That’s an unpleasant surprise, definitely, but at least for the summer you’ll get the 3G Skype-to-Skype action you might’ve forgotten you were waiting for. Upgrades / improvements include:

• Call using your 3G connection. Skype-to-Skype calls on 3G are free until at least end of August 2010, after which there will be a small monthly fee (operator charges for data will still apply).
• Near CD-quality sound for Skype-to-Skype calls using wideband audio (SILK codec) on iPhone 3GS and 2nd generation iPod touch.
• Enhanced call quality indicator.
• Improved start-up time.
• Fast access to the dial pad from iPhone home screen.

This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.

Version 3 of the Chrome browser is one of the browsers for which, starting June 1, Google is phasing out support on its Reader site. The site is used for reading Web pages whose updates are broadcast to subscribers through RSS or Atom feed technology.

“Reader is a cutting-edge Web application, and this will allow us to spend our time improving Reader instead of fixing issues with antiquated browsers,” Mihai Parparita, a technical leader for Google Reader, said in a blog post this week. Reader kept Chrome 3 support longer than some sites: Google Docs dropped support for it and other older browsers on March 1.

In days of yore, browsers changed relatively slowly and were used to browse largely static Web pages. These days, however, browsers and the Web standards they employ are changing fast, developers want to be able to take advantage of newer technology such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for formatting, and advanced programmers are building full-fledged Web applications that can be impossible to run on old browsers.

The Chrome 3 phase-out is a revealing contrast in product longevity compared with another browser on the hit list, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6, introduced in 2001 and the scourge of Web developers who want support for modern Web standards. Even Microsoft wants to people to upgrade from IE6.

But Chrome is automatically updated in the background, without user intervention by default, and old versions fade rapidly into oblivion. Chrome 5 is the current stable version, and Chrome 3 accounted for just 0.11 percent of browser usage in April 2010, according to Net Applications statistics.

Other browsers losing Reader support are Firefox 1.0 and 2.0 and Safari 2.0 and 3.0, Google said.

Another change coming: Google is dropping Reader support for its Gears technology that among other things let a browser store Web data locally on a computer so it was available offline. “We launched offline support three years ago, but only a minority of Reader users actively use it today,” Parparita said.

Browser makers are working on building Gears’ offline storage abilities into nascent HTML standards, and Google has scrapped further Gears work in favor of HTML.

• AC97 drivers
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In addition, they have a Driver Scan feature, which functions to see if you need updated drivers. You do not need to fear the threat of viruses or spyware, because Driver Access has been certified free of viruses and spyware that makes your computer 100% safe.

So, if you have serious problems with the drivers on your computer, driveraccess.com is the solution. Because the driver you need will be updated automatically, of course, with the latest version of the driver. So, you do not need to spend time just to find the latest drivers that are compatible with your computer.

Many of the VoIP service offer the features like call waiting, caller identification, call forwarding, voicemail and many others in many of their plans. After signing up for any of the plans, you will be receiving e-mail alerts for voicemail and enjoying web access as well. Apart from the access to the web, you may avail the facility of managing your account online. The most interesting element is that you are not required to buy a handset or new number.

Mentioned below are some of the unique VoIP service , who satisfy and entice their users with their packages and services:

Axvoice is one of the leading VoIP service in town and has much economical plans to fit every user’s needs. Their packages range from $4.99 a month to $39.99 a month. Axvoice’s residential and business plans grab every eye instantly due to the affordability, services, features and customer support. The features like voicemail, caller ID, call waiting and forwarding, etc are conferred to the subscribers with all the packages. In addition to all, free calls are also offered to the customers.

VoIP Your Life claims to provide its users the astonishing features and services to enjoy with. Their plans’ prices begin from $14.97 a month to $29.97 a month. Their packages such as Premier Global Unlimited, Premier Unlimited and Premier Basic interest the people a lot. No matter which package you select for yourself, you will be provided the below features nonetheless:

Call forwarding, call waiting, caller identification, call blocking, don’t disturb, music on hold and the likes.

ECR Voice is the VoIP service provider that is widely available throughout the USA. They offer three packages for their customers such as Basic, Unlimited and Business. The plans cost the users from $14.90 to $49.95. The features like below are enveloped with all the packages offered by this VoIP service provider:

Caller identification, voicemail, call blocking, call waiting & forwarding and speed dial, etc.

