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Mozilla is about to release Firefox 3 beta 3. The new Firefox 3 is faster, more secure, easier to use, more personal and provides an improved platform for developers. The release notes for beta 2 give a good overview of the new features. There’s an interesting discussion on Ajaxian about Cross-Site XHR Security in Firefox 3: this feature will make cross-site communication easier, but possibly introduces security risks.

Google has come up with some new features to attract the regular user to the internet.

The mega search engine has devised an experimental search page and added some new features to its “alternative views” experiment from last May.

Map view is one feature that according to the official Google blog, solves the problem of looking through many sites for information by “plotting some of the key locations contained in your web results onto a map“, according to Andrew Hogue of Google.

Timeline view is another feature that looks up dates on the internet much like Map View looks up locations along with biographical information generated from a user’s search results.

Mr Hogue explained the control panel on the right side of the page: “Usually we show some text from the page that includes a few of the words you searched for.

“Now you can instead reveal text containing dates, locations, measurements, or images,” he said.

Despite a strong marketing campaign from Apple in the UK, sales of the iPhone suggest it has failed to impress customers across the UK.

The Financial Times reported that “people familiar with the situation” said that O2, the network operator exclusively carrying the iPhone, has sold 10,000 fewer iPhones than expected since its November 9th launch.

Analysts had expected to sell 200,000 of the devices as a conservative estimate.

A spokesman for O2 however said that “those figures did not come from us” and stated that despite the negative reports, “we continue however to be delighted with the device, which is fastest-selling device we have ever had”.

The high cost and long contract have been keep customers from signing new contracts, with the minimum cost for an iPhone and an 18-month contract at an amazing £269 plus £35 per month.

A study funded by mobile phone companies has suggested that radiation from handsets can cause insomnia, headaches and confusion in users.

Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and Wayne State University in the US studied 35 men and 36 women aged between 18 and 45 and exposed some to radiation equivalent to that sent out from mobile phones - 884 MHz of wireless signals - while others were given a placebo effect.

The study found that those exposed to the radiation took longer to enter the first of the deeper stages of sleep and spent less time in the deepest stage.

Reports of headaches were also greater during radio wave exposure than during the “sham” exposures and neither group was able to tell which was receiving the radio waves and which were not.

Sleep expert Dr Jeffrey Lipsitz said the results were not comforting.

“Aside from the sleep aspects, honestly, it’s a little worrisome that you could measure any significant difference in people just because they’ve been exposed to radio waves that simulate cellphone use,” he explained.

“It certainly cries out for more research.”

GNUCitizen said they have found a serious security bug in the BT Home Hub that could let hackers steal identities and commit other types of fraud by controlling calls routed over the internet.

With BT’s Home Hub a widely used router, the ability reach many homes is a serious threat to many customers as the bug can still be sent out even if the default password for the hub has been changed. For the bug to activate, a user of VoIP would have to visit a website that has some kind of malicious code.

Adrian Pastor, one of the hackers GNUCitizen, said that “we believe this is gonna be very hot in the VoIP fraud arena”, in an email.

To resolve the issue, BT has disabled the Remote Assistance features that allow support professionals to gain control over the device, according to Mr Pastor.

As a result however, Mr Pastor said: “Now we have been able to come up with a new technique to steal VoIP calls”.

A discussion in an online webmaster forum indicates that Google might have invented a new ranking penalty for websites that rank well for popular search terms.

What has happened?

During the last few weeks, some webmasters noticed that some of their long term position 1 or position 2 rankings in Google suddenly ranked at position 6.

The problem affected well established websites with a long history. The dropped web pages had long time rankings for popular search terms, usually on position 1.

Why has Google done this?

It is not exactly clear yet which factors cause that ranking drop in Google’s results. There are two theories:

1. Google now considers usage data when calculating the rankings.
2. Google now has a better understanding of word and phrase relationships.

If different usage data is the reason for the change then web pages with a higher click-through rate would get higher positions. However, some webmasters reported that even web pages with high click through rates have been downranked.

The penalty also seems to affect web pages that are listed with an appealing title and a description that is very relevant to the search term so it might be that the click-rate is not taken into account.

We think that it’s more likely that the word and phrase relationships are the reason for the ranking drops. It seems that web pages with too many inbound links using exactly the searched keyword as the anchor text were affected by the filter.

If the link to a special web page always uses exactly the same anchor text then the word variety is probably extremely low compared to the competing websites in the top results. That indicates a manipulation of the anchor texts and Google applies the filter.

What can you do to avoid that filter?

When you build links to your website, make sure that you use different but related keywords for the links to your site. If you overuse the same link text, Google might discover a manipulation.

If you use different but related keywords, then ranking algorithms will consider your web page relevant to a special topic. Use IBP’s inbound link analyzer to get further information about the inbound link structure that leads to top 10 rankings.

Let’s be rational. It’s not even remotely affordable, especially at the high end
—the high end being defined by the option of a 64GB SSD. There aren’t a lot of subnotebooks in that category but, if you are contemplating buying a MacBook Air, you still owe it to your credit card limit to do some research.

read more | digg story

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Apple introduces the MacBook Air
MacBook Air is ultrathin, ultraportable and ultra unlike anything else, that is so thin it can fit inside a letter sized envelope. It’s the result of rethinking conventions. Of multiple wireless innovations. And of breakthrough design. With MacBook Air, mobile computing suddenly has a new standard.

Steve Jobs, co-founder and chief executive of Apple, proved the feat when he debuted the notebook at the Macworld Expo and said the notebook offers other goodies for the tech savvy buyer.

Standard features for the computer include Bluetooth, 802.11n WiFi and 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

What’s more, all of the laptop’s motherboard, storage and cooling systems fit on a single board about the length of pencil and to fit into the laptop, Intel had to shrink its processor to about the size of a pound sterling.

The starting price is about $1,800 and is scheduled to ship in two weeks. Apple will also be offering a $3,100 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo model which will be equipped with a 64 GB solid state disk drive for those out there who need serious power.

Key Features:

• The world’s thinnest notebook - 0.4 cm - 1.94 cm
• 3lbs in weight
• 1.6GHz or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
• 13.3 inch LED back-lit widescreen display
• Up to 5 hours battery time
• Trackpad with multi-touch gesture support
• Back lit keyboard
• Built-in iSight video camera
• 2GB memory
• 80GB 4200-rpm PATA hard drive/ 64GB solid-state drive
• Built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi2 and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• Starting at £1,199

Watch the guided tour.

The favourite websites visited by UK surfers were not surprisingly made up mostly of the large search giants Amazon and Google, proving that people continue to enjoy mega search sites with the occasional odd favourite site.

Awards for the best sites during the past three months were voted on by visitors at BT’s website in the BT Online Excellence Awards made up of 5,000 nominations and 27,000 votes.

The top ten votes from first to last are as follows:

1.Google.com
2. BBC.co.uk
3. Amazon.com (books)
4. Next.co.uk
5. BBC.co.uk/cbeebies
6. Amazon.com
7. BBCgoodfood.com
8. Amazon.com (electrical)
9. Greenpeace.org.uk
10. Gardenersworld.com

Matt Walton, head of online channel development at BT, said: “We weren’t interested in the technical aspects of the sites, just why users like them.

“As we suspected, the range of products or information available was the most important factor, followed by how easy it was use.”

The BBC won best in three of the 17 categories in the contest, winning the top spot for Best Cookery Website, Best Kids Website and Best News Website.