Tech News Today 197

Tech News Today Episode 197

Tech News Today 197: Never Joke About Unicorns

The Japan earthquake and how it affects technology and social media, Eric Schmidt as Commerce Secretary, does your camera need 3G, Unicorns, and more.

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Sarah Lane (@sarahlane)
  • SarahLane.com
• Joanna Stern
  • engadget.com/editor/joanna-stern

Topics

• The YouTube Earthquake – Video From Japan
  • 8.9 earthquake hit at 2:46 PM local time, centered 236 miles east of Tokyo. Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs said KDDI’s undersea cables are broken and the telecom is working to fix telephone and mobile services.
• Sony, Subaru, and Toyota close factories in wake of earthquake, other companies check in
• Japan Sendai Quake and Tsunami: big photo gallery
• Tokyo quake puts data centers, cloud services at risk
• Google reacts to Japanese tsunami with a Person Finder tool
• Twitter, Facebook vital as cell networks jam in Japan

• Massive damage' from Japan quake hits communications

• Earthquake turns TV networks on the Web into print

• Eric Schmidt rumored to be contender for Commerce Secretary
• Current Commerce Secreatary Gary Locke, to be the U.S. ambassador to China. former Pfizer Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Kindler and Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt and US trade representative Ron Kirk all being considered.The next Commerce secretary will have a significant role in Obama’s National Export Initiative to double U.S. exports to $3.1 trillion within five years. Kindler was part of a presidential advisory board on increasing U.S. exports that Obama named last July. Schmidt gave $25,000 to Obama’s inaugural committee and has been called on regularly for economic advice.

Discussion Stories

• Dell’s Number Two In The PC Market Again, Thanks To The iPad
  • 4th quarter survey sales numbers from iSuppli are in. Overall, iSuppli says the fourth quarter set a record for overall PC shipments with more than 93 million units, up nearly 5 percent from the same period in 2009. Dell takes back number two spot as Acer suffers from slow sales of netbooks.

• Amazon Ditches Illinois Affiliates (Including Roger Ebert) To Avoid Web Tax
  • Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed a bill into law Thursday that will require Amazon and other internet retailers that use “affiliates” in the state to start paying the state’s 6.25 percent sales tax. Apparently, that spurred Amazon to quickly notify its Illinois affiliates—which include famed movie critic Roger Ebert—that their Associates accounts will be shut down on April 15.

• iPhone and Blackberry brought down in hacker competition
• iPhone - Charlie Miller principal security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators (4th year in a row pwning something, usually Mac Laptops in the past) in collaboration with Dion Blazakis of ISE. Took one week to discover a flaw using fuzzing software to identify bugs. Drive-by attack that exploited a heap overflow in code related to Safari. Exploit will not work on iOS 4.3. Still, he won $15,000. BlackBerry Torch 9800 running BlackBerry 6 - Willem Pinckaers from Matasano and independent researcher Vincenzo Iozzo with help from researcher Ralf Philipp Weinmann.. Stole a complete contact list and cache of pictures and wrote to file storage. Used the webkit-based browser to visit booby-trapped site with a chain of vulnerabilities including an integer overflow flaw. A reseracher withdrew from attacking the Dell Venue Pro running Windows Phone 7, but may come back at it today. No one has stepped up to attack the Nexus S running Android or Mozilla's Firefox browser.

• Sony working on a Cyber-shot camera with 3G cellular connectivity?
  • Would the camera come with 3G paid, or require service? Do we need a camera with built-in wireless?

News Fuse

• A Dragon Age II gamer banned from BioWare's forums allegedly for inflammatory language is now locked out of the singleplayer game for the duration of his ban, and here's why. EA's backend systems link forum accounts to player accounts. This is worrying some folks...forum trolling has led to multiplayer bans in the past so that an abusive player doesn't ruin the game for others, but why lock a bad forum apple out of his own private Dragon Age?

