Tech News Today 314

Tech News Today Episode 314

Tech News Today 314: The Game Stops Here

New CEO, and end of an era, neither one at Apple this time, GameStop lives up to its name, Samsung protests too much, and more.

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Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Sarah Lane (@sarahlane)
  • SarahLane.com
• Iyaz Akhtar
  • thisoldnerd.finitecomedy.com
• Jason Howell (@raygun01)
  • JasonHowell.net
• Darren Kitchen
  • hak5.org
• Christopher Null
  • blog.intuit.com

Top Stories

• Exclusive: Tim Cook e-mails Apple employees: "Apple is not going to change"
• The entire Steve Jobs story
• Apple stock opens lower, but not plummeting
  • Closed -$2.46, -0.65%"
• Tim Cook, Apple’s new CEO
• Analysts Confident in Apple’s Prospects

• GameStop responds to Deus Ex controversy by pulling it from shelves
  • GameStop will not sell retail copies of Deus Ex: HR until Square Enix provides boxed copies without the OnLive coupon
  • You can still buy the game from GameStop's online store
  • "As part of Deus Ex: Human Revolution's boxed offering on PC, Square Enix included a third-party coupon," Square Enix said in a statement. "GameStop was not made aware of this inclusion and Square Enix respects the right of GameStop to have final say over the contents of products it sells and to adjust them where they see fit in accordance with their policies. Square Enix invites gamers who want to purchase the PC version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution without additional coupons to buy the game at any one of over 4,000 GameStop stores in North America or purchase a digital download copy online from www.gamestop.com.

• RIM Announces Music Service for BlackBerry Messenger
  • BBM Music allows you to build a personal music profile with up to 50 songs. You can refresh your profile by swapping out up to 25 songs each month.
  • Features music from EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group.
  • Up to 50 tracks from your personal profile are shared with your BBM Music Community, and each member of your community can share up to 50 songs from their profile with you.
  • So with each friend that is added to BBM Music, you grow your music collection, since the songs from their profile become available to you.

Discussion Stories

• Will Facebook Take On Instagram With Photo Filters?
• Facebook Targets Instagram With Photo Filters
  • NYTimes reports two engineers say Facebook is coming up with photo filters like Instagram
  • CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to wait until his engineers and artists have created more filters before the feature is released.
  • The Times says Facebook made a failed attempt at acquiring Instagram this summer.

• Microsoft: front facing cameras, Skype integration coming with Mango update (video)
• Windows Phone Mango's WiFi hotspot secret
• Microsoft shows off quad-core Windows slate. Could this be its Build give-away?
  • TechEd event in New Zealand, where two employees also revealed that WP7 Mango will have a front-facing camera
  • Microsoft's Lync VoIP client will soon expand to other platforms, including iOS, Android and Symbian.
  • Skype integration also coming soon
  • A screenshot of a WiFi hotspot feature in action was published by WPCentral
  • investigation by Rafael Rivera showed that connection sharing is indeed built in to Mango itself.

• Samsung gets more definitive about HP, while HP gets less definitive about selling off PSG
  • In an interview with Bloomberg TV’s Emily Chang, Todd Bradley (head of PSG and former Palm CEO) “We’ve lost clarity about what we announced,” he added, calling sunsetting the Touchpad “a prudent business decision” and the less-certain announcement about the Personal Systems Group driven by advice from HP’s securities lawyers to be as transparent with its deliberations as possible. He avoided endorsing the decision to explore splitting the company.
  • Samsung CEO Geosing Choi wrote in a note sent to Wired.com: “To put to rest any speculation on this issue, I would like to definitively state that Samsung Electronics will not acquire Hewlett-Packard’s PC Business. Hewlett-Packard is the global leader in the PC business with sales of 40 million units last year, while Samsung is an emerging player in the category and sold about 10 million units in 2010. Based on the significant disparity in scale with Samsung’s own PC business and the complete lack of synergies, it would be both infeasible and imprudent to even consider such an acquisition."

News Fuse

• Once HP cut the price of the TouchPad to $99, people took one look at the hardware specs and thought - we've got to put Android on it! A couple of people are claiming that the HP TouchPads they received already were running Android 2.2 when they received them. The Android TouchPad appears to be the work of Qualcomm because a "Qualcomm Innovation Center" logo flashes before the tablet starts up. A ROM dump of an Android TouchPad has bene posted on RootzWiki.

