Best Damn Tech News
Ex-Google engineers launched the new search engine Cuil www.cuil.com to ho-hum reviews amidst a massive PR release. With it’s slick interface and huge index they may have been expecting more but with such poor search results, many have written it off already. You might want to try ask.com for better results which isn’t saying much. To give you an example, a search for the “Best Damn Tech Show” brings up a Wikipedia result in the top spot that links you to a page that doesn’t even exist. Nice one.
Friend of the Tech Show, Ted Stevens the longest serving senator in congress has been brought up on charges (7 counts on failing to disclose - not for being a douche as most people thought). We’ve put together a highlight reel or some of his most famous Tedism with more courtesy of Jon Stewart over at our partner broadcaster Comedy Central. http://blog.indecision2008.com/2008/07/30/top-5-daily-show-ted-stevens-moments/
Iris on the Virus
Apple gets pie in the face from security researchers over a failure to act on patching serious DNS BIND flaw.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/29/apple_dns_patch_mia/
Schmidt Faced
Response to Gary Vaynerchuck
Rachel’s Soy Sauce - Dishing up the gossip for the gals
IBM facilities hosting 3 week tech camps for gals after hearing of the decline in female tech engineers http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080731/BUSINESS01/807310312
American Association of University Women Education Foundation is hosting a tech trek camp for 14 year old girl at Stanford University http://www.mercurynews.com/campbell/ci_10036148
Reasons girls should get into tech: hotter more intelligent guys-brain before brawn ladies, you get to travel, go to sweet conferences, meet really interesting people and be a part of the ever changing growing and evolving tech community. the internet is our own little ecosystem plus you get all your drinks for free…trust me, I know! :]
Around the World Wide Web
China had every intention of opening up access to the world but we’ve learned that they’re still at their censorship game - apparently Best Damn Tech Show, Period is still on that list.
Portugal has grabbed 500,000 of the latest Intel produced Classmates PC which is a bit of a slap in the face for OLPC (One Laptop per Child www.olpc.org)
Site of the Week: Chris Brogan dot com - new media business and marketing resource
The Best Damn Band puts together another hit song! This song tells the story of a young lad who’s built a pc network that is beyond compare. Friends come calling, videogames begin and all is well. But wait, what happens when the network crashes and the game is over? The young lad learns a valuable lesson about friendship and network stability in our latest tale…
“After hearing accusations that Coldplay’s Chris Martin stole a song from unknown band Creaky Boards, Schmidt lashes out in defence of Coldplay in this intense and unbridled (and quite obviously unscripted) tirade against the millions of Creaky Boards fanboys.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7Dud5OEgRA
Geeks wanting to participate in a Guiness World record are being called upon to participate in “Download Day” which represents the release of Firefox 3.0. The folks at Firefox are looking for the title of most downloads in a 24 hour period. The day has not been set but will occur some time in June. Sign up at http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/
The D: All Things Digital conference commenced, opening with the comedy duo of Gates and Balls, showing off some features of the new Microsoft 7 predominately multi-touch and banking on this new system to bring them out of the toilet.
Google is wooing developers, at their recent inaugural Google I/O get-together. Some 2500+ web developers were plied with orgasmic delights like Gears, HTML5, Javascript/AJAX and Android. MySpace has already deployed a new email system using Google Gears offering the ability to sort message on your desktop.
AOL also announced that they will be jumping on OpenSocial with open arms
In an attempt to combat apparent lagging broadband adoption here in the States (well behind other countries like Korea, Australia, Canada and Europe), the FCC is proposing that the company buying the newly planned spectrum auction must provide free wireless access nationwide. They will still have the ability to place restrictions on content.
Rand, Iggs and Adam check out Verizon’s ‘My Home 2.0′ event featuring Ryan Howard from the Philadelphia Phillies. Adam cooks burgers and hot dogs while helping Iggs solve his personal network security issues.
Schmidt faced
Around the World Wide Web
Google is by no means the only street mapping system in the world, in fact geo-mapping company MapJack out of Hong Kong and Thailand has been doing the rounds, currently featuring several cities in the US and a couple of Thailand. They tout better quality images, more features and a more immersive experience with additional backpack carrying cameras walking the streets.
