Technology

Digg today responded to early user feedback about its plans for a Google Reader replacement announced earlier this month, saying that it has narrowed down incoming requests to four key points: keep it simple, make it fast, synchronize across devices, and, finally, allow for easy import from Google Reader, of course. However, the company also hinted at its plans to go beyond just a Reader clone, saying that in future versions, it wants to design a tool that can pull in news and content from other sources, including social media sites, Reddit, Hacker News, and elsewhere.

The Google Reader shutdown has been a boon to several startups, which have gained an influx of new users to their various RSS feed-reading services. Feedly, for example, became the top RSS reader on mobile last week, but it’s too soon to count out competitors like NewsBlur, TheOldReader, Reeder, NetNewsWire and others from gaining traction in the weeks ahead.

Digg meanwhile, now incubated and being rebuilt by Betaworks, is an interesting one to watch in this space, as team members there describe themselves as rabid information addicts who also have relied on Google Reader in the past. But Digg’s involvement is appealing to Google Reader’s heaviest users, because the redesigned Digg.com offers a clean, minimalistic user interface, which is what many want to see in their news reader replacement — that is, they want more of a utility and less of a “news magazine”-styled design.

While it’s good to hear that Digg is listening to what this core crowd wants (some 800 comments were left on the company’s original post, the company says) even more interesting perhaps is what Digg may do with the reader replacement in the future — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Google Keep note-keeping app has had a frosty reception. Analysts including Gartner have said its functionality is laughable compared to that of the rival Evernote (saying it’s like saying MSFT Paint is a threat to Photoshop) and other users have rejected it on the grounds that after the death sentence on Reader, Google can’t be trusted not to pull the plug on a service which people have come to rely on — via Slashdot

A web analytics firm has sniffed out a botnet that was raking in $6m a month from online advertisers.

The so-called Chameleon botnet mimicked human visitors on select websites, causing billions of display ad impressions to be served to compromised machines. As many as 120,000 infected drones have been discovered so far. Almost all of the over 202 websites targeted in the scam are located in the US. In some cases, two-thirds of the websites’ traffic was generated from zombie machines.

All the bot browsers report themselves as being Internet Explorer 9.0 running on Windows 7.

The advertisers cough up a few pennies every time an ad is viewed, and the ad network, ad exchanges and the publisher all take their share.

The malign traffic was difficult to identify because the malware used a hundreds of thousands of different ad-exchange cookies. These characteristics earned the malware behind the scam the Chameleon moniker — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Just 20 ISPs are responsible for half of the world’s entire haul of Internet scam and spam emails, says a study. The thesis (PDF), entitled Internet Bad Neighbourhoods is the work of a pair of researchers, Moreira Moura and Giovane Cesare, from the University of Twente, who researched over 42,000 Internet Service Providers worldwide and found the following trends:

• Most spam comes from the U.S.
• Most phishing comes from Asia–of that, Indian network BSNL came top of the list.
• The most crime-ridden network is Nigeria’s Spectranet.
• The majority of bad ISPs are to be found in India, Brazil, and Vietnam.

The researchers propose that Internet providers deal with such networks rather like people deal with crime-ridden neighbourhoods, using security tools to reroute messages from suspect networks or places known to be a source of malicious attacks. All the large Internet firms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google take the issue very seriously and have teams of security experts to deal with the problem — via redwolf.newsvine.com

3-D printers have progressed a lot in the past couple years, but still can’t rival the output of injection-molding machines without violating expensive, patented post-processing techniques.

Enthusiasts have been trying to smooth their printed parts for years by submerging them in acetone or brushing the liquid solvent on by hand — both of which led to unhealthy amounts of chemical exposure and less-than-impressive parts. Now, makers Austin Wilson and Neil Underwood have developed a process that can approximate the results of professional molding machines with only a hot plate, mason jar, and a few ounces of acetone nail-polish remover.

ABS-based printed parts are placed in the jar with the acetone and heated to 90 degrees Celsius on the hot plate. Acetone has a low evaporation point, but is heavier than air so the process creates a small cloud around the model which melts the surface, slowly smoothing it to a mirror finish. After a couple hours, the parts solidify, can be removed, and be displayed with pride — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Tiny Tiny RSS is an open source web-based news feed (RSS/Atom) reader and aggregator, designed to allow you to read news from any location, while feeling as close to a real desktop application as possible

Journalists and geeks united in exasperation on Wednesday evening when Google made a very sad announcement: The company is shuttering Google Reader. We should’ve seen this coming. And those that didn’t see the inevitable death of Google’s RSS feed organiser and reader might’ve easily missed the news, since Google buried it halfway down an official blog post about a bunch of other stuff. But it is true. The search giant will pronounce Reader dead on 1 July 2013. Based on the somewhat storied history of Google killing Reader features, though, we’re pretty sure someone will start working on an alternative within the next few hours — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google has expanded its Indoor Maps range to include over 200 locations across NSW and Victoria. Users can access detailed floor plans of large public buildings by zooming into the location on their tablet or smartphone.

Indoor Maps are essentially indoor directories that you can carry around in your hand. Crucially, the service does not require a GPS signal and instead relies on wireless networks — which means you can use it indoors. The maps will also automatically update themselves when you move up or down a level in a building with multiple floors — via redwolf.newsvine.com

No site is fully immune to getting hacked, but there are some obvious things every site owner can do to make it a bit harder for hackers to break into a web server and add rogue links or take over a site completely. Today, Google launched its new Help for Hacked Sites series to teach webmasters how to avoid getting hacked in the first place — and how to recover their sites if it happens.

The first part of the series is geared toward relatively non-technical users, while the later part is aimed at users who can read code and are comfortable with using terminal commands. Overall, the series features about 80 minutes of video and a dozen or so articles that cover everything from basic things like figuring out that a site was actually hacked to working with your host to recover a site, all the way to using vulnerability scanners, understanding SQL injections, reading log files and using the shell to log into your site to determine the root-cause vulnerability — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Computers are taking another step toward independence from humans, following a new announcement from Caltech. A team of researchers has developed for the first time a method for chips to route circuits around damaged components and thus heal themselves.

These kinds of self-repairing integrated chips, the researchers said, could lead to smartphones that recover by themselves from technical failures ranging from a battery problem to total transistor failure, among many other applications. The research at the California Institute of Technology is described in the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.

The team, composed of engineers from the university’s High-Speed Integrated Circuits lab in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, has demonstrated this capability in tiny power amplifiers. Seventy-six of these tiny amps, including the components needed for self-healing, could fit on a penny — via redwolf.newsvine.com