The updated Google Transparency report now includes copyright takedown requests information. This month’s data shows that Microsoft has been the highest copyright owner with most of Microsoft’s requests made by Marketly and DtecNet. Microsoft’s copyright requests have reached 543,378 URLs this month. The next closest copyright holder is the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) with 162,601 URLs.

Fred von Lohmann, Senior Copyright Counsel, said on the Google blog “in the past month alone, we received about 1.2 million requests made on behalf of more than 1,000 copyright owners to remove search results”.

Marketly are based on Redmond, WA with a satellite office in Ahmadabad, India according to their website. Marketley was founded by Pulin Thakkar, a past software engineer and manager at Microsoft.

Most of Microsoft’s content in requested URLs have been related to pirated software and games.

In past reports, Google has disclosed the amount of requests from government organisations by country as well as their uptime information.

1. Longform

With the rise of internet journalism, the deluge of short and snappy articles that can be finished in a couple of minutes has risen.

Longform curates a different breed of journalism. Their collection of long-form journalism, they say, are “too long and too interesting to be read on a web browser”. These articles often carve a deep narrative and include investigative journalism.

The website has been integrated with reading tools including Readability and Instapaper and can be filtered by topics that interest you.

2. No Excuse List

The No Excuse List compiles free education resources on the internet in a handy directory.

From music theory to language websites, “there’s no longer an excuse for not being able to learn something”, explains the No Excuse List.

3. Organized Wonder

Created recently by Sawyer Hollenshead, Organized Wonder aims to find the “many great videos floating around the web that come from conferences, festivals, talented individuals and companies”.

Organized Wonder encourages users to share thought-provoking videos with their friends and follow other users.

Windows 8 will signal a move away from the transparent UI of Windows Vista and 7 to a design based on their new “clean and crisp” design direction.

Jensen Harris from the Windows 8 team said that the new design was “chromeless” on the Building Windows blog and:

Gone are the glass and reflections. We squared off the edges of windows and the taskbar. We removed all the glows and gradients found on buttons within the chrome. We made the appearance of windows crisper by removing unnecessary shadows and transparency. The default window chrome is white, creating an airy and premium look.

The new look aims to concentrate focus on the apps. The team are also focussing on the touch user interface. Harris said “we resisted the temptation to make people choose between using mouse and keyboard or touch”.

The Building Windows blog post includes an interesting look-back at the past user interfaces of Windows since Windows 1.

Latest additions that will be coming to Firefox 13 include performance improvements, new default tabs and improvements to the web developer tools.

Making Firefox “snappy” is a high priority for the Mozilla team. When loading tabs in a Firefox start-up, “only the active tab will load. Loading of background tabs is deferred until a tab is selected”, according to Lawrence Mandel on the Mozilla Hacks blog.

Mandel said that the “cycle collector is more efficient, spending less time examining memory that is still in use, which results in less pauses as you use Firefox”. Additionally, general performance improvements can be expected all-round Firefox.

A new “home tab” will be included. “Firefox will offer easy access to things users are familiar with today (Bookmarks, History, Settings, Downloads) as well as introduce the Apps Marketplace — a great place to discover exciting new content on the Web”, according to the Mozilla feature page.

As in the other modern web browsers, Firefox will include a “new tab” page. Currently, Firefox displays a blank page.

Mozilla is continuing with their improvements to the new web developer tools, as part of their 2012 desktop strategy they are including a “powerful and beautiful set of Web developer tools”.

Web developers will now have the ability to lock in a pseduo-classes such as :hover, making it easier to inspect the code. One of the most useful features will be the ability to edit CSS files in Firefox. Any changes will now be automatically saved if the CSS file stored locally (file://).

The expected release date is June 5 2012 and is currently available for download as a beta.

Here are some of our favorite new features in Ubuntu 12.04. This is a long-term support release which means it will be supported for 5 years (in previous releases this was three years) and is suitable for large organization-wide installations.

Video lens

Ubuntu’s new video lens searches for videos on the web and on your computer. It gets video from online sources relevant to your location and video sharing websites such as YouTube. For example, if you’re in the UK you may have access to content available in the UK from the BBC iPlayer.

HUD (Heads-up display)

Rather than using the traditional menu system, Ubuntu has created a one-key (alt) “heads-up display”. A good example is in Firefox, just start searching for “book” and results for bookmarking in Firefox will come up. Select items by clicking them or using the arrows and enter key.

This system will “ultimately replace menus in Unity applications” also include voice in the future according to Mark Shuttleworth. However, right now you can still use the menus.

Dash

The Ubuntu dash now displays recent programs and files be default instead of the list of programs. Also notice how the dash adopts the color of your background, just an example of some of the new polish which comes to the new Ubuntu 12.04.

Privacy

Finally, Ubuntu includes a Privacy setting. In settings, select privacy to clear recently viewed files, programs and logs.

The option to disable logging system-wide or in certain programs is also included.

