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On July 1 Google pulls the plug on Reader and, like many other users, I have decided not to be caught unprepared by its rapidly-approaching demise. Shortly after the search giant revealed its execution plans I migrated all my RSS feeds to Feedly, telling myself “OK, now’s the time to move on”. Skip forward a couple of months and Reader is still open in a Chrome tab.

I can’t really move on. The RSS feed aggregator holds a very special place in my heart as I rely on it every single day to write news stories and catch up on things that I’m passionate about. It’s like the perfect relationship except for that one tiny detail (huge actually) — the expiration date is near.

I’ve read dozens of stories on Google killing Reader and, most of the time, the pundits who wrote them suggested that folks, like me, should stop complaining and use Google Currents, Flipboard or even Twitter instead. That’s not a brilliant idea, far from it.

The problem is that none of those services offers a real source for news (like press releases from major companies) and only aggregate stories from popular blogs. Folks would therefore just follow the reporting herd, discovering what’s important when it no longer is. To me, that’s a big no-no.

The most feasible alternative to Reader, at least so far, appears to be Feedly. The up-and-coming RSS feed aggregator is available on popular browsers (as an extension) and operating systems (through an app), but I can’t seem to love its sluggish yet fancy interface. I crave efficiency not an attractive design.

My colleague Alan Buckingham is also disappointed by it. In group chat he says: “I switched to Feedly a month ago, but still hate it!” The fact that Feedly is not available on Windows Phone also puts a dent in its appeal for me. Hopefully the service gets better before Reader goes away.

Maybe I’m overly demanding when it comes to the RSS feed aggregator that I use, but the truth is that I can’t get myself to drop Reader just yet. Even though Google will soon kill the service, I trust the search giant to keep it running in extreme circumstances whereas I can’t say the same about the competition. When Reader users were migrating in great numbers to Feedly the latter was barely functional.

I’ve also grown fond of Reader, but most importantly I feel like I’m dropping my favorite RSS feed aggregator for subpar counterparts. So, I’ll follow Reader right to the very end on July 1.

Photo Credit: Markus Gann/Shutterstock

Opera made a big stink a few months ago when it was announced it was ditching its own Presto Web rendering engine in favor of Webkit. After Google announced it was ditching Webkit in favor of its own forked version called Blink, Opera followed suit saying it would be using Blink as well. Now the Blink-powered Opera is finally here.

Opera Software announced today that it has launched what it’s calling Opera Next. You can think of it as a beta release, but this is the version of Opera that everybody’s been talking about. It’s a completely redesigned Opera that’s faster and more feature rich.

Finally available on desktop, Opera Next comes with a number of new or rethought features. For instance, the shortcuts start page has been transformed into what Opera calls “Speed Dial:”

Speed Dial shortcuts can now be gathered in folders and easily filtered. Drag and drop one Speed Dial entry on top of another to create a folder, or use the new Speed Dial search field to experience the power of visual Speed Dial entries combined with the flexibility and organization of a classic bookmark folder.

Another two new features are called Discover and Stash. With Discover, think of it as a smart RSS feed built right into the browser. It will collect news articles from your country of origin and feed you the content without having to navigate to any particular Web site.

As for Stash, this feature allows users to easily compare Web sites when shopping online:

Simply hit the heart icon in the address bar to collect the websites you want to compare easily while shopping, or to keep your travel research on hotels, sights and flights at your fingertips. Scan your Stash by resizable page preview, or search what you’ve saved, with keywords.

On top of all the new features, Opera’s UI has been completely redesigned from the grou up to look “modern and sleek.”

Of course, the biggest change is the move to the Webkit/Blink Web rendering engine:

With the Chromium engine, users get a standards-compliant and high-performance browser. Opera’s Off-Road mode, previously called Opera Turbo, now supports SPDY protocol and enables loading webpages faster, even in the toughest of network conditions.

