Anonymous Web search now a reality Privacy advocates have been raising a hue and cry about how Google and other popular sites store a user’s search history for months on end. Ask.com is the first to respond to this concern with a tool that lets you cover your tracks and do your Web searches in complete anonymity. AskEraser is the tool that lets you set your privacy preferences so that Ask.com does not store the history of what you have searched for. To ensure that users are aware of this, their privacy settings will be displayed on search pages. As to when this tool will see the light of day, expect a time frame of year-end for US and UK and early 2008 for the rest of us. Of course, if you do not choose to use the tool, Ask.com will do what other search engines do, viz., keep track of your search habits for a year and a half. What this means is if the government asks for information on who searched for what on Ask.com from a particular IP address, the site will not be able to comply as it will not store the information once a user chooses not to let it do so with the AskEraser tool.

Faster GPS on smartphones Nokia, the leader in mobile phones, now offers a service to trim the time taken by a GPS aware cellular phone to figure out where it is. Without this service, a N95 smartphone would take about three minutes to get its GPS in gear. With it, that time’s cut down to one minute. Shipments of phones with GPS are expected to go up by an order of magnitude by 2009 when compared to 2005 shipments. The conventional mechanism uses a telco’s cell sites to speed up location finding. The new service uses data from a SIM card and software to catch satellite signals. As GPS works with the help of satellites this is a good thing. While the N95 is at the upper end of the mobile phone spectrum, owners of mid-range phones need not despair as the Finnish firm will add GPS functionality to a broad range of phones and all these devices will be in a position to take advantage of this new service. Nokia’s entry into location finding has been facilitated by its acquisition of Gate5. It offers maps and routing for free and charges for navigation.

Firefox is big in Europe Firefox is making the big time, at least in Europe. With a jump of 3.1 percent of market share in 32 European countries over four months as per XiTi Monitor, the Web browser scored 21.1 percent of the market in the first week of July 2006. This July, that figure’s bumped up to 27.8 percent. Microsoft continues to own two-thirds of the browser market but there are countries where Firefox is huge. Eastern Europe comes to mind, particularly Slovenia, Poland, Hungary and Croatia. An active community of users in these nations is cited as the reason behind Firefox’s success. Firefox has gone from strength to strength. Two years back its share of the European market was 14 percent. That’s almost doubled now. At that time it was most popular in Finland and Germany. The battle between the latest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer has gone in Firefox’s favour this time around, albeit by a thin margin. As per XiTi Monitor, during the week of July 2 to 8, 2007, the average visit share in a European country was 23.1 percent for Firefox 2 and 22.6 percent for Internet Explorer 7. This, the research firm feels, is the result of Firefox users being quicker to upgrade to the latest version as opposed to those using IE who are still using older versions.

FBI uses spyware The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has used spyware to find out the identity of a person who sent bomb threats to a high school. The spyware known as CIPAV (Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier) is purported to be a Windows program that is transmitted through e-mail or IM. Once installed, it does a search of the hard disk and sends back names of running programs, Web browser data and registry information. At this point CIPAV starts recording sites that are visited but it does not monitor what is being communicated. As of now it is not known whether CIPAV can capture keystrokes. In the case of Timberline High School, the bureau used the IP address collected by CIPAV to figure out the identity of the ex-student who was making threats. This person had used no less than five GMail addresses and a MySpace account. To do this he logged in from three PC bots in Italy. The bureau had got Google and MySpace to hand over IP addresses and got those of the Italian PCs. At this point CIPAV was unleashed to after getting a search warrant. On previous occasions the bureau has used keyloggers that had been directly installed onto target PCs. CIPAV with its action at a distance is something new.

Wi-Fi’s free for Londoners With the launch of a free metropolitan Wi-Fi network in the city of London, city dwellers can log on from anywhere without having to pay for their pleasure. This is a joint undertaking of Free-hotspot.com and MeshHopper. A 13.6-mile stretch of the river Thames that runs through the city is unwired for free. MeshHopper has a fee-based Wi-Fi network that covers the same area. The business model of the free network is, as you would expect, advertisement-based. To get free access you have to view an advertisement of 15 to 30 seconds every 15 minutes. The alternative is to fork out 2.95 pounds per hour or 9.95 pounds a month. Also the freebie is slower at 256Kbps as opposed to double that speed with the paid for version. The network will be extended to 22.3 miles by August. Earlier, a free Wi-Fi network in the city of Norwich had been launched with support from the local council. Manchester is slated to be next. A similar network is being set up in Paris where Alcatel-Lucent and mobile operator SFR are working together to offer free wireless access to people in the capital of France. Many American cities offer either free or subsidised Wi-Fi access with San Francisco and Mountain View being among their number.

Canada to apply levy to iPods With the Canadian Copyright Board has not only upheld a levy on iPods to compensate copyright holders for losses due to piracy, it has also stated unequivocally that it believes that this levy can be applied to other devices as well, including cellphones and computers. It has said that a thing that is ordinarily used by individual consumers to make private copies should not be excluded from the private copying regime for the sole reason that it has other uses. While the decision is likely to be appealed, it is perhaps a sign of the times. As peer-to-peer downloading continues unabated and, in fact, keeps on growing, alternative revenue models are being sought. The private copying levy is one such model. However experts feel that for a levy like this to make sense, it would have to address downloading and uploading. Meanwhile the levy is proving unpopular and pressure is building for a fair use provision. Fair use covers the usage of copyrighted content in small measures and is the basis of sampling in the music business and the usage of excerpts by reviewers among other things.