Did Google Bypass Privacy Rules?

In the wake of reports that Google had circumvented privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser, Microsoft announced today it had discovered that the Web giant had done the same with Internet Explorer.

“When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too?” IE executive Dean Hachamovitch wrote in a blog post this morning. “We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies.”

The blog post, which details Microsoft’s findings and offers privacy protection tips, said it has contacted Google about its concerns and asked it to “commit to honoring P3P privacy settings for users of all browsers.”

Google countered that Microsoft backs a system that is dated and impractical.

“It is well known–including by Microsoft–that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing modern Web functionality,” Rachel Whetstone, senior vice president of communications and policy for Google, said in a statement to CNET this evening. “We have been open about our approach, as have many other Web sites.”

P3P, or Platform for Privacy Preferences, is an official recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium that sites use to summarize their privacy policies.

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Nokia To Unveil Cheaper Windows Phone

Nokia debuted a new, cheaper and more budget-friendly smartphone using Microsoft’s Windows Phone software, targeting a wider market for its new range of smartphones.

Cheaper phones are the key for Nokia and Microsoft in their battle to win a larger share of the market, analysts say.

In addition to the new Lumia 610 Nokia will also unveil at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona a global version of its high-end Lumia 900 phone, which AT&T is scheduled to roll out in the United States, the sources said.

Nokia is set to unveil the phones at a news conference next Monday, on February 27.

Nokia last year dumped its own smartphone software platforms in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone, which has so far had a limited impact due to the high prices of phones using it.

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Future PCs Will Be Constant Learners

Tomorrow’s computers will constantly improve their understanding of the data they work with, which in turn will aid them in providing users with more appropriate information, predicted the software mastermind behind IBM’s Watson system.

Computers in the future “will learn through interacting with us. They will not necessarily require us to sit down and explicitly program them, but through continuous interaction with humans they will start to understand the kind of data and the kind of computation we need,” said IBM Fellow David Ferrucci, who was IBM’s principal investigator for Watson technologies. Ferrucci spoke at the IBM Smarter Computing Executive Forum, held Wednesday in New York.

“This notion of learning through collaboration and interaction is where we think computing is going,” he said.

IBM’s Watson project was an exercise for the company in how to build machines that can better anticipate user needs.

IBM researchers spent four years developing Watson, a supercomputer designed specifically to compete in the TV quiz show “Jeopardy,” a contest that took place last year. On “Jeopardy,” contestants are asked a range of questions across a wide variety of topic areas.

Watson did win at its “Jeopardy” match. Now IBM thinks the Watson computing model can have a wide range of uses.

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Social Networks Go Verified Accounts

Celebrities and other public figures will soon have the ability to verify their accounts and display a preferred “alternative name,” TechCrunch reports.

In an effort to stop impostors, Facebook will reportedly soon allow celebrities and other public figures to verify their accounts in much the same way that Twitter does.

The social network will begin notifying public figures with many subscribers that they can verify their accounts by submitting an image of a government-issued ID, allowing them to display a preferred pseudonym instead of their birth name, according to a TechCrunch report. Facebook will then manually approve the “alternative names” to confirm they are the real stage names or pen names.

Facebook users must be chosen to participate in the program; there is no way to volunteer for verification. However, unlike Twitter, verified accounts will not receive a special badge indicating verified status.

Verification will allow celebrities to be more readily accessible to fans when using their stage names instead of what is officially listed on their birth certificates. The program will also gain more prominent placement in the “People To Subscribe To” section.

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Experts Think iPad 3 Coming in March

Apple will debut a new iPad some time in early March, and will start selling it the following week, according to reports and industry analyst expectations.

The March debut of the iPad 3, as some have called it, was first reported today by AllThingsD, the blog owned by Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Citing unnamed sources, the blog said Apple will host a launch event the first week of March, likely at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, a regular venue for the company’s press announcements.

Last year, then-CEO Steve Jobs returned from medical leave to lead the launch event of the iPad 2 on March 2. Apple started selling the new tablet on March 11, 2011 via its online store.

If Apple follows the same timeline, it will probably conduct the event the week of March 5-9, and begin selling the new model the following week.

It’s possible that Apple will trot out a new iPad on one of the first two days of March — Thursday, March 1 or Friday, March 2 — but Apple usually hosts events earlier in the week.

Next month’s iPad introduction, if it does take place, will be the first without Jobs, who died last October at the age of 56 of complications from his long-running battle with pancreatic cancer.

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Adobe Says No To Android’s Chrome

Chrome for Android will not run Flash Player, the popular software that Apple has famously banned, Adobe confirmed Wednesday.

The acknowledgment was no surprise: Last November, Adobe announced it was abandoning development of Flash for mobile browsers. In other words, Google missed the Flash boat by several months.

“Adobe is no longer developing Flash Player for mobile browsers, and thus Chrome for Android Beta does not support Flash content,” said Bill Howard, a group product manager on the Flash team, in an Adobe blog Tuesday.

The stock Android browser included with the operating system does support Flash, noted Howard.

