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News

• Astronauts sky high on out-of-this-world twittering

  The astronauts of Space Shuttle mission STS-131 are delighted by the response to their extra-terrestrial Twitter messages, they said Monday.

• Web abuzz on talk of Google Facebook killer

  Speculation is spreading around the Web that Google is building a site that could be a Facebook-killer.

• Microsoft fires new shot at Google Docs over support

  Microsoft took another shot at rival Google today as it touted the support it provides for Office 2010.

• SAP readies 'River' cloud platform for public debut

  SAP is segmenting its emerging cloud-computing strategy across multiple development platforms, including one code-named "River," which will support lightweight extensions to its on-premises ERP (enterprise resource planning) software.

• Google moves encrypted search to a new site

  Google's encrypted search engine, launched in May, has moved to a new Web address that isn't as convenient as its original one but that gives organisations the option to block the site for their users without locking them out of other Google services.

• SharePoint 2010: Four Big-Name Social Networking Rivals

  Microsoft became decidedly more social with SharePoint 2010, adding social networking tools like improved wiki and blog integration, tagging and microblogging into its SharePoint MySites feature.

• You Are Here: Scary New Location Privacy Risks

  Location-based services on a mobile phone are terrifically helpful when you need to find a nearby business or directions to the freeway.

• Rackspace cloud chief predicts enterprise caution

  Most large enterprises won't move their established applications on to cloud services for years but are embracing the technology for new projects, the head of Rackspace's cloud business said on Thursday at the Structure 2010 conference in San Francisco.

• The need for real security in a virtual world

  In a recent column, my Security Manager's Journal counterpart, Mathias Thurman, wrote about securing virtual desktop environments. My company is going through the same exercise of evaluating VDI as a replacement for traditional desktops. As Mathias pointed out, the concept of virtualizing the applications that run on the system does not substantially change the threat landscape, nor does it modify the countermeasures we put in place to protect against those threats.

• Google moves its encrypted search

  If you're paranoid about snoops discovering your Web search terms and results, you'll have to start pointing your browser to another URL to use Google encrypted search.

• ICANN board approves dot-XXX top-level domain for porn

  Pornography will have its own top-level domain, dot-XXX, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers decided Friday.

• Red Hat CEO: VMware our biggest competitor

  When it comes to enterprise open source software vendor Red Hat, one might assume its biggest competitors to be Oracle, Novell, Microsoft, or even IBM.

• Salesforce.com sues Microsoft for patent infringement

  Salesforce.com has sued Microsoft for patent infringement, making a move in response to an intellectual property suit Redmond filed against the on-demand CRM (customer relationship management) vendor last month.

• Google Gmail to harness HTML5

  In keeping with Google's enthusiasm for the emerging HTML5 standard, many upcoming features of the company's Gmail Web-based e-mail service will be rendered in HTML5, said Adam de Boor, a staff software engineer working on the service.

• Chinese language top-level domains win ICANN approval

  Web site operators will be able to register domain names written entirely in Chinese characters, including the final characters to the right of the last dot, in a matter of months.