U.S. government analysts believe a Chinese man with government links wrote the key part of a spyware programme used in hacker attacks on Google last year, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

The man, a security consultant in his 30s, posted sections of the programme to a hacking forum where he described it as something he was “working on,” the paper said, quoting an unidentified researcher working for the U.S. government.


The spyware creator works as a freelancer and did not launch the attack, but Chinese officials had “special access” to his programing, the report said.

“If he wants to do the research he’s good at, he has to toe the line now and again,” the paper quoted the unnamed U.S. government researcher saying.

“He would rather not have uniformed guys looking over his shoulder, but there is no way anyone of his skill level can get away from that kind of thing. The state has privileged access to these researchers’ work.”

The report did not say how analysts knew about the man’s government ties.

The allegations over the spyware are the latest episode in a dispute that has pitted Google and the United States against China, with its wall of Internet controls and legions of hackers.

In January, the giant Internet search engine company, Google, threatened to pull back from China and shut its Google.cn Chinese-language portal over complaints of censorship and sophisticated hacking from within China.

Washington has backed those criticisms and urged Beijing to investigate hacking complaints thoroughly and transparently. Beijing has said it opposes hacking.

The Financial Times report also quoted unnamed sources backing a New York Times report that analysts had traced the online attacks to two Chinese educational institutions, the prestigious Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang vocational school.

The two establishments have denied the reports. And the allegation that the latter, a high-school level institute that also trains hairdressers, chefs and car mechanics, could take on one of the world’s most powerful Internet firms, have been widely mocked in Chinese cyberspace.

“How can these future cooks be such powerful hackers?” a web user from Zhejiang province said on the portal www.163.com.

The use of the school’s IP address could simply mean that hackers had taken over its computers to hide their tracks.

But Lanxiang’s website also claims to have the “biggest” computer laboratory in the world, a boast it says is confirmed by Guinness World Records.

There was less online comment about the well-respected Jiaotong University, which attracts top graduates and has a School of Information Security Engineering.

Google
has finally launched its new social product, Buzz, at an event held at its Mountain View, CA headquarters. Google Buzz is an easy way to start conversations, share updates, photos, videos, add comments and much more - right from a Gmail account. The updates, which are often termed as ‘Buzz’, are available in real-time to the users right in their Gmail Inbox.


Head to http://buzz.google.com and check if it is being made available to you from your PC or iPhone/Android browser. Yes, Google Buzz has also been rolled out for iPhone and Android platform, leaving the rest mobile platforms behind for the time being. Buzz is free from any sign-up or setup hassles.

Google Buzz is being heavily compared with Facebook acquired FriendFeed service that allows posting, sharing and viewing photos, videos and commenting within the stream of updates. If you can recollect, two years back, Yahoo had introduced a service named - Buzz, which is mostly a social news service that collates user-select content from the web and ranks it on basis of popularity.

Do note that Buzz doesn’t have any character limitation like Twitter. However, that doesn’t mean one can paste stories and lengthy blog posts just for heck of sharing.

Here are the key features of Google Buzz:

Gmail Inbox Integration:
It will take place without pushing update emails to Inbox mail as the updates will be dynamically updated in real-time to form threaded Buzz conversations. Also, all basic keyboard shortcuts for Gmail work for Buzz as well. It’s obviously visible that Google is counting on those billions of Gmail users who’ll wish to try out Buzz.. But why mix social pleasure with mails? Whether Google should have included Buzz to Gmail or not is going to be a pro-longed debate. Many would like to keep their serious mailing stuff separate from social conversations. However, getting an all-in-one-time access is nothing new. It’s being developed previously like the Adobe Air apps that offer support for multiple account login to share content socially.

Automatic Friends Lists:
Based on the contacts you frequently mail and chat with, Buzz will automatically make names appear in your Buzz stream. Buzz will also give you a list of “Recommended Buzz” users that will based on ‘friend-of-friend’ content sharing into your stream - even if those folks aren’t acquainted to the user.

This may raise a question of privacy. For instance, Adam is a popular guy and is on Becky’s list and wishes to share updates only with Becky’s friends. But what if a contact of Sam who is on Becky’s is recommended to connect with Adam? Also it’s kinda unsure whether the email address could be held as private from the connected ‘friend-of-friend’.

Richer, Faster Sharing Experience:
In Buzz, Google focuses on one of the most crucial aspects in social arena today - real-time sharing and updates. Buzz allows importing feeds from Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader to stay updated with the contacts on those services. Photos from Flickr and Picasa would appear as thumbnail and clicking on thumbnail will give an overlay interface based full view of the image. The posts and comments on the posts get updated in real-time and one doesn’t have to refresh the page. Note that real-time update may not be supported in all web browsers and may cause freezing issues with them abruptly.

