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Recent iPhone ads have touted the utility of having the iPhone on a trip. Vacationing with the iPhone is a great convenience, but also makes it harder to vacation.

Using the quasi-GPS and Google Maps, being able to make dinner reservations, forsaking tour guidebooks and printed itineraries it great. On a recent long weekend to Hawaii, my friends and I discovered and confirmed the utility of the iPhone features on the road. So much so, we didn't even bring our laptops, which is a big deal for some of us. Really, it is. The only physical complaint I had … Read more

The head of Google's open-source programs on Monday urged international delegates to vote against certifying Office Open XML as an ISO standard, saying the Microsoft-led effort poses a risk to users who want unfettered access to documents.

Delegates from international standards bodies are meeting in Geneva this week to resolve technical comments submitted after Office Open XML (OOXML) failed to pass as a standard last September. The results of the five-day ballot resolution meeting are critical for Microsoft's two-year bid to get International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, certification.

Google's open-source programs manager, Zaheda Bhorat, posted a blog … Read more

Brazil, the biggest nation in Latin America, has a number of firsts to its name. It's got the world's best football (soccer in the parlance of you Americans), the country is leagues ahead of everybody else on Planet Earth when it comes to alternative energy--and its citizenry have taken over Orkut. I'm still not clear why Brazilians so groove on this particular social network, but "quem sabe?"

So would the same formula, tailored for a North American audience, work the same magic north of the border? I put the question to Joe Kraus, whom I … Read more

A high-profile incident this weekend in which Pakistan's state-owned telecommunications company managed to cut YouTube off the global Web highlights a long-standing security weakness in the way the Internet is managed.

After receiving a censorship order from the telecommunications ministry directing that YouTube.com be blocked, Pakistan Telecom went even further. By accident or design, the company broadcast instructions worldwide claiming to be the legitimate destination for anyone trying to reach YouTube's range of Internet addresses.

The security weakness lies in why those false instructions, which took YouTube offline for two hours on Sunday, were believed by routers … Read more

This post was updated at 12:54 p.m. PST to add formal comment from Fox Interactive Media.

Don't expect News Corp. to jump ship on its advertising contract with Google for social network MySpace, representatives from the company said on Monday.

TechCrunch had reported earlier that News Corp. was potentially in negotiations with Microsoft, which serves ads on MySpace rival Facebook, as a replacement for the Google ads that have run on MySpace and other Fox Interactive Media sites since August 2006. Google co-founder Sergey Brin had said in the company's most recent earnings announcement that its advertising contract with Fox Interactive had proven less lucrative … Read more

In the age of Google and YouTube, anybody can become a celebrity, villain, or laughingstock in no time. All it takes, for example, is for someone to publicly post another's (embarrassing) private video online, which is what happened to one Canadian teen acting out a scene from Star Wars.

There are also those Web sites out there with the purpose of shaming others. These sites criticize ex-lovers and dress down lousy tippers. But some anonymous postings can greatly harm the reputations of people, with the posters suffering no repercussions.

Read the full Newsweek story at: "The flip side of Internet fame"… Read more

Google could soon be forced to delete identifying user information from its search logs, statements by the European Union data regulators suggest. The search engine's lawyers have long argued that network addresses don't really count as personal information, and even if they did, the company's policy of masking the last few digits of an IP address after 18 months is more than sufficient. European regulators don't appear to be buying Google's claims.

According to an Associated Press report, European data privacy regulators confirmed this past Thursday that Internet search engines based outside Europe must also … Read more

Updated, 9:40 p.m. to add YouTube's explanation of what caused outage.

YouTube suffered a two-hour long, system-wide outage on Sunday that the company said was triggered by a network based in Pakistan.

"For about two hours, traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous Internet Protocols," said YouTube spokesperson Ricardo Reyes in a statement "Many users around the world could not access our site. We have determined that the source of these events was a network in Pakistan. We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening … Read more