Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter compromised for industrial espionage A number of multinational companies, including Apple, Facebook, and Twitter, have been compromised by a group suspected of industrial espionage. Recent reports by Symantec and Kaspersky Lab exposed the hacking collectives as a powerful group that has compromised the billion-dollar companies since 2011. Symantec suspects the highly trained hackers may be independent “hackers for hire”, interested in more than credit card information or customer databases. Instead, they suspect the threat actor is focused on high level corporate information they can profit from, such as insider trading information. Symantec reported that 49 […]

Sidewalk Labs is on a mission to bring free wifi to the world Sidewalk Labs, a startup backed by Google, has begun re-purposing old phone booths in New York City by turning them into free Wi-Fi hotspots. The startup’s initiative to improve city life through tech innovation began last month and started as a winning idea in the city’s Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge, which aimed to find a creative new use for the phone booths. The 10,000 obsolete phone booths will soon be converted into Wi-Fi hotspots and information kiosks that can be used to charge cell phones, make calls, […]

Apple is making Swift open source This week Apple announced that Swift will soon be open source. In the keynote address at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Craig Federighi was met with the applause when he stated that Apple thinks “Swift should be everywhere and used by everyone” and stated “Today we’re announcing that Swift will be open source.” Swift will join the growing array of tech that Apple has decided to make open source as a key part of their software strategy. Federighi outlined the additional new changes we could expect for Swift 2.0, including “all new optimization tech” geared […]

Google launches a new hub to streamline security, privacy, and account management This week at Google I/O, Google announced its new center of control for privacy and security, My Account. Google noted that security and privacy are “two sides of the same coin,” and therefore, are giving users the ability to quickly access and control both from one place. My Account brings two new options, the Privacy Checkup and Security Checkup, to simplify and guide users through the array of settings available to them. You can also manage settings normally used to enhance your search history, such as Web/App activity […]

This week in web perf news the IRS website was used to steal over 100,000 tax returns, Google rolled out algorithm adjustments to remove offensive Google Maps results, Bing added how-old.net to its image search, and Google and Bing announced their searches will be indexing apps across multiple devices. Criminals used IRS website to steal massive amount of tax information A sophisticated breach of the IRS website that helped criminals gain access to tax returns of up to 100,000 people this week. The IRS disclosed that they believe the breach originated in Russia. The criminals used the personal information of […]

This week Bing announced it will add its own mobile-friendliness algorithm to its search results, WordPress released a security update, Google added a new Search Analytics report for web developers, and the FCC denied delay of net neutrality rules. Bing will roll out its own mobile-friendly algorithm in the upcoming months This week Bing announced they would be following Google’s lead, but are taking a slightly different approach to mobile-friendly search rankings. Bing announced in November that they were investing in mobile-friendly pages, and have since added “Mobile-friendly” tags to relevant sites, resulting in positive user feedback. However, Bing will […]

Live streaming apps steal traffic from the pay-per-view Mayweather/Pacquiao fight Over the weekend dozens of live streams of the Mayweather/Pacquiao fight were available through Periscope, a fairly new app owned by Twitter. Because apps like Periscope and Meerkat record and broadcast live, it is more challenging to shut down live streams of TV footage before users see them. HBO and Showtime, who co-produced the pay-per-view boxing match were required to alert Twitter of illegal streams of the so called fight of the century, while many media firms say it should be the app’s responsibility to police the live streaming of […]

There was a lot going on in the internet this week! We can expect to see Twitter and Google partner up, but we can expect the opposite for Comcast and Time Warner cable. WordPress adds a security update after the disclosure of a cross-site scripting vulnerability, and Microsoft developers create a tool that guesses your age, which quickly went viral. Twitter and Google partner up to integrate tweets into Google search results According to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, we can expect to see Twitter content integrated into Google search results sometime this month. A deal was reached between the two […]

Mobile friendliness algorithm update went global this week Google began globally rolling out their mobile search algorithm update to include mobile-friendly websites as a ranking signal. The updated search algorithm improves search result rankings for web pages that are optimized for mobile traffic, and should impact more sites than Google’s Panda and Penguin updates. Only page rankings on mobile searches will be affected by the new search algorithm. Contrary to what was said in a Google hangout Q&A session earlier this year, the new algorithm is isolated to mobile searches only. There are no degrees of mobile-friendliness; your page is […]

Google modifies the structure of URLs on mobile This week Google made a change to the URL structure that is displayed normally from a mobile search, explaining that “well-structured URLs offer users a quick hint about the page topic and how the page fits within the website”. The algorithms were updated starting in the USin an effort to display names that would better reflect the page. This will structure the results using a breadcrumbs-like format, and use the “real-world name of the site” instead of the domain name. I checked search results on my mobile, but the change had not […]