Twitter’s Answer To Facebook Connect

Twitter is preparing to launch a new set of tools that will let third party websites easily integrate Twitter features directly into their web sites and services, multiple sources have confirmed. In a nutshell, this is their response to the massively popular Facebook Connect.

Facebook Connect was first announced in May 2008 (Google and MySpace announcedsimilar projects at the same time).

Facebook Connect became generally available later in 2008, and it hasn’t looked back since. Today, Facebook says 80,000 websites have added Facebook Connect, and 60 million Facebook users engage with Facebook connect on these third party websites each month. For many sites, like our own CrunchBase, it’s the only way to create an account and log in.

Facebook Connect is attractive to a lot of smaller sites simply because it’s so easy to implement. They’ve created a number of widgets that bring Facebook features directly to third party sites, and integration is easy. You can find some of these here on TechCrunch.

Last year Twitter released simply buttons to let users on third party sites sign in to Twitter and identify themselves (we use it in our commenting system).

The new Twitter product will allow sites to authenticate users, pull data and then publish back to Twitter, we’ve heard. All of these features exist today via the Twitter API, but the slick Facebook Connect-like packaging and easy-to-use widgets don’t exist yet.

Twitter is also taking an open, standards based approach. They use OAuth, for example, for authentication and data sharing. Facebook uses proprietary protocols for Facebook Connect.

We’ll update as we hear more. But our understanding is that Twitter has been working with a handful of publishers and will likely announce the new product shortly.

AIDS Virus Traveled to Haiti, Then U.S., Study Says

HIV went directly from Africa to Haiti, then spread to the United States and much of the rest of the world beginning around 1969, suggests an international team of researchers.

The findings settle a key debate on the history and transmission route of the deadly virus, the scientists say.

Even before HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS, Haiti's role in the disease epidemic had been hotly debated.

When AIDS was officially recognized in 1981 in the U.S., for instance, the unusually high prevalence of the disease in Haitian immigrants fueled speculation that the Caribbean island was the source of the mysterious illness.

Another theory held that the AIDS epidemic spread from the U.S. in the mid-1970s after Haiti became a popular destination for sex tourism.

Scientists led by Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, Tucson, tried to solve the puzzle by tracing back the family history of the virus subtype blamed for the epidemic in North America.

The findings suggest that native Haitians carried the disease back to their island from Africa soon after the virus's emergence there.

HIV is commonly transmitted through tainted blood transfusions, dirty needles, and unprotected sex. Infections often lead to a life-threatening condition in which the body's immune defenses are systematically disabled.

Two species of HIV can infect humans—HIV-1 and HIV-2. The former is more virulent, more easily transmitted, and accounts for the lion's share of global HIV infections. HIV-2 is less infectious and is largely confined to parts of Western Africa.

Based on differences in one of the nine genes that make up the virus, HIV-1 is placed in three major groups. The most prevalent, Group M, has eight geographically distinct subtypes.

Worobey and his colleagues looked at subtype B. Though it is found mainly in North America and Europe, the strain is present in the most number of countries.

The researchers analyzed tissue samples from five Haitian AIDS patients collected in 1982 and 1983. All five had then recently immigrated to the U.S. and were among the first recognized victims of AIDS.

A family tree constructed from the HIV-1 genes of the five Haitians and subtype B gene sequences from 19 other countries place the Haitian virus at the root of all branches.

"This is strong evidence that HIV-1 subtype B arrived and began spreading in Haiti before it did elsewhere," Worobey said.

It is generally thought that the virus arrived with Haitian professionals returning from Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) following a wave of nationalism there in the 1960s.

Using advanced statistical techniques, Worobey and his colleagues estimated that the subtype B strain reached Haiti sometime around 1966 and the United States around 1969.

"Until AIDS was initially recognized in 1981, the virus was cryptically [hiddenly] circulating in a sophisticated medical environment for the better part of 12 years," Worobey said.

Beatrice Hahn is a microbiologist at the University of Alabama in Birmingham who was not involved with the study.

