Tech News Today 138

Tech News Today Episode 138

Tech News Today 138: Free Beer For Forgers

Why monkey is a password, Is there an FBI backdoor in BSD? Whether you own your software, and more.

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Scott Johnson
  • myextralife.com
• Kevin Purdy
  • lifehacker.com
• Jason Howell
  • JasonHowell.net

Top Stories

• Amazon's latest Kindle deletion: erotic, incest-themed fiction

• Report of FBI back door roils OpenBSD community
  • BSD Coder Denies Adding FBI Backdoor

• Bing Releases Huge Set of Upgrades: Maps, Local, Mobile, Travel, Image Search

Discussion Stories

• Imagine a world where every app has its own data plan

• YouTube in talks to acquire Next New Networks

• Court: You do not own that copy of WoW you bought

• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Is Time's Person of the Year
  • Facebook Ranked Best Place To Work

News Fuse

• Yahoo Confirmed today that it laad Off 600 employees about 4 percent of their workforce. Area companies like Tucows.com, DirecTV, and several others posted Twitter messages expressing interest in hiring former Yahoo employees and the Tied House brewery is offering free beer to any former Yahoo employee who brings in their severance papers. Free beer for forgers!

• A Greek designer named Alex Tapanaris, whose name appeared on the PDF press release circulated by online trouble-makers Anonymous has had his web site disappeared and, may or may not have been arrested. The UK website THINQ managed to talk to Alex on the phone, and while he wouldn't confirm his arrest

• A Verizon iPhone in 2011 may not add much to Apple's overall sales. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster advises most of the early adopters of a Verizon iPhone will be people switching from AT&T. Munster expects Verizon will add around 2.5 million iPhones on its own next year but cannibalize around 6.5 million from AT&T. In this scenario Apple will likely sell a total of 20 million iPhones.

• 19-year-old Lamar Johnson of Wolverhampton England has admitted being involved in a £500,000 fraud in which he used stolen credit card details to buy his own songs on iTunes and Amazon. He was part of a group who allegedly downloaded the songs 6,000 times in 2008 and 2009. Johnson admitted being responsible for about 2,000.

• China launched a state-sponsored, Twitter-like service called Red Microblog Wednesday, the first step in a plan for local governments to master new media.ONe of the first posts? “I really like the words by Chairman Mao Zedong that ‘The world is ours; we should work together.’ " Other posts contain similar party-line cheering.

• Remember that Forrester Research report we mentioned previously that Internet and TV usage are tied now? Not so fast Internet cheerleaders. In the first quarter of 2010, Nielsen clocked weekly usage at 38 hours and 44 minutes, nearly three times what Forrester found. Over the same time frame, comScore’s account of internet usage was 7 hours and 24 minutes, about half of what Forrester found.

• Google TV got its first software update today, with a much-needed update to the horribly outdated Netflix app,the ability to move and resize video displays while surfing the Web and a "movie results page" that helps users find out which services are offering films and finally the launch of a remote-control app for Android-based devices.

• The crazy madmen at Google fired a week's worth Nexus S's into the Earth's atmosphere, hoping to test both the durability and the information-gathering skills of the onboard compass, gyro, and accelerometer, while dedicated GPS modules were installed in each to help recover the cargo, So far, only six of the phones have been recovered

• Nokia Siemens is touting that the specifications for Long Term HSPA Evolution have just been submitted to the 3GPP, promising theoretical speeds in excess of 650Mbps -- a number that still falls shy of the ITU's definition of a 4G standard, but easily eclipses just about anything shy of LTE-Advanced or WiMAX 2. T-Mobile USA is specifically mentioned in Nokia Siemens' press release as supporting the developments.

Kickers and Weird Science

• Exclusive: Twitter Raises $200 Million at $3.7 Billion Valuation; Adds McCue and Rosenblatt to Board

• Colbert, Drake, Lil Wayne Had Most Retweeted Tweets in 2010

Calendar

• MetroPCS adds 4G LTE in New York, Boston
• Google delays decision on local fiber networks until early 2011
• Telus to bundle free Xbox 360 with every WP7 activation or renewal for a limited time, says leak
• Windows Phone 7 said to be getting major 'Mango' update in August or September
• Dell Streak slips to $100 on contract at Best Buy
• Be a part of TNT this holiday season!

Email

"... after a fashion ;)

Danish broadsheet newspaper ""Politiken"" decided that they too, for the sake of freedom of speech, wished to mirror Wikileaks. Which they have. To that end they bought cloud space... on Amazon ;-)

Amazon doesn't know about it yet - so no waves ... yet.

Danish text: http://www.computerworld.dk/art/112840

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.computerworld.dk/art/112840&sl=da&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8 -hatebaddesign"

"Tom,

I was listening to the podcast from Friday, where you mention that Movie studios are experimenting to combat piracy, and you mentioned that they should start naming movies after common search terms. Well, funny that you mentioned that because there's a movie coming out in April of 2011 called ""Source Code"" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0945513/). At first I thought what a dumb name for a movie, but now I'm sure it's part of their evil plan to make the movie unsearchable for download.

Regards,

-- Guillermo Castro"

"As an active duty USAF person, I can assure you that the NYT et. al. blocks are by no means the most ridiculous blocks we encounter on a daily basis. Some days, it seems like our network admins' slogan is ""If you can do your job, we're not doing ours."" Hooray for smart phones, that can give us the info we need.

-- Daniel "

"Dear TNT People,

I was watching your show 137 and I wanted to make the point that storing in the cloud can be entirely safe if end to end encryption is used like they do in Last Pass. Last Pass cannot decrypt a users password database and hand it over to the Feds even if they were ordered to because they do not know the encryption key.

Security Now went over it in a ton of detail.

-Ben Steele"

Sponsors

Ford

• twitfordfocus.com
• Sync 9
• ad times: :35-:43 and 15:59-18:14

Slingbox

• Slingbox.com/TWiT
• SB 4
• ad times: :43-:55 and 33:34-34:16

Production Information

• Edited by: Jason
• Notes:

This area is for use by TWiT staff only. Please do not add or edit any content within this section.