The United States Federal Trade Commission will fine Google for its breach of Apple’s Safari web browser security, Bloomberg reported on Friday. The Internet giant is currently negotiating with the Commission over an acceptable fine, which could amount to tens of millions of dollars. The fine would be the first time the FTC has ever punished a company for violating Internet privacy safeguards. Google in February was found to be bypassing the privacy settings of millions of unknowing Safari users by using a special code to install cookies on a user’s computer, even when such actions were supposed to be blocked by the browser.

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Last month it came to light that Google had been bypassing privacy settings in Safari, by installing cookies to track the browsing habits of millions of users who didn't know what was happening. Now, the FTC is examining whether the incident violates a legal settlement in which Google pledged not to "misrepresent" its privacy practices to consumers. More »

Last month it came to light that Google had been bypassing privacy settings in Safari, by installing cookies to track the browsing habits of millions of users who didn't know what was happening. Now, the FTC is examining whether the incident violates a legal settlement in which Google pledged not to "misrepresent" its privacy practices to consumers. More »

There was quite a stir sparked last week when it was revealed that Google was exploiting a loophole in a Apple's Safari browser to track users through web ads, and that has now prompted a response from Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, who unsurprisingly turned their attention to their own browser. In an official blog post today, they revealed that Google is indeed bypassing privacy settings in IE as well, although that's only part of the story (more on that later). As Microsoft explains at some length, Google took advantage of what it describes as a "nuance" in the P3P specification, which effectively allowed it to bypass a user's privacy settings and track them using cookies -- a different method than that used in the case of Safari, but one that ultimately has the same goal. Microsoft says it's contacted Google about the matter, but it's offering a solution of its own in the meantime. It'll require you to first upgrade to Internet Explorer 9 if you haven't already, then install a Tracking Protection List that will completely block any such attempts by Google -- details on can be found at the source link below.

As ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley notes, however, Google isn't the only company that was discovered to be taking advantage of the P3P loophole. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab say they alerted Microsoft to the vulnerability in 2010, and just two days ago the director of the lab, Lorrie Faith Cranor, wrote about about the issue again on the TAP blog (sponsored by Microsoft, incidentally), detailing how Facebook and others also skirt IE's ability to block cookies. Indeed, Facebook readily admits on its site does not have a P3P policy, explaining that the standard is "out of date and does not reflect technologies that are currently in use on the web," and that "most websites" also don't currently have P3P policies. On that matter, Microsoft said in a statement to Foley that the "IE team is looking into the reports about Facebook," but that it has "no additional information to share at this time."

Microsoft finds Google bypassed Internet Explorer's privacy settings too, but it's not alone originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google and other leading advertising companies have been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of unknowing Safari users, reports the Wall Street Journal. Using “a special code,â€� the companies were able to bypass the browser’s privacy restrictions and install cookies on a user’s computer, even when such actions were supposed to be blocked. Companies such as Google use cookies to track browsing habits across websites that it places advertisements on. Apple’s Safari Web browser blocks these third-party cookies by default, only allowing them on a website that a user directly interacts with. Read on for more.

The Journal’s research found that this “special code” was present in 22 of the top 100 websites when browsing from a computer, and 23 sites when using the iPhone’s browser. The publication notes that “once the coding was activated, it could enable Google tracking across the vast majority of websites.”

The Mountain View-based company has maintained its innocence, claiming its advertising cookies do not collect personal information. “The Journal mischaracterizes what happened and why. We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled. It’s important to stress that these advertising cookies do not collect personal information,” responded a Google representative.

Vibrant Media, Media Innovation Group and PointRoll all employed a similar code for tracking. Out of all the companies, Google has the largest market share, delivering Internet ads that were viewed at least once by 93% of all U.S. Web users in December. Apple reached out to The Journal and informed the publication that the company is “working to put a stop” to codes that bypass Safari’s privacy settings.

