Tech News Today 323

Tech News Today Episode 323

Tech News Today 323: It's All Fluffy Bunnies.xxx

Deny or embrace porn domains, Netflix bugs everyone, double cell data capacity for nothing, and more.

Submit and vote on story coverage at technewstoday.reddit.com

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Sarah Lane (@sarahlane)
  • SarahLane.com
• Iyaz Akhtar
  • thisoldnerd.finitecomedy.com
• Jason Howell (@raygun01)
  • JasonHowell.net
• Ryan Block
  • gdgt.com

Top Stories

• Exclusive: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Tim Morse Named Interim CEO
• Yang Says “Not for Sale”: All-Hands on Yahoo’s Slippery Deck!
• Bartz’ Job as Yahoo CEO Ended With a Phone Call
• Bartz is out: will Ballmer come back to Yahoo?
• Yahoo CEO Bartz Leaves With 33% Approval Among Employees
• My Picks for Yahoo’s Next CEO
  • Carol Bartz was fired as CEO, interim replacement is CFO Tim Morse
  • ATD lists Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin and Providence Equity Partners, among others as possible acquirers. Also in the Wall Street rumor mill recently are large companies: AT&T, News Corp. and Verizon.
  • Yang reportedly told VPs the company is not for sale. Even though, it was hiring advisory firms, such as Allen & Co., to explore strategic options.
  • Bartz opposed selling stake in Alibaba
  • "To all, I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward. - Carol"

• Did Netflix just start limiting users to one movie stream at a time? No.
• New Netflix Restriction: One Stream Per Customer
  • Yesterday: users reported an error message appearing if you tried to watch more than one stream at a time on different devices.
  • Today: According to spokesman Steve Swasey, no Netflix member is limited to less than two streams at once. The error message was just that, an "error" the company is correcting.
  • Hacking Netflix reports another blip caused S1 of Star Trek: TNG to disappear temporarily over the weekend -
  • The unenforced policy in the terms of service limits you to one stream for every disc you can have out at a time. Streaming only get one stream at a time. This policy remains unenforced.

• It's finally official - the Droid Bionic will launch on Verizon tomorrow for $300. Enjoy its 4.3-inch screen, dual-core processor and LTE goodness.
• Droid Bionic review
• Review: Droid Bionic is a winner
  • DROID Bionic available in stores at $299
  • Verizon will offer a lapdock feature (using Motorola Webtop) similar to the Atrix on ATT. 11.6-inches for $300
  • A $99 dock option charges the phone and pipes video to a connected HDTV.
  • Sloped build like X and X2
  • 1 GHz dual-core processor and 1 GB of RAM (TI OMAP)
  • 4.3-inch qHD (960×540) touchscreen with antireflective coating
  • 32 GB of storage: 16 GB internal, 16 GB microSD card (included)
  • Google Android Gingerbread 2.3.4
  • 8 megapixel auto-focus rear camera supporting 1080p video recording
  • Front-facing camera for video chat over 4G, 3G or Wi-Fi networks

Discussion Stories

• .XXX web domain registration begins
• Limited Registration Begins for .XXX Domains
  • Starting today, brands have 52 days to request to have their name blocked from use with .xxx. The block is a one-time fee of $150-$300
  • Existing adult entertainment sites can also submit their application to reserve a spot on .xxx
  • ICM registry is administering the launch. XXX goes live next year
  • An 18-day land rush registration effort begins October 28. Open registration starts December 6
  • Sunrise A is for those in the adult entertainment business; and Sunrise B is for those outside the industry who might not want to have their businesses associated with a porn-focused domain
  • Disputes go to arbitration; duplicate requests in Sunrise A will be auctioned off

• AT&T, T-Mobile Merger Hearing Set for Sept. 21
• AT&T Able to Cut T-Mobile Bid If Remedies Rise
  • Judge Ellen S. Huvelle with the D.C. District Court. will hear the ATT - DOJ case at 2 PM September 21st in Washington DC
  • Reports say AT&T is willing to sell off 25 percent of T-Mobile's business and promise not to raise existing T-Mobile prices
  • AT&T would be able to pay less than the deal’s original $39 billion value if regulators demand asset sales that surpass 20 percent of that figure, or about $7.8 billion, according to Bloomberg report

• Breakthrough Could Double Wireless Capacity with No New Towers
• Rice University PR
  • Rice University's new "full-duplex" technology allows wireless devices like cell phones and electronic tablets to both "talk" and "listen" to wireless cell towers on the same frequency -- something that requires two frequencies today.
  • In 2010, Ashutosh Sabharwal and Rice colleagues Melissa Duarte and Chris Dick published the first paper showing that full-duplex was possible
  • This summer, Sabharwal and Rice's Achaleshwar Sahai and Gaurav Patel set new performance records < http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.0607> with a real-time demo of the technology that produced signal quality at least 10 times better than any previously published result.
  • Sabharwal's team has gone one step further and achieved asynchronous full-duplex too

News Fuse

• Satellite phone company Iridium announced two new devices. One is the Iridium Extreme, a satellite phone, that is the company's smallest handset offered by Iridium. The other is a mobile hotspot called the AxcessPoint. But it doesn't work like other WiFi hotspots. The AxcessPoint needs to connect by USB to the Extreme and 9555 Irridium phones and only BlackBerry and Android phones can access it.

