal gear range for the load and speed of the car. It sent droning sounds to the test car interior.

Torque in the iQ peaks at 89 foot-pounds at 4,400 rpm, so the car doesn't feel sporty even in city driving. In comparison, the Honda Fit's 1.4-liter four cylinder puts out 117 horsepower and 108 foot-pounds of torque, while the Ford Fiesta's 1.6-liter four cylinder generates 120 horses and 112 foot-pounds of torque.

My mileage was 75 percent city travel and 25 percent highway. And I averaged between 29.5 mpg and 31.7 mpg. With a fuel tank holding 8.5 gallons, this meant my driving range was just over 300 miles.

Surprisingly, standard wheels and tires on the iQ are larger than expected — 16-inchers. Because they are positioned at the outermost corners of the car and the iQ is relatively wide, the car has a more stable feel than you might anticipate.

There's no room for a spare tire in the iQ. The car comes with a tire repair kit, instead.

I liked that the electric power steering in the test car responded quickly.

But rear seats seemed flimsy and are space-constrained, and rear-passenger head restraints are positioned very close to the back window.

Cargo space totals 3.5 cubic feet behind the rear seats — about enough for a thin briefcase and purse. Cargo space expands to 16.7 cubic feet with rear seats folded down.

In the test car, there were no hooks to help hold bags back there in place, the center console didn't have covered storage, and the interior had a liberal amount of hard plastic trim.

There's also no glovebox. Instead, a tray is under the front passenger seat, which is slightly offset to be able to be moved closer to the windshield than the driver's seat so one of the two rear passengers can get more legroom.

By ANN M. JOB, For The Associated Press

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/10/26/national/a085150D83.DTL#ixzz1c3bfOxvE

Finetech Solutions Lanka (pvt.) Ltd (finetech) recently announced that it has become an authorized reseller of the Google Apps suite-consisting of communication and collaboration tools.
“Google Apps Resellers Programme will help us enhance the value of Google Apps for users in Sri Lanka across a broad range of business enterprises, ” says Finetech Director Clehan Pulle. “With this affiliation we will be better able to support our customers as we now have access to Google’s immeasurable resources that provides in terms of training, support and deployment services, which we can in turn offer to our clients” he adds.
Google Apps Reseller Programme comprises resellers, consultants and independent software vendors who sell, service and customize Google Apps for businesses. With this partnership Finetech will have access to APIs which will integrate Google Apps into their customer’s operations and will also be able to maintain a close relationship with them, while providing additional services and support. Sri Lankan businesses will benefit from Google Apps and the attention that Finetech provides.