Columbia is jumping on board the new XO laptops, ordering 65,000 of them. The addition of XP was the clincher. Plus the secret compartment for storing drugs made the deal a winner.
Meanwhile Dell, Acer and HP are also vying for a spot in the cut-price PC market following the success of OLPC and the recent Asus EEE PC which sold for $299 and is almost at 2 million sold. After seeing the popularity of these machines Windows is extending support of its XP sub-notebook OS and slashing the price to $32.
Best Damn News Headlines Answering question from last week as to 4th most popular search engine….AOL Google extends lead over competition last month growing to 61.6 percent, up from 59.8 percent in March seemingly proving unstoppable. Also proving that even a merger between Yahoo and Microsoft would not be enough to topple the giant.
Larry Page made the trip to Washington to appeal to the powers-that-be for access to the unused TV whitespace in an attempt to blanket the whole country with free wifi. He also talked up a possible Yahoo-Google deal citing a near monopoly in communications if Microsoft and Yahoo were to bed together.
Microsoft launches cash for search service that pays users a rebate for buying products they found through the company’s Windows Live search engine. Gates claims that MS will partner with more than 700 retailers including eBay Inc, Barnes & Noble, Sears and Home Depot.
The One Laptop per Child program is planning to resume its BOGOF program where users can purchase the laptop and donate one to a third world child. They announced plans for the 2nd gen, dubbed XO that should be closer to the $100 goal. They also announced a partnership with Microsoft to offer their operating system for cheap (but not cheap enough at this stage as they still have to work out the licensing agreement.) They also have a new domain at www.laptop.org
Around the World Wide Web Europe is planning a ‘big brother’ campaign in a bid to counter terrorism. Their plan includes the creation of a digital vault which will contain information on every email, internet visit and phone call. This central repository will be made available to Home Office officials.
Tech this out - This one straight from the “Oh my God, this is the biggest news ever!” files. Facebook is planning a redesign. They’re talking about tabs folks. http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=509854&id=21073243776#pid=509854 - Napster launched its new mp3 store touting some 6 million unprotected tracks not without its bugs though - HP launches a green initiative for printers…the HP DeskJet D2545 Printer is made almost entirely out of recycled plastic. - Mahaolo are opening up to everyone. The editors will be monitoring but anyone can edit content. - Speilberg has entered the gaming arena with Boom Blox. Teaming up with EA, it has been described as “This is a wacky, addictive puzzle game with precious little story and surprisingly bland characters”
Best Damn News Headlines CBS BUYS online media company CNET for $1.8bill
ReadBurner Partners with Netvibes - Drew talks about it
Ask (IACI) Buys Dictionary.com for $100m
Verizon have announced plans to adopt an open source platform for their phones but will be backing Linux over google’s android
MySpace fake user Lori drew, who allegedly helped create a fake MySpace account to contact neighbour Megan Meier who thought she was chatting with a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans which ended up in the hanging death of Megan has officially been charged with “one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorisation to obtain information to inflict emotional distress.”
Public pressure (and what they call potential copyright infringement) has forced the folks at Sega to pull a marketing website/video for their new game “Offset the evil” by using a campaign that resembled the My Little Pony character. As a result of the backlash they decided “we thought it would be a good time to take it down and move the campaign onto the next stage.”
Yahoo launched its new SearchMonkey platform for developers to add extra features link ratings, add images like a facebook photo aimed at improving the user experience, kickstarting it with the SearchMonkey developer Challenge awarding up to $10,000 for the top apps. These “enhanced results” will apparently replace the current search results.
