Technology

Snapshot extracts the content from a single Google Apps account, compresses it into an easy-to-extract ZIP file, and downloads it to your local machine

Satellite service provider Iridium is introducing a new satellite phone and access point that enable communications anywhere on the face of the Earth from Blackberry and Android mobile devices, and will offer support for Apple’s iOS-based gear later this year.

The two new devices enable use of data applications on mobile smartphones and tablets that have Wi-Fi capabilities, and the access point bridges the connection over the Iridium satellite network.

The speed of the data-only connections is 26K to 27Kbps, according to Iridium CEO Matthew Desch, suitable for email and Internet access — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Invensas, a subsidiary of chip microelectronics company Tessera, has discovered a way of stacking multiple DRAM chips on top of each other. This process, called multi-die face-down packaging, or xFD for short, massively increases memory density, reduces power consumption, and should pave the way for faster and more efficient memory chips — via redwolf.newsvine.com

It was once the world’s leading search engine, its founders held talks about a merger with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation — and it even managed to fend off a $44bn takeover bid by Microsoft. But Yahoo has put itself up for sale, after firing its chief executive of 18 months Carol Bartz by phone.

A fierce manager with a proclivity for swearing, Bartz was brought in to revive Yahoo’s fortunes after the company rejected the Microsoft bid, but she was unable to match the pace of innovation of the new Silicon Valley giants – Google, Facebook and a resurgent Apple.

Her dismissal prompted what Yahoo said was “comprehensive strategic review to position the company for future growth — via redwolf.newsvine.com

We’ve covered proper solid state drive maintenance before, but one of the most overlooked factors in proper SSD care is partition alignment. Here’s how to make sure your partitions are aligned correctly and that you’re getting the most out of your SSD.

We talked about partition alignment in our SSD migrating tutorial, but if you’ve already migrated to an SSD, you might not have realised that you’re sacrificing performance with misaligned partitions. A regular hard drive usually starts its first partition after 63 empty blocks, while SSDs require 64 blocks of data for optimal performance. This means that sometimes, if your SSD was formatted by something other than Windows’ installer, it can be aligned incorrectly and will transfer data much slower than intended — via Lifehacker

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Tuesday announced that it’s started shipping hard disk drives that cram a terabyte of capacity onto a single spinning platter — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Global data centre provider Digital Realty Trust has paid $4 million for a 3 hectare development site in Melbourne.

The company plans to build two data hubs on the Paramount Industrial Park development to support a total of six 1440 kilowatt data centres PODs or performance optimised data centres.

The buy marks the company’s second acquisition in the past seven weeks following an $11 million investment on a 3.48 hectare Western Sydney site — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Zendesk, a popular online customer support platform used by many organisations across the world, will soon open an office in Melbourne, Australia.

The company has been looking at hiring a number of Australian staff with Melbourne postings appearing on its careers site over the past few months.

Zendesk registered its Australian arm as a private company with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission on the 10th June this year, meaning it can now operate in Australia under the name Zendesk Pty Ltd.

By being a private company, it means Zendesk must be either limited by shares or unlimited with share capital, have up to 50 non-employee shareholders and, according to ASIC, not do anything that would require lodgement of a prospectus.

It appears based on the jobs listed so far that Zendesk’s Melbourne office will be mainly focused on boosting sales in the Asia Pacific region, as well as providing support for local customers — via redwolf.newsvine.com

A Turkish hacker group diverted traffic to a number of high-profile websites including the Telegraph, UPS, Betfair, Vodafone, National Geographic, computer-maker Acer and technology news site the Register on Sunday night, putting unwary users at risk of having passwords, emails and other details stolen.

Industry experts warned people not to log into sites such as Betfair because their details could be stolen.

Some people viewing the sites thought that they had been hacked directly, with the sites appearing to show a message in Turkish by a group called Turkguvenligi, who last month carried out a similar attack on a Korean company.

But in fact the sites themselves remained unaffected. The group had instead attacked the domain name system (DNS), which is used to route users to websites. A list of sites affected by the hack, including Microsoft in Brazil and Dell in South Korea, was posted on the zone-h website, used by hackers to list their successes — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The lawsuit between e360 and Spamhaus was a long-running, tortured affair, and it looks like it finally came to a close. With e360 being awarded a whopping $3 in damages against Spamhaus. (Here’s a link to Ars Technica’s recap of the oral argument, where Judge Posner blasted e360’s counsel: This is just totally irresponsible litigation… You can’t just come into a court with a fly-by-night, nothing company and say ‘I’ve lost $130 million’) — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The owner of a defunct online clothing retail operation has been arrested and charged with wire fraud for allegedly overcharging customers by more than US$5 million.

New York-based Classic Closeouts and owner Daniel Greenberg allegedly used customer credit and debit card numbers on file to charge accounts multiple times for items customers did not order, the US Department of Justice said in a press release. Between June and December 2008, the operation charged customers for unordered items more than 70,000 times, the DOJ said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Codecademy is the easiest way to learn how to code. It’s interactive, fun, and you can do it with your friends.