The new Chromium-powered Opera is available for both desktop and mobile. You can grab Opera 15 for desktop here and Opera 14 for Android here. It may be hard to let Presto go, but a faster, standard-compliant Opera can only be a good thing, right?

On Monday, Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller shared a screen cap of a comment Google’s Matt Cutts posted on his blog earlier this month about the Link Disavow tool. The comment is as follows:

“Hmm. One common issue we see with disavow requests is people going through with a fine-toothed comb when they really need to do something more like a machete on the bad backlinks. For example, often it would help to use the ‘domain:’ operator to disavow all bad backlinks from an entire domain rather than trying to use a scalpel to pick out the individual bad links. That’s one reason why we sometimes see it take a while to clean up those old, not-very-good links.”

The more you know.

Mueller underlined the word “machete” in red, indicating that this is a point many webmasters are likely missing.

Google launched the Link Disavow tool back in October, enabling webmasters to tell Google specific links they want it to ignore, as to avoid potential penalties. If you’ve never used it, and haven’t learned much about it by now, you should start with this video from Cutts:

Hat tip to Search Engine Roundtable

Image: Friday the 13th Part 3 (Paramount)

2014 brings us two cars that every all-wheel-drive fan is dying to see. First is the 2014 Nissan GT-R Track Pack. It brings to the table 545 horsepower and 463 lb-ft of torque from its 3.8L twin-turbocharged 24-valve V6. It tops out at 196 mph and will hit 60 mph in under 3 seconds. The price – $115,710.00. Then there’s Audi’s new 2014 Audi R8 V-10 Plus. It comes with a rip-snorting naturally aspirated 550 hp / 398 lb-ft of torque V10, a new Dual-Clutch transmission and an “OH MY GOD” price tag of $188,000. One car is a track beast, the other, an all around animal with a high-class side. Click through and check out what the boys over at Motor Trend thought of them both.

Source: MotorTrend.com

One redditor had a pretty interesting night over the weekend, as they awoke to their Samsung Galaxy S3 on fire – and they have the pictures to prove it. According to the account, the device was stock everything – battery, charger, etc.

Here’s the story, as recounted by redditor vizionx1208:

Last night at about 3:15am EST (about 1 hour after i plugged it in and went to sleep) I was awoken by a loud noise and a weird squeaking sound. (I charge my phone while I’m sleeping on my bed right next to me)

So, I woke up, and saw a ton of smoke coming out of my phone — it also smelled REALLY bad. Half asleep, I jumped out of bed and turned the light on, only to see that my phone was just beginning to go on fire. I dumped a glass of water I had in the room on it to stop it from burning…then woke up my brother to come help. The smoke smelled so bad and wafted through the entire second floor of my house. I had a foam mattress pillow top that had a hole burned through it too–which we later threw out because it was still burning throughout. Also, some of the plastic on my phone was melting and kind of shooting out of it, and some landed on my pinky finger and burned some skin off (very small burn though).

From the rest of their comments on the post, it appears that the redditor has tried to contact Samsung and is at least debating the idea of legal action.

Here are some more images:

The battery:

Of course, Samsung phones aren’t the only ones that may have a history fo spontaneous explosions. We’ve seen plenty of iPhones catch fire in the past few years.

Amanda Bynes has been all over the headlines this week after being arrested for allegedly smoking pot and then throwing her bong out a window and then showing up in court in an insane wig and then announcing she’s going to “sue everyone”. Yes, that’s a lot to take in. But then she reportedly tweeted out some cruel things to Rihanna, which immediately went viral before quickly being deleted.

“@rihanna you look so ugly tryin to be white,” and “Chris Brown beat you because you’re not pretty enough,” showed up on Bynes’ Twitter feed, but she swears that someone jacked her handle and said those things to start trouble. The 27-year old former child star wrote an extended tweet to defend herself.