Finally, Google is continuing to roll out (although there is a waiting list) FriendConnect with the aim of integrating social features like blogging and feedback forms without requiring the skills of a developer. On the other end MySpace, Yahoo and Ebay have jumped on to the OpenID option. One platform not accepting of the Google initiative is Facebook…for his opinion on such issues…
Schmidt faced Facedbook bans Google Friend Connect: Facebook is all about openness and data portability, as long as that doesnt involve openness or portability of data, it seems. Today they wrote a long 7 paragraph blog post to get a single point across: Facebook has banned Googles Friend Connect access to the Facebook API. They claim that Google’s use of the data goes against their policies and wants to work with Google to cometo an agreement, however Facebook’s application distributes their info in a similar fashion.
Iris on the Virus Safari 'carpet bombing' vulnerability. Apple says 'meh'
Tech Tips
Around the World Wide Web While Google is starting to blur certain images on their street view option here in the US, they’re launching street view in the EU amid privacy concerns. According to one source in France “Unlike in the US, we are mostly beautiful people but we do have some uglies. Generally we like to hide the uglies but with something like this Google streetview, it will be difficult”.
Tech this out - Comcast has acquired Plaxo - ComScore data has Google jumping to the head of the class by overtaking Yahoo as the most popular website in the US as determined by the number of unique monthly visitors. - Amazon is taking some interest in Animoto, the very cool music video creator - Flash 10 has been made available for public testing
Tech Biffo I can’t decide who the biffo is between, Myspace and the “Spam Kings” or the Spam King to Spam King for the Spam King title. Self proclaimed “Spam King” Sanford Wallace plus another self-proclaimed “Spam King” Walter Rines has been ordered to pay $230 million to MySpace for hijacking other people’s MySpace pages or setting up their own and sending over 700,000 junk messages to members. Meanwhile another self-proclaimed “Spam King” Scott Richter is being pursued by the News Corp giant.
Best Damn News
Following their failed bid on Yahoo, Microsoft is giving Facebook a bit of a poke to see if they’ll poke back over the possibility of a full acquisition. While they already claim $240 million investment in the company, values are being thrown around in the ballpark of $15 billion.
As anticipated, Grand Theft Auto smashed all sorts of sales records, raking in some $500 million in its first week. The Hooker and Prostitutes Union (HPU) have now changed their tune, now staking a claim in the success of the game. “Even though the game depicts violence against us, it’s all true and now it gives us an extra element of credibility” says Lindy LaLa the union’s spokeperson. Now a new group has come out against the game, RAD (Russians Against Defamation) are complaining that “in the game Russians are depicted in a bad way” they go on to say that “not all Russians are that ugly” citing Baryshnikov, Kournikova and Sharapova as examples. Plus, only 70% of Russians regularly wear sweat suits. (Side note, most copies sold on XBOX)
MySpace launches “Open Availability”, data share with Yahoo, Ebay and Twitter, et al.
Pownce says game on with shared files in friend streams, and more storage space for everyone. Competitor to box.net, ups the game on twitter.
Drewmors
Microsoft trying to buy Facebook now that they’ve dumped Yahoo at the arranged marriage alter?
Do they really want FACEBOOK or do they want Mark Zuckerburg (or both?). Zuckerburg the next Bill Gates? Long term CEO? Ballmer/Gates’ Successor?
The debate on Net Neutrality rages on. Also raging on…
Schmidt faced
Senators to ISP’s: “Think twice” about ‘Net neutrality or else.
Years ago, Congress began protecting ISPs from the twin threats of regulation and taxation; in return, ISPs were expected to deliver an unimpeded connection to the Internet. A move away from a neutral ‘Net would undermine the “very philosophical underpinnings of what we fought for for the last 15 years,” according to Ron Wyden (D-OR). If that happens, he sees no reason for Congress to continue sheltering ISPs.
Iris on the Virus
Chinese cyber attacks
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/08/belgium_india_china_warnings/
Tech Tip
Getting away from your PC
Tech this out
More proof that hackers are generally assholes….the website for the epilepsy foundation was recently hacked with the intent on causing seizures. They exploited a vulnerability in the publishing software that would barrage the users with a lot of flashing images and bright colors.
The MPAA has won a victory against TorrentSpy, claiming a $110 million judgement and permanent injunction for distribution of pirated video. As a result TorrentSpy has shut up shop.
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