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Highs and Lows of 2009 Illustrated in a Google Wave

Paul Lilly — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 08:17:36 -0600

Google's Wave platform is one of the more interesting technologies to see the light of day (to a select few) in 2009, but it's far from the only thing that happened this year. Memorable moments abound, from the Obama inauguration, to Kanye West's antics.

These and many more have been captured in a pretty cool Google Wave rendition of the year's most memorable moments. Perhaps not as cool as Samuel Jackson describing the technology in a Google Wave (Link - NSFW), but pretty groovy nonetheless.

Check it out the 2.5-minute here.

P2P Malware to Grow in 2010, Say Researchers

Bart Salisbury — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:58:49 -0600

Cybercriminals have a lot in common with the Periplaneta americana, the common household cockroach. They seek out the dark, poking and prodding for ways to get in where they are unwanted. In their case it isn’t food, but the misery of computer users they seek out. And, just like cockroaches, once you think you’ve got them blocked, they find a new way in.

Kaspersky Labs’ Cyberthreat Forecast for 2010 says that IT managers and users are becoming more savvy, making fake programs, gaming Trojans, or web sites less useful for cybercriminals. Instead, it looks like they’ll be focusing their attention on P2P networks, botnets, and mobile platforms.

P2P networks will be used to support malware attacks. According to Kaspersky: “This method has been used to spread notorious threats such as TDSS and Virut as well as the first backdoor for Mac OS X. In 2010, we expect to see a significant increase in these types of incidents on P2P networks.”

Mobile platforms, iPhone and Android, will also be more frequently targeted. Kaspersky suspects that iPhone users, without compromised handsets, will be okay, but that Android users might be in for some pain: “The increasing popularity of mobile phones running the Android OS combined with a lack of effective checks to ensure third-party software applications are secure, will lead to a number of high-profile malware outbreaks.”

As for botnets, Kaspersky sees them as offering profitable possibilities by manipulating Internet traffic: “In the future, we foresee the emergence of more "grey" schemes in the botnet services market. These so-called "partner programs" enable botnet owners to make a profit from activities such as sending spam, performing denial of service (DoS) attacks or distributing malware without committing an explicit crime.”

Lastly, Kaspersky sees Google Wave as a potential target for 2010. It’s new. It’s untested. And therefore it’s vulnerable. Kaspersky says: “Attacks on this new Google service will no doubt follow the usual pattern: first, the sending of spam, followed by phishing attacks, then the exploiting of vulnerabilities and the spreading of malware.”

Image Credit: Gary Alpert/Wikimedia Commons

Google Adds New Tools to Manage Public Waves

Ryan Whitwam — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:01:59 -0600

Google Wave is really just a rough pre-beta right now. So any attempts to clean it up and add features are more than welcome. Today the Wave team posted about the newest feature, following waves. This should make the process of managing public waves much less awkward.

From now on, clicking on a public wave will no longer mean it stays in your inbox forever. To stay updated on a public wave, you just hit the “Follow” button. When you are added to a wave or you contribute to one, you will be following it. Hitting the “Archive” button will remove a public wave from your inbox.

Public waves that you have only opened will now automatically fall off your inbox eventually. Finally, the “mute” feature has been replaced by “Unfollow”. Clicking the unfollow button will remove a wave from the inbox immediately. Google may eventually expand the whole “Following” idea to people, groups, and searches. So if Wave wasn’t confusing enough already, you have this to contend with.

Google Wave Opens Federation Support to Allow Private Hosting

Jason Barry — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:11:25 -0500

The benefits of Google Wave are yet to be seen by the mass public. Google released an internal developer sandbox earlier this year and eventually rolled out a consumer preview to 100k users in September. Now, Google has announced its next step in the rollout process: the federation sandbox.

Federated distribution models mean that companies can build and host their own Google Wave servers and integrate them with other servers. The features and promises from Google about Wave’s capabilities mean that corporate collaboration will take on a whole new meaning. This next step, allowing corporations to control their own servers, means that Wave will more likely be adopted into business use.

The federation sandbox is strictly experimental for the current time. They have released about 40k lines of code for inspection and the Wave Federation Protocol and Conversation model. They have also demoed a terminal based Wave client.

You can check out the Wave Federation technical information at the Wave Federation Protocol site.

Google Wave to Open its Own App Store and Itself to Software Developers

Bart Salisbury — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:24:21 -0500

Word has filtered out of the Google Wave Google Technology User Group’s London meeting that Google Wave will be opening an app store. The move, according to Zee over at The Next Web, signals Google’s commitment to this new technology, and provides encouragement for developers to expand Google Wave’s potential.

Google Wave is a real-time collaborative tool that permits groups to interactively ‘converse’ on a project, using richly formatted text, photos, videos and maps. Real-time here is taken to the extreme, with key-stokes shared among participants as they occur--no waiting for the press of a return key to send your thoughts along. The use of what Google calls “concurrency control technology” allows all participants in a wave to edit rich media at the same time.

Third-party developers have already come up with apps for teleconferencing, videoconferencing, and multiplayer gaming. The creation of an app store, similar to what Apple has done for iPhone apps, would provide additional incentive to developers to produce new, innovative add-ons for the Wave environment.

Other news from the London meeting includes Google’s plans to have an extension gallery up and running in a few months; ‘hooks’ which invoke actions, such as opening a new wave or launching a shortcut; merging waves; and deployment on networks and intranets for internal use by businesses. Google Mail, however, doesn’t appear headed for integration.

Image Credit: Google

Scalpers Riding the Google Wave Money Train

Jason Barry — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:23:11 -0500

Google sent out invitations to the new Google Wave beta yesterday and chaos is ensuing. Patrick Runald, senior manager of security and research at Websense, has been keeping an eye on all of the madness.

He has tracked search queries related to Wave invitations that lead you down the dark dirty alleys of the interwebs. Many searches yield results to malware and virus laden sites where it’s always phishing season.

The Wall Street Journal also reported an eBay auction for a Google Wave invite that saw bids get over $100 and side offers in the thousands. EBay quashed the whole thing due to copyright restrictions in its seller policy, but how gadget crazy has the world gone?

Did you get an invite? If you didn’t, are you livid and determined to get one “by any means?” Or are you cool with waiting for your turn to ride the Wave?

No BS Podcast #107: Everybody Do the Google Wave

The Maximum PC Staff — Fri, 29 May 2009 13:45:22 -0500

No Star Trek talk this week. Scout's honor. Instead, the gang talks about futuristic technology that's here today! Several technology conferences going on this week hosted product announcements from Google and Microsoft. At the I/O developer conference in San Francisco, Google announced their support for HTML 5 and the ambitious Wave service. 550 miles away in San Diego, Microsoft revealed their Bing search engine that will replace Live Search. The team also tries out Hulu's desktop application, and ponders its ramifications for Boxee. As always, we take a few listener questions and Gordon spills his thoughts on James Bond in his rant of the week. Join us for all this and more on this week's No BS Podcast!

Do you have a tech question? A comment? A tale of technological triumph? Just need to get something off your chest? A secret to share? Email us at maximumpcpodcast@gmail.com or call our 24-hour No BS Podcast hotline at 877.404.1337 x1337--operators are standing by.

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