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A report from the Wall Street Journal suggests that Google has been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of Safari users, by tracking the browsing habits of people, even if they thought they had blocked such monitoring. More »

Following news earlier on Friday that an untethered jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 was almost ready for public release, an updated version of Greenpois0n has been made available for download. The new build makes use of pod2g’s “corona” exploit and is the result of combined efforts from the iPhone Dev Team, the Chronic Dev team and iOS hacker pod2g. The enhancement made to Greenpois0n that enables iOS devices with A5 processors to be jailbroken has been dubbed “Absinthe A5,” and users need to load the Greenpois0n website on their devices in order to trigger the jailbreak. Users having problems loading the site in Safari should simply go into Settings and enable VPN — after about a minute, the device will reboot and the jailbreak will be applied. iPhone 4S users running iOS 5.0 and iOS 5.0.1 and iPad 2 owners running iOS 5.0.1 can download Greenpois0n for OS X via the read link below to apply. Unfortunately, there is still no option for Windows users looking for an iPhone 4S or iPad 2 untethered jailbreak for the time being.

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Amazon updated its Kindle application for iOS devices on Wednesday with support for PDF files as well as newspaper and magazine subscriptions. A Kindle user can now email a file to his or her Send-to-Kindle address and then access it from within the application, and the app will open Adobe PDF files sent to a computer through iTunes, from Safari or directly from an email account. Amazon also added support for viewing more than 400 newspaper and magazine subscriptions inside the application. The UI for reading periodicals was completely redesigned for the iPad, and it allows users to read newspapers, magazines and print replica text books the way they were meant to be read. The iPhone and iPod touch app also features a redesigned library for quick access to the Newsstand, Kindle Books and Docs. Ars Technica noticed however, that The New York Times currently limits its subscriptions to hardware Kindle devices only, which means anyone who pays for a subscription to that newspaper may have trouble loading it on an iOS device. The update is live now and is available for free from the iTunes App Store.

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Google’s Chrome web browser surpassed Mozilla’s Firefox in global browser market share for the first time ever in November. Research firm StatCounter found that Chrome’s market share during the month was 25.69%, up 4.66% from last November, and that Firefox’s share was a hair lower at 25.33% during the month. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer maintained its lead with 40.63%. ”Our stats measure actual browser usage, not downloads, so while Chrome has been highly effective in ensuring downloads our stats show that people are actually using it to access the web also,” StatCounter CEO Aodjan Cullen said. Internet Explorer remains the top browser in the United States with a 50.66% share. Firefox is the second most popular browser in the U.S. with a 20.09% share, down from 26.75% in November last year, and Chrome is the third most popular browser with a 17.3% share, up from 10.89% last year. Net Applications, another research firm, published similar results on Thursday. By its numbers, Internet Explorer had a 52.64% share in November, followed by Firefox (22.14%), Chrome (18.18%) and Safari (5%). StatCounter’s full press release follows after the break. 

Chrome Overtakes Firefox Globally for First Time

Free web analytics company reports that Internet Explorer still leads despite falling market share

Boston, USA; Dublin, Ireland; Thursday, 1st December, 2011: Google’s browser Chrome overtook Firefox for the first time globally on a monthly basis in November, according to StatCounter, the free website analytics company. The firm’s research arm StatCounter Global Statsreports that Chrome took 25.69% of the worldwide market (up from 4.66% in November 2009) compared to Firefox’s 25.23%. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still maintains a strong lead globally with 40.63%.

“We can look forward to a fascinating battle between Microsoft and Google as the pace of growth of Chrome suggests that it will become a real rival to Internet Explorer globally,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “Our stats measure actual browser usage, not downloads, so while Chrome has been highly effective in ensuring downloads our stats show that people are actually using it to access the web also.”

In the US Internet Explorer continues to perform strongly and is maintaining market share at 50.66%, up slightly from 50.24% year on year. Firefox retains second place on 20.09%, down from 26.75%. Chrome is up to 17.3% from 10.89%. Safari is on 10.76% from 10.71%.