"The paper is a nice piece of evolutionary sleuthing,'' she said. "It shows how chance events can shape a major epidemic and that one virus introduced under the right circumstances can create major havoc."

"The findings are significant," added Robert Garry, a microbiologist at Tulane University. They indicate "an important lineage of subtype B HIV was present in Haiti, which eventually spread elsewhere," he added.

But he is not fully convinced that a Haitian origin is the only explanation for subtype-B strains in the Americas, however.

It is quite likely that other B lineages appeared in the Americas prior to and in all likelihood independently of the Haitian lineage, he said.

"It is possible that HIV made many incursions into the United States. Most of these likely never spread or spread cryptically for a while and burned out," he added. "The one discussed in this paper appears to have been the bomb that actually went off."

Study leader Worobey, a former forest firefighter, likes to use a wildfire analogy.

"It is like a forest fire, it often produces sparks that fly out in front of a fire. Some of those sparks ... die out. But every once in a while one of those sparks ... can start a new wildfire. And that is what we are seeing in this case."

Haiti Earthquake "Strange," Strongest in 200 Years

The magnitude 7 earthquake that struck Haiti yesterday is the strongest earthquake to hit the region in more than two centuries, geologists say.

While earthquakes are not uncommon in the Caribbean island country, the recent Haiti earthquake's intensity surprised experts.

"It's quite strange" from a historical perspective, said Julie Detton, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Haiti is part of the island of Hispaniola, which also hosts the Dominican Republic. The last major earthquake to strike Haiti's side of the island was in 1860.

Yesterday's initial earthquake, which struck at about 5 p.m. local time yesterday, spawned dozens of aftershocks, about 15 of which were magnitude 5 or greater.

Whether the earthquake could trigger other major quakes is not known.

"It's not something that we can project is going to happen," Detton said.

"But definitely if you're moving two [plates] in one area, you're building up stress and strain in another."

The Haiti earthquake was caused by the release of seismic stresses that had built up around two tectonic plates.

The motions of these plates create what are known as strike-slip faults, where two sections of Earth's crust are grinding past each other in opposite directions.

"The Caribbean plate is moving eastward with respect to the North American plate," Detton said.

When the stresses along the fault lines reach a certain point, they can be released in bursts of energy that cause earthquakes, although it's unclear when the energy will be discharged as a series of small quakes or as one big temblor.

Since Haiti is very close to the boundary where the Caribbean and North American plates meet, fault lines linked to the plates' movements run right through the country, Detton said.

In fact, the epicenter of the earthquake was about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southwest of Haiti's capital city, Port-au-Prince. (See a Haiti map.)

In addition, the Haiti earthquake was very shallow, being centered just 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) below Earth's surface.

This put impoverished Port-au-Prince close to the most intense shaking, contributing to the scale of the devastation: Thousands are feared dead and countless buildings have collapsed, from schools and hotels to the Haitian Parliament and local UN headquarters.

The American Red Cross estimates that the Haiti earthquake may have affected about three million people in total.

Google GDrive (via Google Docs)

TechCrunch is reporting that Google GDrive Launches. Just Don’t Call It That. While not currently working with my Google Docs account you will soon be able to upload file formats that were previously not allowed on Google Docs. This could include media files, zip files and more. While not formally called GDrive it sure looks like GDrive.

You will be able to keep files private, make them public or share them with other users. Files need to be under 250mb. Regular Google users have 1gb of space available for free with more space available for purchase at $0.25/GB.

Google Defends Against Large Scale Chinese Cyber Attack: May Cease Chinese Operations

Google is releasing some information about these attacks to the public. The company says that a minimal amount of user information was compromised, but has come to the alarming conclusion that the attacks were targeting the information of Chinese human rights activists. Google found that these attacks were not just going after Google’s data, but were also targeting at least twenty other major companies spanning sectors including Internet, finance, chemicals, and more. Google has also discovered that phishing attacks have been used to compromise the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world.

