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Yahoo Inc. is preparing to tweak several popular sections of its Web site, including its home page, during the next few months to accommodate more material from rival services as the Internet company tries to polish its tarnished  franchise.

The makeover outlined for reporters Thursday represents a key step in Yahoo’s push to regain the momentum that it lost while being outmaneuvered by Internet search rival Google Inc. and more recent upstarts like the rapidly growing online hangouts MySpace and Facebook.

Yahoo’s previous dawdling crimped its profits during the past two years, leading to a dramatic downturn in its market value that triggered an unsolicited takeover bid from Microsoft Corp. this year.

Since Microsoft withdrew its $47.5 billion bid in May, Yahoo has been battling to boost its stock price, which recently sank to its lowest level in nearly five years. Yahoo shares climbed 85 cents, or almost 5 percent, Thursday to close at $18.55 — well below Microsoft’s last offer of $33.

Read more @ news.yahoo.com

From Yahoo! News.

The iPhone 3G has been a hit with consumers, but many have complained about data connections, dropped calls, and overall sluggishness. 

So in response, Apple rolled out the iPhone 2.1 software update Friday, and it said this latest firmware will fix many bugs as well as add features.

The update is expected to improve the accuracy of the 3G signal strength display, as well as decrease the number of dropped calls. These two issues were a major point of frustration for some users and even led to a lawsuit, although Apple CEO Steve Jobs retorted that the issues only affected "a few percent" of iPhone users.

Some users found that programs downloaded from the App Store would cause the handset to crash. That issue has been addressed, as Apple said the firmware will make installing applications quicker and more reliable.

Users with the updated firmware should have a reduced time backing up the handset before syncing with iTunes. Additionally, contacts and searches should load quicker, and the virtual QWERTY keyboard is supposed to be much more responsive.

Read more @ informationweek.com

From Information Week.

To set Google’s new web browser software ‘Chrome’ as your default browser, follow the simple instructions below:

1) Go to Google Chrome

2) Click on the upper-right ‘Tools’ button

3) Go to ‘Options

4) Then click on ‘Make Google Chrome my default browser"

Most of the times the above steps will work, and you will see a green-colored sentence that says: "The default browser is currently Google Chrome."

But sometimes this might not work, especially if you are using Microsoft Vista OS.

So you will have to follow these instructions instead:

1) Right click a shortcut to Google Chrome

2) Click run as Administrator

3) Allow Vista permissions prompt

4) Go to Google Chrome

5) Click on the upper-right ‘Tools’ button

6) Then click on ‘Make Google Chrome my default browser"

In order to uncheck the default browser button, you will have to go to your browser of choice and set that browser as ‘Default Browser’.

Jimmy P. Semaan

Zakeh Blog staff.

We’re not going to follow this manically but it’s worth checking in on how much-hyped Google Chrome is doing since its Sept. 2 launch. Net Applications puts use eight days in at roughly 1 percent of surfers, compared with 0.74 percent share for Opera in August, according to NewsFactor.com.

Or for another comparison, IE 8 beta 2 had 0.34 percent use on Wednesday. Firefox, which recently upgraded was at 19.73 percent. What does it mean? Nothing really except that Google with its wide reach can get from zero to 1 percent and higher when it wants. (That reach would be one of the aspects the Department of Justice is exploring now.) Can it keep share and keep building?

I stopped my first trial after a few video crashes and will wait a while before giving it another shot. Chrome has a lot of appeal for those who want fast loading and the Google brand. But, as Yahoo’s ( NSDQ: YHOO) David Filo mentioned earlier today, Google has had mixed success.

Read more @ washingtonpost.com

From The Washington Post.

The incident was so extreme, it almost defies description. In the wee hours of the morning of 19 March, astronomers detected from more than halfway across the universe a burst of gamma rays brighter than a hundred-billion suns–and aimed squarely at Earth. Now, after 6 months of analysis, an international team of astronomers has discovered why the event was so extraordinary.

From brief glimpses throughout the past decade, astronomers have pieced together a standard theory of gamma ray bursts. When massive stars exhaust their nuclear fuel and can no longer resist the relentless, crushing force of gravity, they collapse violently. As a star much more massive than the sun contracts to the size of an asteroid–or even smaller if it becomes a black hole–it creates unimaginable densities, temperatures, and energy. A great deal of that energy rebounds outward in a jet of particles traveling at nearly the speed of light. When that jet meets surrounding gas or dust, it generates gamma rays.

Read more @ Sciencemag.org

Quick: When’s the last time you checked your e-mail? If you’re like most Americans, the answer is likely within the last 15 minutes — even if you’re not at work. And if you carry a PDA in your pocket, your problem is probably far worse. Some doctors estimate more than 11 million people have e-mail habits that interfere with their lives. Are you one of them?

Forming a deep relationship with your inbox can eat away at your real-life relationships — you know, the ones with your friends, kids, or significant other…those people you used to converse with face-to-face.

The good news, though, is spotting an e-addiction and correcting it isn’t too tough. First, recognize the signs:

1. You check your e-mail more than once an hour, even when you aren’t on the clock.
2. You look at every message that comes in, as it comes in, either at or away from the office.
3. You feel the need to respond to messages instantly or within minutes of when they arrive.
4. You interrupt real, in-person activities on a regular basis to deal with e-mail.
5. E-mail has, in some way, interfered with your regular life — be it in the form of sleep loss, relationship troubles, stress, or any other noticeable effect.

Read more @ pcworld.com

If you’ve got an iPhone, pretty much everything you have done on your handset has been temporarily stored as a screenshot that hackers or forensics experts could eventually recover, according to a renowned iPhone hacker who exposed the security flaw in a webcast Thursday.

While demonstrating how to break the iPhone’s passcode lock in a webcast, iPhone hacker and data-forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski explained that the popular handset snaps a screenshot of your most recent action — regardless of whether it’s sending a text message, e-mailing or browsing a web page — in order to cache it. This is purely for aesthetic purposes: When an iPhone user taps the Home button, the window of the application you have open shrinks and disappears. In order to create that shrinking effect, the iPhone snaps a screenshot, Zdziarski said.

The phone presumably deletes the image after you close the application. But anyone who understands data is aware that in most cases, deletion does not permanently remove files from a storage device. Therefore, forensics experts have used this security flaw to successfully nab criminals who have been accused of rape, murder or drug deals, Zdziarski said.

"There’s no way to prevent it," Zdziarski said during the webcast. "I’m kind of divided on it. I hope Apple fixes it because it’s a significant privacy leak, but at the same time it’s been useful for investigating criminals."

Read more @ wired.com