oakland police funeral

On Thursday, entertainment trade publication Variety reported that an executive from film studio Lionsgate said the Wii could be equipped to stream movies as early as this year.


Are movies next?

(Credit: GameSpot)"The thing that is clearly a force in digital are the game devices," Curt Marvis, president of digital media for Lionsgate, told Variety. "I think when we see the Wii come into the market with the ability to stream movies, which I think is maybe going to happen as soon as this year, oakland police funeral I think that's going to be a big marketplace for digital distribution."

A Nintendo representative said the company doesn't comment on rumor or speculation.

The major film studios are fans of game consoles. People are used to thinking of the boxes as entertainment devices. The devices are connected to televisions so they own choice living room real estate.

3 day potty training

SAN FRANCISCO--Memristors are arguably the most important thing HP Labs is working on--it could fundamentally change the memory chip industry--but its director has no problem talking about it openly. 3 day potty training

While most hardcore research on future products is kept under heavy guard until it can be patented, HP Labs is insisting that forward-thinking technology research has to be done collaboratively and (mostly) in the open.

HP Labs underwent a major overhaul a year ago, shortly after bringing in new director Prith Banerjee. He whittled down the vast number of projects his researchers were devoted to, and laid out eight very specific areas of focus. Banerjee also impressed upon HP scientists the importance of working with both government researchers and universities to collaborate on future projects, like memristors.


An atomic force microscope view of a circuit with 17 memristors.

(Credit: J.J. Yang/HP Labs)A year later, HP Labs is now ready to discuss specific projects it is pursuing with partners at universities around the world, and in some cases with government funding. They will be officially released Monday in HP Labs' Annual Report. All of the selected projects are beyond near-term products set to debut from HP, but are usually three to seven years out, according to Rich Friedrich, director of the Open Innovation Office at HP. Forty-five professors from 35 worldwide academic institutions are involved.

The application for the projects ranges from cool consumer tech like the "Multimodal Command-and-Control By Integrating Two-Handed Gestures and Speech" collaboration with academics in India and New York to looking at new ways of harnessing information for commercial enterprise like "Workload Management for an Operational Business Intelligence Supercomputer" under research by a German professor.

It's unusual for large IT companies to work so closely with those outside of the company's own labs, 3 day potty training and more so for them to announce exactly which projects they'll be tackling.

"These are very hard problems," Banerjee said to a gathering of reporters Friday morning. He insists that his way is the only way to make significant progress in what is clearly a global market for innovation: "We can't build everything ourselves."

But all of this takes money, and when the economy is in turmoil, it's easy to imagine that anything that doesn't impact a company's bottom line immediately might be de-emphasized. Banerjee insists that is not the case at HP. While the HP Labs' annual budget of $150 million pales in comparison to HP's total research-and-development funding allotment of $3.5 billion, CEO Mark Hurd is "very supportive" of the Labs group, Banerjee said.

The Open Innovation Office has seen that firsthand. "We have more money this year than last year, 3 day potty training even though the economy is tough," Friedrich said, because HP sees that the collaborative research "is the pipeline of growth for the company."

dana carvey

Muziik is a new free music service--started by a 15-year-old and his dad--that uses music from YouTube clips. CNET News intern Erik Palm talks to reporter Greg Sandoval about how it works and what some of the obstacles could be.

Plus, the mother of another 15-year-old boy has sued Apple because her son's 16GB iPod Touch allegedly blew up in his pants pocket, dana carvey leaving him burned.

dylan ratigan

This is a story about Jerry Jalava, a Finnish software developer who lost part of his finger in a motorcycle accident last July. According to his friend, Henri Bergius, when the surgeon assigned to work on Jalava's prosthetic finger discovered his hacking history, he made a clever suggestion: incorporate a USB key into the new digit.

The prosthetic finger contains a 2GB USB key, and Jalava also loaded it with Billix distribution, CouchDBX, and Ajatus to run off the drive, throwing even more geek cred into the mix.

When Jalava needs the drive, he simply pulls it off his left hand, plugs it in, and comes back to pick it up after the transfers are finished. dylan ratigan That dispels any parallels to that scene in "Robocop" when he uses the giant spike that comes out of his hand to transfer data from the OCP criminal database to the computer in his head.

