Technology

Nefarious search engine optimisers be warned. Google is coming for you — again.

Following previous changes to Google’s ranking and page layout algorithms, the search giant is pushing yet another update to its algorithm this week with the hopes of curbing black hat webspam from creeping into search results.

The change will go live for all languages at the same time within the next few days, said engineer Matt Cutts in a blog post yesterday, and will affect roughly 3.1 percent of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice — via redwolf.newsvine.com

If your system gets a malware infection, booting can be next to impossible — and even if you’ve followed all the best security precautions, sometimes hardware or software failures can render your system inaccessible. Make sure you’re prepared by setting up a recovery USB stick ahead of time — via Lifehacker Australia

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Focus only on your emails and wipe out the noise added to your inbox by Gmail ads. Gmelius gives you the option to remove all the ads present in Gmail (top, right and bottom). To note that Gmelius does not deactivate the automatic Gmail filtering and scanning system which allows Google to parse for keywords in your emails and then match and serve targeted ads when you browse the Web

Google’s web spam team’s recent warning to 20,000 webmasters about vulnerabilities on their sites is a drop in the ocean, with the search giant revealing that it is stepping up its plans against malicious sites.

Earlier this week, head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts, who is also the author of Google’s SafeSearch family filter, tweeted that Google had sent out 20,000 emails to webmasters who have had their sites compromised. The search giant isn’t required to notify webmasters that their sites are vulnerable; however, as it trawls the web to index sites, it is able to discover which sites have malicious content, and it chooses to notify the sites affected — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Often times, for whatever reason, the Internet connection on my Mac will lock up. Only restarting the Airport or Ethernet interfaces seem to resolve the issue in a timely manner. (This is different from a router crash which requires a manual restart of the router — in my case an Airport Extreme.) I have developed some interconnected scripts that will automatically accomplish this task for me when attached to launchctl. This is important for me because I often have to access files over the internet and if the connection has locked up there is no way for me to access them without manual intervention — via Mac OSX Hints

Augmented reality glasses targeted at athletes and other sportsmen and women are being developed by Oakley

The business’s chief executive told Bloomberg that the firm had been working on the project for 15 years and had filed about 600 related patents.

Colin Baden said that the aim was to create a self-contained unit that could also communicate with smartphones.

The announcement comes a fortnight after Google released a concept video of its own heads-up display project — via redwolf.newsvine.com

An electronic paper watch designed by a Canadian entrepreneur to work alongside smartphones has raised more than $3m (£1.8m; 2.2m euros) in less than a week on net funding site Kickstarter.

It is a record for the site which crowdsources cash to fund start-ups.

Eric Migicovsky initially sought $10,000 over a five-week period but the total, six days in, now stands at $3.4m.

It is the fifth Kickstarter project to make more than $1m.

The Pebble watch reached the $1m mark in 28 hours. The firm behind the device, which has been designing smartwatches for three years, said that it was blown away by the support — via redwolf.newsvine.com