• Samsung headed to court today to defend itself in Germany against Apple's accusations that the Galaxy Tab infringes Apple's Community Design. The court, which has banned sale of the Tab in Germany, decided... to put off a decision until September 9th. In the meantime, the ban stays in place.

• Samsung's Galaxy S II is coming to the U.S., but according to the Wall Street Journal it's not coming to Verizon. Before you get too depressed, Boy Genius Reports says Verizon may not get the Galaxy S II, it would be getting a Samsung phone with nearly identical specs under another name. Samsung will hold its press conference to officially announce the U.S. Galaxy S II on August 29th.
• Exclusive: Verizon passes on GALAXY S II, but ‘similar’ Samsung phone launching soon

• Universal Plug and Play is a suite of protocols that allow computers and consumer electronics in a home network to communicate. It also allows would-be hackers to scan the internal networks of residents using a host of home routers by Linksys, Edimax and Sitecom and others. The scanning tool, Umap, was released in June of 2010 by Daniel Garcia and has since been updated to version 0.7 beta following his talk at DEFCON. To mitigate this attack users are urged to disable the authenticationless UPnP protocol. Or listen to the latest Security Now for all the geeky details.

• 22 year old Peter Gibson has been charged of conspiracy by Scotland Yard for attempting a DDoS attack on PayPal. The attacks were in response to PayPal no longer accepting contributions to Wikileaks in December 2010. Gibson was originally questioned by authorities in April and is believed to connected to that incredibly well known hacker group, Anonymous.

• Facebook has officially hit 1 trillion page views, according to Google. The data was compiled by the Google-owned Double Click Adplanner and also shows that in June more than 870 million unique users visited Facebook-- an average of 1,149.42 page views per user. And more unique visitors than Facebook's reported 750 million users. A lot of bots hitting those public profiles? Who knows?

• There's a big COO/CEO shake-up. Lenovo's COO Rory P. Read has left Lenovo and will be the head of AMD. AMD has been without a permanent CEO since the departure of Dirk Meyer in January. What's that? You don't know about Rory Read? He worked for IBM for over 20 years and led global operations for Lenovo. Good luck at AMD, Rory.

• Recently, an AT&T document leaked out that showed it would cost AT&T considerably less money to build out its next genration wireless network compared to purchasing T-Mobile. Now, AT&T is facing additional review by the FCC because of that document. It would cost AT&T under $4 billion to bring LTE to 80 to 97% of the U.S. AT&T wants to buy T-Mobile for $39 billion. Let the conspiracy theories continue.

• After 14 years and over 15,000 stories posted, Rob Malda, AKA CmdrTaco is leaving Slashdot, the site he helped create. He didn't indicate any plans other than spending more time with family. But we know it isn't a decision he made lightly as he loses his ability to post. It's the end of an era in more than one arena today. We here at Tech News Today Mod you up for Interesting Rob malda and hope your KArma always remains positive.

Randomizer

• Aussie triumph in phone-throwing comp

Calendar

• On this day in 1991: Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old university student from Finland, writes a post to a user group asking for feedback on a simple kernel for a Unix-like operating system that runs on an Intel 386 processor. It would eventually be called Linux.
• PAX Prime kicks off in Seattle tomorrow 8/26
• Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, Galaxy Note, and Wave 3 launching at IFA on September 1st
• Facebook Announces f8 Developer Conference: September 22

Email

"Hey TNT crew,

I just want to say a small congratulations your 314th e'pi'sode (or 3.14, ya I'm just that geeky). Though since your e'pi'sode happens in August, and August traditionally being such a slow tech news month, I wonder what you'll be talking about today? Best wishes to you all, see you on your Tao day!

Chris Portland, Oregon."

"Just wanted to send a quick email to correct a few things said about Onlive yesterday.

Tom had mentioned that there was a fee involved with Onlive, or that it cost for the service, but that the Deus Ex game would be free that you were talking about yesterday that the code was given out for, but the Onlive service is actually FREE. There are NO cost involved other than renting or purchasing games, or if you want to sign up for there all you can play play pack plan for 9.99 a month that gives you unlimited play to over 85 games for that flat fee. The service is free to sign up, and free to demo anything you wish.

Also, the Onlive service doesn't run in your browser. You actually download a small client to your desktop. Onlive runs on PCs, Macs, your TV via a the small Onlive game system, and coming this fall, via ipad, android tablets, and smartphones.

- Justin Stone"

Sponsors

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Production Information

• Edited by: Jason
• Notes:

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