Tech News Today 136

Tech News Today Episode 136

Tech News Today 136: Strawberry Short Circuit

iPhone outsells all Verizon smartphones, Google under fire from MS and other search engines, strawberry-picking robots , and more.

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Jason Howell
  • JasonHowell.net
• Darren Kitchen
  • hak5.org

Top Stories

• Google under fire by specialized search sites
  • Microsoft joins protest against Google web travel buy

• AT&T's iPhone outsells all Verizon smartphones put together

• Hack attack on Gawker spawns Twitter spam
  • Exclusive: ‘Gnosis’ Explains The Method And Reasoning Behind Gawker Media Hack
  • Gawker wrestles with reader data breach, hacking
  • FAQ: Compromised Commenting Accounts on Gawker Media
  • How to Prevent a Gawker-Style Hack From Endangering You
  • How to check if your password was exposed in Gawker hack
  • Google Doc of hacked file
  • Gawker not alone, McDonald's Says Customer Database Hacked

Discussion Stories

• Amazon Says Hardware, Not Hackers, Caused Outage
  • Amazon knocked offline by 'hardware failure'

• Anonymous Wikileaks attackers 'easy' to find says study
  • Anonymous isn't: LOIC leaks internet address of user
  • Grand jury meets to decide fate of WikiLeaks founder
  • Leaked: Julian Assange’s OkCupid Profile

• Supreme Court lets ban on "gray market" imports stand

• FCC Commissioner: net neutrality rules should cover wireless

News Fuse

• Nissan delivered the first Nissan Leaf electric cars this weekend. Olivier Chalouhi from the San Francisco Area got the first one, a shiny black number. New Leafs, -- Leaves?-- also arrived in Arizona, Southern California, Oregon, Seattle, and Tennessee also. A second batch of Nissan's all-electric hatchbacks is coming on December 20th, with the company promising a nationwide US launch for 2012.

• U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman dismissed Paul Allen's famous patent case, in which he sues pretty much everyone except Microsoft. Judge Pechman stated Allen didn't specifiy which of his competitors' products infringed his patents. The lawsuit, named Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, eBay, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Staples as violating patents.

• You and the handful of tech bloggers who cared, can be very excited now. The Google Latitude app for geolocation and check-ins has finally arrived for the iPhone. Latitude was submitted to the app store around February 2009, back when the President's approval rating was still above 50%, and casued quite a stir when it wasn't approved. But hey better late than crushed by Foursquare and Facebook.

• Didn't know that Apple had an API to detect jailbroken iPhones? Well don't worry, Apple has dropped iOS 4.0's jailbreak detection API with no explanation given. That comes just in time for Tuesday, when Stefan Esser of Sektion Eins will demonstrate a tool called antid0te, which reportedly adds ASLR (address space layout randomization) onto jailbroken iOS devices.

• A new FCC report claims that 68 percent of connections in the US advertised as 'broadband' fall below the agency's most recent minimum requirement: 4Mbps down and 1Mbps up. In other words, more than two-thirds of broadband Internet connections in the US aren't really broadband. At the same time, Forrester Research announced US folks spend as much time online as watching television.

• Internet Now as Popular as TV, Survey Shows

• Sylvain Zimmer, was among those intrigued by a strange formula scribbled on a chalkboard in the background of a Chrome OS video. Sylvain decoded the message "speed and destroy." from the formula. He thenput goo.gl, in front of those words linked to a page congratulating him for being "first to figure out our MENSA-certified puzzle" and promising to send him a Cr-48 laptop as his prize.

• Turns out Netflix is on to something. Research firm In-Stat claims sales of both DVDs and Blu-ray discs, are expected to decline by $4.6 billion between 2009 and 2014. Blu-Ray on its own will rise but not nearly enough to make up for the dive in DVD sales. In-Stat predicts streaming content and digital downloads are to blame.

• It's patent-snatching time! Apple and Google are reportedly in a bidding war for bankrupt Canadian telecom Nortel's patent portfolio. Unnamed sources speaking to Reuters confirmed that the two companies—among others—participated in the first round of bids on Nortel's IP portfolio, the most highly prized being patents related to 3G and 4G wireless tech.

Kickers and Weird Science

• Strawberry-picking robot knows when they're ripe

Calendar

• Hindsight 2010: Top Trends on Twitter
• PS3 to start streaming ITV and Channel 4 content in the UK this week
• OpenLeaks is live... sort of
  • http://www.openleaks.org/

• T-Mobile drops the G2 to $50 on contract, really wants you to buy one
• Be a part of TNT this holiday season!

Email

"A couple weeks behind in listening to the pcasts.. but yeah Jamaica and I suspect other Caribbean territories are fore the most part Blackberry.

Yep as a smartphone its top of the heap... Iphone et al just don't cut it out here. Its cool and chic but not as practical as a B'berry which has a keypad... handles messages like a snap (which is the main use of a mobile phone)..and a dataplan which is much more affordable than most.

Nokia of course rule the dumb phone market.

Russ Kingston, Jamaica"

"Hello TNTers. I can’t understand why you constantly use the phrase “Hack” when referring to the alternative uses for Kinect. The device itself has in no way been hacked as neither the software nor hardware for Kinect have been modified. An actual Kinect Hack would be if someone figured out how to load new firmware onto the Kinect so I could cheat on Dance Central which no one has been able to do because of safegaurds. That is what Microsoft has been saying all along. Read their quote on tampering again if you don’t believe me. Even CNET, when they started reporting on Kinect ”Hacks”, referred to them as “open source Kinect drivers” but the media in their attention grabbing way decided to call them hacks when they are not.

Oscar El Paso, TX"

Sponsors

Ford

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GE

• Ecomagination.com/challenge
• GE 4
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Production Information

• Edited by: Jason
• Notes:

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