“@matthewnewcomen: @AmandaBynes You made the ny post! Bashing riri?” I saw a bunch of mocked up tweets about me bashing Rihanna in my mentions. I’m followed by so many people that someone is always mocking up fake tweets so I feel the need to address them! Rihanna and I met and I’m sure we’ll be in a music video together one day! That’s one of the mocked up images, they took photos of me from outside and morphed them onto someone else’s body. I am allergic to marijuana and alcohol but I smoke tobacco. Why does Rihanna smoke weed and not get in trouble for it but I smoke tobacco and people think I’m on drugs? I refuse to be treated like someone I’m not, which is why I fought for myself and am suing everyone involved. I don’t need to go to rehab. There is never a drug or alcohol in my system! I’m sick of all the lies! What would you do if someone accused you of things you didn’t do and yet you still had to be in jail at all over it! I’m so offended but I am so educated that I know cops cannot illegally enter my apartment, sexually harass me, arrest me, take me to a MENTAL HOSPITAL, then lock me up for a crime I didn’t commit. I’m suing them all for this upsetting nightmare. My lawyer knows I’m a model citizen who doesn’t partake in drugs. He’s going to court this week to set the record straight again on my behalf. Thankfully I’m an educated multi-millionaire who knows better than to speak to perverted unjust cops without my lawyer.

If you don’t want to be creeped out by the Xbox One Kinect sensor’s ability to track your every move in your living room, then don’t read about some of the ideas that Microsoft has been batting around for how to give viewers incentives to sit through commercials. Per Polygon, Microsoft filed a patent application back in 2011 that detailed how Kinect could watch viewers to make sure they’re sitting through commercials and then reward them with special “achievements” for watching a certain number of ads. Polygon says that getting a certain number of achievements might unlock awards that could include digital gifts, avatar enhancements or reward points.

Continue reading…

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), home to the Stampede supercomputer, is preparing to accelerate its Internet2 connectivity to 100 Gbps this summer, and NASA Ames selects a SGI system to support research.

TACC Upgrades to 100 Gbps

TACC at the University of Texas at Austin announced that it will be upgrading from 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) to 100 Gbps in Internet connectivity with the help of Internet2.  The upgrade will empower scientists to reach TACC using Internet2′s new 100 Gigabit-Ethernet and 8.8-terabit-per-second optical network, platform, services and technologies. It will also enable the University of Texas Research Cyberinfrastructure (UTRC) to have 100 Gbps connectivity between UT System institutions and other research universities throughout Texas.

“TACC’s world-class computational, visualization and storage systems enable users to create and manipulate petabytes of data, and we’ll add new systems focusing on data intensive computing starting this summer,” said TACC Director Jay Boisseau. “This Internet2 bandwidth upgrade will enable researchers to achieve a tenfold increase in moving data to/from TACC’s supercomputing, visualization and data storage systems, greatly increasing their productivity and their ability to make new discoveries.”

Internet2 is comprised of over 220 U.S. universities, 60 corporations, 70 government agencies, and more than 100 research and education partners. Internet2 recently established direct peering with Microsoft Cloud Services, enabling improved access to infrastructure and application services that support virtual learning environments and large-scale data intensive research projects.

“The 100 Gbps Internet2 Innovation Platform serves as an accelerator to scientific research and provides increased access to the most advanced computational resources for faculty members at institutions around the country,” said Jim Bottum, Internet2 Inaugural Presidential Fellow and chief information officer at Clemson University. “By streamlining access to the latest advanced national cyberinfrastructure systems like Stampede at TACC, researchers are afforded a lightweight avenue for conducting transformational research.”

SGI selected by NASA

SGI announced that NASA’s Ames Research Center has selected an SGI UV 2000 shared memory system to support more than a thousand active users around the country who are doing research for earth, space and aeronautics missions. The new Endeavour system, named in honor fo the Space Shuttle Endeavour,  is based on the latest Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 product family and has a total of 1536 cores and 6TB of global shared memory. It will provide large, shared memory capability and will enable solutions for many NASA science and engineering applications, including simulation and modeling of global ocean circulation, galaxy and planet formation, and aerodynamic design for air and space vehicles.

