In RetroTech: NetLingo Blog

Google will pay you $1 Million if you can hack its Web browser.

According to Forbes, Chrome has entered an international hacking contest called Pwn2Own (see also: pwn) for the past three years and has been left untouched, while other brand name browsers like Safari, Internet Explorer, and Firefox all fell victim to hacker cyberattacks. So why the huge cash prize? Google explains that it's asking for a detailed report of how the hacker was able to exploit the browser (which is not an official condition of the contest). That information will go into making future releases of Chrome even safer. "Not only can we fix the bugs, but by studying the vulnerability and exploit techniques we can enhance our mitigations, automated testing, and sandboxing," write Chrome security engineers Chris Evans and Justin Schuh. It all goes down next week as part of the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver.

Google is also hiring engineers to design and test the self-driving cars it's been working on.

According to LinkedIn, the following listings were posted within the last two weeks of February, 2012:

• Automotive System Test Engineer. The job listing doesn't have much detail, but requires experience in the automotive industry.
• System Test Engineer, Special Projects. This is apparently all about designing safety systems. From the listing: "As a System Test Engineer, you will design and execute test plans and procedures for automotive active safety systems. You will also be responsible for performing technical performance analyses of a variety of electronic and mechanical systems under test and writing detailed test and defect reports that summarize the test results."
• Industrial Designer, Special Projects. This person will be working on automotive applications. We suppose it could mean navigation apps for Android, or something like that, but the "Special Projects" listing makes it sound like it's part of Sergey Brin's group. Brin is known to be overseeing the cars project. From the posting: "As an Industrial Designer focused on automotive applications, you will be working across a broad range of influence levels and within an interdisciplinary team with hardware, software, and user experience experts."

Last fall, we heard that the self-driving cars team had about 50 engineers and was working with major car companies. Several folks in Silicon Valley have seen the self-driving cars on the highway throughout February 2012. Google has also posted a couple job listings for "augmented reality" experts, and Wired speculates those jobs are for the glasses it's building (see: AR headset 8-)

- As seen in Business Insider
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Researchers published a list of the top 10 myths about Internet safety for children to show how many peoples' knowledge of online dangers are out of date. Among common mistakes is the belief that putting a PC in the family living room will help keep young people away from risky behavior.

In fact, say the team from EU Kids Online, children find it so easy to go online at a friend's house or on a smartphone that this advice is out of date. Parents are better advised to talk to their children about their Internet habits or join them in some online activity.

Another common myth highlighted in the study is that children know more than adults about the digital world – in fact only just over one in three youngsters are sure that they know more than their parents.

The top 10 list is published as part of the final report of EU Kids Online – a research project based at the London School of Economics and Political Science which surveyed 25,000 children and their parents across Europe to understand where the true online risks and opportunities lie. Funded by the European Commission's Safer Internet Program, the project aims to give policy makers the best possible advice on how to educate and protect against risks such as bullying, pornographic or inappropriate content and making contacts with unsuitable people in the real world.

The report makes a series of recommendations to governments, industry, children, parents and teachers which range from a call for more user-friendly parental controls and online safety features to ensuring children also lead a rich life away from the computer.

Professor Sonia Livingstone, who headed the project, said: "Most people have concerns about the Internet and the effects it can have on a new digital generation of children. But are they concerned about the right things?

'Our study showed that in general they are not. Often their view of how children behave online is out of date and needs updating – that's why we included the list of Top 10 myths in our report. For example, while parents worry more about 'stranger danger', children find cyberbullying the most upsetting risk. Also, it's interesting to note that the parents who are most worried have children who encounter no more risks than children of parents who aren't worried.

"Often people also don't appreciate that the digital world brings both risks and opportunities for young people, or that risk isn't automatically a bad thing as it may give children a chance to learn how to cope and become resilient. It's only by understanding and balancing these things that we'll be able to give children the practical help they need to get the best from the Internet and other online activity.

"The work our team of researchers has done offers governments, parents and teachers the most comprehensive insight yet into how to help."

The Top 10 Myths about Children's Online Risks

1. Digital natives know it all.
Only 36% of 9-16-year-olds say it is very true that they know more about the Internet than their parents. This myth obscures children's needs to develop digital skills.

2. Everyone is creating their own content.
The study showed that only one in five children had recently used a file-sharing site or created an avatar, half that number wrote a blog. Most children use the Internet for ready-made content.

3. Under 13s can't use social networking sites.
Although many sites (including Facebook) say that users must be aged at least 13, the survey shows that age limits don't work – 38% of 9-12-year-olds have a social networking profile. Some argue age limits should be scrapped to allow greater honesty and protective action.

4. Everyone watches porn online.
One in seven children saw sexual images online in the past year. Even allowing for under-reporting, this myth has been partly created by media hype.

5. Bullies are baddies.
The study shows that 60% who bully (online or offline) have themselves been bullied. Bullies and victims are often the same people.

6. People you meet on the Internet are strangers.
Most online contacts are people children know face-to-face; 9% met offline people they'd first contacted online – most didn't go alone and only 1% had a bad experience.

7. Offline risks migrate online.
This is not necessarily true. While children who lead risky offline lives are more likely to expose themselves to danger online, it cannot be assumed that those who are low-risk offline are protected while online.

8. Putting the PC in the living room will help.
Children find it so easy to go online at a friend's house or on a smartphone that this advice is out of date. Parents are better advised to talk to their children about their Internet habits or join them in some online activity.