ITP is laced with the packages, which fit the users’ bill. The mesmerize the customers with free adapter, first month fee wave, calling card and free 800 number when a sign up is made. Just pay $19.99 a month and grab all this into your pocket. Besides limitless calls to USA and Canada are conferred to the users as well. Like others, the features like caller ID, call waiting, voicemail and more come along with every package.

Experience the high quality of services and features with VoIP. Sign up and enjoy the benefits.

Facebook claims that it has 400 million users. But are they well-protected from prying eyes, scammers, and unwanted marketers?

Not according to Joan Goodchild, senior editor of CSO (Chief Security Officer) Online.

She says your privacy may be at far greater risk of being violated than you know, when you log onto the social-networking site, due to security gaffes or marketing efforts by the company.

Facebook came under fire this past week, when 15 privacy and consumer protection organizations filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, charging that the site, among other things, manipulates privacy settings to make users’ personal information available for commercial use. Also, some Facebook users found their private chats accessible to everyone on their contact list–a major security breach that’s left a lot of people wondering just how secure the site is.

In two words, asserts Goodchild: not very.

On “The Early Show on Saturday Morning,” Goodchild spotlighted five dangers she says Facebook users expose themselves to, probably without being aware of them:

1. Your information is being shared with third parties
2. Privacy settings revert to a less safe default mode after each redesign
3. Facebook ads may contain malware
4. Your real friends unknowingly make you vulnerable
5. Scammers are creating fake profiles

Below is an edited transcript of the interview.

Is Facebook a secure platform to communicate with your friends?
Here’s the thing: Facebook is one of the most popular sites in the world. Security holes are being found on a regular basis. It is not as inherently secure as people think it is, when they log on every day.

Certainly, there are growing pains. Facebook is considered a young company, and it has been around a few years now. It is continuing to figure this out. They are so young, they are still trying to figure out how they are going to make money. It is hard to compare this to others; we have never had this phenomenon before in the way [so many] people are communicating with each other–only e-mail comes close.

The potential for crime is real. According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, victims of Internet-related crimes lost $559 million in 2009. That was up 110 percent from the previous year. If you’re not careful using Facebook, you are looking at the potential for identity theft, or possibly even something like assault, if you share information with a dangerous person you think is actually a “friend.” One British police agency recently reported that the number of crimes it has responded to in the last year involving Facebook climbed 346 percent. These are real threats.

Lately, it seems a week doesn’t go by without some news about a Facebook-related security problem. Earlier this week, TechCrunch discovered a security hole that made it possible for users to read their friends’ private chats. Facebook has since patched it, but who knows how long that flaw existed? Some speculate it may have been that way for years.

Last month, researchers at VeriSign’s iDefense group discovered that a hacker was selling Facebook usernames and passwords in an underground hacker forum. It was estimated that he had about 1.5 million accounts–and was selling them for between $25 and $45.

And the site is constantly under attack from hackers trying to spam these 400 million users, or harvest their data, or run other scams. Certainly, there is a lot of criticism in the security community of Facebook’s handling of security. Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that the company rarely responds to inquiries.

Do people really have privacy on Facebook?
No. There are all kinds of ways third parties can access information about you. For instance, you may not realize that, when you are playing the popular games on Facebook, such as FarmVille, or take those popular quizzes–every time you do that, you authorize an application to be downloaded to your profile that gives information to third parties about you that you have never signed off on.

Does Facebook share info about users with third parties through things such as Open Graph?
Open Graph is a new concept for Facebook, which unveiled it last month at its F8 conference. It actually is basically a way to share the information in your profile with all kinds of third parties, such as advertisers, so they can have a better idea of your interests and what you are discussing, so Facebook can–as portrayed–”make it a more personal experience.”

The theory behind Open Graph–even if it has not implemented it–is its whole business model, isn’t it?
That is the business model–Facebook is trying to get you to share as much information as possible so it can monetize it by sharing it with advertisers.

Isn’t it in Facebook’s best interest to get you to share as much info as possible?
It absolutely is. Facebook’s mission is to get you to share as much information as it can so it can share it with advertisers. As it looks now, the more info you share, the more money it is going to make with advertisers.