Check out more pictures of Jalava's cybernetic finger in the slideshow below, and be sure to listen to Thursday's episode of The 404 Podcast to hear 30 jokes in a row about what would happen if this were to go on another part of the body.

a new way forward

The authors of the latest variant of the Conficker worm are upping the ante against security vendors who are working to stop the spread and threat of the persistent program.

Conficker.C shuts down security services, a new way forward blocks computers from connecting to security Web sites, and downloads a Trojan. It also is programmed to begin connecting to 50,000 different domains on April 1 to receive updated copies or other malware, as opposed to connecting to 250 domains a day as previous versions are doing, Ben Greenbaum, senior research manager for Symantec Security Response, said on Friday.

The authors of the code are "strengthening their hold on their collection of infected machines at the same time they are attempting to strengthen their ability to control those machines by moving to 50,000 domains," he said.

A self-described "cabal" of companies, including Microsoft, Symantec, and a host of domain registration providers, have been trying to thwart the efforts of Conficker by pre-registering and locking up the domain names being used by the worm to distribute updates.

Now that Conficker.C is targeting 50,000 domains, the group has its work cut out for it, Greenbaum said. Regardless, "it's unknown at this point whether (boosting the domains) is an effective sidestep around the cabal's actions," he said.

The worm, also called Kido or Downadup, was first detected in November and is believed to have infected more than 10,000 computers. The first two versions exploit a vulnerability that Microsoft patched in October.

The second variant, Conficker.B, was detected last month. It added the ability to spread through network shares and via removable storage devices, like USB drives, through the AutoRun function in Windows.

Among the domains targeted by Conficker was that of Southwest Airlines, which was expected to see an increase in traffic from the botnet on Friday, Sophos said last week. However, a Southwest spokesman said there had been no impact to the site from any additional traffic as a result of Conficker.

Experts are urging computer users to apply the Microsoft patch and update their antivirus software. And this week,a new way forward Enigma Software Group and BitDefender announced free Conficker removal tools.

Conficker has proved to be such a nuisance that Microsoft has even offered a $250,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the Conficker case.

wkyt

There is now a lot more about Mars to view in Google Earth than there was just a month ago.

Google announced Friday a major update to show more details of Mars both in its history and the present day. Originally the 3D maps of Mars were available with the release of Google Earth 5.0, just a little more than a month ago. The update shows how our knowledge of Mars, wkyt and our study of astronomy, has evolved over time.

According to Google, the new update allows us to travel back in time to see the antique maps originally drawn by astronomers Giovanni Schiaparelli, Percival Lowell, and others. It also show present-day Mars with a "Live from Mars" layer, which is a continuous stream of the latest imagery, including those from NASA's THEMIS camera aboard the Mars Odyssey spacecraft.

Users can have the feel of flying along with Odyssey as well as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to see what the two crafts have been observing lately and where they are headed next.

Without having used the original release of Mars 3D map, I tried the new update and loved it. After selecting Mars from the toolbar in Google Earth, I could do a 3D flight around the Red Planet.

The new update now makes the surface of Mars covered with informational layers, imagery, and terrain. I could also zoom in and out, wkyt change the camera view, or click on icon to read more about certain locations and events, most of which I didn't know that they exist before.

indicted

Killzone 2 is being celebrated by video game journalists as one of the greatest first-person shooters ever released, but the game--which takes place on Planet Helghan as war erupts all over the world--is catching some fire of its own here on Earth, around Toronto.

According to a report in The Star, indicted a Toronto newspaper, Pauline Johnson Junior Public School officials e-mailed Sony Canada after seeing more than 300 Killzone 2 ads placed on bus shelters near their school. Citing poor placement and suspect images, the officials demanded Sony remove the ads immediately out of concern for students.

"My kids, who come from a lot of different countries, who have to experience violence, who basically come here to seek shelter and safety, that's the stuff they don't need to see," Davis Mirza, a fourth and fifth grade teacher at the school, told The Star.

According to Mirza, the ads featured a "menacing head with glowing eyes" that was wearing a mask with a breathing tube as a war zone "like Iraq" was depicted behind the figure. Citing Sony's responsibility to the community, Mirza told The Star that he was upset the company wasn't doing its part to "promote any kind of community renewal or even responsibility."

Once Sony Canada received the e-mail, the ads were taken down immediately, company officials told The Star, and from now on, it will establish an advertising-free radius around schools. Sony representatives didn't indicate how far that radius would reach, but the company wants to be "sensitive to community concerns."

The idea of moving ads away from schools is probably a smart decision on the part of Sony and every other video game developer that doesn't want to upset an entire community. School officials have a point when they complain about violent video game ads around kids who aren't even old enough to buy them and Sony did the right thing by bringing the ads down and in effect, indicted admitting it was wrong.

But if Sony will start creating an advertising barrier around schools, how far away should it be? Some might say that one mile is far enough, since most kids will be on the bus by then. Others might say the advertisements can be placed within a few hundred yards from a school.

How far should violent video game ads be kept from schools?
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Polldaddy.comEither way, Sony has made the pledge to keep violent video game ads away from schools. But developing the proper radius might be difficult, since there are so many schools in most communities, leaving only certain areas available to ads. And then there's the likelihood that ads placed in these areas won't be effective because they won't be viewed by the target demographic. After all, the ads in the bus shelters were placed there for a reason: kids would see them and want the game.

While I applaud Sony for taking the ads down over community unrest, I wonder how it plans to implement its advertising-free zones, since a standard distance probably won't work around every school. indicted In fact, I'm not even sure what a fair distance would be. Does Sony know something we don't?

In trying to do good, I wonder if Sony has hindered its ability to effectively advertise.

Do you have a good idea of how far Sony should keep violent video game ads away from schools? Vote in the poll here and let us know

vince shlomi

The Symbian Foundation committed itself to an aggressive operating release schedule Friday, promising a new version of the open-source OS every six months for the next several years.

Symbian is the world's most widely used smartphone operating system, but it has been losing ground to rivals like Apple, vince shlomi Research in Motion, and Microsoft in recent months. Last year Nokia, formerly Symbian's largest shareholder, decided to revive its growth by unifying the software and releasing it under an open-source license as part of a foundation of companies.

That plan is rounding into shape, according to Symbian's David Wood. The first unified release created under the Foundation, known as Symbian^2, is expected to be "functionally complete" by the middle of this year and "hardened" (debugged) by the end of the year, meaning that devices bearing the new software could start to appear as the year closes.


Symbian is setting an aggressive schedule for making improvments to the Symbian OS.

(Credit: Symbian)
Symbian^3 is scheduled to reach functional completion around the same time, with a hardened version on tap for the middle of 2010. That means Symbian and its partners plan to make frequent updates to software, which could make it much easier to react to changing trends in how people use smartphones.

Symbian developers will start by unifying development behind the S60 user interface, relieving Symbian developers from having to choose between three distinct user interfaces. But the group is going to have to come up with something that tops--or at least matches--some of the newer projects to hit the scene, vince shlomi such as Palm's webOS, as well as something that captures the imagination of the public.

capricorn one

Facebook users just don't seem to be as young as they used to be. And they're going to the social-networking site a lot more often.

A new report from traffic tracker Hitwise shows that U.S. visits to Facebook grew 149 percent in February compared with the same month a year earlier. That pushed Facebook's market share among folks in the United States visiting social-networking Web sites to 36 percent last month, capricorn one versus 14 percent in February 2008.

Facebook stayed in second place, but it's gaining ground against the No. 1 site. In February, MySpace accounted for 52 percent of U.S. visits to social-networking sites, but that's down 28 percent from its year-earlier market share of 73 percent.

kron 4

Apple got people talking this week on topics ranging from the merits (and demerits) of the tiny new buttonless iPod Shuffle to predictions about what it has in store for an upcoming iPhone 3.0 event.

Technology watchers--particularly those focused on trends in gadgetry--put on a collective smile Tuesday morning when Apple announced its latest version of the iPod Shuffle.

The grin wasn't necessarily out of excitement for the new Shuffle, which is smaller than a AA battery and also recites song titles, kron 4 artists, and playlist names to help with navigation despite the lack of any screen on the device. It was more likely the recollection of that far-fetched but increasingly poignant spoof iPod Flea video that stormed the blogosphere several years ago. In the video by Photoshop maven Scott Kelby, the iPod Flea--bearing a striking resemblance to a Tic Tac mint--pokes fun at Apple's shrinking music players and the related accessory industry. That video came before a similar "Saturday Night Live" skit featuring Steve Jobs presenting the iPod "pequeno" followed by the invisible "invisa."

Photos: The wee little Shuffle
And here we are: the new iPod isn't quite mint-sized, but it does look much like a stick of minty gum. It immediately took some heat for being too small, shunning compatibility with third-party headphones without a special adapter, and for the fact that it doesn't have a screen or even any buttons. Some have come to the new Shuffle's defense, but one CNET contributor even went as far as calling it a disaster. Although that same writer, David Carnoy, later came around and realized that the real story may be that the Shuffle's "VoiceOver" feature is a precursor to Apple launching an entire new voice interface for its whole line of mobile products.

Despite taking some flak, the Shuffle's new interface did generate a lot of interest. Upon getting their hands on it, blog iFixIt immediately tore it apart to see what was inside. And CNET's Donald Bell gave it a generally favorable review.


But the Shuffle isn't the only thing Apple had up its sleeve this week. It also got people buzzing about what's next when it announced on Wednesday a March 17 invitation-only event to discuss a new iPhone SDK and an updated version of the iPhone software.

CNET News' Tom Krazit says this could explain why the company has been slow to offer renewals for current SDK licenses, as it might be requiring developers to sign a whole new agreement. While the software will be the main attraction, developers will be closely watching for details about how the new SDK will affect their businesses.

On the software front, judging by the comments about the event, iPhone users are looking for Apple to finally bring cut-and-paste capability to the device. Of all the advancements Apple has planned for the iPhone 3.0 software, that's probably the one users are hoping for the most. Click here for more of Krazit's take on what to expect from iPhone 3.0.

And in other product news, Krazit sorts through some of the Apple tablet and Netbook rumors and ponders the possibility the company is looking at a future e-book store or reader.

Also from Apple this week came the release of iTunes 8.1, which adds support for the newly released iPod Shuffles, along with some security fixes, promised new Genius features, and support for CD imports to iTunes Plus. Security-wise, the update includes a fix for a vulnerability that could lead to theft of usernames and passwords if a podcast containing malware were subscribed to.

Microsoft
Microsoft did a lot of looking ahead this week. kron 4 Microsoft won't say how many people are running its cloud operating system, Windows Azure, but the numbers are growing. Senior Director Steven Martin said they are "approving more and more developers every day." And while much of the mainstream tech world is still getting its head around what exactly Azure will be, some software companies are already digging in and writing Azure code. Since it was announced in October, Microsoft hasn't said much about Azure. But expect more details at next week's Mix conference in Las Vegas.

On the desktop side, Redmond says it's done some work to make sure Windows 7 can run on Netbooks, the fashionable PCs du jour. It will offer a low-cost version of Windows 7 that can be run on less expensive Netbooks; that would obviously mean less profits. However, Microsoft thinks the line between traditional laptops and Netbooks will soon blur, and people will demand more performance in a smaller container, meaning there is still a future for a more full-blown version of Windows 7 in that field.

With Windows 7, it's also making an effort to "rescue" some apps that wouldn't run on Windows Vista, by making sure they will run on Windows 7. A few of the now-Windows-friendly programs include the Spanish-language IKEA Home Kitchen Planner, a German version of QuickTime, and the Arabic program Khalifa Cartoon Characters Creator.

Microsoft divulged a few new details--primarily of interest to developers--about its upcoming Windows Marketplace. The online store will sell apps that run on Windows Mobile devices and is expected to launch later this year.

The software maker will charge developers $99 a year to register, plus $99 for each application they submit to get a program into the app store. Developers who choose to charge for their programs will keep 70 percent of the proceeds, the same percentage Apple pays its App Store developers and slightly less than Research In Motion has said it will give for its forthcoming store.

Microsoft also added to its mouse and keyboard lines with its unusually shaped Arc Mouse--and there's nary a beige one in the bunch. It also stepped into a new realm in hardware with its Notebook Cooling Base, an inch-thick stand with a built-in fan that keeps the temperature of a laptop down.