In light of the attacks, and after attempts by the Chinese government to further restrict free speech on the web, Google has decided it will deploy a fully uncensored version of its search engine in China. This is a major change: since January 2006, Google has made concessions to the Chinese government and offered a censored (and highly controversial) version of its search engine at Google.cn. Google isn’t playing that game any longer. Should the Chinese government decide that an uncensored engine is illegal, then Google may cease operations in China entirely.  We have included Google’s blog posts about the decision in their entirety below.

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People interested wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this U.S. government report (PDF), Nart Villeneuve’s blog and this presentation on the GhostNet spying incident.

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

Here’s a second post, from the Google Enterprise Blog:

Many corporations and consumers regularly come under cyber attack, and Google is no exception. We recently detected a cyber attack targeting our infrastructure and that of at least 20 other publicly listed companies. This incident was particularly notable for its high degree of sophistication. We believe Google Apps and related customer data were not affected by this incident. Please read more about our public response on the Official Google Blog.

This attack may understandably raise some questions, so we wanted to take this opportunity to share some additional information and assure you that Google is introducing additional security measures to help ensure the safety of your data.

This was not an assault on cloud computing. It was an attack on the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical. The route the attackers used was malicious software used to infect personal computers. Any computer connected to the Internet can fall victim to such attacks. While some intellectual property on our corporate network was compromised, we believe our customer cloud-based data remains secure.

While any company can be subject to such an attack, those who use our cloud services benefit from our data security capabilities. At Google, we invest massive amounts of time and money in security. Nothing is more important to us. Our response to this attack shows that we are dedicated to protecting the businesses and users who have entrusted us with their sensitive email and document information. We are telling you this because we are committed to transparency, accountability, and maintaining your trust.

Google’s China Stance: More about Business than Thwarting Evil

Writing about China as an American is always tricky, but nowhere near as tricky as what an American company faces doing business there. Let me say upfront, I don’t envy Google. The company has had more success in China than a lot of other big Valley names, but isn’t and will likely never be the market leader. And to get that far, many in the West feel Google has had to compromise its “do-no-evil” ethics by agreeing to some of the government’s censorship rules. Google has been damned either way: China is too big of a market to ignore, but getting as far as they have has come at a steep price to their reputation and international (read: Western) integrity.

Enter the now famous blog post (that was notably, only on the English-language site) saying that Google was no longer playing by the Chinese government’s rules and was prepared to close down Chinese operations if it came to that. Valley elites erupted into applause on Twitter and blogs saying Google was showing more backbone than the US government and was a model of integrity for the world.

I’ll give Google this much: They’re taking a bad situation and making something good out of it, both from a human and business point of view. I’m not saying human rights didn’t play into the decision, but this was as much about business. Lest we get too self-righteous as Westerners, we should remember three things:

1. Google’s business was not doing well in China. Does anyone really think Google would be doing this if it had top market share in the country? For one thing, I’d guess that would open them up to shareholder lawsuits. Google is a for-profit, publicly-held company at the end of the day. When I met with Google’s former head of China Kai-fu Lee in Beijing last October, he noted that one reason he left Google was that it was clear the company was never going to substantially increase its market share or beat Baidu. Google has clearly decided doing business in China isn’t worth it, and are turning what would be a negative into a marketing positive for its business in the rest of the world.

2. Google is ready to burn bridges. This is not how negotiations are done in China, and Google has done well enough there to know that. You don’t get results by pressuring the government in a public, English-language blog post. If Google were indeed still working with the government this letter would not have been posted because it has likely slammed every door shut, as a long-time entrepreneur in China Marc van der Chijs and many others said on Twitter. This was a scorched earth move, aimed at buying Google some good will in the rest of the world; Chinese customers and staff were essentially just thrown under the bus.

3. This is only going to be a trickier issue in the next decade. Think the Shandaacquisition of Mochi Media was an isolated event? Think again. Chinese Web companies are building huge cash hoards and valuable stock currencies and it’s still a comparatively young Web market. Increasingly, these companies could be likely buyers of US startups—not the other way around. Will the Valley’s rhetoric stick then?

