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Chinese Internet giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is in the process of raising a US$3 billion loan from around six banks to buy back the stake that Yahoo Inc. owns in the company, people familiar with... Read more

Google has just released Chrome version 17, which brings several minor enhancements to the company's web browser— including a new web address preloading feature and improved... Read more

Google has just released Chrome version 17, which brings several minor enhancements to the company’s web browser— including a new web address preloading feature and improved protection against malicious downloads.

The new Chrome introduces a preemptive rendering” feature that will automatically begin loading and rendering a page in the background while the user is typing the address in the omnibox (the combined address and search text entry field in Chrome’s navigation toolbar). The preloading will occur in cases when the top match generated by the omnibox’s autocompletion functionality is a site that the user visits frequently.

When the user hits the enter key and confirms the autocompletion result, the prerendered page will display almost instantly. The feature extends Chrome’s existing predictive page loading functionality to autocompletion results. Unlike Chrome’s instant search capability, however, the autocompletion preloading waits until the user hits the enter key before displaying the rendered page.

Google has also added some new security functionality to Chrome. Every time that the user downloads a file, the browser will compare it against a whiltelist of known-good files and publishers. If the file isn’t in the whitelist, its URL will be transmitted to Google’s servers, which will perform an automatic analysis and attempt to guess if the file is malicious based on various factors like the trustworthiness of its source. If the file is deemed a potential risk, the user will receive a warning.

Google says that data collected by the browser for the malware detection feature is only used to flag malicious files and isn’t used for any other purpose. The company will retain the IP address of the user and other metadata for a period of two weeks, at which point all of the data except the URL of the file will be purged from Google’s databases.

Users who are concerned about the privacy implications of this functionality can prevent the browser from relaying this information to Google by disabling the phishing and malware protection features in the browser’s preferences. You can refer to the official Chromium blog for additional details about the malware detection feature.

Chrome 17 is available through the browser’s automatic updater and can also be downloaded from Google’s website. More information about the new release is available in the official Google Chrome blog

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Intel has announced that its Haswell architecture, due to ship some time in 2013, will include hardware support for transactional memory. Transactional memory is a promising... Read more

Intel has announced that its Haswell architecture, due to ship some time in 2013, will include hardware support for transactional memory.

Transactional memory is a promising technique designed to make the creation of reliable multithreaded programs easier. It does this by using a transactional model wherein complex operations can be performed concurrently, in isolation from each other, with those operations either completing or being undone as if they’d never been started—a model that developers are already familiar with from database programming.

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The pocket-size USB flash drive has become nearly ubiquitous in the PC world, for moving files among machines and for adding extra storage. But it can’t be used with most tablets because they lack... Read more

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Motorola Mobility’s demand that Apple pay it patent royalties of 2.25 percent on sales of some iPhones and iPads raised a lot of eyebrows. But not at Google, which could close its acquisition of... Read more

Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason is known for his sense of humor, but during the company’s first earnings call today, it was all business. Of course, you knew at least a little bit would slip through. In... Read more