Facebook users who’ve been avoiding the new Timeline profile format won’t have a choice for much longer, because Facebook will be switching all users over to the Timeline format in the next few weeks.

Timeline is Facebook’s attempt to narrate users’ life stories through photos, status updates, major events, and new friends. Like the old profiles, Timelines are arranged in reverse chronological order, but it’s now much easier to go back in time, with an index of years on the right side of the screen. Users can fill in information at any point in their Timelines, including “life before Facebook.”

Users can also plug in Facebook apps, showing summaries of the music they’re listening to, the articles they’re reading, and the movies they’re watching. Facebook recently expanded the scope of this feature to include apps for food, shopping, concerts, and more.
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The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) have been making headlines, but what are they, exactly? Here are the facts.

The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are getting more negative attention, as major websites such as Wikipedia plan to protest the bills with blackouts on Wednesday. Even Google will join the action, with a link on its homepage explaining why the company opposes the legislation.

But what are SOPA and PIPA, exactly, and why are tech luminaries lambasting legislation aimed at stamping out copyright infringement? Read on for a full explanation.
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Facebook has confirmed the spam attack over the last few days, but said it limited the damage. The highly offensive imagery was reported as part of various users’ Facebook news feeds. The giant social networking site said that the spam attack exploited a browser vulnerability.

New spam on Facebook, which displays pornographic and violent imagery, is not the work of Anonymous. That’s the word in a new posting from the political hacktivist group.
There has been speculation by security researchers that the spam was result of something called the Fawkes Virus, a reference to the Guy Fawkes masks that Anonymous members wear in their video communiqués. Fawkes was famous for his role in the Gunpowder Plot that targeted England’s King James I in the 17th century, and the Guy Fawkes masks figured prominently in a popular, anti-totalitarian movie set in an alternative modern England, called V for Vendetta.

‘Highly Untrue’

But, in a posting on the Pastebin site where Anonymous members have been known to issue communications, AnonymousWiki reports that Anonymous involvement in this attack is “highly untrue.”
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“It has become one of the places where students and most of the rest of us now are getting much of our core information,” said analyst Rob Enderle. “It is a crowdsourced kind of effort and it is not advertiser-supported. The only way it survives, much like any public effort, is through public support.”

Even as WikiLeaks remains silenced by a lack of funds, another wiki is getting support from high-tech places. Wikimedia, the parent company of Wikipedia, just raked in $500,000 from two heavy hitters.
The Brin Wojcicki Foundation, started by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, awarded the half-million-dollar grant to the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and its sister sites. The Wikimedia Foundation kicked off its eighth annual fundraiser on Wednesday.

“This grant is an important endorsement of the Wikimedia Foundation and its work, and I hope it will send a signal as we kick off our annual fundraising campaign this week,” said Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “This is how Wikipedia works: people use it, they like it, and so they help pay for it, to keep it freely available for themselves and for everyone around the world. I am very grateful to Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki for supporting what we do.”
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The Linux world looked ahead to a future without mobile flash — some with joy, others not so much. “Flash was potentially great technology, but Adobe messed it up by keeping it as a moving target and never getting it right,” said blogger Robert Pogson. Blogger hairyfeet, on the other hand, sees a darker future for content in which freedoms are further restricted.

If ever there was an announcement to get tongues wagging in the Linux blogosphere and beyond, it was the news that Adobe will stop developing Flash for mobile devices.

That, of course, is just what was announced last week, and the wagging hasn’t stopped ever since.
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The Run is impressive in many ways, though none of them are the obvious ones. Much has been made of the ‘interactive cutscenes’ and the story in general, but these are actually the weakest elements.

The strongest – thankfully – lie in the racing itself. These cars and roads are exciting, sexy and fun. Turns out that’s a good way to make a racing game. Who knew?

The concept is that you, Slick McDouche – he must have a name, but we don’t care – are in an exclusive, high-stakes, coast-to-coast race across America. What’s more, you’ve only just escaped the mob, who drop you into a car crusher during the game’s opener.
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TOLEDO, Ohio — Chrysler Group plans to invest at least $500 million into its Toledo North Assembly Plant and hire a second shift of workers in late 2013 to build a new Fiat-based SUV for Jeep, as well as other vehicles.

Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne, visiting the plant for this morning’s announcement, said the automaker planned to replace the Liberty with a vehicle he said would be “superior” in technology to its SUV flagship, the Jeep Grand Cherokee.

“This plant has been chosen to build the future Jeep SUV to replace the current Jeep Liberty that will be exported to markets all over the world,” Marchionne said at the plant this morning.

“Jeep is at the heart of our plans to internationalize Chrysler, a process which is being accelerated by Chrysler’s access to Fiat’s distribution capabilities in Europe and Latin America.”

Toledo North is Chrysler’s only assembly plant with only one shift of workers. Today’s announcement is expected to add an additional 1,105 hourly and salaried jobs to the plant, which builds the Jeep Liberty and Dodge Nitro SUVs.
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Mirasol’s reflective display is being tested by device manufacturers, and could appear on shelves next year.

Even as the processing power and download speeds of mobile devices surge, one component still lags behind: the screen. LCD panels use significantly more power than any other component of a phone or tablet because of their need to pump out bright light to form an image.

The only practical alternative is e-ink, the technology used in the Amazon Kindle; it consumes orders of magnitude less power but sacrifices color and the ability to change images fast enough for video playback or smooth game play.
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In the wake of rising scam reports, the company has launched new protective measures and released statistics on attacks.

Facebook is countering reports about scams affecting its users—and a rising user perception of insecurity—with new security tweaks and the release of statistics suggesting that most of its 800 million active users experience few problems.

The company is also announcing two new features. One generates passwords for your Facebook apps to protect your main account; another deals with a side effect of security—the lockdown of compromised accounts—by enabling your Facebook friends to help you recover an account.

While Facebook employs some of the highest-tech tools in the business, it is also one of the Web’s most attractive targets by dint of its size.

“I feel pretty strongly that Facebook is the safest place for users to have their information on the Internet, without question,” Tao Stein, Facebook’s software engineer for site integrity, said in an interview.
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Jack Dorsey says Square’s real mission is to turn the humble receipt into a lucrative new publishing platform.

Jack Dorsey, known to his 1.7 million followers at @jack, is trying to invent a new form of publishing again. The last time he did that, he helped to create Twitter.

For a few years now, Dorsey has been working on Square, a company he founded that offers a dinky card reader that makes it possible for anyone to accept credit-card payments on a phone or tablet. In conversation with David Kirkpatrick at the Techonomy conference in Tucson, Arizona, today, he explained that Square is actually a publishing company, too, and that creating a new publishing medium is a big part of where his new company’s profit potential lies.
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