• A UK government advisory body, the Broadband Stakeholders Group, has confirmed that most of the major fixed line internet providers in the country will next week sign-up to a new Voluntary Code of Practice on Traffic Management Transparency. Recently everybody from the European Commission to the UK government has called upon ISPs to be more 'transparent' with their traffic management policies.

• A promotion offering Microsoft Points, 48-hour Xbox Live passes, and in-game props could have cost Microsoft more than it bargained for last weekend after Xbox Live users discovered that they could generate hundreds of working codes and redeem thousands of points. Estimates have been made that Microsoft Points worth between $1 million and $3 million dollars were generated illicitly before Microsoft shut the system down on Monday.

• Wondering when the copy paste we expected in January will finally arrive on Windows Phones 7? Eric Hautala of Microsoft posted on the company's official Windows Phone blog that the glitches that bricked a few Samsung phones in February has caused the company to take the time to make sure everything's rock solid before proceeding with the so-called No Donuts update -- which includes copy and paste, performance improvements, and CDMA support

• But here's an update that HAS happened for Windows Phone 7! Our long national Windows Phone 7 data-gobbling nightmare is over. Yahoo updated its IMAP servers in the last few days, fixing the issue that led to Windows Phones 7 gobbling through large multiples of the kilobytes they really needed to just to check that inbox full of Facebook updates and funny jokes forwarded by your Uncle Harry.

• Folks, as you know, SXSW is coming up and will shortly be clogging your Twitter stream. But what if you're really not interested? Peter Kafka at AllThingsD points out today that TweetDeck’s filter function, allows you to block any Tweet with “SXSW” (or any other term you want) from your feed. We're just saying.

• Knowledge Ecology International has obtained a leaked document from the new Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, that, like the ACTA before it, had its intellectual property chapter drafted by the US.The chapter was drafted in secret and has been classified for at least four years after negotiations end. The agreement exports (nearly verbatim) the DMCA's rules on digital locks, ISP liability, and subscriber disconnections, to the rest of the world.

• And now a sad tale of a Swede who should never have listened to his unicorn. Ryan of Sweden heard about Liberty Media's amnesty plan for get copyright infringers so he sent an email promising that he will pay 'from the pot of gold I got at the leprechaun at the end of the rainbow', despite criticism of the studio from his unicorn. Liberty Media's lawyers have issued a subpoena to Google for personal information related to Ryan's Gmail account.

Kickers and Weird Science

• Saving the Earth: meet NASA's Planetary Protection Officer
  • PPO has two main jobs: to make sure that missions we send into space looking for extraterrestrial life don't end up contaminating their destinations with earthlings, and to make sure that anything we bring back to Earth doesn't accidentally end all life on Earth. NASA's Planetary Protection Officer is Cassie Conley --- Recently, several missions have returned samples from space, including Stardust, Genesis, and Hyabusa. Upon returning, their samples have been kept in biosafety level (BSL) 4 facilities, similar to the kinds of rooms we use for studying pathogens like ebola.

Calendar

• Motorola Xoom update rolling out , brings 'required enhancements' for Flash 10.2
• Flash 10.2 beta hits Android Market on March 18th, only supports Honeycomb at release
• Jailbreak for iOS 4.3 is already up and running
• MCVUK reports Sony NGP heading to Europe November 11th, according to anonymous sources.
• T-Mobile's new data plans launch Sunday 3/13
• Sony Xperia Play hits the UK on March 31st, thumbsticks coming never
• SXSW coverage Saturday and Sunday 3/12 and 13

Email

"Hy TNTeam,

as probably lots of viewers wrote you:

non Google-sanctioned devices which use the OpenSource edition of Android are not allowed to use the Android Marketplace and there are lots of those in China. This is also what Amazon speculates on with there (soon to be?) Android App Store.

keep up the good work --Jakob from Romania"

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Production Information

• Edited by: Jeff
• Notes:

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