“A portion of our current code base requires either large memory within a node or utilizes Open MP as the communication software between tens to hundreds of processors,” said William Thigpen, high-end computing project manager at the NAS facility. “The largest portion of Endeavour is able to meet the large shared memory requirement with 4 terabytes of addressable memory and can apply over 1,000 cores against an Open MP application.”

A white Nexus 4 was rumored for a long long time folks, and it’s finally official. LG just announced that it will be available in Hong Kong on May 29 with global introductions such as Asia, North America, Europe, and the Middle East “over the next several weeks.” It has the same specs as the black Nexus 4 such as a 4.7-inch (1280 x 768) True HD IPS Plus display with 320ppi, a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro CPU, and 2GB of RAM. Nothing was mentioned about Android 4.3, but we expect to see that update soon. Hit the break for the press statement.

LG INTRODUCES NEW NEXUS 4 WHITE

Same Popular Smartphone, Different Color

SEOUL, May 28, 2013 ㅡ LG Electronics (LG) today announced the launch of Nexus 4 White, the newest edition of the popular smartphone developed in collaboration with Google. Nexus 4 White features the same stellar Android™ experience as the original Nexus 4, combining LG’s sophisticated hardware design and popular Google Services such as Google Now and Photosphere for an outstanding overall user experience.

“Nexus 4 set the standard for Android 4.2 Jelly Bean smartphones,” said Dr. Jong-seok Park, president and CEO of LG Mobile Communications Company. “Nexus 4 White delivers the same Google experience to consumers in a stylish and attractive color option.”

Nexus 4 White comes with the superb 4.7-inch 1280-by-768 True HD IPS Plus display (320ppi) supported by Zerogap Touch technology. At its heart is the high performing Qualcomm Snapdragon™ S4 Pro processor and 2GB of RAM.

Starting in Hong Kong on May 29, Nexus 4 White will roll out globally in select markets in Asia, North America, Europe and the Middle East over the next several weeks.

Come comment on this article: The white Nexus 4 is official and will be available on May 29 in Hong Kong

Google has sent an email around to Google Buzz users about their data from the service, which the company announced would be shutting down back in October 2011.

If you’re like me, you were probably surprised to get an email about a service you haven’t thought about in a long time, but Google may still have your data from Buzz, and you have until July 17th to get it out. This is the date, the email informs, that Google will take the last step in shutting down Buzz for good.

Google suggests users save a copy of their Buzz posts to Google Drive, assuming you really care what happens to your Buzz posts. Google says it will store two types of files to Drive. One type is private, and contains a snapshot of the Google Buzz public and private posts you authored. The second type contains a copy of only your public Buzz posts, and by default, will be viewable by anyone with the link, which may appear in search results on your Google Profile (if you’ve linked to your Buzz posts).

Neither file type will count against your storage limits, Google says.

“Any comments you made on other users’ posts will only be saved to those users’ files and not to yours,” Google explains. “Once the change described in this email is final, only that user will be able to change the sharing settings of those files. This means that if you have commented on another author’s private post, that author could choose to make that post and its comments public. If you would like to avoid that possibility, delete all your Buzz content now.”

The new files will only contain comments from users that previously enabled Buzz, and they won’t contain comments that were deleted before moving the data to Drive. When the files are created, they will be treated just like any other Drive file, in that you can do whatever you want to with them.

If you want to take a look at your old Buzz posts, you can do so at http://profiles.google.com/me/buzz.

“Breaking Bad” star Aaron Paul tied the knot over the weekend, and if you were hoping for some blue rock candy in lieu of a cake, you’ll be disappointed.

