All New Gadgets Updates

Child Pornography is one of the worst things to happen since the birth of the internet.  The battle against the victimization of children is one that is being fought by agencies worldwide, and it now has over 500 million friends to help them out.

According the Microsoft Blog, Facebook is joining Microsoft in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s PhotoDNA program to combat child pornography.  For those who are unaware of what the PhotoDNA program is all about. It was developed by Microsoft, working with digital imaging expert Dr. Hany Farid of Dartmouth College (North Hampshire) and it can identifies certain images irrespective of changes made to the image like resizing or cropping.

Microsoft began implementing PhotoDNA technology in Bing and SkyDrive, including images posted to SkyDrive through Hotmail. In over two years the PhotoDNA software was able to identify over 1,500 matches on SkyDrive and 1,500 matches through Bing’s image search index .Facebook is the first online service provider to join Microsoft and use the PhotoDNA software. To stay in perspective, Facebook services host more than 30 billion pieces of shared content, including photos, Web links, news stories, blog posts and more. Searching through them for child pornography will be a tough task, but not impossible thanks to PhotoDNA.

Google took the lead ages ago by providing a free Office suite replacement on the web. Microsoft followed suit and it has been working on a web-based office suite called Office 365. It’s been in beta for a long time and it’s finally time to be launched. According to Neowin, the suite is all set to launch sometime this month.

According to a Tweet post by Jon Roskill from Microsoft, the date set for the launch this year on the 28th of June. He also states there are some 100,000 customers on beta. The beta first launched in late 2010 to limited users after which it was made available as a public beta in April, this year. Those who register for the beta will also get an additional month of free access to the service. The Office 365 suite will include Exchange, SharePoint, Lync (which isn’t available to Mac users) and Office Web Apps 2010. To compete with Google’s mostly free Docs service. Microsoft also has a free version available for non-business or enterprise users. Docs.com is one of them. For business users, the schemes for Office 365 start from $10 a month to $27 a month.