Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, but not necessarily to create it outright. This makes Wikipedia a natural partner.

It’s therefore no surprise to hear when the search colossus helps out the cooperatively written project.

Specifically, Google is helping Wikipedia with translation, so subject matter documented in one language needn’t be created from scratch in another. Google described some of its translation work in a presentation at the Wikimania conference in Poland over the weekend.

“In the last 16 months, Google has been working with the Wikimedia Foundation, students, professors, Google volunteers, paid translators, and members of the Wikipedia community to increase Wikipedia content in Arabic, Indic languages, and Swahili,” Google said at the conference. In a blog post on Wednesday, Google said it has begun the work with Hindi, which despite having millions of speakers had only 21,000 Wikipedia articles in 2008 compared with 2.5 million in English.

All of this is a laudable goal, given how often Wikipedia entries show up in Google search results. But there’s an interesting, financially helpful side effect of the work, too: it’s perfectly suited to improving Google’s own translation tools.

That’s because Google’s translation technology begins with content in which the same text appears in multiple languages. The more examples of human translation it has, the better it works and the less often it has to fall back on machine translation. Wikipedia provides a diverse and growing body of subject matter that seems ideal for the task.

Google helps others help itself with the Google Translator Toolkit, which lets people collaboratively translate documents with Google’s technology offering a head start.

The Translator Toolkit can specifically import Wikipedia pages, and doing so contributes a project to Google’s translation technology. “Translated segments for Wikipedia articles are stored in our global, shared translation memory. You cannot change this setting for Wikipedia translations,” the tool notes.

“There are many Internet users who have used our tools to translate more than 100 million words of Wikipedia content into various languages worldwide,” Google product manager Michael Galvez said in the blog post.

Having better translation directly helps Google by lowering language barriers for its sites–not just supplying search results, but indexing Web sites, captioning YouTube videos, translating e-mail, and translating Web pages viewed in Chrome.

If you own an Android phone, you already know how to use Vlingo’s SuperDialer, a beta feature that expands the app’s vocally triggered “call” command to search not just your personal phone book, but also a wider directory of businesses.

Tap Vlingo’s home screen widget and speak out the name of the business or category of business you’d like to call, for example “Call Little Star Pizza” or “call pizza.” (Omitting the “call” command will trigger the default Google search, but not the SuperDialer’s business listings.)

Vlingo then returns a list of results from your phone book and from its own directory. You’ll press the green icon of a phone to directly dial the business. Or, you’ll tap the business name to get an aggregated summary page with reviews, the address, and tabs to call the business, view it on a map, navigate, or look up its Web site, if available.

At first, Vlingo’s SuperDialer sounds like a redundancy of Google’s voice search, which comes preinstalled with most of today’s Android phones.

However, there are differences. Start a voice search for a business name in Google, and in most cases you’ll see a Place listing surface, with ratings, a map, and a phone number you can click to call. Search in Vlingo, and you’ll get a summary screen that’s better integrated with Google Maps Navigation than Google’s own search. In fact, you can also ask for directions outright with a “directions” command.

We tested Vlingo’s voice search widget side-by-side with Google’s similar widget, and as long as there’s a Google results summary for the same business, and we remembered to precede our search with the word “call” with Vlingo, it was possible to dial a business using both services in just two taps. We should note that Vlingo does not use Google’s search engine to seek out business listings.

The other benefit that Vlingo presents is the rest of the Vlingo app itself, which obeys voice commands to draft a text message, update Facebook or Twitter status, or compose e-mail, in addition to browsing the Web and business directories. It can also launch third-party applications (though not always precisely, in our experience) and read your incoming e-mails and texts while you drive.

Vlingo is a premium product at a limited-time $9.99 one-time fee in the Android Market, and in our view the SuperDialer doesn’t best Google’s own voice search enough to warrant a purchase on the call command functionality alone. But if you’re already a Vlingo user, or want to be, the SuperDialer is certainly a neat expansion of the Vlingo app for U.S. and Canadian residents. Vlingo works on Android phones running 2.0 of the operating system or higher.

