Data security

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how valuable is the ability to find the perfect image of an object from the entire Web? According to a bills of exchange delivered by two Google researchers at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing last weekend, the search-engine giant may be one step closer to answering that question.

Information scientists Shumeet Baluja and Yushi Jing announced the development of an algorithm, called VisualRank, that generates significantly greater degree relevant image-search results than current results using text-based clues (captions and other words associated by each image).

The goal ultimately is to train computers to move beyond text into the sufficient identification of "rich content" -- the shapes, colors and context of images that humans recognize with little effort.

Quantifying Relevance

VisualRank, Baluja and Jing reported, is designed to incorporate ongoing advances in computer recognition into Web search technology. The complicated process blends image-recognition advances with Google's sophisticated tools during assigning rank and weight to search results.

The net effect, they said, is that within a relatively narrow universe of search results, the algorithm was able to reduce the number of irrelevant results by more than 80 percent.

But as Baluja and Jing freely concede, it is highly impractical to try to identify comparable images among the billions currently stored adhering the Web. To experiment its system, the Google team created data sets of images of the 2,000 products most commonly searched for on Google. Team members then assigned a relevance score to images produced by Google's normal image-search tool and VisualRank.

Practical Possibilities?

One of the questions is whether VisualRank has adapted to practice market possibilities or is merely a challenging intellectual exercise. As industry observers have pointed out, the Web site Like.com also offers surfers the ability to locate images of similar products by searching for a particular element in each image. But the Web place, launched in 2006, also focuses its visual search on smaller subsets of images and makes no attempt to categorize every online image.

"Riya is a new kind of visual search engine," Like.com proudly proclaims. "We look inside the image, not only at the text around it." The site says searchers can catch "uniform faces and objects" in many online images, and then narrow the investigate results "using disguise, shape and make."

Similarly, the site Blinkx.com offers a tool for searching for specific video content. According to the company, its search tool is based on a "unique combination of patented conceptual search, speech recognition and video analysis software to efficiently, automatically and accurately find and qualify online video."

A potential customer for improved image search is law enforcement. Increasingly, federal and state investigators have shown attract in software that enables them to more quickly and effectively determine if a suspect hard drive contains possible child pornography. Although there is no indication that Google intends to market its VisualRank algorithm to law enforcement or computer juridical firms, that may be one of the more logical applications for Google's new tool.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. newspaper money fell 3.6 percent in the latest set of figures released by an industry group on Monday, thoughtful a migration of readers to the Internet and publishers' efforts to streamline their businesses.

The figures were released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations and compared the six months ending in March 2008 with the same period a year earlier.

Weekday paid circulation at many of the top 25 U.S. papers fell, though some papers, including Gannett Co Inc's USA Today and News Corp's Wall Street Journal, reported gains of less than 1 percent.

Weekday circulation at The New York Times fell 3.85 percent while Tribune Co's Los Angeles Times reported a drop of 5.13 percent.

The New York Post, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, reported a drop of 3.07 percent, while the New York Daily News, owned through tabloid rival Mortimer Zuckerman, posted a 2.09 percent drop. The Daily News reported circulation of 703,137, slightly ahead of the Post at 702,488.

Murdoch and Zuckerman are vying to buy the Newsday newspaper on Long Island from Tribune. That paper reported a 4.68 percent drop in circulation to 379,613 copies.

Sunday circulation fell 4.6 percent overall. The New York Times and the New York Daily News both saw Sunday circulation befall more than 9 percent. At Newhouse Newspapers' The Star-Ledger in Newark, New Jersey, Sunday circulation declined 12 percent.

The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News reported a combined send down of 14.79 percent. The Denver Post is owned by privately held MediaNews Group Inc. The Rocky Mountain News is published by EW Scripps Co.

The weekday results include more than 530 papers. The Sunday results include nearly 600 papers.

The Sunday circulation drop represents to some extent a deliberate effort to cut back on the number of copies of the dissertation they are putting out on the weekend, said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida.