9. Teaching digital skills reduces online risk.
Actually the more digital skills a child has, the more risks they are likely to encounter as they broaden their online experience. What more skills can do is reduce the potential harm that risks can bring.

10. Children can get around safety software.
In fact, fewer than one in three 11-16 year-olds say they can change filter preferences. And most say their parents' actions to limit their Internet activity is helpful.

- For a copy of the full report and further information about EU Kids Online visit their site at www.eukidsonline.net
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It's just a little, clickable icon. But Facebook's "Like" button, with its omnipresent "thumbs up" symbol, has made the company billions of dollars. The story of the button's creation can be traced to a core group of Facebook veterans.

Facebook Director of Engineering Andrew Bosworth posted his version of the button's history on Quora.com in 2010. Bosworth writes that he and a small group of co-workers worked on the project, codenamed “Props.” They debated other ideas including plus/minus signs and star ratings. According to Bosworth’s post, the Like button was originally going to be called the "Awesome" button. Apparently, founder Mark Zuckerberg put the kibosh on that idea.

The idea for the Like button began in 2007, according to Bosworth. There has been some debate over the years over whether Facebook copied the "Like" name from rival site FriendFeed. According to Bosworth, Facebook was working on the concept months before Friendfeed pushed out its own "Like" feature. Facebook unleashed the Like button in February 2009.

Whatever the timing, the success of the button can't be overstated. Rapper Eminem is the most "liked" person on Facebook. As of press time, the Detroit native had more than 52.5 million "likes." Others in his rarefied air include Lady Gaga (47.5 million), Rihanna (50.8 million), and Katy Perry (39 million).

The button itself is clicked millions of times every hour. Facebook doesn't publicly release stats on just how popular the button is, but back in 2010 (which, we admit, is an eon in Web years), 7.6 million pages were "liked" every 20 minutes, according to independent blog Business and Facebook.

According to Facebook's recent S1 IPO filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the site's users "generated an average of 2.7 billion Likes and Comments per day during the three months ended December 31, 2011." Break those numbers down, and it comes out to 112,500,000 Likes and Comments ever hour or about 1,875,000 every minute or, to break it down even further, around 31,250 Likes and Comments every second.

Now we're just waiting for the "Love" button!

As seen in Yahoo! Finance
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Erin Jansen
Founder, NetLingo.com
http://www.netlingo.com
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:-)

Facebook is widely expected to file for its IPO this week, with an actual offering date some time in May. It will be one of the biggest public offerings of any company in history -- Facebook plans to raise up to $10 billion at a $100 billion valuation.

But the fact that Facebook is so widely used makes it a hugely symbolic event as well. Normal people who otherwise would never care about a tech company hitting the public markets are going to be paying attention to this one.

In coming years, the Facebook IPO will probably stand out as a once-per-decade event in the tech industry, alongside these other biggies:

* Apple's IPO in 1980 kicked off the personal computer era.
Apple's IPO kicked off the personal computing era, but the company blew its early lead. IBM launched its PC a little later, but it really took Microsoft to open the PC market to dozens of low-cost clones, crystalize the vision -- a computer on every desk and in every home -- and figure out that software, more than hardware, would drive adoption.

* Netscape's IPO in 1995 launched the Internet era.
Before Netscape, the Internet was a tool for academics and nerds. Six months after Netscape went public, the phrase "dot-com" started showing up in TV commercials, and dozens of eventual Internet giants -- from Yahoo to Amazon -- followed. Netscape eventually got crushed by Microsoft's decision to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows (as well as by its own missteps), but the dot-com era was no doubt the Netscape era.

* The iPhone launch in 2007 began the mobile era.
Palm, RIM, Microsoft and a few other companies had built combination phone-computers before 2007, but Apple took the concept and pushed it into the mainstream, with a lot of help from Google's fast-following Android and all its hardware partners. In a short five years, Microsoft has lost its monopoly on Internet-connected clients, everybody has an "app store," and (as William Gibson once pointed out), the silhouetted figure of a person checking a smartphone has replaced the cigarette smoker as the most common scene on a city street.

* The Facebook IPO will kick off the social era.

In each case, these companies did not just launch products. They launched platforms on which thousands or millions of others could make their own businesses, and in the process changed what people did with technology. Facebook is doing the same thing with social. The importance of Facebook's IPO is not about Facebook the product, where people go to share pictures of their kids or their high scores on Farmville.

The importance is Facebook the platform, which allows developers to build social experiences into everything they create, regardless of the computing device that users have in front of them. Whether it's a desktop PC, laptop, smartphone, even a dumb phone, Facebook is building a platform that will let you share what you do.

There will of course be competing platforms -- Google is trying with Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn have their own spins, and companies like Box and Jive and Yammer might end up carving out the "Facebook for the enterprise" niche. But five years ago, a lot of people scoffed at the idea that mainstream computer users would want to share everything they did online. Now, the idea is taken for granted.

In another five years, we'll barely remember a time when it was HARD to share what you're doing, watching, hearing, or thinking with thousands of other people in real time.

(Oh and by the way, Google's IPO was a huge event, but it didn't kick off a new era in computing -- nobody else has a search business but Google, and the rise of Web apps and cloud computing, while significant, had its roots in the dot-com era and was driven forward as much by enterprise companies like Salesforce as it was by Google.)

-As seen in Business Insider
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