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Now you can make TinyURL vanity URLs too.

With the popularity of TinyURL and it’s automatic integration with services like Twitter, most of the good ones have already been snatched up, so if you’re looking to get a vanity mini URL from another similar service, your best bet is to go with one of the little guys. My CNET colleague Nicole Lee did a great roundup on some competitors back in March. Of the bunch, my favorite MooURL has always seemed to have the most open of any, but now that I’ve told you, the secret is out.

Not content to just sit around recovering from Independence Day shenanigans this past weekend, TinyURL released a much-needed feature to its URL-shortening service that others have had for ages: vanity URLs. This means the nonsensical shortened URLs it spits out from your 1,000 character-plus links can now be changed to whatever name you want after the forward slash–that is as long as it hasn’t been taken by someone else.

Fujitsu would sell all of its plants–including those in Japan, Thailand, and the Philippines–for between 70 billion yen and 100 billion yen (approximately $660 million to $944 million), according to Japan’s Nikkei news service.

The deal would be finalized by the end of the year, according to Nikkei.

Solid-state drive suppliers such Intel, Micron Technology, Samsung, and STEC are also beginning to target SSDs as replacements for hard disk drives in the enterprise.

Beyond the brutal price competition that is typical in the hard disk drive industry, there is a clear-and-present threat now from solid-state drives. Until this year relegated to digital camera and music player storage, solid-state drives are now making inroads–albeit small–in laptops, particularly ultraportables like the MacBook Air, Dell’s new E4200 line, and Netbooks such as the Asus Eee PC.

A Western Digital representative would not comment on the report.

Fujitsu is in talks to sell its hard disk drive business to Western Digital, according to a Japan-based report.

This would be one of the largest business unit sell-offs for a Japanese electronics company, Nikkei said, adding that Fujitsu’s hard disk drive business has been posting losses.

Western Digital is the second-largest hard disk drive maker in the world behind Seagate Technology. Fujitsu’s HDD unit is ranked sixth.

(Credit: Belkin)

$19.99, available in September.

The magic of magnets!

You’re on stage, in the middle of your first song. The band’s tight. The sound’s dialed in. The audience is grooving. But you–idiot guitarist–forgot to do the Stevie Ray Vaughan trick of tucking your cable up through your strap, so instead it’s running straight down to the floor, next to your feet. Excited, you take a step forward to pose for your friends in the front row and step right on your cord. It comes out with an ear-splitting pop and buzz. The bass player rolls his eyes as you get down on the stage, pick the end of the cable back up, plug it back into your guitar–another loud pop–and finish the solo. Momentum lost. Show ruined. Chances of rock stardom zero.

Belkin’s got the solution: BreakFree connectors. They’re magnetic, like the MacBook’s MagSafe power cable. They can’t prevent you from stepping on your cord, but when you do there’s no pop, no buzz, and you can reattach them very quickly. They’re also excellent for guitarists who like to change axes between songs, but lack the roadies or foresight to do the busy work of turning on the bypass each time. Plus, you’re less likely to damage your input jack after hundreds of plugs and unplugs–and there are few things worse than an input jack failing on stage. (What’s that crackling sound?)

Microsoft first demonstrated the browser at the Mix conference in March. Among its improvements are malware protection, better standards support, and the ability to carve off a piece of a Web page, known as a Web slice. It also supports having private sessions that don’t get logged in a browser’s history.

“We will be very selective about what changes we make between the next update and final release,” he wrote. “We will act on the most critical issues. We will be super clear about product changes we make between the update and the final release.”

Microsoft plans to offer one more public test version of
Internet Explorer 8 before releasing the final version of the updated browser, the company said late Wednesday.

The first beta version was released in March, with a second beta arriving over the summer.

Hachamovitch said that Web site developers should test their sites and report “any critical issues” to Microsoft.

The next test, essentially a “release candidate” version will come in the first quarter of 2009. That means the final release won’t hit Microsoft’s initial goal of finishing the browser this year.

Hachamovitch also called on technical users to download the current beta 2 version and let Microsoft know how that goes.

“Our next public release of IE (typically called a “release candidate”) indicates the end of the beta period,” general manager Dean Hachamovitch said in a blog posting. “We want the technical community of people and organizations interested in Web browsers to take this update as a strong signal that IE8 is effectively complete and done.”

Manu Thapar, former vice president of engineering at Yahoo, has been hired as MySpace’s senior vice president of engineering, a role that involves architecture and security management as well as the creation of an offshore development team. Another Yahoo veteran, Tish Whitcraft, has joined MySpace as senior vice president of customer care and will oversee the construction of a “self-help” tool for MySpace users.