Isn’t there also a security problem every time it redesigns the site?
Every time Facebook redesigns the site, which [usually] happens a few times a year, it puts your privacy settings back to a default in which, essentially, all of your information is made public. It is up to you, the user, to check the privacy settings and decide what you want to share and what you don’t want to share.

Facebook does not [necessarily] notify you of the changes, and your privacy settings are set back to a public default. Many times, you may find out through friends. Facebook is not alerting you to these changes; it is just letting you know the site has been redesigned.

Can your real friends on Facebook also can make you vulnerable?
Absolutely. Your security is only as good as your friend’s security. If someone in your network of friends has a weak password, and his or her profile is hacked, he or she can now send you malware, for example.

There is a common scam called a 419 scam, in which someone hacks your profile and sends messages to your friends asking for money – claiming to be you–saying, “Hey, I was in London, I was mugged, please wire me money.” People fall for it. People think their good friend needs help–and end up wiring money to Nigeria.

A lot of Web sites we use display banner ads, but do we have to be wary of them on Facebook?
Absolutely: Facebook has not been able to screen all of its ads. It hasn’t done a great job of vetting which ads are safe and which are not. As a result, you may get an ad in your profile when you are browsing around one day that has malicious code in it. In fact, last month, there was an ad with malware that asked people to download antivirus software that was actually a virus.

Is too big a network of friends dangerous?
You know people with a lot of friends–500, 1,000 friends on Facebook? What is the likelihood they are all real? There was a study in 2008 that concluded that 40 percent of all Facebook profiles are fake. They have been set up by bots or impostors.

If you have 500 friends, it is likely there is a percentage of people you don’t really know, and you are sharing a lot of information with them, such as when you are on vacation, your children’s pictures, their names. Is this information you really want to put out there to people you don’t even know?

Comparing Facebook’s latest product modifications to deadly natural disasters is probably a little bit inappropriate, but the psychological reaction doesn’t seem all that different. The social network modified its policies for handling user data once again as part of its F8 conference and release of the Open Graph API, and ever since it became clear that more information is being set as public by default and more is being shared with third parties, concerned Facebook users have been on jittery alert, perhaps prone to overreaction, concerned that something even bigger may be about to change.

They might be freaking out a little too much. Still, the lesson to be learned from this bizarre analogy is that dealing with social media is more like disaster preparedness than you would think.

On Wednesday, one small but alarming security hole was found in Facebook; the company attributed it to an engineering bug, and patched it. On Thursday, PC World detailed that Facebook was “secretly adding” third-party applications to user profiles, something that the company once again attributed to a bug and said that it had been fixed. Investor-pundit Paul Kedrosky and fanboy idol Peter Rojas, former editor of Engadget and co-founder of GDGT, both announced on Thursday that they were deactivating their Facebook profiles.

Basically, Facebook is the Pacific Ring of the Web. In its six-year history the company has radically changed its product by implementing one small, step-by-step move after another. Recently published excerpts from David Kirkpatrick’s forthcoming book “The Facebook Effect” recall small Facebook features and quirks that were quietly snuffed from the site, like the random placement of the “Wedding Crashers” quote “I don’t even know what a quail looks like” under its search query field. Cue a few thousand early Facebook users saying, “Oh, yeah, I remember that!”

How do you bust up a giant landmass into seven pieces without anybody noticing? Slowly. How do you turn an uptight, closed-off Web business built by a few college students into a sprawling creature that seems capable of sharing anything with anyone anywhere? Very, very slowly. But when something big happens, people start to notice the small stuff that they wish they’d seen earlier. Concerned Facebook members are now acting like the social network has grown into something beyond their control, that even lawmakers might not be able to do much good, that the company is acting more like an unpredictable force of nature than a business run by, well, humans. Which is funny, because these days Facebook is playing up its human side, its fallibility.

After Wednesday’s privacy glitch caused Facebook to temporarily disable its chat feature while all the bugs were fixed, The New York Times quoted the company’s vice president of public policy, Elliot Schrage, as saying, “Are we perfect? Of course not.” We should be getting used to the fact that an “iterative” product model, the sort of practice that’s become commonplace now that pushing out new features no longer requires waiting for the next release of a shrink-wrapped software package, will mean imperfections. It will mean screw-ups. It will mean bugs that are quickly patched and poorly thought-out features that are pulled in due time, but they were there in the first place, and user data may have been affected in the process. These are Facebook’s tectonic plates, and we are just riding around on them.

This is disconcerting, and perhaps unethical. It’s provoked concern among lawmakers, anger among activist groups, and fear among Facebook members. But, for better or for worse, this is how Facebook has been working for the past six years, and the Web at large may finally be coming to that sort of understanding.

The ground is moving at Facebook, and it always has been. The social network can credit a big portion of its success to this ability and willingness to keep changing while some of its industry brethren–MySpace, Digg–kept products relatively static and are now suffering the consequences. This doesn’t mean that Facebook’s unstoppable by any means, though. Maybe the coalition of U.S. senators petitioning the Federal Trade Commission to rein in social networks’ handling of user data a bit will be effective, and Facebook will be forced to stabilize the iteration of its service a bit; this, in turn, could mean that its lightning-speed innovation could be curbed as red tape and roadblocks go up, making it more likely that another service could race in and start chewing at its market share.

Or members could, of course, just leave–and Facebook’s business model is only as good as the 400 million people who inhabit it. But people choose to live in areas prone to deadly natural disasters, too. Living your life (or a portion of it) on the Web and entrusting personal data to social-media services like Facebook means that you’re agreeing to colonize a product that’s subject to change and unexpected error. This is true for many services besides Facebook, too. Twitter’s shown hints of major expansion plans. Location-based networking start-ups have an appetite for marketing partnership dollars and a whole lot of private data in their coffers. Then there’s Blippy, the new, edgy purchase-sharing start-up that accidentally exposed several users’ credit card numbers last month.

You could choose to err on the side of paranoia, assume that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is greedily dreaming of how awesome it will be when he sells everyone’s data to marketers and uses the profits to buy himself a private island, and delete your Facebook account. Or you could just be aware, be cautious, and figure that maybe your credit card data is something you want to keep off of Facebook for now.

Because while Facebook is the company it is today–subject to constant and frequent volatility, eager to tread into new marketing and networking territory–this is how it’s going to be.

So how odd and strangely refreshing to see Yahoo roll up a little ball of competitive spit and blow it in the direction of Google.

In a new ad, Yahoo suggests that Google has got it all wrong. Home pages aren’t for being dull and lifeless. They aren’t for sending people on their way as quickly as possible. They’re for being your all purpose online bedside table. You know, the one where you keep your after-shave, your eyebrow pencil, your deodorant, several books, your nasal hair remover, your BlackBerry (office issue), your iPhone (personal use) and your various medicines and loose change.

Naturally, I paraphrase. For the tagline of this new spot is “Your favorite stuff all in one place. Make Yahoo your home page.”

What a thoughtful strategy this is, albeit one that is being pursued by Facebook with all the straightforwardness and vigor of a direct mail lawyer.

Perhaps the highlight of this piece is the part when a home page that looks mightily like that of Google (sans the Google logo) is accompanied by the words: “When you look at this home page nothing looks back at you. You come to this place so you can leave.”

Yahoo contrasts this with its own approach. It claims Yahoo “doesn’t hustle you out the door. It’s a place that gets to know you, a place that finds things for you.” How true. There are so many for whom the clean, simple, welcoming design of Yahoo is the home for news of sports, finance and other vital things.

“Yahoo’s mission now is to convince consumers that Yahoo is the place where you go to navigate the entire Web,” Jeff Goodby, the co-founder of the ad agency responsible for this piece, told the Wall Street Journal.

This is a worthy quest. But one only wishes it could be presented in a manner that was just slightly less redolent of a large cup of chamomile.

Watching little Scrabble tiles with logos on them waft across the screen merely suggests a small wardrobe change for some of these poor logos after their shoot for a Windows Mobile campaign of late last year.

I know there will be some who might wish that if the idea was to present a serious contrast between Yahoo and Google, there might have been a slightly greater attempt to create a little more, well, drama. As it is, this may feel like little more than a small child tweaking its great uncle’s bottom.

SAN FRANCISCO–With a new tool called Spindex, Microsoft’s Future Social Experiences Labs division is diving into a niche where many have failed: social-media aggregation.

Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsoft’s FUSE labs, unveiled the tool onstage here at the Web 2.0 Expo on Tuesday afternoon, saying, “we kind of call it the impossible project.”

