DailyDose, your everyday technology news brief is here. In this edition: The CloudFare outage that took down 785,000 Websites and 12 other top stories.
Stuff
Seagate to Cease Production of 7200rpm Mobile Hard Drives This Year. Seagate Technology, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of hard disk drives, plans to cease production of mobile hard drives with 7200rpm spindle speed late this year as the mainstream market demand will shift to different products, such as solid-state hybrid drives (SSHDs). The company will continue to offer 5400rpm HDDs for value notebooks.Read the story here.
Apple finally catching up with new iMac demand, now shipping both sizes in 1-3 days. Apple seems to have finally caught up with demand for its latest iMac models. Both the new 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs are now shipping from Apple’s online store in 1-3 business days. Up until earlier today, Apple’s new iMacs were quoted as having a shipping time of 2-3 weeks for the 21.5-inch model and 3-4 weeks for the larger 27-inch configurations. More here.
Yahoo to shut down seven products, including Blackberry app: Yahoo Inc is shutting down seven products, including its mobile app for Blackberry smartphones, as new Chief Executive Marissa Mayer takes a page from Google Inc’s play book by eliminating unsuccessful products en-masse. More here.
Digital Living & Gaming
Web Privacy Becomes A Business Imperative. Privacy is no longer just a regulatory headache. Increasingly, Internet companies are pushing each other to prove to consumers that their data is safe and in their control. Established companies are trying to gain market advantage by casting themselves as more privacy-friendly than their rivals. More here.
CloudFlare Was Down Due To Edge Routers Crashing, Taking Down 785,000 Websites Including 4chan, Wikileaks, Metallica.com. Security and caching service CloudFlare was down for close to an hour due to an issue with its edge routers. It’s now back up and running. As the service adds a layer between 785,000 websites and their users in order to speed up traffic and prevent DDoS attacks and other security issues, all of those websites were affected — 4chan was one of them. Read the report here. You can also check out the official blog post here.
Inc
A trimmer, sharper Groupon seen in the post-Mason era: Groupon Inc under a new chief executive should look a lot trimmer with a sharply reduced international arm, a more focused business – and minus its large and once internally celebrated editorial staff, analysts and investors say. More here.
Why Are Indians So Entrepreneurial In The U.S.? A recent study exposed an alarming trend in the tech industry. Immigrant entrepreneurs, who in recent years have launched half the startups in Silicon Valley, are founding drastically fewer companies. Except for one group: Indians. What makes entrepreneurs from India so different? Find out here.
Nokia’s comeback suffers a blow as it is dropped from the Euro Stoxx 50 Index. Nokia’s slow and steady comeback has suffered a blow with news that the Finnish mobile-maker will be dropped from the Euro Stoxx 50 Index this month, in a move that could affect its share price.Currently ranked 34th in the 15-year old listing — which is compiled to include 50 of the top stocks from across the Eurozone — the company will be replaced by French aerospace firm EADS on March 18 as part of a regular index review, according to an announcement. Read the story here.
HardCode
Google tests data compression proxy feature to speed up Chrome for Android, like Opera Turbo and Amazon Silk. Google’s Chrome for Android team is experimenting with a new data compression proxy feature to speed up browsing similar to the methods used by Opera Turbo and Amazon Silk. The feature is currently optional but could one day be flipped on by default if Google deems it ready, significantly helping those on slow connections. More here.
Peek and poke in the age of Linux. Some time ago I ran into a production issue where the init process (upstart) stopped behaving properly. Specifically, instead of spawning new processes, it deadlocked in a transitional state. To be precise, the init process itself was responsive, but the critical services were stuck in one of the pre- or post- states, never actually restarting. What’s worse, upstart doesn’t allow forcing a state transition and trying to manually create and send DBus events didn’t help either. Read more here.
Social
Facebook’s News Feed, A Skittish Gift Horse. Remember Facebook Questions? Checkins? Spotify listens? They had their time at the top of the news feed because Facebook favors new products, but their prominence diminished as they matured. This and competition for space between posts may explain why New York Times writer Nick Bilton gets fewer Likes on shares to his public followers than a year ago. The news feed is a bumpy ride. According to Zuckerberg’s Law Of Sharing, we post twice as much each year, but we’re not doubling how long we spend reading our social streams.See what TechCrunch has to say about Facebook’s new news feed which is expected this week here.
Misc
SpaceX Dragon successfully docks with International Space Station. After some issues with its thrusters hours after launch, the SpaceX Dragon capsule successfully docked with the International Space Station. NASA reported that the capsule attached to the Harmony module of the ISS at 8:56am EST Sunday morning, with the door set to be opened on Monday morning.Full report here.
In Medical First, a Baby With H.I.V. Is Deemed Cured. Doctors announced on Sunday that a baby had been cured of an H.I.V. infection for the first time, a startling development that could change how infected newborns are treated and sharply reduce the number of children living with the virus that causes AIDS.The baby, born in rural Mississippi, was treated aggressively with antiretroviral drugs starting around 30 hours after birth, something that is not usually done. If further study shows this works in other babies, it will almost certainly be recommended globally. Read this amazing story here.