"Maintaining high levels of circulation requires lots of introductory offers and most of those folks don't renew," Edmonds uttered, adding that attempts to keep that level high through such offers can cost more money than it is worth.

The New York Times is an example of one of those papers, spokeswoman Diane McNulty said. "In the past, we offered discounts, and a lot of those folks, though, as soon as the price went up, they dropped," she said.

(Editing by Maureen Bavdek)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nine major record labels filed suit against an online music provider on Monday, accusing Project Playlist Inc of a "massive infringement" of their copyrights to the songs of artists such as U2 and Gwen Stefani.

Project Playlist (http://www.projectplaylist.com) enables its users to easily find, play and share music with others for free, according to the suit filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

The website compiles a vast index of songs on the Internet and users can "quickly and easily search the index for recordings by their favorite artists. At the click of a mouse, Project Playlist instantly streams a digital performance of the selected recording to the user, who can listen to it on his or her computer or mobile device," the lawsuit said.

"Project Playlist besides has begun optimizing its location for use on iPhones and iPods," the record companies said in the suit.

The Beverly Hills, California-based company, an affiliate of KR Capital Partners LLC, also allows its users to embed their personalized playlists on social network sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Blogger, the suit in law said. The record companies said projectplaylist.com gets more than 600,000 daily users, nearly 9.5 million mean proportion page views per day.

"In short (Project Playlist's) entire business amounts to nothing more than a massive infringement" of the record companies' copyrights, the record companies said.

They are seeking to enjoin Project Playlist from continuing to offer its customers free music and are also seeking unspecified damages.

Attempts to reach Project Playlist with regard to comment were unavailing.

The nine record labels are: Warner Music Group Corp's Atlantic Recording Corp, Elektra Entertainment Group Inc and Warner Bros. Records Inc; EMI Group Plc's Capitol Records LLC, Priority Records LLC and Virgin Records America Inc; and the Interscope Records, Motown Record Co LP and UMG Recordings Inc labels of Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group.

(Reporting by Leslie Gevirtz; editing by means of Gerald E. McCormick)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Warner Bros. Television Group will relaunch its defunct WB network as an online video site sacrifice original programming and reruns of shows such as "Friends" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," aimed at a new generation of viewers.

TheWB.com targets 16-to-34-year-old viewers with new shows developed by writer and farmer Josh Schwartz, known for "Gossip Girl" "The O.C.," and "Terminator 4" director McG.

The launch comes as media companies struggle to attract junior viewers who spend as much time watching television viewed like they do sending text messages on cell phones and watching online videos.

Schwartz's "Gossip Girl," for instance, has failed to generate big ratings concerning the CW network, formed in 2006 from the merger of the old WB and UPN networks, but has attracted a loyal following online.

The CW network, which once streamed full episodes of the show on the Internet, decided recently to pull it off the Internet in a bid to boost TV viewership for the series.

Schwartz is developing a new show for TheWB.com that "takes viewers to the front of the line and behind the soundboard of a fictional Hollywood rock club," Warner Bros said in a statement.

TheWb.com will also be distributed by Comcast Corp's video-on-demand service and its online festival site Fancast.com. The new locality will also be available on Time Warner's AOL.

Reuters/Nielsen

Microsoft on Friday found itself trying to clarify that it has nothing to do with the poor coding practices that have enabled a massive SQL injection attack to affect Web sites using Microsoft IIS Web Server and Microsoft SQL Server.

"The attacks are facilitated by the agency of SQL injection exploits and are not issues related to IIS 6.0, ASP, ASP.Net, or Microsoft SQL technologies," said Bill Sisk, a communications manager at Microsoft, in a blog post. "SQL injection attacks enable malicious users to execute commands in an application's database."

Sisk said that to defend against SQL injection attacks, developers should follow secure coding practices.

SQL injection attacks involve insufficiently filtered code submitted to SQL databases end user input mechanisms.

On Friday, U.S. CERT issued a warning about SQL injection attacks that have compromised a large number of legitimate Web sites. Affected Web sites contain injected JavaScript that attempts to exploit several known vulnerabilities. U.S. CERT recommends disabling JavaScript and ActiveX.

Because but for this legitimate Web sites deliver this attack, SAN Internet Storm Center handler Donald Smith observes that the concept of a "trusted" or "legitimate" site is no longer meaningful. The attack has reportedly affected the Web sites of the United Nations and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to name a few.

On Thursday, computer security firm F-Secure said that it had found the offending JavaScript code on covering half a million Web pages. The company said that IT administrators should immediately block nmidahena.com, aspder.com, and nihaorr1.com, three domains associated with the injection attack.

Google may have taken some action to remove some of the affected pages from its index. A Google search for a text string associated with the malicious JavaScipt now yields only 56,700 results. A screenshot of that which is presumably a similar Google peer into -- the exact string is blurred -- performed by F-Secure last week shows 510,000 results.

A search using the same text string on Microsoft's Live Search returns 268,000 results. Yahoo Search returns 560,000 results for the text string in question.

Patrick Runald, a security researcher at F-Secure, explained in a blog post that the attack "finds quite text fields in the database and adds a link to malicious JavaScript to each and every unit of them which will make your Web site display them automatically. So essentially what happened was that the attackers looked for ASP or ASPX pages containing some type of querystring (a dynamic value such as an article ID, product ID, et cetera) parameter and tried to use that to upload their SQL injection code."

Runald reiterated Sisk's point that poorly written ASP and ASPX (.net) was to blame rather than some specific vulnerability in Microsoft's software.

LONDON (Reuters) - The transcript from Oscar Wilde's trial for gross indecency at London's Old Bailey Court went online for the first time on Monday by the side of a raft of murder, robbery and abduction cases.

Up for free examination are 110,000 pages of transcripts -- including Wilde's trial and the notorious story of Dr Crippen and the murder of his married woman.

Lurid tales of murder and rape, stories of pickpocketing and robbery -- every type of crime was paraded before the London court, which is topped by a statue of Justice with a sword in one hand and scales in the other.

The www.oldbaileyonline.org site was billed as the largest single source of searchable historical information about British lives that has ever been published.

The transcripts cover every one of the 210,000 trials held at the Old Bailey from 1674 to 1913, from just after The Great Fire that ravaged London to just before the outbreak of World War One. The court is still in operation.

As well as chronicling a string of sensational trials, the records also list the biographical details of about 3,000 men and women executed at the notorious Tyburn gallows in London.

"Until now, this treasure trove of festive, legal and family history has only been available to a few dedicated historians who were prepared to devote months peering at microfilms," said Professor Tim Hitchcock, a co-director of the project.

The Web site is being published by the Humanities Research Institute and is a joint project by means of the British Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire along with the Open University.

"Beside the desperate drama of crimes punished, the proceedings give us a new and remarkable audience to the everyday," Hitchcock said.

"History is full of information about kings and queens but there isn't much that tells us about the everyday life of ordinary people," he added.

Professor Robert Shoemaker, another co-director, said people from all over the world can inspect the site for free and get a valuable insight into a whole row of crimes.

"These crimes were committed by Irish terrorists, train robbers and suffragettes as well as by ordinary people," he said.

The site could in addition help people to search for criminal ancestors.

Researcher Joan Brewer found her husband's great-great-grandmother, Phoebe Douglas, who was transported to Australia in 1829.

Her trial details how she and two friends distracted the owner of a London draper's shop, allowing them to steal 30 yards (meters) of printed cotton.

"What made it even sadder was that she had a child she wasn't able to bring through her to Australia," Brewer said.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

LONDON - Coldplay will make the first single from their new album available as a free download to fans who visit the English band's Web site.

"Violet Hill," the first single from "Viva La Vida," will be available on http://www.coldplay.com from 7:15 a.m. EDT Tuesday, one week before it goes on sale at digital retailers.