The reception was on the theme of a ’20s carnival, complete with a ferris wheel and other rides, burlesque dancers, an antique photo booth, and David Blaine doing magic tricks for the guests. The men in the wedding party wore top hats and bow ties, and the bride–Lauren Parsekian–and her attendants looked lovely in white vintage-style gowns with strings of pearls.

The celebrity couple did their day right, and even managed to get buddy John Mayer to sing a few tunes; he performed “Daughter” during the bride’s first dance with her father.

Paul has always spoken extremely highly of his new bride and credits her with some of his success; in a GQ interview, he said that she is “the greatest woman that has ever existed. No offense to other women on this planet, but she is hands down the best.” He also thanked her in his Emmy acceptance speech last year, and said that when he met her, he knew she was the one.

“You know when people say, ‘When you know, you know’? It was crazy,” he said in an interview. “I couldn’t imagine myself being without her. … I was like, ‘Wait, can this actually exist?’”

“Breaking Bad” resumes this summer for one last season and there’s no doubt it will go out with a bang. The actor, who plays “Jesse Pinkman” on the hugely popular AMC show, is riding high on success and the beginning of a new life with his woman, but it’s sure to be a bittersweet year as he says goodbye to the show that made him famous.

And so it begins. #mrmrspaul twitter.com/aaronpaul_8/st…

— Aaron Paul (@aaronpaul_8) May 25, 2013

A day will never go by without me reminding you how special you are. Thanks for last night my pretty… instagram.com/p/Z0r0OyOILG/

— Aaron Paul (@aaronpaul_8) May 27, 2013

Image: FameFlynet

A California man on Monday fired on his two daughters before taking his own life, all while his grandchildren were inside the house.

According to a Fresno Bee report, 63-year-old Anthony Alvarez of Orosi, California killed one of his daughters, and injured the other early on Monday morning. Jennifer Kimble, the 37-year-old daughter who died, was shot multiple times and died at the scene. She was a cafeteria worker at a local elementary school and the mother of three children, a 13-year-old boy, an 11-year-old boy, and an 8-year-old girl. The other sister, 33-year-old Valerie Alvarez, was taken to a nearby hospital where she is reportedly in critical condition.

According to the Bee, the children’s father was at work during the time of the shooting. The 8-year-old reportedly called 911 when she heard gunshots. Authorities are currently investigating the motive for the shooting. The details of the incident, including a possible motive, have not been released.

Orosi is a small town of around 9,000 people just outside of Fresno.

With hectic schedules, it can be hard to keep track of everything in your news feed. That’s why we created the TalkAndroid Daily Dose. This is where we recap the day’s hottest stories so you can get yourself up to speed in quick fashion. Happy reading!!

Apps

Floating Notifications app adds chat head notifications to all apps

Public beta of Tapatalk 4 released through Google Play

Google

Google to help fund and develop new wireless networks in emerging markets

Ouya

OUYA console gets unofficial CWM recovery

Phones

HTC One with larger screen pending announcement, multiple carrier versions exist 

White Nexus 4 spotted yet again, for sale in India

New benchmark for Snapdragon 800 discovered for Pantech device

Samsung “Premiere 2013″ event announced for June 20, Galaxy S 4 Activ, Mini, and Zoom expected to launch

Swiss carrier Swisscom teams up with Samsung to give away Galaxy S 4s in the world’s most intense staring contest

Galaxy Note 3 could feature Optical Image Stabilization, according to report

ZTE Grand S US launch delayed until 2014

Miscellaneous

Samsung releases informational video about HomeSync 1TB media streamer

 

Come comment on this article: TalkAndroid Daily Dose for May 27, 2013

In a recent interview, Jeffrey Katzenberg described his first day at Disney as the newly appointed head of The Walt Disney Studios. The equally new Disney CEO, Michael Eisner, gave him a simple, unambiguous mandate: fix animation at Disney.

