Hasta La Gadget!

In a move to combat piracy, Google will be taking into consideration the number of valid copyright removal notices they will receive for any given site in their search algorithms. Beginning next week, websites with high numbers of removal notices will start to appear lower in their results. Google is hoping that the implementation will help users find legitimate and quality sources of content more easily. Although the new signal will affect the ranking of search results, the company said that it will not be removing any pages from search results unless it will receive a valid copyright removal notice from the owner.

“Since we re-booted our copyright removals over two years ago, we’ve been given much more data by copyright owners about infringing content online. In fact, we’re now receiving and processing more copyright removal notices every day than we did in all of 2009—more than 4.3 million URLs in the last 30 days alone. We will now be using this data as a signal in our search rankings,” said Amit Singhal, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google reportedly testing new log-in page that can manage multiple accounts on Gmail, Google brings richer and interactive answers to mobile search,

What started out as a hackathon project could turn out into a highly lucrative milking cow for the giant social network. We are hearing reports today that Facebook is testing out a new feature that will allow its users to turn their photos into real postcards. So how does it work? Those who were able to test the feature were able to view a “Mail A Postcard” button at the bottom of the photos they’re viewing.

By clicking the button, a screen will open up and will then prompt the user to enter the mailing address of a person as well as an option to write down a personal message to be included in the photo (see example above). Few testers say that for now, they were only able to mail their own private photos, and that it doesn’t work on public photos. The new “Mail A Postcard” feature is reportedly powered by Sincerely, the makers of Postagram. Details of the feature are still bleak, and Facebook has yet to release an official statement to confirm it.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Facebook announces dedicated email address to report phishing scams, World’s cutest dog owner actually works on Facebook,

Following Facebook’s 10-Q report earlier this month that revealed a staggering number of fake accounts, roughly 83.09 million accounts all in all, Facebook is announcing a dedicated email address to report those scams. Facebook users can now report phishing scams on the platform by sending reports to phish@fb.com, an email address available to the public to report phishing attempts. As you know, phishing is actually an attempt to acquire personal information such as username, password, or financial information via impersonation or spoofing. So if you have experienced any of these, you can write to phish@fb.com to report them.

“By providing Facebook with reports, we can investigate and request for browser blacklisting and site takedowns where appropriate. We will then work with our eCrime team to ensure we hold bad actors accountable. Additionally, in some cases, we’ll be able to identify victims, and secure their accounts,” Facebook said. The social network previously explained that out of the 8.7 percent fake accounts it has estimated, 4.8 percent of them are duplicate accounts, 2.4 percent of them can be considered as user-misclassified, and the remaining 1.5 percent are spam.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Facebook expands Bug Bounty program, Facebook begins notifying users whose PCs are infected with the notorious DNSChanger malware,

Google is bringing good news to all Chrome users on Windows today. After two long years of working with Adobe to sandbox the Flash Player plug-in, the Google Chrome team is finally announcing its new plug-in architecture that improves the sandboxing of Flash on Windows. Google’s announcement today comes right after last week’s Chrome Stable release that included a new API known as getUserMedia. Google said that they were finally able to ship PPAPI Flash to all Windows Chrome users, thereby improving its security and stability, as well as performance down the line.

Windows XP users will also find the update nifty as Flash is also sandboxed on the old platform. “Chrome OS has had this deeper Flash sandboxing from the beginning, Linux has had it since Chrome’s last stable release, and Mac support is on the way. Ultimately, this means a safer experience for you as you browse the web,” said Viet-Trung Luu, Software Engineer for Google Chrome. “We take the security of Chrome extremely seriously, so we’re excited to be delivering these enhanced protections, and we’ve enjoyed collaborating with Adobe on this effort.”

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google Chrome Browser Gets Native Flash Support, Could Google Bundle Flash With Its Chrome Browser?,

If you happen to love dogs, then probably you know who Boo is. Just a quick “world’s cutest dog” search on Google will tell you who the dog is. And while I love my 2-year old Rottweiler more, I got to admit that Boo is one hell of a cute dog. Won’t you agree? Well, the 6-year-old Pomeranian with a weird coiffure recently hit the top stories this morning. That’s because the public now knows who Boo’s “mom” is.

Interestingly, the owner of the dog with more than five million Facebook fans is Irene Ahn, and she happens to work at Facebook, sort of leading the social network’s finance department. AllThingsD, who first broke the story, said that Ahn used to work for Yahoo and PayPal prior to joining Mark Zuckerberg’s company in December 2008. Apparently Boo’s owner has kept her identity secret to most of the world. When Boo guested on Good Morning America last year, Irene Ahn reportedly stayed off-camera. Even when Boo’s book was published last year, Ahn decided to write it under the pseudonym J.H. Lee. Interesting isn’t it?

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