AP - France's lower house of parliament has approved a pioneering bill allowing authorities to cut off Internet access to people who download illegally.

Reuters - Schools in Beijing are quietly removing the Green Dam filter, which was required for all school computers in July, due to complaints over problems with the software.

PC World - Google's experimental Fast Flip is a new way to consume online news, but not a better one. It falls into the trap of trying to make a computer imitate real-life. Rarely does this have a happy ending.

One problem with reading news online today is that browsing can be really slow. A media-rich page loads dozens of files and can take as much as 10 seconds to load over broadband, which can be frustrating. What we need instead is a way to flip through articles really fast without unnatural delays, just as we can in print. The flow should feel seamless and let you rapidly flip forward to the content you like, without the constant wait for things to load. Imagine taking 10 seconds to turn the page of a print magazine!

Today we're adding a new experiment to Google Labs: Google Fast Flip, accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com. Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. At the same time, we provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community. Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.


To build Google Fast Flip, we partnered with three dozen top publishers, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek. These partners will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads. This gives publishers an opportunity to introduce new readers to their content. It also tests our theory that being able to read articles faster means people will read more of them, driving more ad revenue to publishers.

The publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet. However, we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution. We think Fast Flip could be one way to help, and we're looking to find other ways to help as well in the near future.

We've also made a mobile version of Fast Flip with tactile page flipping for Android-powered devices and the iPhone, so you can browse on the go. This is accessible at the same address.

Go to Google Labs and give Fast Flip a spin. If you have suggestions to make the service better, please let us know. We'll keep working on new ways to improve your news-reading experience. Happy flipping!

Posted by Krishna Bharat, Distinguished Researcher, Google News

The New York Times will reform it sales online advertising sales policy after a scammer changed an ad from a "national advertiser" to a phony virus-protection software product that infected readers' computers and told them their computers were unprotected.

At TechCrunch50, Microsoft shows off a new way to skin a search. It uses thumbnail images that match queries. Not bad.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Symantec, Commercial, Windows x64

Little in the Windows world seems to polarize opinion like a Symantec product, and in particular one from the Norton range. Seemingly equally loved and hated by users, Norton products in recent times have grown in both functionality and size, leading many to categorize the applications as 'bloated'.

Fanboys and haters sit up and take notice, Symantec have announced the release of their 2010 range of security products, including Norton Antivirus 2010 and Norton Internet Security 2010!

In the list of new features in the 2010 range, it does seem that Symantec have taken note of the concerns of users around the size and performance of the applications, as they state:

"Symantec has made an ongoing commitment to delivering security products that are fast and light. The Norton 2010 products have maintained an eye on performance, in spite of adding significant new protection technology to the release. Independent 3rd party test lab, PassMark Software was commissioned to benchmark Symantec and top security software competitors' performance impact on key metric."

Long story short: NIS 2010 is faster than previous versions and it's less resource-intense (idling at a reported 10Mb). The once painful install has been addressed as well -- NIS installs in about a minute. Test scans under NIS turned out solid results as well: 61 seconds on an HDD and 31 on an SSD.

Continue reading Symantec release 2010 Norton security products

Symantec release 2010 Norton security products originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments



Sponsored Topics: Symantec - Norton Internet Security - Security - antivirus - Norton 2010