Spindex will launch with an array of data that isn’t typically found in a social-network feed dashboards like Seesmic or TweetDeck–a genre of app that has been thrown into limbo in the wake of Twitter’s decision to launch official mobile and eventually desktop clients. In addition to Facebook and Twitter, Spindex can handle RSS, bookmarking service Evernote, and Microsoft-owned search engine Bing, with more services still to come.

A Windows Live ID is required to join Spindex, which is currently in a closed-beta preview version and will be expanding soon.

“We’ve been thinking for a long time about how can we do, kind, of, your own personal index,” Cheng said of the product, describing it as a “social personal index” and “a personal Rolodex.” Basically, it aims to provide a way to sift through the “media” side of social media–and unlike most social aggregation services, the slant is toward indexing and archiving rather than the hot-button “real-time” craze. The Web-based Spindex app features a social feed stream, a “trending topics” section that goes a little deeper than the one Twitter offers, and the ability to bookmark items and add them as favorites.

“We have one index for everybody in the world,” Cheng said of traditional, nonsocial search index indexes like Google’s and Bing’s. “If you want to delete something you can’t, if you want to mark something up it’s really challenging.”

Whether it’s still “impossible,” as Cheng had joke earlier, will become evident as this project expands.

What could be more accurate. Each time someone takes a new Apple product and, you know, smashes it, destroys it, or mutilates it, one cannot help but admire the ingenuity that has gone in to such a pursuit. Ingenuity that could have otherwise been put to use in, oh, perhaps an episode of “Mythbusters.”

Still, this is modern art. If anything is.

You see, the creators of this video, in which they microwave the new iPad 3G, don’t merely toss it in the microwave as if this were the recalcitrant chef at your local Armenian bistro. No, they boot it up. They find a widescreen version of an iPhone 3GS being microwaved and ensure it is fully displayed on the iPad’s glorious screen. Only then do they place it carefully into the microwave.

Microwaving My New 3G 64GB iPAD In HD Wide Screen

This is no three-minute cooking operation. The iPad is zapped for a glorious 18 minutes, so that it enjoys the full benefit of a summer in Austin, Texas. Smoke begins to hiss from its sides. But it takes quite some time for crackling to occur and flames to erupt.

Once the flames are doused, the sight is as sad as the state of contemporary spelling. Black and cracked, it resembles what is left of an old frat house TV after a particularly amusing initiation night.

Though the video feels somewhat longer than several funerals I’ve attended, there is a surprise near the end.

When hands begin to pull apart the device there is a yellow sticky substance, not unlike English fudge, that makes the whole concoction suddenly look strangely appetizing. Truly, I can see a demented disciple of the great Fernan Adria attempt to re-create this feat using all the tools of molecular gastronomy.

I have no evidence that these people have any connection to Google or Adobe, but there can be no question that, one day, little blue people will look at us and marvel at how clever we truly were.

Because of the sheer number of blogs that are out there, the same basic information can also be found at several different sources, and with search sites like Google, and Bing, there’s a very real need to get high traffic quickly, in order to keep your blog at the top of the heap, or even in the middle of the pack.

The first and very best way to keep traffic flowing at a good clip is to find a subject that isn’t getting much coverage. Most college sports teams have a myriad of levels of coverage from anything to small student blogs, to large sports sites like ESPN and Yahoo writing articles that provide more insight than you’re able to provide because of their insider status. However, in a male dominated area like sports, a University’s women’s program might find itself largely ignored, and this is an area where you can swoop in and snatch up an audience.

Keep in mind there has to be interest in the topic you’re blogging on. While there’s little coverage of the Longwood University Women’s bowling team, that’s probably because there’s little general interest, no matter how closely you cover them.

The next best way to get traffic flowing to your blog is to sell yourself. This can be done a number of ways. If you’re the first reporting on a specific item, using social networking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, and Twitter make sense. Even Facebook can be used to get the word out there that you’re the one who’s in the know. More original ways to get your blog noticed would be using a podcast format, where you can cover the things written in a recording, for those who don’t have the time to sit down and read, or you can cover additional items that might help gain interest in your site in general.

It’s important to note that the most important aspect to remember when trying to get visitors to your blog is that the blogosphere is full of those who have their own opinions, and if you can present your information in a way that will start a conversation you’re more likely to be rewarded for your efforts and make money constantly.

How to make money tips by: make money