Google Inc.’s e-mail service is almost ready to accept all comers, nearly three years after the online search leader shook up the Internet by offering users an unprecedented amount of free storage and displaying ads based on the content of the correspondence.
Effective Wednesday, the Mountain View-based company removed the invitation-only restrictions on its Gmail service in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Brazil. Google opened up the service last year in several other parts of the world, including Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and Egypt.
Invitations to open a Gmail account are still required in North America, Asia and most parts of the South America, but Google spokeswoman Courtney Hohne said those restrictions will be lifted “very soon.” Even then, Gmail will retain a “beta” tag to signify the company still considers the service to be in a testing phase.
Getting a Gmail invitation hasn’t been too difficult for some time. Current account holders have had as many as 100 invitations to send out to friends and family. Anyone willing to provide Google with their cell phone number can also request an invitation.
Broken space-ride dream fixed:
A man who gave up a free space ride because he couldn’t afford the taxes on the contest prize may be going to the cosmos after all.
Brian Emmett, a 31-year-old software consultant from Silicon Valley, has signed on to become a consultant to a space tourism upstart in exchange for a chance to experience weightlessness some 60 miles above Earth.
Emmett won a space trip as part of a 2005 sweepstakes sponsored by software company Oracle Corp. He forfeited the prize after calculating he would owe $25,000 in taxes for a spaceflight valued at $138,000.
Enter Benson Space Co., a company founded by rocket entrepreneur Jim Benson, who is trying to break into the suborbital spaceflight business.
Benson, who dreamed of flying to space as a boy, said he sympathized with Emmett and offered him a consulting position.
As part of the agreement, Benson said, the firm would pay Emmett an undisclosed amount to serve as a “test passenger,” allowing him to hitch a free ride into space in late 2008 when the company hopes to send its first paying tourists. Benson said the partnership frees Emmett from any tax responsibility.
“IM-speak” creeping into the classroom:
Middle school teacher Julia Austin is noticing a new generation of errors creeping into her pupils’ essays.
Sure, they still commit the classic blunders – like the commonly used “ain’t.” But an increasing number of Austin’s eighth-graders also submit classwork containing “b4,” “ur,” “2” and “wata” – words that may confuse adults but are part of the teens’ everyday lives.
This “instant messaging-speak” or “IM-speak” emerged more than a decade ago. Used in e-mails and cell phone text messages, most teens are familiar with this tech talk and use it to flirt, plan dates and gossip.
But junior high and high school teachers nationwide say they see a troubling trend: The words have become so commonplace in children’s social lives that the techno spellings are finding their way into essays and other writing assignments.
“The IM-speak is so prevalent now,” said Austin, a language arts teacher at Stonewall Jackson Middle School in Orlando. “I’m always having to instruct my students against using it.”
Vicki Davis, a high school teacher at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Ga., said she even finds the abbreviated words in term papers.
“I’m Southern, but I wouldn’t use the sayings, “squeal like a pig” or “kick the bucket,” in formal writing (because) some people may not understand,” Davis said. “IM-speak should be treated the same way.”
We’ll have none of that on this site:
A Web site that ranks and displays news stories, blogs and other items based on recommendations from its visitors has responded to efforts to manipulate the rankings by dropping its list of most active users.
In an open letter, Digg founder Kevin Rose said the top users who were spending “hundreds if not thousands of hours” identifying the best stories for others to read wound up getting blamed for much of the efforts at manipulation, which includes offering cash and other incentives to vote favorably for certain items.
The list of top users, which Rose said had been created to recognize those who worked hard to make Digg useful, also potentially gave companies wishing to publicize their stories an easy way to find people whom they might be able to influence.
“After considerable internal debate and discussion with many of those who make up the Top Digger list, we’ve decided to remove the list” effective last Friday, Rose said.
Watch for the green bar to appear:
Users of Microsoft Corp.’s latest Web browser can start looking for the address bar to turn green while shopping or banking.
The security feature in Internet Explorer 7 is activated when sites have what’s known as an extended-validation certificate. That’s given out to merchants that have undergone and passed screening that is more rigorous than what is normally required to obtain regular certificates, which trigger a closed padlock on the browser familiar to many online shoppers.
But lack of a green bar shouldn’t be interpreted as a sign a merchant is fraudulent.
Many smaller and newer businesses will not be able to get the EV certificates because rules for verifying them have yet to be written.
And the green bar only appears when there’s a transaction or login – such as entering a credit card number or password. The address bar might remain white while visiting the home page of a merchant with EV certification.
The appearance of the green bar should tell visitors that the merchant does exist and operates at the location it says it does, though it doesn’t validate its quality of service.
Browser makers and certificate issuers have been working on the EV system for nearly two years partly to address the rise of “phishing” scams in which Web sites try to mimic legitimate businesses to steal passwords and other sensitive data.
Anti-piracy raid nabs 870:
Authorities have seized nearly 5 million pirated discs and arrested 870 people in a two-month anti-piracy operation in about a dozen Asia-Pacific nations.
Operation Trident involved 1,874 raids by national law enforcement agencies, according to the Motion Picture Association, which coordinated the operation in December and January.
The raids targeted pirate production facilities, pirated optical discs from street vendors, retail shops and markets; and the exporters of pirated DVDs and video CDs, the group said.
Illegal copying of music, movies and software is a costly problem in China, Malaysia, Thailand and other Asian countries, where manufacturers and legitimate sellers lose billions of dollars to piracy.
Singapore to play host to game convention:
Video-game developers, manufacturers, publishers and players from around the world will gather in Singapore in September for a convention expected to be the region’s largest.
Games Convention Asia, which starts Sept. 6, will address the development needs of Asia’s rapidly growing digital interactive gaming industry, which is expected to triple in value to $7.5 billion by 2008, according to the convention’s organizers.
Western companies must adapt to differences in the Asian market to take advantage of the potential business here, said Chris Thompson, Asia vice president of Electronic Arts Inc., one of the advisers to the convention. Thompson said Asian gamers tend to value being online and being mobile – the social aspects of gaming.
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