A smily final Goodbye from Benazir Bhutto :Pakistan's Bhutto assassinated in gun, bomb attack

A smily final Goodbye from Benazir Bhutto

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on Thursday in a gun and bomb attack as she left an election rally in the city of Rawalpindi.
State media and her party confirmed her death.
"She has been martyred," said party official Rehman Malik.
Bhutto, 54, died in hospital in Rawalpindi. Ary-One Television said she had been shot in the head.
Police said a suicide bomber fired shots at Bhutto as she was leaving the rally venue in a park before blowing himself up.
"The man first fired at Bhutto's vehicle. She ducked and then he blew himself up," said police officer Mohammad Shahid.
Police said 16 people had been killed in the blast, which occurred during campaigning for a January 8 national election. It is unclear if the poll will now go ahead.
"It is the act of those who want to disintegrate Pakistan because she was a symbol of unity. They have finished the Bhutto family. They are enemies of Pakistan," senior Bhutto party official Farzana Raja told Reuters.
Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was Pakistan's first popularly elected prime minister. He was executed in 1979 after being deposed in a military coup.
A Reuters witness at the scene of the attack said he had heard two shots moments before the blast. Another Reuters witness saw bodies and a mutilated human head strewn on a road outside the park where she held her rally.
A spokesman for President Pervez Musharraf said he had to confirm the news before commenting.
A suicide bomber killed nearly 150 people in an attack on Bhutto on October 19 as she paraded through the southern city of Karachi on her return from eight years in self-imposed exile.
Islamist militants were blamed for that attack but Bhutto had said she was prepared to face the danger to help the country.
In her speech on Thursday, Bhutto spoke of the risks she faced.
"I put my life in danger and came here because I feel this country is in danger. People are worried. We will bring the country out of this crisis," Bhutto told the rally.
TEARS, SHOTS
People cried and hugged each other outside the hospital where she died. Some shouted anti-Musharraf slogans.
Another former prime minister and opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, spoke to the crowd.
"My heart is bleeding and I'm as grieved as you are," Sharif said.
Residents of Karachi, Bhutto's home town, said they had heard gun shots after news of Bhutto's death spread, apparently from her enraged supporters.
On international financial markets, gold and government bonds rose while U.S. stock futures fell on Thursday after news of Bhutto's assassination.
Analysts say the shock of the Bhutto news triggered a classic capital flight to assets which are considered as safe havens in times of geopolitical stress

Bhutto became the first female prime minister in the Muslim world when she was elected in 1988 at the age of 35. She was deposed in 1990, re-elected in 1993, and ousted again in 1996 amid charges of corruption and mismanagement.
She said the charges were politically motivated but in 1999 chose to stay in exile rather than face them.
Bhutto's family is no stranger to violence.
Both of her brothers died in mysterious circumstances and she had said al Qaeda assassins tried to kill her several times in the 1990s.
Intelligence reports have said al Qaeda, the Taliban and Pakistani jihadi groups have sent suicide bombers after her.

Privacy :Google's privacy faux pas with Reader

For some time now, Google has allowed you to share with your friends blog posts you view using Reader. You got to select the items you wanted shared and you got to choose your friends. When you marked a new item as shared, your friends who use Reader would see it. (Technically, your shared items were on a public Web page, so they could have been seen by others who are not your friends, if those people could figure out how to find that page.)
Google is assuming that anyone you have had a conversation with using Google Talk is a friend, so they’ll automatically be able to see and read what you’ve read and marked as shared. You can still manage your friends list and explicitly tell Reader not to share with some of your newfound friends. Of course, you’d have to know that Google had started sharing your items more widely, which many people apparently did not, even though Google alerted them through a pop-up window

In its attempts to add social elements to products, is Google pulling a Facebook?
Google Reader has allowed people to share items they are interested in with others since 2006 with hyperlinks, clips on blogs and storing them on a public page that you had to know the URL for to see.
Last week, Google tweaked Google Reader so that your shared items are automatically made available to your Google Talk contacts.
But, as anyone who uses instant messaging knows, not all of your IM contacts are friends. Many are acquaintances or people you barely know and with whom you may not want to share a reading list.
Recently, Facebook was forced to modify its new Beacon ad targeting service that notifies friends in your network when you buy things on sites of Facebook partners. Facebook made that an opt-in feature, however, after consumer groups and Facebook members complained the service violated people's privacy.
Google, too, has been crucified in the blogosphere over its Google Reader change, with bloggers saying the Google Talk contact sharing feature should be opt in, not opt out.
To calm the masses, Google posted an item on the Google Reader Blog that explains the company's reasoning behind the change and tells how to clear the shared-items list and how to tag items to share with a limited number of people.
"We'd hoped that making it easier to share with the people you chat with often would be useful and interesting, but we underestimated the number of users who were using the Share button to send stories to a limited number of people," the blog says.
Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Land blog, writes: "Frankly, a better solution would be to dump the friends sharing feature until it comes back in a new form, where you specifically and deliberately create a list of contacts that you do want to share material with."