Adobe explained its decision to halt work on Flash Player for mobile browsers as necessary to shift resources, notably to its efforts on HTML5, the still-developing standard that will ultimately replace many of the functions Flash has offered.

“We will continue to leverage our experience with Flash to accelerate our work with the W3C and WebKit to bring similar capabilities to HTML5 as quickly as possible,” Danny Winokur, the Adobe executive in charge of interactive development, said last year. He was referring to the World Wide Web Consortium standards body and WebKit, the open-source browser engine that powers Chrome and Apple’s Safari. “And we will design new features in Flash for a smooth transition to HTML5 as the standards evolve.”

Analysts read the move as a tacit surrender to the trend, first seen at Apple, to skip support for Flash on smartphones and tablets. In 2010, former Apple Steve Jobs had famously dismissed Flash as unsuitable for mobile devices because it was slow, drained batteries and posed security problems.

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The U.S. Is Falling Behind

The U.S. government is losing a race in cyberspace — a social-networking race for the hearts and minds of the Internet community, a computer security expert said Wednesday.

Other countries — and many companies — are using social-networking tools to their advantage, while the U.S. government has taken tiny steps forward, said Rand Waltzman, a program manager focused on cybersecurity at the U.S.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The Chinese government pays citizens to patrol social-networking sites and dispute negative talk about all levels of government or any aspect of Chinese life, and companies such as Dell and Best Buy are training workers to respond to complaints on Facebook and other social-networking services, Waltzman said at the Suits and Spooks security conference in Arlington, Virginia.

U.S. regulations prevent the government from undertaking similar campaigns, he said. “Any time you want to go to the bathroom, you need presidential approval,” he said.

The U.S. will not be able to protect its residents if it cannot engage in its own covert social-media operations, Waltzman said.

Waltzman told about a U.S. special forces unit in Iraq in 2009 that attacked an insurgent paramilitary group, killed 16 of the members of the group and seized a “huge” weapons cache. As soon as the U.S. unit left the scene, the Iraqi group returned, put the bodies on prayer mats, and uploaded a photograph from a cheap mobile phone, he said. The group put out a press release in English and Arabic.

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Google Goes Pay To Track

Amid widespread concern about its new privacy policies, Google is now facing additional criticism over a deal to offer users Amazon gift certificates if they open their Web movements to the company in a program called Screenwise.

Google says the program launched “near the beginning of the year,” but the company’s low-key offer was disclosed Tuesday night on the blog Search Engine Land.

Google is asking users to add an extension to the Chrome browser that will share their Web-browsing activity with the company. In exchange, users will receive a $5 Amazon gift when they sign up and additional $5 gift card values for every three months they continue to share. (Amazon is not a partner in the project.) Users must be over age 13, and minors will need parental consent to participate. The tracking extension can be turned off at any time, allowing participants to temporarily close their metaphorical shades on Google.

The company says the program will help it “improve Google products and services and make a better online experience for everyone.”

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iPhone Adds To Sprint’s Losses

Sprint Nextel posted a bigger loss, reflecting the higher costs of offering Apple Inc’s iPhone. But the loss was smaller than expected because its signed up fewer new customers than expected.

Since Sprint subsidizes the cost of some of its phone sales, its costs rise and profit dwindles the more customers it wins. But since subscriptions fell short of expectations, its loss was smaller than expected.

Sprint’s loss was 35 cents per share excluding unusual items compared with Wall Street expectations for a loss of 37 cents per share, according to Thomson Reuters.

Its profit margin based on operating earnings before interest, depreciation and amortization (OIBDA) fell to 9.5 percent from 16 percent a year earlier but beat expectations for 8.6 percent, according to eight analyst estimates Reuters compiled.

“It’s still unbelievably depressed and subscribers were below expectations,” said Roe Equity Research analyst Kevin Roe who also noted that Sprint’s targets for the full year were not particularly impressive.

The margin decline was hurt by the hefty cost of selling the iPhone.

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Samsung Plans To Go Low-End

Samsung Electronics Co, the world’s top television maker, has seen TV sales firming up so far this year and plans to launch cheaper TVs, as demand for lower-end models increase, the head of its TV business said on Wednesday.

Demand for lower-end TVs has been increasing in recent months as major South Korean retailers such as E-Mart Co introduced flat-screen models that are as much as 40 percent cheaper through alliances with small local manufacturers.

“As long as there’s demand, we’re open to get into that segment,” Kim Hyun-suk, executive vice president of Samsung’s visual display division, told reporters.

“We’ve been preparing to introduce cheap models and have been studying to optimize production costs and retail prices. Those (cheap) models will be ready for sale in one or two months.”

Samsung, the most profitable TV maker, also introduced on Wednesday its highest-end premium set that it hopes will help boost profitability, as a fragile global economy threatens to sap demand growth this year after no growth in 2010.

The ES8000 model has voice, motion and face recognition functions, as well as 3D and Internet-enabled capabilities. The models, available in sizes of between 46 and 65 inches, will go on sale from this weekend in South Korea before a global launch in March.

Kim said Samsung’s TV sales so far this year have been stronger than a year ago and demand from China remained solid.

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