Although a veteran in the film business, Katzenberg had no experience with animation and little appetite for it. Disney long-timers, however, informed him that Walt Disney had left extensive notes and audio recordings concerning his experiences making animation, which were stored in the Disney archives.

Looking through these records, he discovered that Walt had effectively “left the recipe for making a Disney animated movie.” Katzenberg proceeded to apply this recipe with remarkable success, adding on the way some extra ingredients of his own.

Walt Disney, however, left another, arguably even more valuable, recipe for his company. This was a strategic recipe or what I call a corporate theory of sustained growth. This corporate theory is largely captured in the adjacent drawing also from the Disney archives, published in 1957. It depicts a central film asset that in very precise ways infuses value into and is in turn supported by an array of related entertainment assets.

Illustration: @1957 Disney

The map has, of course, evolved over the ensuing years as additional assets have accumulated (in fact, there are evolving depictions of this Disney synergy map in the archives). While drawing such a map today would require more boxes and more arrows, (and perhaps an independent web of interconnected assets surrounding the ESPN franchise), the fundamental patterns and the underlying insight and intuition would remain quite consistent. The strategic vision that Walt long ago composed has revealed a succession of strategic possibilities that have fueled a remarkable record of value creating growth.

Effective corporate theories like this provide managers with vision to navigate the surrounding strategic terrain over an extended period of time. They provide a conceptual tool and filter — one that can be repeatedly used to select, acquire, and assemble complementary bundles of assets, activities, and resources from the abundance available.

As I explain in my HBR article, What Is the Theory of Your Firm, the vision provided by a good theory has three distinct components. First, there is foresight about an industry’s evolution, including relevant technological change or evolving consumer preferences. Second, there is insight about the distinctive and valuable assets and resources of the firm. Finally, there is cross-sight — the ability to identify adjacent assets uniquely valuable to your firm or assets with value that others are simply unable to perceive.

Such vision is critical as a firm seeks to acquire assets in highly competitive markets, where the key is not merely recognizing synergy with available assets. Many firms may also possess synergy with the assets you target. Instead, the key is either recognizing synergy unique to your firm — synergy unavailable to others — or recognizing value that while available to others, they simply cannot see. Only firms that possess such vision can participate in markets for assets and predictably generate value post acquisition.

Vision-providing corporate theories need not be as visually compelling as Disney’s synergy map. Many corporate theories are perhaps better captured in words. In the academic world, the most powerful theories are at once elegant and parsimonious. They explain vast terrain using but a few short symbols or words — offering compelling predictions about how the world operates. The hallmark of an effective corporate theory is one that simply and succinctly captures how the relevant strategic terrain will react and respond as the firm takes strategic actions. It must point to a succession of strategic actions that are value creating for the firm.

Does your firm currently possess a corporate theory that reveals foresight, insight and cross-sight to guide your growth? Does it provide you with clear predictions about the relevant future of your industry (or related industries)? Does it provide you with a clear understanding of what is truly distinctive and unique about your organization? Does it reveal uniquely valuable assets and opportunities? If not, it may be time to set about composing your own corporate theory of value creating growth.

The writing is on the wall: The infrastructure that supported the web in its early days is no longer up to the job. As we depend more on the internet — let’s just give in and call it the cloud — the companies that are providing the underlying computing power to support services like Facebook, Google and Amazon Web Services are remaking the hardware and software on which those services depend. In doing so, they have changed the culture inside IT organizations, disrupted old-line businesses and made it easier than ever to build a web-based business.

We’ve documented those shifts for the last six years at our GigaOM Structure conference and in our reporting on the site, but this year we’re looking ahead. We’ve found ten up-and-coming people who are already planning the next generation of infrastructure. These men and women are solving problems most companies aren’t even anticipating yet.

We’re talking about problems like how to apply data to healthcare outcomes using high performance computing, or writing a new type of programming framework for making real-time web pages. Some are taking their programming skills and thinking about embedding privacy settings in the programming framework instead of something people code by hand. Others are tackling the issue of next-generation databases and storage.