If the popularization of the digital camera made self-portrait photos feasible, then the proliferation of social Web (and online dating) sites has made them inevitable, even essential. As such, the practice has become a bit of an art for those who strive to capture the best shots. If you’re considering honing your own skills in this arena, the following tips should come in handy.

First, let’s talk devices. Of course, you could always use a digital camera, connect it to your computer, download the images, and then upload them to your profile. But that’s so 2007. Instead, DO use a good camera phone that lets you directly upload pics to the Web.

Many phones provide direct links to social sites such as Twitter and Facebook; my Android phone even has an option to send images to Facebook from the photo album. But even without this direct link, you can send pics to many social-networking sites via MMS. This eliminates many of the steps that come along with using a standalone camera. While you’re at it, DO look for a phone with a self-portrait mirror to make things even easier.

Already have a great camera or phone without the mirror? DON’T forget that practice makes perfect. Taking pics that don’t crop out half your head and do result in exactly the look you want will take some experimentation. Of course, you can use a mirror in a pinch, but if you want to take self-portraits on the fly, you’ll need to learn the finer points of the extended-arm shot.

Another benefit of mastering the aforementioned skill is that you can then include others in your self-taken pics, which is a good thing. With the exception of sites that have an obvious dating bent, DON’T fill your profile with only photos of yourself. People who do this come across as vain and self-centered, and–of course–you aren’t one of those people (right?).

That’s not to say you shouldn’t look your best in photos. After all, people are using many social sites to find love nowadays. To that end, I’m letting the following Samsung ad do the talking:

Well, naturally I can’t let anyone else do all the talking for me. Especially when I don’t agree with some of it. First of all, unless you’re a frat boy and the year is 1984, DON’T pop your collar (obviously ironic shots excluded, of course). Also, you may want to steer clear of the suggestion of nudity, depending on who’s in your social network (my dad is my Facebook friend, for example). But by all means, DO experiment with angles, lighting, and reflective surfaces. At the very least, it keeps things interesting.

Have your own tips or rants about social site self-portraits? Please leave them in the comment section below!

The bidding for Palm earlier this year apparently attracted interest from some prominent Silicon Valley companies, including some that were reportedly mostly interested in keeping the intellectual property out of the hands of their foes.
HP Slate

HP plans to use Palm’s WebOS in tablet-style devices, but what of the Windows 7 slate that HP’s Phil McKinney talked about earlier this year? HP won’t say.
(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

Hewlett-Packard ultimately turned in the winning bid, agreeing in April to pay $1.2 billion for the PDA pioneer. However, before that was announced, five prominent Silicon Valley companies kicked the tires on the company, including Apple, Google, and Research in Motion, according to a Business Insider report that cites sources familiar with the negations.

Interest in Palm’s vast library of intellectual property and patents attracted the interest of two fierce rivals: Google and Apple. Apple bid on Palm for the patent portfolio, even though it would mean that the company would have had to support two competing app platforms. Apple reportedly lost out because it didn’t bid enough.

Subsequently, Google was interested in Palm because it thought Apple might want the intellectual property, Business Insider reported. However, Google reportedly did not pursue a bid because it didn’t know Apple was bidding.

Perhaps most intriguing is that BlackBerry-maker RIM had the deal for Palm in its hands and “had to work incredibly hard to blow it,” a source told Business Insider. RIM was reportedly the frontrunner, but HP came back with a higher bid.

Representatives for Google and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Rumors began to fly that Palm was headed for a sale after its most recent dismal quarterly earnings report showed that the company had yet to gain any real momentum for its Palm Pre and Palm Pixi phones. Palm had hoped that the new hardware, along with its new WebOS mobile operating system, would help turn the company around.

Many saw as a quick way for the PC and enterprise services company to get into the burgeoning mobile device market. However, HP has been quick to point out Palm’s appealing IP portfolio and has talked mostly about its plans for WebOS, which so far include a tablet and Web-connected printers.