But the revolving doors at MySpace are moving fast. TechCrunch reported Tuesday that the company was looking to lay off as much as 5 percent of its workforce, which chief operating officer Amit Kapur confirmed to the blog later in the day. But the exec classified the move as “performance driven,” meaning that fired employees would be replaced and that MySpace was actually looking to hire as many as 300 new employees.

The hiring announcement comes so close on the heels of the layoff reports that conspiracy theorists might speculate MySpace put out a release about fairly recent executive picks to temper any bad press. But when asked, a MySpace representative classified the hires as “very recent…or are locked and loaded to start soon,” so it’s more likely that personnel changes just happened to fall into the rumor mill at an opportune time.

On the media side, Angela Courtin has been hired as MySpace’s senior vice president of marketing, entertainment, and content. She comes from MTV Networks, where she was vice president of integrated marketing. Jason Oberfest, a former biz-dev guru at Los Angeles Times Interactive, has been hired as vice president of business development to work in both deal making and developer relations. And Abe Thomas, a former employee of eBay and its PayPal subsidiary, has been hired as vice president of online marketing.

MySpace, the social network owned by News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media, announced Wednesday that it has hired five new members for its executive team–three senior vice presidents and two vice president–in fields ranging from engineering to customer service. They’re coming from a mixed background of media and tech.

SlyDial, a straight-to-voicemail call service I covered back in early April, has opened up its doors to everything this morning after undergoing three months of beta testing. New on Monday is a premium service heavy users can subscribe to in order to get all the perks of the service without having to listen to the in-house ads that run before connecting you to a call. There are a few plans available: either a 15 cents per call one-time fee, or a $4.95 monthly or $29.95 yearly plan, which only makes sense if you think you’re going to be sending more than 30 SlyDial calls a month.

SlyDial now lets you plug in your contacts and be connected with them just by clicking the SlyDial logo on the left.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

I still hold true to what I said about SlyDial in my initial hands-on. It’s a potentially evil service for people who misuse it (see the guy in the video embedded after the break), giving anyone the excuse that they “tried to call you” without having to approach actual conversation. That said, it can be wonderfully convenient if you want to send someone the equivalent of a voice text message without interrupting what they’re doing.

SlyDial is a creation of Mobile Sphere, the same folks who did Joopz, the PC-to-mobile phone text-messaging service and Webware 100 2008 finalist.

More useful might be the new quick-dial functionality included for registered users. You can add any contacts from your phone book and have the service automatically connect you to their voice mailboxes. It saves you from having to enter the number or make a phone call in the first place; it’ll simply call you instead.

A spokeperson for Google said “Google takes the security of our users very seriously, and we work hard to protect them from malware. Using Blogger, or any Google product, to serve or host malware is a violation of our product policies. We actively work to detect and remove sites that serve malware from our network.”

In its Security Threat Report for the first half of 2008, Sophos says it finds just over 16,000 malicious pages each day, mostly the result of malicious SQL-injection attacks on legitimate Web sites such as the attack on Sony’s U.S. PlayStation site in July. Tricks used by criminal hackers include using simple HTML code to place via SQL-injection a 1×1 pixel element (about the size of a pin prick) on an infected page. In loading the page, the Internet browser would then contact a server running exploit scripts and malicious code. But because the sites are legitimate, some security vendors struggle with blocking infected Web pages.

According to a report out Wednesday, antivirus vendor Sophos says it detects one Web page with malicious content every 5 seconds–a trend that is up 300 percent from 2007.

As for illegitimate sites, Sophos notes that Geocities and Blogger both make it easy for anyone to set up a Web site without much identification. Blogger, owned by Google, is particularly problematic, says Sophos, with the blog site alone accounting for nearly 2 percent of all malware hosts. It is not only possible for the Blogger sites to host malicious code, but criminal attackers can also inject links to malicious sites in the comments sections of the blogs.

Windows Vista, for example, was shipped in November 2006 with a built-in Windows Mail e-mail program and Windows Photo Gallery, a tool for viewing and organizing photos. Since then, though, Microsoft has released downloadable programs that essentially replace those operating system components. Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Mail are more tightly integrated with Microsoft’s online photo, blogging, and e-mail services.

Updated 10:55 a.m., with more details

According to Dow Jones, Kollar-Kotelly said the technical documents are “integral to interoperability” when it comes to creating Windows programs. According to the wire report, Microsoft officials told Kollar-Kotelly that they can have a draft version of the requested documentation by March and a final version by the end of next June.

There was also discussion at the hearing over whether Microsoft was losing ground in providing documentation. Microsoft acknowledges that the number of outstanding issues has risen, but said it is to be expected as the company makes more documentation available to more testers.

The company is expected to take this another step further with Windows 7, the new version of Windows that Microsoft is aiming to ship late next year.

