Internet

Google Maps and Street View have become so useful that it's hard to imagine living without the services sometimes. Street View is especially useful when searching for businesses—seeing exactly what that hole-in-the-wall taqueria looks like from your computer often helps you find it when you're wandering around after some late night bar hopping. But unfortunately for Internet business-stalkers, Street View stops at a storefront's front door, and who knows what could be going on inside.

Google has decided to help answer those questions by introducing Google Business Photos, a free service that will allow business owners to request Google take photos of the inside of their storefronts for use with Google Maps. Google VP of Product Marisa Mayer announced the new initiative at the Social-Loco conference in San Francisco this week, noting that the feature would be live for end users in roughly a week.

The feature is tied in with Google Places (a related, Yelp-like service that lets users read about a business and leave reviews), where business owners can already submit their own photos. Google Business Photos, however, allows owners to request a Google photographer to come and take pictures—a list of cities that Google plans to start with is already online, but businesses in any city can apply for a photo shoot. "[D]emand will help us decide where to send our photographers next," Google wrote.

Why would Google be so nice as to offer free professional photographs to businesses? Because it's trying to grow Places, Maps, and Street View at a faster rate than its competitors; the more content that's readily available to users, the better. Yelp in particular has a leg up on Google Places when it comes to business reviews, simply because of its massive mindshare. If Google can juice up its own business listings with a slew of new photos—all while integrating them with Street View—it could keep users from moving to other sites for more info after the search is done.

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April was the first time that Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4 were available for the full month, making it the first chance to really get a feel for how rapidly users are switching to the new offerings—and the first opportunity to see if compelling new versions are able to halt Internet Explorer's market share slide, or spur new interest in Firefox.

Both Microsoft and Mozilla will be disappointed to learn that so far, nothing much has changed. Internet Explorer is down yet again, dropping 0.81 points to 55.11 percent. Firefox experienced a small drop of 0.17 points, to 21.63 percent. Chrome was up 0.37 points to 11.94 percent, and Safari was up 0.54 points to 7.15 percent. The implication from this is that the new browsers, though both substantial upgrades over their predecessors, are doing little to attract users of other browsers; the people switching to them are merely upgraders.

Facebook has reinstated a number of sites' Facebook pages that were taken down due to bogus copyright claims this week. The company issued an apology for the inconvenience and says that DMCA notice abuse is an issue that Facebook takes seriously, but serious questions still remain about the effectiveness of Facebook's process for dealing with complaints.

"We have invested significant resources into creating a dedicated team that uses specialized tools, systems and technology to review and properly handle intellectual property notices. This system evaluates a number of factors when deciding how to respond and, in many cases, we require the reporter to provide additional information before we can take action. As a result of these efforts, the vast majority of intellectual property notices that we receive are handled without incident," Facebook spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter told Ars on Thursday evening.

"Of course, no system is perfect and we are always striving to improve our practices. As such, we will be considering the results of our investigation into this matter as we continue to refine our systems and procedures."

Apple has reportedly been working hard to launch new cloud-based services for iOS and Mac users, including a revamped MobileMe and an iTunes-based "digital locker," all powered by a huge data center in Maiden, North Carolina. Now, a new rumor published Wednesday night suggests Apple may be calling its new services "iCloud."

According to GigaOm, a Swedish-based company called Xcerion had until recently been using iCloud.com to run a cloud-based storage service of the same name. Xcerion has just rebranded rebranded the service "CloudMe," and a source for GigaOm claimed that the iCloud.com domain name had been sold to Apple for $4.5 million.

Xcerion—not Apple or its domain name management service—is still listed as the domain owner in Network Solutions Whois database, so for now we consider this rumor plausible if unverifiable. Apple is believed to be launching its new services soon, since Apple has stopped selling new $99 per year MobileMe subscriptions. Apple is also believed to planning to discuss its digital locker service in early June at WWDC 2011.

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US businesses have been taken for at least $11 million over the last year thanks to unauthorized wire transfers to China. The situation is so serious that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has issued a fraud alert to small- and medium-sized businesses, warning that cybercriminals have been compromising the businesses' banking credentials in order to send money overseas.

At least 20 incidents occurred between March of 2010 and April of 2011 that resulted in the credentials of small-to-medium-sized businesses being compromised. According to the FBI, the typical scenario involves scammers sending phishing e-mails to the business in question, at which time someone enters the business' banking credentials into a malicious website. The scammers then use the credentials to log into the business' real banking website in order to wire money to "Chinese economic and trade companies."

