Facebook hit by privacy complaints

By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: June 9 2011 06:19 | Last updated: June 9 2011 06:19

Facebook was facing a fresh backlash from privacy advocates on Thursday as opposition mounted to its handling of a new facial recognition feature that has been added to the social networking service in recent weeks

Facebook, meanwhile, said it had received “almost no user complaints” about the new feature, and that, after some regulators raised questions, it was “providing them with additional information which we are confident will satisfy any concerns they will have.”For more detail read : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/00b50d52-9253-11e0-9e00-00144feab49a.html#axzz1OlpBdh4F.

Most India organizations not IPv6 ready

Sujit JohnSujit John, TNN | Jun 9, 2011, 06.11am IST
BANGALORE: IPv6 Day did not lead to an internet crash or any other misfortune that some had predicted. At least not till late on Wednesday when this was written. But the test of the new internet protocol (IP) version, which will enormously expand the number of internet addresses that can be made available, did show that very few organizations have moved to the new system. Some even worry that in India, telecom service providers will soon have no more addresses to provide to those who wish to use the internet.

Web performance management company Akamai Technologies' data showed the IPv6 traffic of about 250 hits per second on an average. The internet traffic on a regular day, over the existing IPv4 network, is 10 million hits per second. "The good news is that IPv6 works. But very little of infrastructure has been created for the new version. And it shows we need to do a lot of work as an industry ," Harald Prokop, senior V-P of engineering at Akamai said.

IPv4 has about 4.3 billion addresses . Almost all of these have been exhausted . APNIC ( Asia Pacific Network Information Centre), which oversees the Asia-Pacific region, has announced that it has almost finished its allocation of IPv4 address and has placed the remaining under limited distribution. IPv6 offers 340 undecillion (that's 340 followed by 36 zeroes) addresses. And it should last many many years, even if lots of everyday products (your washing machine , refrigerator, etc) begin to talk to each other and to us over the internet , as expected. But the trouble for now is, the IPv4 and IPv6 networks are incompatible. If you have an IPv6 enabled device, it cannot access most of the current content because all of those are written for IPv4. Some like Facebook, Google and Yahoo have made their sites IPv6 compliant. But the vast majority has not. Only 5,375 of the top 1 million web sites by popularity have IPv6 connections, according to one estimate.

Given this, IPv4 will remain the dominant protocol for some more time. But then the question is, what happens to those who need a new internet connection if the address registries have run out of addresses? Prokop says some will try to use their IPv4 spaces more efficiently. "I have also heard that companies are buying addresses from those that are not using them." 

Microsoft Seizes the Moment With Gaming News

By Rob Spiegel
TechNewsWorld
06/06/11 2:17 PM PT

Microsoft is on a roll in gaming, and its latest announcements are likely to keep anticipation high. One of the coolest new things the company has come out with is "the ability to scan stuff and bring it into games," noted tech analyst Rob Enderle. "You can transcend the virtual world and bring it into the real world.".

On the eve of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) Monday, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) premiered a lineup of new games for the Xbox 360, including "Gears of War 3" and "Forza Motorsport 4." The company also debuted the trailer for "Halo 4" and unveiled the next installment of "Fable," by developer Peter Molyneux.

n addition, Microsoft announced a new voice-based entertainment search tool. Voice search with Bing on Xbox 360 lets users search Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX), Hulu Plus and ESPN. The tool can also be used to search music and video on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace.