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W3C presents Key Web Services Standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published three new standards to help vendors such as Microsoft, IBM and BEA Systems improve Web services performance for customers.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published three new standards to help vendors improve Web services performance for customers.

The standards body on Tuesday issued XML-binary Optimized Packaging, SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism and Resource Representation SOAP Header Block to help developers package and send binary data in a SOAP 1.2 message.

The new schemas aim to solve a much-maligned problem in sharing and employing data between different flavors of Web services software. This includes simple tasks such as sending a video clip from a handheld computer to a desktop and major jobs such as exchanging large documents among several collaborators.

A major part of the problem is that Web services (define) applications are based on XML (define). This is a sufficient language for simple reading tasks. But when a programmer encodes binary data as XML, it yields a large, or "fat" file that sops up bandwidth and slows down applications.

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Google Set to Open AdWords Access

Google appears ready to provide greater access to its search-based advertising technology to advertisers and search-engine marketers.

Google plans to launch an API for its AdWords programs, a move that would give advertisers more control in managing their ads and allow vendors of bid-management tools to integrate with Google's system, according to search-engine marketers.

Google sells sponsored listings through its AdWords program in an auction-like model, where advertisers bid on the keywords that trigger their ads. Advertisers pay based on the number of clicks on their listings.

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Thunderbird takes on phishing sites

Taking advantage of the layout of the most common phishing e-mails (displaying one URL in the body of the message while actually pointing to another in the source), builds of Thunderbird with the safeguards built-in will display an alert and prompt the user to confirm whether she wants to actually visit the link.

The feature has not yet made it into a production release of Thunderbird, and will likely see some additional refinement before it is officially added and released.

Thunderbird has yet to build the kind of following that Firefox has since its 1.0 release. This is due in part to lack of name recognition, as well as the fact that Firefox has been much more heavily publicized as a more-secure alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. However, Outlook and Outlook Express have also had security problems of their own.

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FITC 2005

The annual canadian FITC conference is coming up and introducing a large list of speakers. Now entering there fourth year, FITC is the only Canadian Festival of its kind; combining cutting edge technical speakers with inspirational creative speakers from around the world.

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Test Build Mozilla Thunderbird Inline Spell Checking

A test build of Mozilla Thunderbird with inline spell checking is available for Windows. Developed by Scott MacGregor and building on the work Neil Deakin did for Nvu, the feature highlights potentially misspelled words with a red dotted underline (much like applications such as Microsoft Word). Users can easily pick from the top seven spelling suggestions using the context menu. Scott has posted more details about the inline spell checker test build in the MozillaZine Forums. You can grab the build (Windows installer) from the inlinespellcheck-test-build directory on ftp.mozilla.org but please read the forum post before installing and leave your feedback in the same topic. A screenshot of the inline spell check in action is available.

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Ask and Ballmer Answers

What name is synonymous with Microsoft? If you answered Bill Gates, you're only half right. When Gates took on the role of chief software architect, he left Steve Ballmer to call the shots day-to-day.

Since Ballmer took over as CEO in early 2000, he has slowly assumed the public mantle of leadership while longtime partner Gates focuses on technology. With that in mind, MCP Magazine surveyed their readers and found out what they wanted to hear from Steve.

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Search Engines, Bloggers Team to Fight Spam

Google, MSN, Six Apart and Yahoo plan to support an HTML tag to keep comment-spam postings out of search engines.

The Internet's leading search engines and a major Weblog tool vendor are joining together to fight the onslaught of spam in the comment sections of blogs.

Google Inc., Microsoft Corp.'s MSN division, Yahoo Inc. and Six Apart Ltd. announced late Tuesday that they are supporting a tag called "nofollow" to exclude links in blog comments from search-engine crawlers and to prevent spam posts from influencing search rankings.

Comment spam occurs when spammers attempt to dump Web site links into the comment sections of blogs. The spammers often use automated bots with the goal of trying to game search engines by increasing their link popularity. Incoming and outgoing links are a major factor in determining where a site ranks in search results.

The "nofollow" tag is already a part of HTML, but Google suggested using it as a way for blogs to tell search-engine spiders to ignore hyperlinks appearing within comment sections, trackbacks and referrer lists, said Anil Dash, vice president of Six Apart's professional network.

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Win the battle against spyware with Windows AntiSpyware

Windows AntiSpyware is a security technology that helps protect Windows users from spyware and other potentially unwanted software.

Windows AntiSpyware (Beta) is a security technology that helps protect Windows users from spyware and other potentially unwanted software. Known spyware on your PC can be detected and removed. This helps reduce negative effects caused by spyware including slow PC performance, annoying pop-up ads, unwanted changes to Internet settings, and unauthorized use of your private information. Continuous protection improves Internet browsing safety by guarding over 50 ways spyware can enter your PC.

Click here to start the war against spyware!

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MSN expected to test new blog and search features

MSN is expected to test new blog and search features that will enable users to find blogs and syndicate content using the RSS format.

Microsoft's Internet division will add features to MyMSN to its personalized Web service, that will let users find blogs and syndicate content using the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) format, according to company representatives.

People will be able to add content feeds to their MyMSN pages so they can view snippets of news and information in one place, without surfing to each individual page. Another feature will let people search for specific content contained within blogs.

"RSS is getting a lot of traction and we see it as a great tool for people to gain immediacy when it comes to information," said Brooke Richardson, MSN lead product manager.

MSN is taking a page from rival Yahoo when it comes to RSS. Last year, Yahoo began supporting the syndication format, allowing My Yahoo subscribers to search for RSS feeds and aggregate headlines from around the Web.

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