Public and Private Sharing:
An option of public and private sharing of updates is offered. So, one has a choice to make update publicly viewable or only for private network of friends and family. Public updates to Google Profiles of the user and the contacts who follow them. Private updates can be shared across the private network that could be setup. Note that public updates will be visible on the user’s Google Profile and will eventually show up in Google Search. So, be careful what information you share in the Buzz. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT share personal information in the Buzz. Be afraid, be very afraid.

By InformationWeek

The issues appear to be less about the Nexus One itself and more about Google’s online-only approach to support. Customers can only buy the device and get support online, mostly through help forums, which Google monitors. “The online model is not a good one,” Ken Dulaney, analyst for Gartner, told InformationWeek on Monday.

Gartner believes Google will eventually have to provide support through a retail store, probably through a partnership with carriers. “Sometimes you have to go to the store and have someone look at the phone,” Dulaney said.

Google said it was moving as fast as possible to address complaints. “We work quickly to solve any customer support issues as they come up, and we are trying to be as open and transparent as possible through our online customer help forums,” the company said in a statement e-mailed to InformationWeek. “We’ll continue to address all issues in as timely of a manner as possible.”

In the meantime, some Nexus One customers are having trouble getting answers to their questions, particularly about spotty 3G coverage. The Nexus One costs $529 for an unlocked model that can be used on multiple carriers. Initially, however, T-Mobile is the best option for 3G coverage.

Spotty 3G coverage, whether its the Nexus One or Apple’s iPhone, is typical for today’s networks, so those complaints are not surprising. “Customers are going to complain about that for just about everybody,” Dulaney said. “There is always spotty coverage. That’s a buyer beware type of thing with all the carriers.”

But getting the run around is not typical. Customers report calling T-Mobile and being told that the problem lies with HTC, the smartphone manufacturer. Calling HTC, and they get told to call T-Mobile, because its a network problem.

T-Mobile is getting complaints from current customers who want the Nexus One, but are ineligible for the discount, which is only for new customers. Depending on their current phone and the length of time they have on their service contract, T-Mobile customers could be eligible for a partial discount for upgrading to the Nexus One.

“That’s an ongoing problem,” Dulaney said, noting that carriers haven’t done a very good job in general in educating customers. “There’s a lot people who still don’t understand what a subsidy is.”

Apple, which gets high marks from customer service, offers support online, over the phone and at its retail stores. The multiple options approach has been credited with the company’s success in providing customer service.

full story / source

Twitter has reached profitability after signing deals with Google and Microsoft to make the micro-blogging service searchable on the Internet, BusinessWeek magazine reported on Monday.

BusinessWeek, which was purchased in October by financial news agency Bloomberg, said Twitter had signed a 15-million-dollar data-mining deal with Google and a 10-million-dollar agreement with Microsoft.

“The deals were huge,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek quoted an unidentified person “familiar with the company’s finances” as saying. “With two scoops of the pen, a lot of revenue came in.”

The magazine said the agreements to make Twitter messages known as “tweets” searchable by Google and Microsoft’s new search engine Bing “carry sufficient value to help Twitter achieve a small profit for 2009.”

It said Twitter also achieved profitability by renegotiating deals with telecommunications companies to bring down costs.

Twitter has been working on ways to make money from its globally popular service, and revenue producing ideas mentioned to date include selling premium accounts that businesses could use for marketing or image building.

The San Francisco-based startup has won millions of users since the service that allows people to pepper one another with 140-character-or-less messages launched in August 2006.

The next battle in the search wars could be over access to news content. The FT reports that Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)-which has made increasing the market share of its Bing search engine its top online priority-has reached out to “big online publishers” in order to get them to pull their sites from Google (NSDQ: GOOG). Among the parties currently in discussions with Microsoft is News Corp. (NYSE: NWS), which has very loudly threatened to block search engines from crawling the content of its newspapers.

Unclear how far along these discussions are, although TechCrunch also reported a week ago that Microsoft had a meeting with representatives from top British papers, including the Financial Times, about giving their content “premium positions” on Bing.

This report seems to take that a step further since not only would Microsoft presumably be giving the content of its partners better play, it would also be paying to ensure that their content could not be found directly via the search engine of its arch-rival.

That would give Bing bragging rights to something Google does not have. Its other attempts at doing so haven’t been as successful. For instance, after it announced a deal with Twitter to feature Tweets from the microblog in real-time, Google followed up with its own agreement hours later.

For the newspapers, of course, the question is whether Microsoft’s dollars can make up for the loss of traffic that Google generates for them.

Online publishers would likely demand top dollar. Asked about the possibility last week, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch said he wasn’t convinced even Microsoft could afford it: “If they were to pay everybody for everything they took, from every newspaper in the world and every magazine they wouldn’t have any profits left.”

source