Today, we’re pushing infrastructure to the limits with our demands for real-time information and connections between users and services that can number in the thousands. We just assume that someone, somewhere is doing the hard work to make all this possible.

The Cloud Trailblazers are those people. Read on to meet them and check out the videos of them epxlaining their technologies that we’ve embedded in their stories. Also, come to our Structure conference on June 19 and 20th in San Francisco to see them speak and meet them face to face. The IT world is changing, these people will help you keep up.

—Stacey Higginbotham

Go to page 2 (of 11) on GigaOM .

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As you may know, Chris Brown was involved in a traffic accident last week when he rear-ended a Mercedes in his Range Rover. Now the woman driving the Mercedes says it was a hit-and-run as she accuses Brown of not handing over his correct insurance information.

TMZ reports that the LAPD is currently investigating whether or not Brown refused to hand over his driver license number to the woman driving the Mercedes. It’s also alleged that he gave her the incorrect insurance information.

In a followup report, TMZ reports that sources close to Brown say that he gave all the necessary information to the woman after the accident. After the accusations of a hit-and-run came out, he had his lawyer try to contact the woman, but she has apparently been avoiding any and all phone calls from Brown’s lawyer.

It looks like a case of he said/she said at this point in time, but we won’t know anything for sure until the LAPD wraps up its investigation. That may be a while away, however, as the police have not contacted Brown or his lawyer yet. He had better hope the investigation comes out in his favor though as any law breaking under his current probation would send Brown to four years in prison.

For anyone paying attention, the fact that Chinese hackers apparently accessed key U.S. weapons designs may be unsettling but hardly surprising. Previously undisclosed findings by the Defense Science Board show that more than two dozen major weapons designs were breached, according to a Washington Post report on Tuesday. Affected projects range from U.S. missile defenses to combat aircraft — including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — and ships. (The Post compiled a list of the affected weapons here.)

Dan Geer, a superstar among computer security and risk management experts, spoke to me about just this sort of risk last week. The most sobering part of the conversation was Geer’s stated belief that the game has definitively shifted from prevention of attacks to mitigation of their consequences.

In short: if you have something worth accessing, it will be accessed. The only realistic goal now is to make sure you know when that breach happens as fast as possible.  I quoted him on this topic earlier, but his words ring even more eerily true now:

“If your enemy really is the People’s Liberation Army, what can you do? We can sputter about it but they’re serious and they’re good … The most serious attackers will probably get in no matter what you do. At this point, the design principal, if you’re a security person working inside a firm, is not no failures, but no silent failures.”

Of course security vendors have latched onto these threats as a way to sell more stuff and are increasingly glomming onto big data analysis as a way to shorten the time between an attack and stopping it in a high-stakes game of whack-a-mole.

As RSA executive chairman Art Coviello said a few months ago: “It’s not about perfect security; its all about ratcheting down risk as much as you can.”

And it’s not just huge government contractors, agencies and suppliers at risk. “No industry is immune,”  cautioned Geer, who is also an advisor to In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and other security agencies, and to Verdasys, a security vendor. Almost anyone can see why hackers target gigantic players like Boeing that spend billions on designs which could be used to build similar products at much lower cost. But don’t forget that any grocery store chain that uses credit cards is also a target for someone, Geer said.

Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user Dysanovic

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Viral content site BuzzFeed and CNN have partnered to create a brand new YouTube channel that will see BuzzFeed repurpose CNN content in a more viral fashion. According to The Wall Street Journal, the content will be specifically designed to be shared via social media – something BuzzFeed knows quite a bit about.

The new channel, CNN BuzzFeed, launches today. The initial goal is for BuzzFeed to create about three new videos a week, which will sit alongside other videos from CNN. BuzzFeed, who has already been producing original videos for their multiple YouTube channels, is said to be planning on focusing some videos on serious news issues.