In just a year, this resulted in $11 million in losses, with transfer amounts ranging from $50,000 to $985,000 at a time. The total attempted amounts were closer to $20 million, though—the FBI says that many attempted transfers were over $900,000, but the scammers are usually more successful trying smaller amounts. On top of the electronic wire transfers, some of the scammers also sent domestic money mules to the US in order to make further fraudulent transactions.

"The economic and trade companies appear to be registered as legitimate businesses and typically hold bank accounts with the Agricultural Bank of China, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and the Bank of China," the FBI warned. "At this time, it is unknown who is behind these unauthorized transfers, if the Chinese accounts were the final transfer destination or if the funds were transferred elsewhere, or why the legitimate companies received the unauthorized funds. Money transfers to companies that contain these described characteristics should be closely scrutinized."

From the sound of it, these small businesses and their respective banks are simply falling for simple social engineering tricks combined with malware. (The FBI says that some—but not all—cases seem to involve ZeuS, Backdoor.bot, and Spybot.) Let this be a warning to small businesses: a good way to start protecting yourself would be to get some basic firewall and virus protection, with online security training among those who control the bank accounts.

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Taking a leaf from MPEG-LA's playbook, Google has announced the WebM Community Cross-License Initiative, a consortium of companies that agree to share any patents that those companies may hold that are relevant to the WebM video format, and in particular the VP8 video compression algorithm. True to Google's ambitions for the format, the shared patents are all available on a royalty-free basis, both to consortium members and anyone else that wants to implement WebM.

Since the launch of WebM, Google has positioned itself as the only company with relevant patents. Though the company is still not acknowledging that any third parties might have any patent claims, creating this community means that even if such claims emerge at a later date, then, as long as those claims are made by community members, they pose no risk to WebM implementors.

In creating this community, Google is acting in a manner similar to MPEG-LA, the organization that handles licensing for competing video codec H.264. MPEG-LA forms patent pools where groups of related patents that are jointly licensed together, in a convenient package, with the aim of giving would-be implementors of a particular technology a one-stop shop to obtain all the intellectual property rights they need. MPEG-LA's agreements also include certain conditions that protect licensees; if a company with patents in the pool discovers that it has additional patents that cover the technology, licensees need not worry: their licenses will cover the use of these patents too.

The major difference between the two is that MPEG-LA charges for use of its patent pools in many, but not every, scenario, whereas the WebM Community Cross-License Initiative will not charge in any way, ever.

The move will serve to better assure would-be implementors of WebM technology that it will not open them up to legal liability. Lawsuit-magnet Microsoft, in particular, has raised a number of questions about the patent risk surrounding WebM, and is unlikely to integrate support for the standard until the concerns are resolved to its satisfaction (though it's happy for Google to take the risk). Creating a consortium of companies bound by a promise to offer any relevant patents they may own on a royalty-free basis, even without identifying what those patents may be, is a positive step by Google to diminish that risk.

The exact terms of the cross-license agreement have not been decided. The intent is to create an agreement that essentially extends Google's existing VP8 patent grants to all the community members: they will each offer a royalty-free license to use their patents, subject to the condition that community members not sue each other. If any community member sues any other for any patent related to WebM then the suing community member wil lose its rights to use any of the other WebM Patents.

Including Google itself, there are currently 17 companies in the WebM Community, representing a range of interests. Browser developers Opera and Mozilla are both members, as is consumer electronics giant LG Electronics, along with semiconductor supremos Samsung and Texas Instruments. Notable absences from the community include Microsoft and Apple.

Indeed, compared to the list of companies with patents in the H.264 patent pool—the companies perhaps most likely to have patents covering WebM—and the lack of overlap is significant. Cisco, LG, and Samsung are members of both groups, but there are 26 other companies in the H.264 patent pool that have not yet joined the WebM initiative. These companies all have a vested interest in defending H.264's royalty payments, and their absence will leave some doubts over the significance of the consortium.

MPEG-LA is not standing still either. In February, the company announced a call for the submission of WebM patents, with a view to forming a patent pool of its own. That initial call ended last month, and though the group has been quiet since that announcement, a statement given to The H said that patents had been submitted for inclusion in the pool, and that the pool-creation process was continuing. The next step for MPEG-LA will be to assess the submitted patents to determine if they are essential to VP8; if they are, a pool will be formed.

