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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Although Apple is being declared the winner in its throwdown with Adobe over mobile Flash, its victory could increase competition in the market for the company. That’s because resources formerly devoted to Flash applications now can be redirected at developing HTML 5 apps — a development that could be good for HTML 5, but not necessarily for Apple.

Adobe’s announcement this week that it was stopping further development of its Flash player for mobile devices could create more winners than losers in the cybersphere, according to several experts interviewed by MacNewsWorld.

One beneficiary of Adobe’s decision, which appears to have vindicated Apple’s dogged stance not to support Flash on its mobile devices, will be the latest version of the language for creating Web pages, HTML 5, according to Geoff Blair, studio director for Lost Decade Games.
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It totally fixes the problem. It makes things worse. It does nothing. There was never a problem in the first place. Those are some of the various general reactions users are having to iOS 5.0.1, Apple’s update to its mobile OS is designed to address the complaints some users were having about battery drain in the iPhone 4S. Judging by customer feedback, though, not everyone is happy with the solution.

Apple on Thursday pushed out iOS 5.0.1, an iPhone operating system update designed to address problems some iPhone 4S users had reported regarding the device’s quickly draining battery.

However, the update apparently did not solve the battery-drain issues for everyone, according to many posts on the company’s own support forum.

Whereas iPhone users typically expect their phones to easily make it through a full day of moderate use between charges, some 4S users insist that the battery charge falls 1 percent every few minutes. Some users reported that the patch even worsened the problem. Others say that the update did indeed solve the issue and have witnessed a boost in battery performance. And still others claim to have never noticed a problem to begin with.
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Google just announced that it is acquiring Motorola Mobility. The search and online advertising company is buying the company for approximately $12.5 billion (or $40 per share), in cash. The price represents a premium of 63 percent to the closing price of Motorola Mobility shares last Friday. Google had about $39 billion in cash at last count.

Here’s the other important part of the PR (the why, and what happens to Android now):

The acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a dedicated Android partner, will enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem and will enhance competition in mobile computing. Motorola Mobility will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. Google will run Motorola Mobility as a separate business.

In a blog post, Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page writes that Google has acquired Motorola not only because of its strength in Android smartphones and devices, but also for being a “market leader in the home devices and video solutions business.”
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Amazon may have changed its Kindle iOS app to comply with Apple’s revised in-app subscription policy, but the retailer has now come out with its own, web-based alternative, known as the Kindle Cloud Reader. Compatible with both Chrome and Safari, the new app is essentially a browser version of the Kindle eBook reader, providing PC, Mac and Chromebook users with access to their digitized libraries. The tool also offers local storage, allowing for offline reading, though Amazon’s device limit still applies, so if your library’s already strewn across multiple gadgets, the app’s reading functionality may be limited. The company unveiled the Cloud Reader today with relatively little fanfare or explanation, but its site highlights the service’s main attractions, including its iPad optimization.
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It’s easy to imagine that our whiz-bang gadgets have made us more productive than ever. But what if that’s simply not the case?

America isn’t innovating like it used to. And by “like it used to,” I mean the period from after World War II to 1973, when an explosion of new technologies increased worker productivity at a pace that, had it continued to the present day, would mean an increase in the average worker’s wage of 51 percent, or $18 per hour. (This difference is represented by the gray area in the graph, above.)

That’s just one of the surprising (at least to me) long-term trends explained in a new report from The Brookings Institution, A Dozen Economic Facts About Innovation, which delves into everything from the reasons for wage stagnation among middle-income men to the effects of innovation on life expectancy.

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Rumors flew in late June that Electronic Arts was in late-stage discussions to acquire casual gaming stalwart PopCap Games for an eyebrow-raising $1 billion. As it would turn out, those rumors weren’t far off.

Today, EA announced plans to purchase PopCap for $650 million in cash. The deal, which is expected to close by the end of August, also sees EA paying out $100 million in shares to “certain stockholders of PopCap.” EA also intends to offer some $50 million in employee retention awards.

Additionally, PopCap has been extended a sizable performance-related earn-out that could potentially increase the purchase price. Should PopCap generate in excess of $343 million in revenue by the end of 2013, EA will pay out an additional $550 million. If PopCap’s earnings come in at $200 million, that payout would drop to $275 million, while $110 million in revenue would yield $100 million. Anything less than $91 million would result in no additional compensation.
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What will happen when the buzz around Google’s new social networking site, Google+, dies down? Well, Facebook hopes to take over the spotlight.

Its CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg told reporters that the company is preparing something “awesome” to be launched next week. Speaking from the Seattle office, Zuckerberg would only say that the project was developed there.

The only major engineering center outside of its Palo Alto, California headquarters, this unit played a pivotal role in developing Facebook’s improved mobile site.

Hence, Reuters speculates that the launch might involve something mobile or tablet-related–perhaps the Facebook iPad app. At present, iPad users use either Safari or other third-party apps like MyPad to access Facebook.

Since Facebook has been focusing on winning over more Apple users, it might just unveil a new platform for mobile Safari–if tech blog site TechCrunch is right. Dubbed Project Spartan, the new HTML5-based platform aims to compete with Apple’s App Store on iOS devices. According to TechCrunch, “80 or so” third-party developers are already onboard Project Spartan, including Zynga.
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Google+, Google’s ambitious project to redefine the future of social media, has created a huge buzz. Google+ has posed threat to different groups in numerous ways – it has attacked boldly on the present social network king Facebook, while China immediately blocked the access to Google+ with its “great firewall”, and Google’s unpreparedness to face the massive influx of traffic has forced the beta version of Google+ to close its invitation door.

Google has a history of attempts and failures when it comes to rolling out social networking services. In 2004, Google’s social networking site Orkut debuted and disappeared – with a minor popularity in Brazil and India. Open Social, launched in 2007 with the aim to create an open standard for social network applications, faded away as Facebook monopolized the spotlight. 2009 saw Google’s struggles in the social-based communications system Wave and Buzz, both stirred the market but did not survive.
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