CdA Ironman goes high-tech
If you’re near a computer during next weekend’s Coeur d’Alene Ironman, you can gather near-real-time reports on the competitors.
The managers of the Ironman Web site have added a “track an athlete” feature that uses GPS data and tracking chips on every competitor.
Log on to http://ironman.com and click on Ironman Live. That leads you to Live Athlete Tracking. Clicking that lets you choose Ford Ironman Coeur d’Alene.
On race day – Sunday – you can track athletes there by bib number, name or division.
Clicking on an athlete’s name will then provide you with pacing and split information.
Ironman.com will also be providing day-of-race webcasts updating overall results, according to an organization spokesman.
China blocks Flickr images
Flickr.com, one of the world’s most popular photo-sharing sites, owned by Yahoo Inc., is being blocked by the Chinese government, Yahoo’s Hong Kong unit said.
Flickr – popular among a growing class of digital photo enthusiasts in the world’s second-largest Internet market – has not shown photos to users in mainland China since last week amid rumors Beijing took action after images of the Tiananmen massacre in June 1989 were posted.
“It is our understanding that Flickr users in China are not able to see images on Flickr, and we have confirmed that this is not a technical issue on our end,” a spokeswoman for Yahoo Hong Kong said in an e-mail in response to a Reuters inquiry.
“It appears that the Chinese government is restricting access to Flickr, although we have not received confirmation from them,” the spokeswoman said in the e-mail.
China’s Communist Party has banned references to the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in state media, the Internet and books as part of a whitewash campaign, meaning most young Chinese are ignorant of the events.
Yellowbook.com gains ground
A recent Web survey shows Yellowbook.com is the fastest growing Web site in the U.S. Internet phone-directory category, based on first quarter 2007 searches.
Yellowbook.com showed an 85 percent gain in searches versus the same quarter of 2006. But measured by total Web searches, Yellowbook is still well behind the market leaders such as Yahoo, Google and sound-alike competitor Yellowpages.com.
Yahoo’s phone and address finder is the market leader, accounting for 22.4 percent of those directory searches, according to measurement firm comScore. Compared to one year ago, Yahoo fell 3 percent in total searches, said comScore. Behind Yahoo are Superpages.com, with 19 percent of the market, Yellowpages with 17.6 percent and Google with 12 percent.
One in 10 sites could have malware
Google researchers have found a disturbing trend: They say at least one in 10 Web pages is booby-trapped with malware. Google’s Ghost in the Browser study, released this spring, looked at over 4.5 million Web pages, and found that 10 percent were capable of activating malicious codes and 16 percent were suspected to contain codes that might be a threat to computers.
“To entice users to install malware, adversaries employ social engineering. The user is presented with links that promise access to ‘interesting’ pages with explicit pornographic content, copyrighted software or media. A common example are sites that display thumbnails to adult videos,” the study states.
Google says browsers can be compromised just by visiting a Web page and become the vehicle for installing multitudes of malware on their systems. “The victims are completely unaware of the ghost in their browsers and do not know that their key strokes and other confidential transactions could be observed by remote adversaries,” said the Google release.