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Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a pretty grim disease. Victims experience progressive muscle weakness, leading to death; patients survive a median of only two to five years following the onset of symptoms. Currently, there are no effective therapies. So it's not surprising that when a preliminary study shows a hint of efficacy, patients will do what they can to get access to the drug and share their experiences with fellow patients. A company called PatientsLikeMe has now used this tendency to share information to crowdsource a sort of clinical trial, obtaining data on the effectiveness of off-label use of a drug.

Although ALS remains untreatable, it's a focus of active research, and promising results have been seen in some animal models and small clinical trials. One of these, a 2008 study, involved only 16 patients, but suggested that a simple chemical, lithium carbonate, could significantly slow ALS progression. With no other treatments and the drug already on the market, a number of patients convinced their physicians to provide the lithium carbonate off-label. Although these patients didn't provide a randomized clinical trial population, they did present the opportunity for at least testing whether the lithium carbonate might have an impact on disease progression.

To get an answer, the site put together a data-acquisition form that enabled patients to input their disease status over time using a standardized assay for ALS symptoms. All told, over 3,500 patients started tracking their disease progression; 150 of them started taking lithium, with nearly 80 continuing the treatment for a year.

A control sample was identified by comparing disease progression profiles (how rapidly symptoms got worse) from those who started lithium to those who hadn't. By matching similar progression curves, the authors felt they would increase the probability of providing a relevant comparison.

When the numbers were crunched, the lithium carbonate did not come out looking good. There was essentially no difference at all between those who took the drug and those who didn't when it comes to ALS progression. This result is the same as one obtained from a larger clinical trial that was completed recently. One somewhat surprising result is that the drug didn't even exhibit a placebo effect, which is rather unusual.

So even if the results weren't very promising for those with the disease, the approach looks like it has potential. The authors go out of their way to point out that "observational studies using unblinded data are not a substitute for double-blind randomized control trials," and warn that ALS patients may be somewhat unusual, in terms of their high motivation to seek out any alternative treatment. Still, they conclude that even with its limitations, "data reported by patients over the internet may be useful for accelerating clinical discovery and evaluating the effectiveness of drugs already in use."

There's a little added motivation for focusing on ALS by the team behind the website, too. The MIT engineers that founded it have a brother with the disease. Despite that focus, however, the site currently claims to be tracking over 500 other diseases.

Nature Biotechnology, 2011. DOI: 10.1038/nbt.1837  (About DOIs).

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Not sure you need yet another deal site in your life? Too bad, because if you have a Facebook account, it's there already. Facebook announced Tuesday morning that it was launching Deals on Facebook, a Groupon-like deal center that allows businesses in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego, and San Francisco to offer steep discounts to Facebook users. And despite our tongue-in-cheek reaction, the new Deals offering is likely to take off simply because of its heavy Facebook integration and Facebook's massive built-in audience.

Deals on Facebook is launching today in five cities, but Facebook says it hopes to expand to other cities in the future. (When you go to the Deals page now and you live in another city, it asks you to sign up to be notified when the feature will be available to you.) A typical deal page looks just like you'd expect Groupon or Living Social mishmashed with Facebook to look—you can buy the coupon directly through Facebook and then post it to your wall, or share it with friends. Each deal is "Like"-able as well and you can post comments on the deal's Facebook wall, adding an extra social layer on top of your typical coupon site.

Deals on Facebook differs from Facebook's other deal-related product, Check-In Deals, which was launched late last year. That feature works with Facebook's check-in system (called Places) and allows businesses to offer discounts to users who have checked in there. It's a little more immediate—you're already at a restaurant or a coffee shop, and now you get a free bagel with your purchase of coffee. Deals on Facebook, on the other hand, lets you plan a little further in advance for bigger jaunts, like a trip to the aquarium or that skydiving adventure you've been fantasizing about.

As usual, Facebook is trying to make it easy for its user base to get deals from other places too—the company says it's working on bringing discounts from the likes of OpenTable, Gilt City, Plum District, and a handful of others onto the site as well. It's possible that you've never even heard of many of those, which is kind of the point—Facebook is hoping to compete with the big names, not these tiny specialty sites. Still, with the recent launch of the Google Offers beta, there are plenty of big names available to compete with, so Facebook will have to expand quickly if it wants to nab mindshare from potential Google customers or take advantage of burned out Groupon users.

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