Also of note
The South by Southwest Interactive Festival, which kicked off Friday in Austin, Texas, has seen explosive growth...Palm still hasn't said how much the upcoming Pre will cost, but we now know that the phone's service will be priced in line with Sprint's other smartphone services...AOL named a former Google exec as its new CEO...IBM took the wraps off a bevy of technologies with a distinctively social-network flavor...Obama's CIO has temporarily stepped down after FBI raids ex-employer...Facebook rolled out a new Twitter-like home page...Steve Wozniak got called a "Teletubby going mad" on "Dancing with the Stars" and then suffered a foot fracture...Google launched Google Voice, kron 4 a sort of middleman for phone calls that, among other things, automatically transcribed voice mails.

amanda knox

Not everyone is as lucky as we are to work adjacent to a hotel with a fresh supply of taxicabs pulling up to its curb. When you're stuck without a ride, cab-calling applications can make ordering a taxi through local companies a surer, safer thing than throwing yourself in the middle of a darkened street and flailing your arms wildly.

A recent application we've looked at, RideCharge for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile (www.ridecharge.com from the mobile browser), not only lets you order a cab from your phone without placing a call,amanda knox but it also has you enter a credit card payment when the ride is complete--tip, too. To round out the service, RideCharge e-mails a a receipt to print for your records, or for an expense report.


iPhone's RideCharge application, Taxi Magic, doesn't have cashless payment yet.

(Credit: CNET)Adding mobile payment to the cab-calling concept gives RideCharge additional layers of service and convenience. On a GPS-enabled phone, you'll receive notifications when your cab is dispatched and can track its progress to your destination. You just have to be comfortable paying with your phone, and paying RideCharge a convenience surcharge per ride--$1.50 for a taxi or shuttle and $3 for a limo or sedan, like the kind business travelers might take to the airport.

Yet quite a few scenarios for these business travelers, and regular Janes and Joes, would obviate the need to ever use RideCharge. Most hotels, for instance, have taxi ranks or concierge services that will flag you a ride. If you're somewhere stationary, you could easily spare the extra minute to call a dispatcher from a free listings application or Web site. However, RideCharge will have its uses for pedestrians struggling to find a cab, and for those who would rather use a sure thing than search, or who would rather type than talk.

For Apple fans, RideCharge also offers a far sexier version for iPhone and iPod Touch. Called Taxi Magic, the free application also lets you ping a cab company for a pick-up in about 30 U.S. cities and track the cab's progress, but doesn't yet have an integrated mobile payment function--which means no surcharge for now. If there's no partnered taxi company to take your order, amanda knox the application lists phone numbers you can call from the iPhone.

job listing

Not everyone is as lucky as we are to work adjacent to a hotel with a fresh supply of taxicabs pulling up to its curb. When you're stuck without a ride, cab-calling applications can make ordering a taxi through local companies a surer, job listing safer thing than throwing yourself in the middle of a darkened street and flailing your arms wildly.

A recent application we've looked at, RideCharge for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile (www.ridecharge.com from the mobile browser), not only lets you order a cab from your phone without placing a call, but it also has you enter a credit card payment when the ride is complete--tip, too. To round out the service, RideCharge e-mails a a receipt to print for your records, or for an expense report.


iPhone's RideCharge application, Taxi Magic, doesn't have cashless payment yet.

(Credit: CNET)Adding mobile payment to the cab-calling concept gives RideCharge additional layers of service and convenience. On a GPS-enabled phone, you'll receive notifications when your cab is dispatched and can track its progress to your destination. You just have to be comfortable paying with your phone, and paying RideCharge a convenience surcharge per ride--$1.50 for a taxi or shuttle and $3 for a limo or sedan, like the kind business travelers might take to the airport.

Yet quite a few scenarios for these business travelers, and regular Janes and Joes, would obviate the need to ever use RideCharge. Most hotels, for instance, have taxi ranks or concierge services that will flag you a ride. If you're somewhere stationary, you could easily spare the extra minute to call a dispatcher from a free listings application or Web site. However, RideCharge will have its uses for pedestrians struggling to find a cab, job listing and for those who would rather use a sure thing than search, or who would rather type than talk.

