The Department of Justice cleared Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility just hours after European regulators gave the deal the nod. Now Google is officially in the hardware business—for better or worse.

In a statement, the Department of Justice said it was closing its investigation into the Google-Motorola deal and also closing a probe into the sale of Nortel’s patents by a consortium led by Apple. In other words, everyone is happy with their patents.

For Google, there’s a larger issue ahead. Google has become hardware happy overnight and Motorola Mobility could be a distraction. Google absorbs about 19,000 employees once the deal closes. Motorola Mobility will contribute revenue growth to Google, but the device maker doesn’t bring a lot of earnings to the party.

Source: ZDNet.com

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.9. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 90 bug fixes, some of which are security related.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.3.9:

Added max_input_vars directive to prevent attacks based on hash collisions. (CVE-2011-4885)
Fixed bug #60150 (Integer overflow during the parsing of invalid exif header). (CVE-2011-4566)

Key enhancements in PHP 5.3.9 include:

Fixed bug #55475 (is_a() triggers autoloader, new optional 3rd argument to is_a and is_subclass_of).
Fixed bug #55609 (mysqlnd cannot be built shared)
Many changes to the FPM SAPI module

For a full list of changes in PHP 5.3.9, see the ChangeLog. For source downloads please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/.

All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.3.9.

visit PHP.net for further details

The founders of Google Inc. (GOOG) and EBay Inc. (EBAY) attacked Hollywood-backed anti-piracy legislation in the U.S. House and Senate that they said would threaten the technology industry and lead to Web censorship.

The Internet executives said the bills would have a “chilling effect on innovation” and give the U.S. government the “power to censor the Web using techniques similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran,” according to a letter sent to U.S. lawmakers and published today in newspapers including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.

Lobbying in Washington by Internet companies and motion- picture studios has intensified as a House committee prepares to vote tomorrow on the Hollywood-supported bill, which has become a flash point in the debate over how to curb online trafficking of illegally copied movies, television shows and music.

The controversy has drawn in Google co-founder Sergey Brin, PayPal Inc. co-founder Elon Musk, EBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) co-founder Jerry Yang, who were among 16 Internet executives signing today’s letter.

The House bill, and similar legislation in the Senate, would let the Justice Department seek court orders requiring U.S. Internet-service providers, search engines, payment processors and ad networks to block or cease business with non- U.S. websites linked to online piracy.

Read the full news at Bloomberg.com

Opera 11.51 was released on September 1, 2011. It’s a minor update which fixes a known security issue, improves stability and offers full-screen support in Mac Lion.

Of more interest to web developers is Dragonfly 1.1 — Opera’s Firebug-like console. I gave version 1.0 a glowing review in May, but there were a few minor niggles which caused concern. More than 200 bug fixes and interface updates have been implemented in the latest edition, so let’s look at the highlights…
DOM Inspector

Perhaps the biggest problem with Dragonfly 1.0 was the lack of links and line numbers to styles in CSS files. That problem has been addressed and I suspect many developers will be thankful.

The Inspector now supports pseudo classes and pseudo elements. This includes ::before and ::after which now appear as nodes within the DOM tree. It’s a fantastic facility which is yet to appear in competing tools.

A new button is also provided which allows you to toggle states including :link, :visited, :hover, :active, :focus and ::selection. While a similar function exists in Firebug, few developers know about it and Dragonfly’s implementation is superior.

Finally, there’s an new “Search” tab which allows you to locate elements by text, regular expression, CSS selector and XPath (e.g. (e.g. enter //div to find all div elements in the page). Very useful.

JavaScript Debugger
An improved search facility has also been implemented within the Scripts tab. It’s possible to search using text or regular expressions across a single file or all JavaScript files. You can also include or omit dynamically-injected scripts.

Network and Resource Inspectors
It’s now possible to inspect POST data sent via standard or multi-part forms. A new search field is also provided in the Resource Inspector.

One of the primary criticisms of v1.0 was Ajax monitoring. Dragonfly 1.1 is better and, given my limited test, it correctly reported all background XMLHttpRequest calls. Unfortunately, the returned message body is still shown as an encoded base64 string so it’s impossible to directly inspect JSON data. Opera — please, please address it in the next version!

Read entire article at Sitepoint

Quality content are becoming a standard for search engines. Its becoming a big factor in ranking websites in terms of search engine result. To give you an overview on how you can produce high quality content, Bing suggested the following steps to follow.

Bing’s Guidelines For Quality Content

Duplicate content – don’t use articles or content that appear in other places. Produce your own unique content.

Thin content – don’t produce pages with little relevant content on them – go deep when producing content – think “authority” when building your pages. Ask yourself if this page of content would be considered an authority on the topic.

All text/All images – work to find a balance here, including images to help explain the content, or using text to fill in details about images on the page. Remember that text held inside an image isn’t readable by the crawlers.

Being lonely – enable ways for visitors to share your content through social media.

Translation tools – rarely does a machine translation tool leave you with content that reads properly and that actually captures the original sentiment. Avoid simply using a tool to translate content from one language to the next and posting that content online.

Skipping proofreading – when you are finished producing content, take the time to check for spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and for the overall flow when reading. Does it sound like you’re repeating words too frequently? Remove them. Don’t be afraid to rewrite the content, either.

Long videos – If you produce video content, keep it easily consumable. Even a short 3 – 4 minute video can be packed with useful content, so running a video out to 20 minutes is poor form in most instances. It increases download times and leads to visitor dissatisfaction at having to wait for the video to load. Plus, if you are adding a transcription of your video, even a short video can produce a lengthy transcription.

Excessively long pages – if your content runs long, move it to a second page. Readers need a break, so be careful here to balance the length of your pages. Make sure your pagination solution doesn’t cause other issues for your search optimization efforts, though.

Content for content’s sake – if you are producing content, be sure its valuable. Don’t just add text to every page to create a deeper page. Be sure the text, images or videos are all relevant to the content of the page.

The Bing’s guide to quality content was originally posted at DEVWEBPRO

Webmasters, you may notice some changes in you Search queries data due to the launch of Google Instant. With Google Instant, the page updates dynamically to show results for the top completion of what the user has typed, so this means people could be seeing and visiting your website much faster than before, and often without clicking the search button or hitting “enter.”

With Google Instant, you may notice an increase in impressions because your site will appear in search results as users type.

Impressions are measured in three ways with Google Instant:

1. Your site is displayed in search results as a response to a user’s completed query (e.g. by pressing “enter” or selecting a term from autocomplete). This is the traditional model.

   With Google Instant, we also measure impressions in these new cases:

2. The user begins to type a term on Google and clicks on a link on the page, such as a search result, ad, or a related search.
3. The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.

To give an example, let’s say your site has lots of impressions for [hotels] and [hotels in santa cruz]. Now, because Instant is quickly fetching results as the user types, the user could see your site in the search results for [hotels] after typing only the partial query [hote]. If a user types the partial query [hote] and then clicks on any result on the page for [hotels], that counts as an impression for your site. That impression will appear in Webmaster Tools for the query [hotels]. The term ‘hotels’ would also be included in the HTTP referrer when the user clicks through to visit your website.

It’s likely that your site will still see impressions for queries like [hotels in santa cruz], but because Instant is helping the user find results faster, your site may see an increase in impressions for shorter terms as well.

Source:  Google Webmaster Blog