In the UK, Internet Explorer also leads the market with 42.82%. Chrome is on 24.82%, having overtaken Firefox (20.56%) in July. (For other individual country or regional analysis see StatCounter Global Stats).

StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month (4 billion from the US) from the StatCounter network of more than three million websites.

As well as free web research, StatCounter (http://statcounter.com/) provides free website traffic analysis. This allows website owners, developers and bloggers to capture valuable intelligence on their site in real time including number of visitors, visitors by country/region, search terms, popular pages, download stats, exit links and other data.

In September StatCounter announced its new website with added features.

Read [Net Applications]

When Facebook announced a revamped mobile page in April, its lead mobile exec Eric Tseng said the social network would focus on using the HTML5 standard for future updates instead of updating individual applications for each mobile operating system. “Project Spartan” is the fruit of those labors, reports claim, and it will be the social network’s attempt to the spill its games and applications into the mobile space. Images and information on Project Spartan were recently posted on a Facebook developer page before being pulled. Thankfully TechCrunch grabbed several of the images and information from the site before it was taken down. The leaked photos clearly display a panel loaded with Facebook Pages, mobile apps and events being accessed from an iPhone’s Safari browser. There also appears to be a notifications component. Facebook will officially announce the platform sometime next week, TechCrunch said. Read on a few additional photos of Project Spartan.

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Amazon launched its new Kindle Cloud Reader service on Wednesday that provides users with access their Kindle library using Chrome or Safari on Mac, PC, Linux and the Chromebook. Kindle Cloud Reader is also optimized for the iPad and offers a caching feature for offline reading. To get started, simply navigate to http://read.amazon.com and install the small required plug-in. We gave the service a quick run this morning and were impressed by how fast it loaded our eBook library. We definitely still prefer the standalone app on the iPad, but we’re sure Amazon created this option as a loophole to get around Apple’s iTunes App Store rules. Don’t use Safari or Chrome? Amazon still has you covered with its Kindle for PC client. Read on for the full press release.

Introducing Kindle Cloud Reader

Read over 950,000 Kindle books in your web browser – no download or installation required

Based on HTML5, Kindle Cloud Reader optimizes for the platform you’re using and automatically stores your latest book locally for offline reading

Instant Books – no waiting for a download, start reading the book immediately, offline or online

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–(NASDAQ: AMZN) – For over two years, Amazon has been offering a wide selection of free Kindle reading apps that enable customers to “Buy Once, Read Everywhere.â€� Customers can already read Kindle books on the largest number of the most popular devices and platforms, including Kindles, iPads, iPhones, iPod touches, PCs, Macs, Android phones and tablets, and BlackBerrys. Today, Amazon.com announced Kindle Cloud Reader, its latest Kindle reading application that leverages HTML5 and enables customers to read Kindle books instantly using only their web browser – online or offline – with no downloading or installation required. As with all Kindle apps, Kindle Cloud Reader automatically synchronizes your Kindle library, as well as your last page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights for all of your Kindle books, no matter how you choose to read them. Kindle Cloud Reader with its integrated touch optimized Kindle Store is available starting today for Safari on iPad, Safari on desktop and Chrome at www.amazon.com/cloudreader.

“We are excited to take this leap forward in our ‘Buy Once, Read Everywhere’ mission and help customers access their library instantly from anywhere�

“We are excited to take this leap forward in our ‘Buy Once, Read Everywhere’ mission and help customers access their library instantly from anywhere,� said Dorothy Nicholls, Director, Amazon Kindle. “We have written the application from the ground up in HTML5, so that customers can also access their content offline directly from their browser. The flexibility of HTML5 allows us to build one application that automatically adapts to the platform you’re using – from Chrome to iOS. To make it easy and seamless to discover new books, we’ve added an integrated, touch optimized store directly into Cloud Reader, allowing customers one click access to a vast selection of books.�

Features of Kindle Cloud Reader include:

• An immersive view of your entire Kindle library, with instant access to all of your books
• Start reading over 950,000 Kindle books instantly within your browser
• An embedded Kindle Store optimized for your web browser makes it seamless to discover new books and start reading them instantly
• New Kindle Store for iPad is built from the ground up for iPad’s touch interface
• Your current book is automatically made available for offline use, and you can choose to save a book for reading offline at any time
• Receive automatic software updates without the need to download new software
• Select any book to start reading, customize the page layout to your desired font size, text color, background color, and more
• View all of the notes, highlights, and bookmarks that you’ve made on other Kindle apps or on Kindle
• Sync your last page read across your Kindle and free Kindle apps so you can always pick up where you left off

Kindle Cloud Reader is available for Safari on iPad, Safari on desktop and Chrome starting today. Kindle Cloud Reader on the iPad is optimized for the size and unique touch interface of iPad. Without even leaving the app, customers can start shopping in the Kindle Store and will find a unique and immersive shopping experience built specifically for iPad’s Safari browser.

Kindle Cloud Reader will be available on additional web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, the BlackBerry PlayBook browser, and other mobile browsers, in the coming months.

Amazon.com customers can start reading their Kindle books immediately using Kindle Cloud Reader at www.amazon.com/cloudreader.

Did you finally use JailbreakMe to free your iPhone? Well, if you're also sick of pecking at its virtual keyboard, then Andrew Liu's new Swype iOS port may pique your interest. Although the app's still in the earliest of stages -- version 0.1.0, to be exact -- we can confirm it works, but it did take us two downloads via a repo with Cydia and functionality proved limited. We were able to swipe words in pre-loaded apps like Messaging, Mail and Search, but had no luck with Safari or others we've downloaded. Furthermore, Swype's all-important blue trace-line is absent, and our words didn't always come out as expected. Liu stated on Twitter that the current release is still a beta and that he'll be sprucing it up soon; in the meantime, let us know how your swipe-typing goes in the comments if you choose to install it.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Unofficial Swype port makes its way to iOS, slides in via Jailbreak radar originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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20,000 songs? Not nearly enough. $24.99 a year? Way too spendy. Unlimited and $20 a year? That's a little better, at least, and that's what Amazon just moved to. Taking a step up from its previous $20 for 20GB plan, the former bookseller is now letting new subscribers get any amount of storage they want for that price -- unlimited for .mp3 and .m4a files, anyway. Naturally this means any songs purchased through Amazon MP3 will also be stored for to an infinite extent, not counting against your all-important quota. This is a "limited time" kind of deal, so if you've been on the fence now's the time to click that cart, but there's another new feature that isn't going away: Cloud Player for Web on iPad. This lets you play your cloud tunes through Safari and that, combined with the whole unlimited storage thing, should ease any nagging feelings of regret you've been suffering since budgetary pressures talked you into the 16GB model.

Continue reading Amazon Cloud Player hits iPad, adds unlimited storage, scoffs at constrained competition

Amazon Cloud Player hits iPad, adds unlimited storage, scoffs at constrained competition originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Jul 2011 19:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Web-based jailbreak tool Jailbreakme.com is back, and jailbreaking your iPhone, iPad or iPad touch has never been easier. How easy is it, you ask? Simply navigate to jailbreakme.com in Safari on your iOS device and then follow the on-screen instructions. Within seconds, you’ll be on your way to sporting an open iDevice. What’s more, JailbreakMe 3.0 is the first widely available tool to feature support for the iPad 2 (running iOS 4.3.3), so tablet owners will undoubtedly be excited about that. The service also supports every other iOS device other than Apple TV: iPad (iOS 4.3+), iPhone 3GS (iOS 4.3+), GSM iPhone 4 (iOS 4.3+), CDMA iPhone 4 (iOS 4.2.6+) and third or fourth-gen iPod touch (iOS 4.3+). Developer betas of iOS 5 are not supported. Remember to back up with iTunes before jailbreaking and, of course, proceed at your own risk.