This may be the most shocking part: In retrospect Yahoo has played China far better than Google. It pulled out of the country years ago, knowing it wouldn’t win and owns nearly 40% of the Alibaba, a company that very definitely knows how to grow in China. Entrepreneur and angel investor in China Bill Bishop —who hasn’t always agreed with my China coverage in the past—pointed this out, adding “Not often Yahoo looks smarter than Google.”

Yearlong Star Eclipse May Help Solve Space Mystery

While relatively few people were looking, an unusual eclipse darkened New Year's Day.

On January 1 a giant space object blotted out our view of Epsilon Aurigae, a yellow supergiant star about 2,000 light-years from Earth. Based on studies of Epsilon Aurigae's previous eclipses, astronomers expect the star won't fully regain its bright shine until early 2011.

Normally the star is so bright it can be seen with the naked eye even by city dwellers. For all but the most rural star-gazers, though, the mystery object that eclipses the star causes it to vanish for about 18 months every 27.1 years.

Ever since the star's periodic eclipses were first recorded in 1821, astronomers have been puzzling over how Epsilon Aurigae pulls off its lengthy disappearing act.

Now, "using data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, we've reached a solution to a nearly two-century-old mystery," study leader Don Hoard, of the California Institute of Technology, said today at an American Astronomical Association press briefing in Washington, D.C.

According to the new model, Epsilon Aurigae is a dying star being orbited by another star, and that stellar dance partner is cloaked in a wide disk of dark dust.

Based on the new Spitzer data, Hoard's team thinks the eclipse lasts so long because the dark disk is about 744,000,000 miles (1,197,351,936 kilometers) across—eight times as wide as the distance from Earth to the sun.


Binary star systems have long been known to cause stellar eclipses as seen from Earth. Epsilon Aurigae is unusual, though, because it has the longest lasting known eclipse.

The 18-month eclipse started last August, but it took the disk until now to fully obscure Epsilon Aurigae.

"If the eclipse was simply being caused by another [darker] star passing in front of the visible star, it shouldn't last that long," Hoard said.

Astronomers had suggested in the 1950s that whatever is passing in front of Epsilon Aurigae is masked by a disk of material.

The new Spitzer data, combined with readings of other light waves from ground and space-based observatories, suggest that the star inside the disk is a B-type, a blue star three times as hot as our sun.

At first, the team wasn't sure how to explain the readings.

Assuming Epsilon Aurigae is as massive as other similar stars, a lone B star, Hoard said, shouldn't be massive enough to generate enough gravity for the binary pair to orbit they way they do.

"So then we started thinking, Well, we need more mass but no more light" in the system for the disk model to work, he said.

The team started by wondering whether something else might join the B star at the center of the disk.

A black hole would add the mass the scientists thought was needed, but it would also add more light than has been observed in the system. That's because a black hole would gobble up matter from the disk, then spit it out in the form of detectable radiation.


Perhaps, though, the object in the disk wasn't the problem at all, the astronomers thought, but rather Epsilon Aurigae itself.

"So we back up for a minute and say, OK, what if [Epsilon Aurigae] is not a massive supergiant star? What if it's a low-mass … dying star?" Hoard said.

Such a star "can be big, but it doesn't have to have a lot of mass," Hoard said.

"And if we start with that assumption, everything just falls nicely into place."

In other words, the model of a large but low-mass star orbited by a B star shrouded in dust matches the centuries of data collected so far on Epsilon Aurigae—potentially explaining once and for all how the long, strange eclipse is possible.


Other experts, however, are not quite ready to close the case file.

"Don says that we've solved it. I disagree," said Arne Henden, director of the nonprofit American Association of Variable Star Observers.

Even with the new model, he argued, the Epsilon Aurigae system is full of mysteries, such as the structure and composition of the supposed dark disk.

"What is the nature of this dusty disk? These are things you normally see around young stellar objects," said Henden, who is also a senior research scientist for the Universities Space Research Association at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.