The comments, by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, came as part of a regular status conference to discuss Microsoft’s compliance with its antitrust consent decree. A difference of opinion had arisen over whether the technical details were required in addition to the licensing of actual communications protocols. Microsoft said it would continue to offer the so-called “overview documents” but had maintained that it was not required to do so under the consent decree, while the plaintiffs in the case had argued the documents were required.

The judge presiding over Microsoft’s antitrust case said Tuesday that the company must release details on how different parts of Windows work together, according to a Dow Jones Newswires report.

It’s an interesting issue, particularly as Microsoft works to more closely tie its desktop programs to online services. In addition to efforts on the application side, Microsoft has also dabbled in linking various parts of the operating system to online services.

But here’s the real kicker: Every geek and X-phile knows Bigfoot prefers the thick forests of the Pacific Northwest. What the heck was this one doing in Georgia? Searching for decent barbecue?

According to a press release, the creature:

• Stands 7-feet-7-inches tall.
• Weighs more than 500 pounds.
• Looks part human and part ape-like.
• Is male.
• Has reddish hair and blackish-gray eyes.
• Has two arms and two legs, and five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot.
• Has flat feet that are similar to human feet.
• Has a footprint that is 16.75 inches long and 5.75 inches wide at the heel.
• Has hands that are 11.75 inches long from the palm to the tip of the middle finger and are 6.25 inches wide.
• Walks upright. (Several of them apparently were seen on the day the body was found.)
• Has teeth that are more human-like than ape-like.
• Has been undergoing DNA testing.

A couple of hunters in northern Georgia (the state, not the country) claim to have found a carcass of the legendary creature known as Bigfoot (or Sasquatch, if you prefer).

He's reeeeeeeeeeeeal! (Or is he?)

The two hunters teamed up with a fellow named Tom Biscardi, head of a group called Searching for Bigfoot; they plan to hold a press conference on Friday in Palo Alto, Calif., to show off DNA evidence and photos–but not the body itself. That’s apparently being kept under wraps. (Yeah, right.)

The two amateur Bigfoot hunters who claim to have found the body in Georgia, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, are a cop and a former corrections officer, respectively. Biscardi, according to LiveScience, has been responsible for at least one Bigfoot hoax before, leading many to take this with an even bigger grain of salt than they normally would.

(Credit:
Amblin Entertainment)

This summer has filled quite the appetite for strange creatures in the news, fueled by photos of the “Montauk Monster,” a strange carcass that washed ashore in eastern Long Island, New York. That creature, which earned plenty of headlines on Gawker and other New York-centric blogs, has been shakily confirmed as a viral marketing stunt. Earlier this week, a Texas man claimed to have videotaped a legendary creature called the Chupacabra, but the video really just looks like a weird dog.

Biscardi’s Web site, searchingforbigfoot.com, proceeded to crash under bandwidth pressures.

The FBI has been slow with providing its employees with desktop Internet access, since its closed network infrastructure was its first priority, but now more than 20,000 BlackBerrys have been deployed to its agents, analysts, and task force officers.

WASHINGTON–The FBI’s chief information officer announced his resignation Wednesday, nearly five years after inheriting an information technology program fraught with disaster and dramatically turning it around.

The biggest challenge for his successor, Azmi said, “will be maintaining those relationships. More than anything, it’s about the transparency we’ve brought.”

Azmi’s last official day will be October 17, and he said his successor will likely be named a few weeks after that. From a large pool of applicants from the public and private sectors, the bureau has narrowed its choices to candidates from the private sector.

(Credit:
FBI)

The FBI’s IT branch currently has 54 IT projects in development and plans to complete 20 by the end of the calendar year. It’s already deployed the first phase of Sentinel, the program developed to replace VCF, and the rest of the project is on schedule and on budget, Azmi said. Sentinel is expected to be completed and fully deployed by 2012.

Officially named the CIO in 2004, Azmi has since been working to build the bureau’s IT branch and build confidence both within the agency and on Capitol Hill, where he meets with lawmakers twice a week.

After 24 years working for the federal government, Azmi said he is resigning to spend more time with his family.

When Azmi joined the FBI as the acting CIO, the bureau was scheduled to roll out Virtual Case File, a software program meant to replace its archaic, paper-based criminal tracking system. Instead, the system was scrapped–and Azmi got to break the news to FBI Director Robert Mueller that the $170 million system, designed by Science Applications International, was unsalvageable.

“We should be measured not where some think we should be, but on where we have come from and what we have accomplished,” Azmi said.

Zalmai Azmi

“In 2004, everyone was asking when the FBI would join the 21st century,” said CIO Zalmai Azmi. “Today I can tell you that we are in the 21st century and continue to move forward.”