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Mozilla on Tuesday finally issued the new public release version of its wildly popular Web browser, Firefox. Version 5 of Firefox wasn’t met with quite the same fanfare as Firefox 4, but the update is a major one nonetheless. Mozilla bills its new browser as being faster than ever with “even more awesomeness,” and we can’t say we disagree. Firefox 5 has received massive improvements aimed at providing speedier performance, and the UI has been redesigned and improved as well. Firefox’s “do not track” feature also works across mobile and desktop platforms now, and Mozilla has improved support for MathML, HTML 5, XHR, and SMIL as well. Other areas targeted by the new build include CSS animation and JavaScript support, and Mozilla has promised more frequent updates so more new features shouldn’t be far off. According to Net Applications, Mozilla’s Firefox browser was used by 21.71% of the global market in May, second only to Internet Explorer’s 54.27% share. Chrome, Safari and Opera rounded out the top-5 with 12.52%, 7.28% and 2.03%, respectively.

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We just loaded up Apple’s brand new iOS 5 on our iPhone and iPad 2, and man… we’ve been waiting a while for this stuff. For starters, notifications with Notification Center are so, so necessary, and while we haven’t lived with it for a while, we can already see how much of a difference this will make in daily usage. Also, the Twitter integration? Ridiculously slick and easy. Now, the really interesting part… iMessage. We haven’t found anyone to use this with, so we’ll report back, but it’s tied to your Apple ID which is how your iPad and iPod touch can make use it of, since they obviously don’t have cell phone numbers. Well, you know, the iPod touch doesn’t. We’ll be updating this post live as we keep toying with iOS 5 on the iPhone and iPad 2, and we’ll keep updating the screenshots in the gallery below as well!

• Preference to open pages in Safari in a new page or in background (amazing!).
• More alert choices for emails, calendar, and the ability to buy more.
• Ability to create keyboard shortcuts (autotext) to replace custom phrases. The default entry is “omw” which is replaced with, “On my way!”
• Software update option in settings to check for the latest OS.
• Sync now button to wireless sync to iTunes
• Ability to customize how notifications in Notification Center look — you can customize how many recent ones to show, 1, 5 or 10, if it’s showed in the lock screen, if it’s in Notification Center, and also the alert style, banner or alert style.
• Twitter installs directly from the settings page if it’s not installed directly, you aren’t even taken to the App Store.
• FaceTime button in iMessage messages at the top now
• Tweeting photos is, so so slick. It displays on Twitter as powered by Photobucket, and it’s from iOS.
• There’s a new option to print out from the Maps app… hilarious.
• You can make new albums right from the device itself in Photos.
• You can move and add photos to albums.
• Doesn’t look iMessage is fully baked in here yet.
• You can customize the default alert times. This is so needed — so now when you enter a calendar entry, you don’t have to set the default alert time you like — I’m a 15 minute calendar alert type of guy.
• Email flagging doesn’t look to be enabled in this beta, though S/MIME support is. Never mind, it is. You have to go into the message and tap “mark”.
• It seems that Reminders sync with Exchange (Tasks basically), but you can’t set location-based reminders if you’re on Exchange, just with iCloud. You can selectively choose where to sync the reminder though, it’s just not streamlined if you use Exchange.
• You can set the caller ID for FaceTime calls, so if you call someone, you can choose it to display your cellular number or email address.

Amazon’s Cloud Player, which provides access to music stored on your Amazon Cloud Drive, is now working in Safari on iOS devices including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Amazon hasn’t announced the support just yet, but if you navigate to your Amazon Cloud Player account from an iOS device — and ignore a few warnings about your device not being supported — you’ll be able to access and play all of your tunes. As TechCrunch first spotted, your music will also pause if you receive a phone call or a push notification. Amazon has only recognized full support through computers and on Android smartphones, so there may still be a few bugs to be found. We’re hoping there’s a native iOS app in the works, too, but we won’t hold our breath just yet.

[Via 9to5 Mac]

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