Tech News Today 167

Tech News Today Episode 167

Tech News Today 167: It's Gonna Get Dirty

Is Microsoft a gaming company now?, What's really going on at Hulu, Netflix rates the ISPs, and more.

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Jason Howell
  • JasonHowell.net
• J. Sperling Reich
  • showbizsandbox.com
• Scott Johnson
  • frogpants.com/tms

Top Stories

• Is Microsoft becoming a gaming company?
  • Second quarter earnings posted 8.17 billion profit and revenue of 19.95 billion about even with last year. However entertainment and devices revenue rose 55 Percent (thanks Kinect) while Windows and Windows live revenue fell 30 percent. The revenue gap between the two is now just 1.3 billion-- a year ago it was 4.8 billion.

• Sony's NGP announced: stuffed with tech, no price or release date
  • Sony's next-gen PSP (NGP) has a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, quad-core GPU as well
  • Sony's next PSP (codename NGP): a closer look
  • The Sony NGP/PSP2: What we still don't know
  • 5" OLED screen, front and rear cameras, touch screen on display and on back of similar size and proportion, may sync gameplay with PS3, built-in 3G connection, game stored on flash memory cards. Uncharted, Wipeout, Killzone, Hot Shots, Resistance, and LittleBigPlanet releases either shown or hinted at. A Call of Duty title was also announced.

• Sony's PlayStation suite brings Sony games to Android phones
  • an official PlayStation Store filled with games for your Android tablets and cellphones,starting with an emulator for existing PSOne titles and is promising an Android game store later this year, says it's hardware neutral, Sony controls the marketplace with PlayStation Certified, PlayStation Suite will emulate touchscreen controls,

Discussion Stories

• Hulu looking to become more like cable, at risk of losing some ABC and Fox content?
  • Hulu management has discussed recasting Hulu as an online cable operator that would use the Web to send live TV channels and video-on-demand content to subscribers talk that Disney may pull some ABC content and News Corp. may pull some Fox content from Hulu's free offerings, offering it instead on Netflix and other premium competitors.
  • Higher Prices Boost Time Warner Cable, But Subscriber Losses Continue
  • TWC lost a net 141,000 video subs in the last quarter, added 94,000 Internet customers-- revenues still up thanks to higher rates

• rates North American ISPs
  • Netflix Gets Social: “Extensive” Facebook Integration Is Coming
  • High-res chart
  • Netflix: ISPs who charge by the gigabyte are ridiculous

• Google begins censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and other Big Media profanity
  • Google blocks BitTorrent from being used in instant search

• Norway: Sony's PS3 "updates" actually downgrade system
  • Court grants Sony's temporary restraining order against Geohot, PS3 jailbreak still available everywhere

News Fuse

• DRAM may stop being cheap soon according to DigiTimes. With demand increasing sharply for mobile RAM, specialty DRAM and NAND flash memory, chipmakers are planning to devote less capacity to PC DRAM. If true, it means you should upgrade your RAM soon before the price starts creeping back up.

• Police in the UK have arrested five individuals thought to be involved in DDoS attacks by Anonymous. Three teenagers aged 15, 16 and 19, were arrested with two men, aged 20 and 26. The five males are being held after a series of arrests at residential addresses in the West Midlands, Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey and London this morning.

• Looks like those HTC Facebook phones we were hearing about are not for reals. Dan Rose, head of business development Facebook said in a statement it's just a manufacturer integrating Facebook into their device in an interesting way. " When asked about Facebook-branding, Rose quoted a fictional Cameron Winkelvoss: "No. There's no such thing as Harvard law. And there's no such thing as a Facebook phone."

• Microsoft has charged an 11-year-old autistic child, Julias Jackson, with cheating and taken away all his Xbox Live achievements. He has not been suspended from Xbox Live however. His mother, Jennifer Zdenek is furious. Xbox Live staff have emailed Zdenek three times to explain why Julias' Gamerscore was reset and that he can still earn achievements in the future. The boys mother says she will cancel Xbox Live at the end of the month.

• China's Lenovo is partnering up with NEC for a "strategic alliance" in Japan. Under the terms of the deal, the NEC Lenovo Japan Group will be formed. Lenovo gets 51 percent of the shares and NEC will own 49 percent plus the choice of first CEO, for which it's selected its own Hideyo Takasu. No word on what this wonder twin power-activated corporation might end up doing.

• After a leaked document from the department of justice showed police will be able to demand extensive private information for minor offenses, some Swedish ISPs have decided to fight back. Several ISPs will route all traffic through VPN. The data will be logged, but pointless as it will not be identifiable. ISP Bahnhof says they will give you the option to opt out of VPN, but giving up your privacy will cost $8 a month extra.

• More competition in ISPs is desparately needed, and some hope just launched. Lightsquared just got approved to sell mobile high-speed Internet on a wholesale basis. The FCC granted the company permission to open its satellite and base station networks to a wide variety of mobile broadband partners. The move could mean new, innovative 4G services across the country, among them under-served rural areas.

• Facebook is getting behind HTML5 in a bigger way by extending a helping hand to social gamemakers who use HTML5 instead of Flash. Cory Ondrejka gave a tech talk on the topic at Facebook HQ last night. He admits that HTML5 is not working consistently across browsers but touted a bench-marking tool that “exercises browsers under game-like conditions to measure how many sprites can move around on the screen at once.”

Kickers and Weird Science

• Princess Leia Debuts Kinect-Powered 3-D Video Streaming

Calendar

• WikiLeaks alternative OpenLeaks goes live
• With Skype 5.0 out of beta, group video chat becomes a premium feature
• Rupert Murdoch’s Daily for iPad Debuts Feb. 2 at the Guggenheim in New York
• Verizon iPhone Pre-Orders to Start at 3am ET on February 3rd, Offering AT&T iPhone Trade Ins
• Motorola Atrix 4G at the end of February and Xoom tablet too although it might slip to March, Droid Bionic and LTE Xoom in Q2 - all according to Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha during the Motorola earnings call.

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Production Information

• Edited by: Jason
• Notes:

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