Tech News Today 76

Tech News Today Episode 76

Tech News Today 76: 802.11pigeon

Fast winged broadband, Google gets sued by SkyHook, Android's monster marketshare rise

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Becky Worley (@bworley)
  • BeckyWorley.com
• Nate Lanxon
  • Lanxon.co.uk
• Erik Lanigan (@eriklanigan)

Top Stories

• Why Skyhook Is Suing Google: Google Basically Forced Motorola To Ditch Skyhook To Pass Compliance Tests[1]

• Android grabs huge marketshare gain, everyone else slips

• Android vs. iPhone: Wait just a minute!

• ipad killing netbook sales says bestbuy

Other Stories

• Microsoft demoes Twitter and Netflix apps for Windows Phone 7, releases final dev tools

• Netflix, Twitter, OpenTable, Flixster, and Travelocity have all confirmed plans for their Windows Phone 7 apps. Those apps should be availabe by the holiday season accoring to Microsoft

• TWiT.tv app for WP7!

• Verizon won't sell Windows Phone 7 until 2011

• Yahoo Previews Fancy New ProductsImage

• Yahoo unveils three-year plan to become cool again

• Yahoo Says It Will Speed Up Its ‘Shipping Cycle’

• Diaspora code released[2]

• ABC TV's My Generation Sync iPad App will will display polls, trivia and other content timed to be relevant to what is happening on the show while you're watching. Audio watermarking embedded in the broadcast triggers timed content. The app can be used to watch live or recorded broadcasts.

• Game Biz Tips Atoms To Bits: EA Makes More From FIFA Downloads Than Discs

News Fuse

• A House Judiciary subcommittee today passed the Cell Tax Fairness Act of 2009 (H.R. 1521). The bipartisan bill would ban new state or local taxes on mobile phones for the next five years. Currently, cell phone consumers spend on average more than 15 percent in taxes on their wireless service. This is compared with about 7 percent in taxes on other taxable goods, according to Lofgren. How nice of the Federal government to ban state and local taxes while leaving the door wide open for Federal taxes.

• Researcher Nicholas Sze has calculated the Two quadrillionth digit of Pi using Yahoo's Hadoop cloud computing technology. The computation took 23 days on 1,000 computers. This is just a slice of Pi, not a continuous string. But it's the farthest slice we've had yet. I am beside myself with elation

• Justin.tv for iPhone 2.0 adds live video broadcasting, chatting and Facebook and Twitter sharing, catching the iOS crowd up with their Android neighbors. The Android live streaming app accounts for 20 percent of Justin.TV's live streaming broadcasts.

• More than one million Web domains were infected with malicious code in the second quarter of 2010 — around one percent of all active Web domains, according to new data from anti-malware firm Dasient. The number was extrapolated from data gained through a sample scan of sites combined with customer deployments. One could presume the solution must to be to buy some anti-malware. From Dasient. Just guessing.

• Verizon today said it would bring the new faster 4G LTE wireless to 30 'NFL' cities by the end of the year. I guess this means Green Bay is getting LTE, since there are only 32 teams and 4 of them share a metro area. Either that or Verizon thinks the Packers play in Milwaukee.

• Many groups are up in arms over the sale of violent video games to minors, but the FTC has done some research and says it's relatively hard for minors to get ahold of m-rated games. at least when compared to the difficulty level for buying mature rated cds, r-rated movie tickets and r rated DVDs. while they didn't compare the m-rated video game purchase to being 16 and trying to buy a six-pack, we do think this data should at least keep the common sense media folks off the video game witchhunt for a while.

• On Monday the head of a state run holding company Russian Technologies State Corp. showed off a prototype of the country’s first domestically-manufactured 4G smartphone. The 4G phone is expected to launch next year under the Yota brand, which already makes a portable wi-fi “egg” that looks vaguely Apple-inspired in its design.

• Excited about IE9, but still running WIndows XP- wahwah, Microsoft senior director of IE business and marketing, told the register No IE9 hardware acceleration features in the current version of IE8, or older PCs running Windows XP.

Kickers and Weird Science

• Pigeon flies past broadband in data speed race

Calendar

• PS3 Blu-ray 3D playback landing Tuesday

• iPad comes to China Friday 9/17

• black friday predictions from dealnews

• The 6502 Microprocessor Turns 35

Voicemail

• iYaz Video message on Microsoft's Surface tablet

Email

"Hey Tom and company,

Just finished listening to the Wednesday TNT here in Bangkok and the listener voicemail at the end compelled me to comment.

It's exhausting to hear people (particularly Leo himself) keep repeating the mantra that the world contains determined pirates and ""honest people"" with nothing in between. Repeating this line of wishful thinking over and over doesn't make it true, and I think it's being naive to ignore human nature.

How many of us can honestly say that we never used the original Napster, or Bittorrent, or installed a friend's copy of a program on our computers? You shouldn't need to have a degree in behavioral economics to realize that if piracy is made fast, easy, and anonymous, that a great number of people will participate, often justifying it as a victimless crime.

Most copy protection schemes acknowledge this reality and are just trying to slow down that huge group of us in between the felons and the saints.

Roger"

"TNT,

In the segment about Google firing the employee for doing creepy things Tom indicated that this guy was a real concern as opposed to the accidental sniffing of too much packet data. A concern of privacy advocates is that while Google the company may have no intentions of doing anything bad with the data they accidentally collected (or the giga-tons of data that they intentionally collect), having it all under one roof makes it tempting for individuals at the company.

The IRS has had problems in the past with employees looking up information on famous people.

Google probably has way more interesting information on you than the IRS has.

Todd"

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Production Information

• Edited by: Erik
• Notes: Mediafly publish: 5:00

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