• GlobalSign, a certificate authority, has put a halt to issuing authentication certificates after seeing a post on Pastebin by ComodoHacker. The post mentioned that ComodoHacker had gained access to a number of certificate authorities and mentioned GlobalSign by name. This is the second European certificate authority to be hacked in two months joining DigiNotar.

• The iPhone 5 hysteria continues. Pocketnow.com took a look at the EXIF data of a picture and concluded that the image must be from the next iPhone. The EXIF data says an iPhone 4 took the picture, but the image apparently was cropped from a nearly 8MP snapshot. EXIF data can be faked, but the mania continues until Apple just announces the phone.

• Facebook made $1.6 billion in the first half of 2011 according to a Reuters source. Net income was about half a billion dollars. Investors have previously valued the company at about $80 billion. Facebook does not report numbers since it is still a privately held company. However the looming threat of Google Plus does not seem to have slowed its ad growth... yet.

• TiVo is readying its quad-tuner Premiere Elite DVR for retail. The Premiere has been announced before, but it was only available via television service providers. The Elite will have a 2TB hard drive to store all those recordings you can make on its four tuners and access to things like YouTube, Amazon Video, and Netflix. It will cost about $500 for the box, but there's no launch date announced yet.

• AMD is shipping what it calls the world's first 16-core Bulldozer processors for servers in October. The processors have 8 Bulldozer modules - ExtremeTech explains the modules as "more than one core, but not quite two." If you're wondering when you can get one in your desktop, the consumer level version of the Intel i7 competitor, codenamed "Zambezi," still doesn't have a release date.

• The Seoul offices of Google received a couple of friendly visits from South Korea's antitrust regulator yesterday and today. Google has been facing scrutiny in South Korea since several local Internet portals filed a complaint with the Korean Fair Trade Commission saying that Google is restraining competition. Google said it would work with the commission to address its questions.

• A ruling on a copyright lawsuit against over 5000 Bittorrenting defendants has been made. Judge Bernard Zimmerman said that even though these defendants may have acted in a swarm, it does not mean they were "acting in concert" such that they could all be joined in one case. Apart from all kinds of jurisdictional and fairness issues, Judge Zimmerman also made a common sense argument against the joining of all these defendants, “No courtroom in this building can hold over 200, let alone 5000.”

• While talking up the power of Nvidia's Tegra processor, Nvidia's CEO said that he believes that Windows Phone 7 apps will run on the next version of Windows on the desktop. Microsoft has never said anything to back up this claim, but considering Windows 8 will be able to run on the ARM architecture and all Windows Phones already run on ARM, it's not too far a jump.

Randomizer

• Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) bomb developed in South Korea

Calendar

• On this day in 1998: Larry Page and Sergey Brin Incorported their company. Google Inc followed a $100,000 check written by Andy Bechtolsheim, a founder of Sun Microsystems.

• Velocity Micro Cruz T408 8-inch tablet has gotten its 802.11 FCC credentials, has gone on sale for $240 at Amazon. front-facing cam, 4gb storage, micro-sd slot, but no Android Market support

• GameFly "unlimited pc play" Beta begins tomorrow September 8 - the free client lets users buy Windows/Mac games & interact with other Unlimited Play users. GameFly members can also rent computer games & manage their console and handheld game rentals.

• AT&T Impulse 4G available September 18th for $29.99. Huawei-sourced Android 2.2 device which AT&T says will eventually be updated to Gingerbread

• Eric Schmidt says Ice Cream Sandwich will be released in October / November - at least that's what he told SalesForce.com CEO Marc Benioff on stage at last week's Dreamforce conference

Email

"Hi TNT crew. Yesterday was my last day on Netflix at my old price. I called and cancelled, sure I could have done it over the Internet, but I wanted to let them know that a 60% price increase, coupled with an impending loss of Starz was an unacceptable combination. The rep told me, ""we didn't lose Starz, in fact, we just renewed with them"". I informed him he was 100% incorrect, that indeed Netflix stock took a 9% hit on the news last week. I wonder how many other people have been talked into staying with this false information? My main beef with this increase is they are trying to get people off of DVD's before their catalog is truly up to speed. If every DVD was available to stream they could charge $100 a month for a DVD and I wouldn't bat an eye. Mike in NH"

"Guys,

With reference to the Dragon Con episode, LoveFilm is a division of Amazon so they know how the video rental & streaming business works well. Therefore, as content rights became available, I wouldn't be surprised if the new Kindle is used as a trojan horse to undermine Netflix's position in the US market. So, anyone want to put money on an Amazon TV with airplay like capabilities?

Love the show,

Yours, Ethaniel"

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Production Information

• Edited by: Jason
• Notes:

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