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Reports in todays UK tabloid newspapers indicate that members of the UK parliament are demanding that YouTube cleans up its video network.
Kids as young as eight are finding images of porn, violence and horror on internet video sites like YouTube. According to a commons report, one in six schoolchildren has seen "nasty, worrying and frightening" content. It also revealed video sharing sites like YouTube do nothing to protect kids from such content.
The industry standard for removing offensive content is 24 hours, something which is a "shocking" length of time according to the commons culture, media and sport committee.
One way YouTube could clear the site up is have a reporting system where anything over a certain amount of bad reports gets removed from public view until moderators can ensure it should be removed permanently. What do Zakeh readers think? Have you found porn, violence and horror on YouTube?

View: YouTube

India is developing a laptop to be sold at US$10, that will target higher education applications, a minister of the federal government said Tuesday in Delhi. Research on the new low-cost laptop is being carried out at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, said D. Purandeswari, Minister of State for Higher Education, at a conference in Delhi. This measure will help raise the quality of higher education in India, she added.
The Minister did not however give the specifications of the $10 laptop, nor is it clear if the rock-bottom price will be achieved with the help of a government subsidy. The Indian government is planning to use information and communications technology (ICT) to strengthen its current programs for distance learning by making them accessible online, Purandeswari said.

View: The full story @ PCWorld

Apple has come under fire for failing to patch the critical Domain Name System (DNS) flaw which prompted a (rest of) industry wide response earlier this month.
For anyone just back from a trip up the Amazon, the discovery of a domain spoofing vulnerability by security researcher Dan Kaminsky sparked a massive patching effort that began on 8 July. Dozens of vendors - including Microsoft, Cisco, Ubuntu and the Internet Systems Consortium, which maintains BIND - released updates that mitigated against the risk of cache poisoning attacks, which stem from security shortcomings in the protocol itself rather than coding errors.

View: The full story @ The Reg

Watch out Apple, because Dell is poised to unveil an MP3 player and music downloads service, according to company insiders. The Wall Street Journal has it on good authority from a mole within Dell that the PC manufacturer has already designed and tested its own MP3 player. The gadget’s thought to feature a small iPod Nano-esque display and allow users to navigate through tracks with a scroll wheel that’s integrated into the player and positioned just below the display.
The mole’s also said that Dell intends to launch an “online download service” that sources tracks and video content from several unnamed sources. This could be done directly through the Dell MP3 player, because it’s also thought to feature Wi-Fi connectivity.

View: The full story @ The Reg

Yahoo Music is offering refunds to anyone who bought songs from the service. Is it time for MSN Music follow Yahoo’s lead?
Yahoo announced last week that it would no longer issue authorization keys for the digital rights management, or DRM, software on its songs. This meant that anyone who bought songs from the service would still be able to hear their songs through its service but would be unable to move them to other devices or computers.
This did not play well with Web users. Now Yahoo Music plans to issue refunds and is trying to go one step further. If a customer would prefer music over a refund, Yahoo is looking for a way to give the customer copies of the purchased songs in the DRM-free MP3 format, according to a Yahoo representative.

Have you ever looked at Google and thought: "There aren’t enough search results here"? Well, surprisingly, you are not alone. Today marked the launch of a new search engine, known as Cuil (pronounced Cool). The founders claim that with 120 billion (yes, 120,000,000,000) sites indexed, that they have 3 times the total sites indexed of the market leader Google.
"The Web continues to grow at a fantastic rate and other search engines are unable to keep up with it,” said Tom Costello, CEO and co-founder of Cuil. “Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user. In addition, Cuil presents searchers with content-based results, not just popular ones, providing different and more insightful answers that illustrate the vastness and the variety of the Web."

View: Cuil

If the web were a vast savanna of content and webpages, search engines might be our safari guides, helping us navigate through miles and miles of barren wastes. At the moment, Google seems to be the guide of choice for most web travellers, and for good reason too: Google has reached over one trillion unique indexed URLs, according to a post on the company weblog by Jesse Alpert & Nissan Hajaj. Contrast this to the paltry 26 million URLs Google had in 1998 when it first started out, and even the one billion the company had attained in 2000.

According to the blog: "Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!
View: Google Weblog

Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good - and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, leaving users unable to access the songs they have purchased. Starting September 30 users will not be able to purchase songs from the Yahoo Music Unlimited Store.

Songs and albums that are purchased through Yahoo Music Unlimited Store are protected by a Digital Rights Management (DRM) system that requires a valid license key for playing them on the PC. The company will be taking off this license key servers offline on the same day the store shuts.

Once the Yahoo store goes down and the key servers go offline, existing tracks cannot be authorized to play on new computers. Instead, Yahoo recommends customers burn their files to CD and re-rip them onto their computer. (In the process, you’ll lose a bunch of blank CDs, not to mention sound quality.)

Earlier this year, a similar situation arose with MSN Music - although Microsoft has since relented and will keep the DRM authorization servers up and running through 2011.

The reaction of most music fans has been: "’Yahoo had an online music store?’"

If there’s one positive that can be drawn from this, it’s that all four major labels and most indies now sell DRM-free online.

Microsoft has unveiled further details about its upcoming DirectX 11 at the annual GameFest developer conference in Seattle.

A new ’shader’ technology "lays the groundwork for the GPU to be used for more than just 3D graphics", according to the software giant.

"Developers will be able to take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor," said Chris Satchell, chief technology officer at Microsoft’s entertainment business division.

DirectX 11 will also offer support for tessellation, giving models a smoother appearance when viewed up close, in addition to multi-threaded resource handling to make the most of multi-processor set-ups.

The new Software Developer Kit will be compatible with existing DirectX 10 hardware, but will require the much-maligned Windows Vista thereby excluding millions of XP users.

Games based on the current DirectX 10 SDK for Windows, including Crysis, Gears of War and BioShock, have been well received and praised for their added realism.

All three were nominated in the Best Game category at last year’s Bafta Video Games Awards.

Microsoft said that DirectX 11 will be launched "later this year".

Source: vnunet.com

Microsoft and Facebook strengthened their existing partnership Thursday with the announcement that Microsoft would be powering the social network’s Web search and sponsored links.

The announcement was made at Microsoft’s annual financial analysts meeting in Redmond. Sources indicate the search services will be integrated into Facebook without many changes to the overall site design.

Facebook will begin using an API from Microsoft some time in the fall. The move mirrors a similar deal between Google and MySpace made almost two years ago. The search giant paid $900 million for MySpace’s search box and ads.

Google’s deal extends across all Fox Interactive sites, which include Rottentomatoes.com, Gamespy.com, fox.com, americanidol.com, and others. In addition to search, Google also has rights to advertising on these sites.

The actual monetary value of Thursday’s Facebook deal was not disclosed, although Microsoft previously invested $240 million in the site last October. That deal made Microsoft the exclusive third-party provider for advertising on Facebook.