It behest be available as a free download from the Web site for one week, a statement said.

The Web site will also give preliminary details about free shows at London's Brixton Academy on June 16 and at New York's Madison Square Garden on June 23.

Coldplay also announced Monday that the UK release of their new album has been moved up four days to June 12. That's the same day the album will be released in much of the world.

Despite recent efforts to clamp down on electronic payments fraud, the crime is still rife and is undermining citizens' confidence in buying and selling over the internet, the European Commission said Monday.

A Commission report on fraud and countermeasures taken betwixt 2004 and 2007 shows that even though the number of discovered cases is a small minority of the overall number of transactions using new payment services, they undermine the general level of confidence among citizens in the European Union.

In addition, electronic payment fraud is increasingly moving to non-face-to-face situations such viewed like Internet payments, the report said.

"Payment fraud is a moving target and, inevitably, new threats appear, such as identity theft/fraud and, more generally, cyber crime. In 2007, the Commission announced its policy objectives regarding cyber crime and will continue to closely monitor developments in this area," the Commission said.

Two recent pieces of E.U. legislation have tried to tackle the issue: a payment services directive and a money laundering directive. The money laundering law includes a "know your customer" rule for electronic transactions, but the Commission now believes more work is needed to raise citizens' awareness of the dangers.

"The Commission is working actively to minimize the payment fraud threat, for the benefit of consumers and financial services providers alike," said Charlie McCreevy, Commissioner for the E.U. internal market.

Action now being planned includes running awareness campaigns targeting the general public in the E.U. These could include running conferences about the dangers of electronic payments, the Commission said.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - The digital divide that separates rich and poor nations by dint of. their unequal access to information technology also exists within Europe's biggest economy, German industry association Bitkom said on Monday.

Western German states such as Hesse and Bavaria dominate Internet addresses ending in the German ".de" country code domain, with the country's five former Communist eastern states coming bottom of the list.

On average, there were 138 Internet addresses registered for 1,000 inhabitants in western states, twice as many as the average of 69 per many in the east, declared the IT, telecoms and new media association, Bitkom.

Germany was divided in 1945 following its defeat in the Second World War and reunited in 1990. Despite hundreds of billions of euros in investment in the east, Germany's eastern states are still poorer and suffer higher unemployment.

As a whole, Germany has the nature's second-biggest Internet presence after the United States, said Bitkom, quoting figures from the German Network Information Centre (DENIC), the central registering for all domains under the top level domain ".de."

Almost 75 the masses Web addresses are registered to the ."com" international domain, most from the United States, Bitkom said, followed by German ".de" addresses with about 12 million.

About 11 million are registered as ".net" international addresses and roughly the same number belong to the ".cn" Chinese top-level domain.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan, editing by Elizabeth Fullerton)

LONDON (Reuters) - Coldplay will accord. absent the first single from their new album for free over the Internet, the British band said on its Web site.

A note posted on www.coldplay.com says that fans can download "Violet Hill," from the album "Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends," free for one week from 1115 GMT on Tuesday. The album will be launched in Britain on June 12.

Coldplay also announced two free shows -- one at London's Brixton Academy on June 16 and another at Madison Square Garden in New York on June 23.

The giveaway is the latest attempt by musicians to win fans and media exposure through new marketing initiatives.

Last year Prince gave away his album "Planet Earth" for free with copies of a weekly newspaper, angering retailers and the record label which had a deal to distribute it.

A seven-inch vinyl version of "Violet Hill" disposition also be given at a distance on the cover if the music weekly NME on May 7.

Radiohead topped the album charts in Britain and the United States after initially offering listeners the chance to pay what they wanted to download the album "In Rainbows."

As bands seek new ways to sell their music and connect with fans, particularly over the Internet, record labels are struggling to keep pace and esteem incorrigible a number of top acts from their rostas as a result of the industry shakeup.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White)