Cryptography expert Bruce Schneier used to write his passwords down on a slip of paper and keep it in his wallet.

Today, he uses a free Windows password-storage tool called Password Safe that he designed five years ago and released into the open-source community. The desktop application lets users remember only one master password to access their password list.

But Schneier still recommends the paper method for people who don’t have their computers with them at all times like he does. “Either write the passwords down and put them in your wallet, or use something like Password Safe,” he said in an interview on Wednesday.

Encryption image

PGP creator Phil Zimmermann stores his passwords in an encrypted text file, which he described as a “cumbersome, manually operated password management system.”

And crypto cracker Karsten Nohl’s method is much simpler yet harder–he stores all his passwords in his brain.

“I use a nontrivial function to diversify passwords for every use,” Nohl said. “Disclosing anything about the function would lessen its strength. Security-through-obscurity, but only because I cannot compute any strong ciphers in my head.”

An informal survey of a dozen or so security experts reveals that some of them still rely on the paper and pen method. One respondent even admitted to succumbing to the post-it-note under the keyboard clich?! (If you do choose to write the passwords down you should avoid including the Web site or other identifying information, obviously.)

Password management isn’t sexy but it’s a problem that touches everyone who touches a computer. Not only are people forced to create new passwords at a dizzying level as they join social networks, do e-commerce and deal with frequently expiring passwords at work, but there are new and novel password theft methods all the time. Just this week Mozilla disabled a Firefox add-on that was intercepting login data and sending it on to a remote server.

There are a variety of solutions for people who want to upgrade from the paper-based practice. To cover them all would be an exhaustive and impossible task, but I’ll mention a few notables.

For those whose computer is always at hand, password managers stored on the desktop can be a good option. In addition to Password Safe, sources recommended another open-source software called KeePass. For the Macintosh, there’s 1Password ($39.95), which my colleague Jason Parker said was “the best in its class for the Mac.”

I was curious about the USB-based password managers and gave MyKey ($29.99) a try. I found it worked great but it does have some limitations–it only works on Windows-based PCs with the MyKey software installed. This meant I couldn’t use it on my home Mac or on friends’ computers I used during a recent vacation, something I wouldn’t be able to do with a desktop-based system either.

The Yubikey ($25) is another USB password device, but it differs in that it works on any computer or major operating system platform and requires no client software.

“It’s the same thing as putting the passwords in your wallet; it’s putting them on something physical that you are securing,” Schneier said when asked his opinion of using USB devices for storing passwords. “People can lose their keys or their wallet. Just put the passwords on the one you are less likely to lose.”

If you want to use a password manager that is not tethered to a particular computer, there are also hosted services where the passwords are stored in the cloud. This offers convenience the other methods don’t, but it means you are at the mercy of the security measures deployed on whatever computer you are using, so be cautious about using Internet kiosks and other public Web-surfing computers. You also have to trust that the company hosting the server holding your passwords won’t get hacked or otherwise compromised.

If you are interested in a free online password manager service, CNET Blogger Dennis Reilly wrote about RoboForm Online late last year.

Many people find the saved passwords feature on browsers handy, but they may not realize that attackers who get physical or remote access to the computer can easily see those stored passwords. This CNET TV video shows you how to hide them in Firefox by creating a master password for the browser.

A free extension for Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer called LastPass encrypts passwords and stores them on your hard drive and is beloved by colleagues at CNET News, as well as Download.com and CNET sister site ZDNet. It runs on the major operating systems, syncs data between multiple browsers, and automatically logs you into a site with one mouse click. And if you are using a computer other than the one you normally use you can retrieve your login information from the LastPass Web site.

Regardless of how you manage your passwords, experts say you should be careful to choose ones that have an appropriate level of security for the intended use or Web site. For instance, you can get by with an easy password for a Web site where all you do is log on to read news. But you should choose a much stronger password–meaning it is more difficult to guess or to figure out using a dictionary attack tool–for banking and other sites dealing with sensitive information like credit cards. And use different passwords for the different sites so that if one password is compromised your other sites or accounts aren’t at risk.