“There has been a massive cultural shift in how people – particularly young people – consume news and entertainment and Ze [Frank] and his team are tapping into the next generation of video production and consumption,” said BuzzFeed president and COO Jon Steinberg.

Welcome to CNNBuzzFeed on YouTube bit.ly/13VOzLU

— Jon Steinberg (@jonsteinberg) May 28, 2013

It’ll be ad-free at the start, but that will eventually change:

“The more agile way to do it is to launch without letting advertising products dictate editorial content,” said Steinberg. “BuzzFeed and CNN will figure out ways to do various ad formats and sponsored content down the road,”

For Buzzfeed, the new partnership means more expansion. The company plans to hire 30 more employees to work in a new L.A. studio.

Here’s the first video on the channel, which is a mashup of famous rescue moments originally broadcast on CNN.

Eurapp is a new study being led by DERI at NUI Galway and GigaOM Research and was recently launched by the European Commission as part of its Digital Agenda: Startup Europe initiative. Eurapp brings together app developers, platform providers, policy makers and other stakeholders to address the future of the European app economy at its first working workshop in Brussels on June 14.

“In Eurapp, we’re creating a model and near-term forecast for the European app economy in terms of jobs profiles and market size,” says David Card, the VP of Research for GigaOM Research. “We also plan to identify and propose ideas to solve key problems affecting the app economy in Europe through two crowdsourcing challenges that will be run mid-summer.”

The working workshop will feature talks from the co-founders of app companies SwiftKey, Tyba and Betapond, focusing on successes they have had and various problems they have faced in the past. Platform managers and evangelists from Samsung and Microsoft will discuss the growth in apps supported by their platforms in Europe. The European Young Innovators Forum will provide perspectives from young tech entrepreneurs.

The workshop will feature Mapping Sessions to identify primary bottlenecks experienced by app companies located in Europe that could potentially be addressed by EU-wide policy actions and also explore the main issues that companies have in achieving their desired metrics for success.

GigaOM readers are invited to take part in the workshop. Registration for the workshop is free, but places are limited. Get more information at http://eurapp.eu.

When Google offered a series of concessions in order to settle its search-related antitrust investigation in Europe, some of those whose complaints had kicked off the whole affair were quick to dismiss Google’s proposals. And now it looks like the European Commission itself will also tell the U.S. firm to go back to the drawing board.

Google is accused of surreptitiously favoring its own services in its search results, locking advertisers onto its platform and scraping content from rival, subject-specific search engines. To settle the Commission’s investigation, it proposed labelling links to its own services, letting websites opt out of having their content show up in Google’s specialized search, and taking some of the lock-in out of its ad contracts.

On Tuesday, according to a Reuters report, EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia told European parliamentarians that it was a near-certainty that Google would have to revise its proposals. Referring to the extended period that Google’s rivals have been given to formally respond to the proposals, he said: “After, we will analyze the responses we have received, we will ask Google, probably, I cannot anticipate this formally, almost 100 percent we will ask Google: you should improve your proposals.”

When those proposals were formally revealed in March, Foundem – a British vertical search and comparison site that’s part of Microsoft’s anti-Google FairSearch organization – was quick to issue a comprehensive counter-argument (PDF warning). This more-or-less came down to Foundem saying Google’s proposals wouldn’t change the alleged inherent bias in its search rankings.

The European consumer protection organization BEUC also noted that the proposed concessions wouldn’t stop Google from manipulating its natural search results. In the U.S., by the way, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) cleared Google of so-called “search bias”.

The European Commission had originally set a deadline of May 26 for responses to Google’s concessions. That has been pushed back to June 27. Apart from giving a pretty clear characterization of the responses the Commission has already received, Almunia said on Tuesday that he had not yet decided whether to press on with a formal antitrust investigation over Android — an investigation that was again called for by FairSearch.

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