Other cool features

• The log-in screen will match your background image
• Better power management
• Change the size of icons in the launcher
• Ubuntu One is redesigned as well as new recommendations in the Ubuntu Software Centre

Welcome to the new Linear Fix. This blog has been moved from WordPress.com to Tumblr and brings some 263 technology posts along with it.

To find a post try using general ‘tag’ keywords. For example, if you’re searching for our articles covering the best subreddits on Reddit, just search for ‘reddit’.

Linear Fix coverage has garnered more than 170,000 views on WordPress.com, however the change to Tumblr means no advertising for our free coverage and total editorial control over the design of the blog.

Got any suggestions? Just click on the ask icon at the top of this blog.

Instagram on iOS (left) and Android (right). Image via Instagram.

Instagram is now available for download at Google Play for use on Android devices. The popular app aims to replicate the familiar features of the original iOS version, down to the same algorithms for the filters and user interface. The app allows users to set retro filters to images and share them online.

Right now, however, the Instagram team say that “Tilt Shift/Blur, Share from Feed, Live Preview and Share to Flickr” are not yet in the Android version, but these features are expected in future versions. The company has prepared for the release, saying “our Engineering team has been focused on infrastructure scaling to ensure that users have the best experience possible” and that support material

Statistics made available for the release, show that more than 430,000 people were on the waiting list for the Android release, 30 million users were already using the iOS version and five million photos were taken each day.

The app has yet to be translated into a Windows Phone and Blackberry version. The team said “we have nothing to announce at this time, but we are always actively considering ways to expand Instagram’s utility to everyone in the world”.

1. Boagworld

Boagworld’s podcast proclaims that they are “longest running web design podcast” and is one of the most well-known podcasts available on web development. The podcast is hosted by Paul Boag and is created in ‘seasons’ which focuss on a particular section of web development.

2. SitePoint Podcast

These web developers from Melbourne, Australia known for their books and online marketplaces present a polished podcasts with informative guests (and the occasional joke about Australian internet) and usually concentrate on a specific topic such as vendor prefixes, paywalls and responsive design.

3. Think Vitamin Radio

This bi-weekly is run by Carsonified, a web event company, that runs Think Vitamin and was started in late 2010. Think Vitamin Radio discuss “the latest hot topics in web design, web development and web business”.

4. Creative Coding

The Creative Coding podcast “discuss the ins-and-outs of programming for visual and creative applications”. Its content includes Flash, CSS and JavaScript so far and includes new developments in the web industry.

5. Web Weekly

The Web Weekly is run by Kevin Dees and Jonas Flint covering news and specific web topics. The Web Weekly is available every Friday.

Keep an on eye on The Industry

The Industry’s podcast brings an hour’s worth of discussion and is a relatively new website founded in November 2011. The Industry describe themselves as “designed focused” and will be made weekly, as of publication they have five podcasts to listen to.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is representing a Ohio small business owner who has requested a federal judge to open “a process that would allow him and other lawful Megaupload users to get their files back”, according to the EFF.

The EFF will represent Kyle Goodwin, a Ohio high school sports reporting business owner, who stored video footage, promotional packages and interviews on Megaupload for backup purposes. Since the January FBI lockdown on Megaupload servers, Goodwin has been unable to get access to the backup after his hard-drive crashed shortly before the copyright infringement investigation.

Goodwin had paid for a premium account and his business, OhioSportsNet, which broadcasts Ohio high school sporting events, interviews and creates multimedia has been left without raw footage required for its personalized highlight reels, a sports team documentary and other promotional videos. A filing with the Eastern District Court of Virginia said that after finding his hard-drive had crashed “to his surprise, he could not get past the welcome screen. Initially, he was not concerned, figuring there were some technical problems that would be ironed out and he would have access to his files”.

Carpathia Hosting, the Virginia-based company which leased servers holding some files for Megaupload, has now been allowed to deleted files after the completed federal investigation. The company has amassed more than $500,000 in expenses holding the data since January, saying they it costs more than $9,000 a day. However the company has “moved for a protective order that would allow for an approved procedure for customers to retrieve their files before deletion”, according to the EFF.

The EFF say “the procedure would help rectify the collateral damage caused by the government’s seizure of Megaupload.com as part of a copyright infringement investigation”.

Megaupload have reportedly dropped its lawsuit against Universal Music which was sparked when Universal Music Group issued a takedown request to YouTube of the Megaupload song video.

Google engineers have updated the Google Docs spell checking feature to use the same information gathered by GoogleBot and used in its search.

Yew Jin Lim, Software Engineer at Google, said that the change allows contextual correction such as “Icland is an icland” should be “Iceland is an island” on the Google Docs blog. Lim also pointed out that by using data from GoogleBot, the spell checker is able to remain relevant to current trends, using a popular Dupstep artist, Skrillex, as an example. In this case, corrected from “Skrillax”.

Also, one of the problems of some modern spell checkers is that sentences with homophones such as “the document is plane wrong” is correctly suggested to be changed to “the document is plain wrong”. However, some complex homophones such as “for egg sample” won’t be corrected to “for example”.

Yim said “this new spell checker is available for English documents and presentations, but we plan to bring it to more languages soon”.