But the blue star in the new model would be much older, and its dusty disk seems to be filled with unusually large particles.

"There are still a lot of details that need to be worked out," study leader Hoard agreed. 

Both astronomers hope that during the current Epsilon Aurigae eclipse, modern technology combined with extensive public participation will help answer the lingering riddles.

Henden's star-observer organization is helping to organize a project called Citizen Sky, in which backyard astronomers are being trained to monitor Epsilon Aurigae's eclipse from start to finish.

Since the project's launch last September, more than 120 people in 19 countries have already submitted data.

"Technology has evolved tremendously since the last eclipse [in 1984], and amateur astronomers are able to get exquisite detail on a nightly basis," Henden said.

Aside from engaging the public in astronomy, he added, the Citizen Sky project "shows that classical astronomy"—using earthbound, optical telescopes—"is still alive and well."

Our Solar System May Have Millions of "Twins"

Of the billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, 15 percent may host "twins" of our solar system, a new study says.

While that might not sound like much, the find suggests that several hundred million star systems look a lot like the one we call home, the study authors say.

The research is based on surveys of stars with gas giant planets—similar toJupiter and Saturn—that orbit far from their stars.

As in our solar system, vast distances stretch between these stars and their gas giants. This creates ample room for rocky planets to thrive in the stars' habitable zones, the regions where liquid water can exist.

And that boosts the likelihood that other Earths, and maybe even other forms of life, abound in the Milky Way.

"For the first ten years of planet hunting, we were feeling a bit worried—other systems looked so different from our own solar system," noted Debra Fischer, an astronomer at San Francisco State University who was not involved in the research.

"[These] results are reassuring us that there are solar systems akin to our own. This is real data that strengthens the hypothesis that there are many habitable worlds like our Earth."



Astronomers think that gas giants generally form farther from their stars, while rocky worlds like Earth form closer in.

But in some star systems it's thought that gas giants migrate inward, knocking any smaller planets out of their orbits or destroying the rocky worlds outright.

Meanwhile, star systems like ours have gas giants in stable outer orbits.

"In these systems there is room for terrestrial planets to prosper and not get knocked out of their orbits," said study co-author Andy Gould, an astronomer at Ohio State University. 

What's more, studies of Jupiter suggest that outer gas giants can act as gravitational shields, protecting inner rocky worlds—and any life-forms on them—from frequent asteroid impacts.

To find such star systems, nearly a hundred scientists joined forces as part of the Microlensing Follow-Up Network, or MicroFUN, to scour the galaxy using a technique called gravitational microlensing.

In this method, when one star passes in front of another, as seen from Earth, the nearer star's gravity acts like a lens, bending and magnifying the more distant star's light.

If the nearer star has orbiting planets, keen-eyed observers can spot the subtle clues of their presence in the magnified light.

If all the stars in the Milky Way hosted solar system twins, astronomers should have found at least six such systems them by now, according to a statistical analysis of four years' worth of microlensing data.

But so far, only one other system like ours has been spotted: In 2006 astronomers found a star with its own versions of Jupiter and Saturn.

That means just 15 percent of the galaxy's stars must have solar systems like ours, Gould and colleagues announced this week at the 215th meeting of theAmerican Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.


Gould cautioned that his team's "very rough" estimate is based on limited data and is likely to change as other star systems are spotted in the coming years.

For instance, some systems could house only Earthlike planets and no gas giants, Gould said. But for now we don't know, since most stars are too far away for current instruments to detect small, rocky worlds.

That might change as newer planet-hunting missions, such as the Kepler space telescope, begin to bear fruit.

Still, the new findings are in line with recent studies that say lower-mass planets such as "super Earths" might be relatively common in the galaxy, said Michael Meyer, of the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich, Switzerland.

"It may turn out that stars harboring even lower-mass terrestrial planets may be the rule rather than the exception," said Meyer, who was not involved in the study.

"If so, understanding the dynamical relationship between the smaller terrestrial planets and the more massive gas and ice giants may help us to understand how common Earthlike planets might be in our galaxy."

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