Google’s fight to keep search a secret

Can Google keep a secret?
Google’s Marissa Mayer argues that Google must keep its search secrets out of the hands of spammers.
Conspiracy theorists disinclined to read any further, fire away about the NSA and Wi-Fi-gate. The actual

topic of this discussion is more basic to Google’s core identity: should it be required to disclose how its secret recipe for organizing the Internet is put together as to assure regulators and Internet publishers that it isn’t gaming the results?

The New York Times fired the first salvo–at least this week–suggesting in an editorial Wednesday that “the potential impact of Google’s algorithm on the Internet economy is such that it is worth exploring ways to ensure that the editorial policy guiding Google’s tweaks is solely intended to improve the quality of the results and not to help Google’s other businesses.” That was quickly followed by an opinion piece in The Financial Times credited to Google’s Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, defending Google’s need to keep that formula secret because “if search engines were forced to disclose their algorithms and not just the signals they use, or, worse, if they had to use a standardized algorithm, spammers would certainly use that knowledge to game the system, making the results suspect.”

It’s just the latest headache for Google when it comes to federal regulation both at home and in Europe, which is probably why it chose to place its op-ed piece in the FT. Simply put, there are a growing number of regulators, agitators, and regular people who just don’t trust Google when it comes to the integrity of its search results.

For years it was enough for Google to proclaim its independence and the public took it at its word, especially because of the quality of its search results compared with alternatives and the benefits those results brought to most businesses on the Web. But suspicion has grown ever since Google’s 2007 move to introduce universal search technology that shone a brighter spotlight on its own vertical search categories, highlighting results for images, maps, products, and news within the main search results page.

There is a clear argument for keeping Google’s algorithms behind closed doors, even for a company that loves to work the word “open” into nearly every public statement it makes. It’s one that acknowledges the dark side of the Internet: billions are already spent in hopes of gaming Google’s search results, and spammers, hucksters, and criminals intent on doing damage will have a far easier time doing so if they have educated knowledge as to where to place their bets.

In addition, if Google’s algorithms are revealed, then why shouldn’t Yahoo’s or Microsoft’s also see the air? Or even Ask.com’s? After all, if Google were to become the MySpace of search engines, overrun with spam and generally unpalatable, traffic would flow in to those other companies and the entire process would just repeat itself elsewhere. The end result would not be good for the Internet.

Yet even though Google has done a great deal of good for the world, it’s still a for-profit corporation controlled by just three men. Google is the front door to the Internet for hundreds of millions of people, and while it has been instrumental in bringing the benefits of that medium to the world it would be unwise to assume that any corporation will always act in the interest of the public good until this world crumbles.

This is a harder dilemma than it may seem, and it’s probably one that can’t be solved with an algorithm. Google needs to figure out a way to shore up the public’s confidence in its integrity while continuing to stay one step ahead of those who are dying for the chance to exploit its search technology for their own benefit.

Otherwise, someone else will make that decision for them, resulting in either ham-handed regulation with any number of unintended consequences or the decline of Google’s effectiveness as the links between the world’s questions and the world’s answers. Those turned off by Google’s arrogance may celebrate that in the short term, but don’t expect any rivals that fill Google’s shoes to avoid one day traveling down the same road.
CNET news

Project number one

the National Education Network

Contribution from within the Sudanese Society for websites in the advancement of education in the country.

Acknowledge the members that will be launched project – the National Education Network – (a network of public education – NNE)

In the month of July in the state of Khartoum in the first stage of the project, and then all its different states.

To download the general features of the project click here

Managers of the masters and owners of schools wishing to join the network please send your e-mail to contact us for the maiden is sent password page registration form.

Or by phone: 0911286669

Or via e-mail: edu@swa-sd.org