Tech News Today 143

Tech News Today Episode 143

Tech News Today 143: GamePrix Is Pronounced "Game-Pree"

Why Skype went down, Super Verizon Windows Motorola phone rumour, CIA starts WTF, and more.

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Becky Worley (@bworley)
  • BeckyWorley.com
• Jason Howell
  • JasonHowell.net

Top Stories

• Kinect rumored to have PC support in waiting

• Skype outage affecting users around the globe
  • Skype downtime today
  • Skype Is Down, 8 Million Lost Connection in Last Hour
  • Over half of late-20s crowd own cell phones only
  • Skype apologises for losing half of daily call traffic
  • The Year In Downtime

• Sony rolls out music-streaming service

Discussion Stories

• FCC: We didn't impose stricter net neutrality regulations on wireless because Android is open
  • FCC: Yup, we're going to stop "paid prioritization" on the 'Net
  • FCC Net Neutrality Decision Faces Tenuous Existence
  • Net neutrality: the carriers react

• How Wikileaks killed Spain's anti-P2P law
  • Wikileaks: All 250,000 cables reported leaked in Norway
  • CIA Launches WTF to Investigate Wikileaks

• Verizon Wireless branded Windows Phone 7 apps surface in Marketplace
  • Verizon to Sell Motorola 4G Phone
  • Samsung LTE phone with front-facing camera headed to Verizon?
  • Motorola trademarks "Motorola Xoom" worldwide
  • Motorola Mobility Acquires Cloud Storage Startup Zecter

News Fuse

• Sad news for advocates of free speech and johns who travel frequently- Craigslist's adult services section is now out of business worldwide. 4 months ago the service closed in the US and now it's down globally an official from craigslist told the Connecticut attorney general yesterday Richard Blumenthal called it "another another important step in the ongoing fight to more effectively screen and stop pernicious prostitution ads."

• It's that time of year when we think back on 2010: can you guess the most pirated film of the year? According to torrentfreak.com it's...... AVATAR. yes James Cameron's epic was downloaded over 16 million timesfrom bittorrent alone. second place was comic book action film Kick-Ass, with 11.4m downloads, followed by Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception with 9.7m. Last year's top-pirated film was JJ Abrams' Star Trek reboot, which was downloaded close to 11m times.

• Wanna outwit counterfeiters, electronically track bills and make some 'fracking' cool high-tech money in the process: try putting some thin-film transistors 250 nanometres thick into your bills. German and japanese researchers are confabbing on the project which would use voltages of just 3V. Such small voltages could be transmitted wirelessly by an external reader, such as the kind that communicates with the RFID tags found on many products.' Take that international money launderers

• Toshiba'sselling its Nagasaki manufacturing plant back to Sony for 50 billion yen, or roughly $597 million in US money. Toshiba originally purchased the semiconductor facility for 100 90 billion yen (then $835 million) back in 2008, Sony may have just found the perfect place to build more CMOS chips for its high-end camera lineup, too. Sony reportedly told the Nikkei Business Daily that it may repurpose the facility to produce HD image sensors for cameras and smartphones. What will happen to the chip that launched 40 million PS3s and a graphics co-processor or two? With any luck, we'll find out at CES 2011 quite soon.

• Google Wave is safe int he open source arms of Apache these days but a little Googly bit of it still survives in Google Shared Spaces. The Wave gadgets have been given a standalone home here, the idea being that you create a Space, invite some people, and then stop collaborate and... er... share. It's basically just a more task-focused version of Wave.

• You know when you have a fight with a friend and they start pulling in other friends that weren't really involved? Well Activision's fight with Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella just yanked in Electronic Arts. Activision claims Infinity Ward conspired with EA on the possibility of creating an independent game studio that would steal Activision employees.

• If you live in a household with someone who owns a tablet or eReader, you are at greater risk of owning one yourself. According to pollster YouGov, 17 percent of iPad owners have more thanone iPad in their homes, and 15 percent of Kindle owners have more than one unit. Only 21 percent of second-tablet owners got them as gifts.

• Mark Hurd, the former Hewlett-Packard Co. chief executive, is fighting to keep private the letter that led to his resignation. The eight-page letter, in which former HP contractor Jodie Fisher accused Mr. Hurd of sexual harassment, is currently under seal in Delaware’s Court of Chancery. The law firm for the plaintiff in the lawsuit said in November it intended to make the letter public. Earlier this month, Mr. Hurd’s lawyers filed a motion to keep the letter under wraps.

Kickers and Weird Science

• New Tech Promises Cheap Gene Sequencing In Minutes
  • DNA tags let us sequence the genome from a single parent

Calendar

• DC Universe Online To Launch January 11th - long-awaited superhero MMO role playing game
• Nexus S gets its first update over the air
• "xmas shopping- Get it by Dec. 24 -- AMAZON - Order as late as 7 p.m. PST Wednesday with FREE Two-Day Shipping"

Voicemail

• Anonymous: The internet and the free market

Email

"Hi TNT Chaps,

There was a bit of a political argy bargy last night on this side of the pond over News Corporation's attempt to fully takeover BSkyB, the result of which means it is now more likely to be green lighted (decision due January). This may be of interest to you guys because it would mean News Corporation will have a paywall with BSkyB that has millions of subscribers for catchup/video on demand services, and a paywall with their newspaper division that has about 2 subscribers. So, post takeover comes Rupert Murdoch's master plan: News Corporation gives the BSkyB subscribers access to the newspaper divisions content and in one swoop Rupert has again saved print journalism from the apocalypse. Technically his business model for The Times et all would have still failed in my view, but, in business, it doesn't matter how you get the numbers as long as you do, and I think it is a move to watch out for.

Here are a couple of links with more information on story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2010/12/what_vince_cable_said_about_ru.html http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/dec/21/vince-cable-war-murdoch-gaffe

Love the show, and happy holidays to all at TWiT,

Yours,

Ethaniel,"

"Aloha TNT crew,

About that Windows port to the ARM architecture you guys spoke about yesterday...

Most people think of ARM processors as mobile chips but the architecture is also making significant advances into the datacenter due to it's significant energy efficiency over x86 chips common today. Just google ""ARM server"" and you'll see what I mean.

The only architectures supported by Windows Server are x86 (32 and 64bit) and Itanium which means Microsoft would get no share of this burgeoning market set to be dominated by Linux. My guess is they're porting Windows Server to ARM, not Windows 7 for tablets.

Keep up the great work,

Kyle Hasegawa Tokyo, Japan"

"Hi Tom and cohorts. In reference to your video caller about the blocking of news sites and the declassification of information. One of the first things they teach you is ""Publication does not mean declassification"". Won't matter how much classified gets loose it won't be declassified until the date stamp or the magic wand. You might be surprised at how much stuff is known from WWII that was still classified in the 1980's even though it was considered common knowledge and possibly taught in history classes. Go figure. Eric Jones"

Sponsors

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Production Information

• Edited by: Jason
• Notes:

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