Google patent case setback

WASHINGTON, Dec 26 (24hoursnews) - A federal appeals court handed Google Inc (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) a setback in a patent fight on Wednesday, tossing out part of a summary judgment in the Web search engine's favor in a lawsuit filed by HyperphRase Technologies, LLC.
Hyperphrase Technologies filed suit against Google in April 2006, alleging that Google's AdSense and the AutoLink function of its toolbar infringed claims in four Hyperphrase patents relating to the contextual linking and presentation of information. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin rejected the allegations in a summary judgement in Google's favor, and Hyperphrase appealed.The appeals court ruled that Google's immensely profitable AdSense did not infringe on HyperphRase's patents. It handed down a split decision on AutoLink, agreeing that Google did not infringe, as claimed, on one of the HyperphRase patents. But it vacated a summary judgment in Google's favor on two others and sent it back to the Wisconsin district court.
In Wednesday's ruling on the Google-Hyperphrase case, the court of appeals upheld the judgement of the district court regarding AdSense. The way AdSense infers the topic of a Web page to associate it with keywords that may not appear on the page, and link those keywords to advertisements, did not constitute use of a "data reference" in the sense of the Hyperphrase patents at issue, the district court had found, and the court of appeals agreed.
A Google representative reached in London would not immediately comment on the court of appeals ruling.
The company's latest quarterly financial report warns that is subject to intellectual property rights claims, and may face more in the future. Such cases are costly to defend and could require it to pay damages or prevent it from using certain technologies
One such case, brought by Northeastern University in Boston and by Jarg, a company in Massachusetts that develops distributed search technologies, charges Google with infringing a patent for a method of breaking database queries into fragments and distributing them to multiple computers to get search results faster. Google has until Jan. 11 to file a response in that case.
The case is one of dozens that Google is fighting. Like many high tech firms, it regularly faces patent infringement lawsuits

Apple's Piping Hot Innovation

In the year 2007 its seen innovation is the key point of success in technology market, Apple hit iPod, Now looking for new,
Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) Chief Executive Steve Jobs wants to patent a process that will save customers the hassle of waiting to order a cup of coffee at a local Starbucks (nasdaq: SBUX - news - people ) or a fresh burger at the nearest fast food restaurant. Even better: The technology would let you jump the line of those ordering in person.

In an application with the U.S. Patent Office filed on Dec. 20, the Cupertino, Calif.-based computer and gadget company described a wireless system that would allow customers to place an order at a store using a wireless device such as a media player, a wireless personal digital assistant or a cellphone.

The system could go far beyond the program that Apple announced with Starbucks in September, which allows iPhone users to press a button and wirelessly download the song playing in the background as they sip their soy lattes.

Apple's application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office describes a process for placing an order and then notifying customers when an order is ready to grab at a pick-up station. One goal, the patent application notes, is to avoid an "annoying wait in a long queue if the purchaser arrives before completion of the order."

U.S. Patent Application #20070291710 describes a device that also would keep tabs on where a user shops and what he or she likes to buy. Computers at participating stores would keep track of regular customers and their favorite orders.

Customers might tap a button to order their favorite drink, say a double-shot mocha, as they stroll up to the nearest coffee shop. When the drink is ready go to, the device--such as an iPhone--would chime or blink to let the thirsty one know it's time to scoop up the order at the counter.

The patent puts Apple's partnership with Starbucks in a new light. The technology promises to morph Apple from the business of simply selling gadgets and music and movies that can be played on those devices into an intermediary in all kinds of exchanges.

Apple is notoriously tight-lipped about its future products. But head honcho Jobs has also said that he believes the innovative insights at the core of the iPhone all start in the software built into the device, not its sleek form factor.

Apple applied for 12 patents in December, and was granted eight others, giving investors and Apple fans an idea of where the secretive company could be headed next.

Most cover relatively mundane technologies. Others, however, have stirred interest. Patent application #20070288886, unhelpfully titled "Run-Time Code Injection To Perform Checks," describes a system that would restrict the use of some software to "specific hardware platforms."

The application, published Dec. 13, suggests Apple could adopt something similar to Microsoft's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) widely criticized Windows Genuine Advantage copy protection program, which checks a user's machine to confirm that it is not running a pirated version of Microsoft's software in exchange for access to certain software updates.