For Apple fans, RideCharge also offers a far sexier version for iPhone and iPod Touch. Called Taxi Magic, the free application also lets you ping a cab company for a pick-up in about 30 U.S. cities and track the cab's progress, but doesn't yet have an integrated mobile payment function--which means no surcharge for now. If there's no partnered taxi company to take your order, the application lists phone numbers you can call from the iPhone.

tom izzo

Apple developers have been having a tough time renewing their iPhone development licenses, according to reports. For them, tom izzo the company had some good news Friday: the licensing for all developers has been extended to July 11--one year after the opening of the iTunes App Store.

Additionally, Apple announced that licensing renewals will begin in May, a full 60 days prior to the developer program expiration date. Developers got the news in an e-mail.

william rast

If you like Google Reader, but would prefer to keep it from taking up an oh-so-important tab in your browser, you'll definitely like GReader Popup. This experimental Firefox extension pulls up a version of Google Reader that sits atop any page you have open. You can plow through feeds using all the usual keyboard shortcuts you would in Google Reader. william rast Then, when done, you simply click the icon in the bottom right hand corner of your browser and it goes away.

No fuss, no tab switching, and most importantly--more real estate in your browser for extra tabs.

It's a wonderfully simple tool, and built off the same idea behind GCal Popup, which does the same thing but for Google Calendar. With both installed you can hop to specific Google apps from any page, using the bottom part of your browser like an application launcher, or by learning the two-button keyboard shortcut that pulls it up.

My one qualm is that it does a hit or miss job at resizing Google Reader to fit your browser. I had parts of the interface cut off, even when running it on a 1600x1050 screen. If you're trying it out on a small laptop or Netbook this can be a deal-killer.

willie aames

I arrived at the Austin Convention Center 45 minutes before the start of a talk on Friday afternoon that I was hoping to catch, "The Ecosystem of News" led by Outside.in founder Steven Johnson. Unfortunately, willie aames that wasn't enough time: the line-waiting time was clocking in at around an hour.

By the time I made it over to the room where Johnson's talk was being held, the room was full and no one else was being allowed in. There was no simulcast. (Luckily, my colleague Daniel Terdiman was there to see what Johnson had to say.)

The conference that's arguably the biggest must-attend for the digitally edgy has a check-in process that was painfully analog; I've been to plenty of big tech-industry trade shows and I've never waited for that long in line. Granted, with the number of concerts and film screenings that are part of the two other South by Southwest extravaganzas (SXSW Music and SXSW Film) are a big draw, and SXSW is consequently more likely to have to deal with people making counterfeit badges and sneaking into events than, say, the Web 2.0 Expo. And to be fair, SXSW Film attendees were waiting in the same line as those for SXSWi.

But still. You don't want the biggest topic of conversation at Day 1's after-parties to be the fact that it took an hour just to check in. Here's my suggestion for SXSWi 2010: Have a contest to revolutionize the conference check-in process. It's going to be especially crucial if SXSWi continues to grow. There are so many creative minds that come to this event every year; there would certainly be some interesting ideas.

eri yoshida

AUSTIN, Texas--The future of news is not breadlines for journalists, a lack of reporting on politicians' scandals, and a dearth of coverage of what's really going on behind the lines of wars around the world.

In fact, a surprisingly optimistic author Steven Johnson said Friday during his talk, "The Ecosystem of News," at the South by Southwest Interactive festival (SXSWi), there's actually a bright future for news and the best hope for a vibrant, effective,eri yoshida and worthwhile news-gathering community is to look back at the model set over the last decade or so in technology journalism.


Steven Johnson
These days, there's no shortage of signs that the news business is collapsing in on itself, unable to develop a modern business model, and confused by how to tackle the threats posed by online classified sites like Craigslist and amateur bloggers posting news items obsessively and continuously.

And where many see these signs pessimistically as proof that the news business as we know it is dead, Johnson, whose books include "The Invention of Air" and "Emergence," sees the same fate as a good thing. After all, he suggested, why cling to failed systems when new ones that are rising to meet the needs of the future are emerging all on their own?

Johnson began his talk by framing what he called "old growth media," the traditional combination of newspapers, magazines, and television news. He recalled how, when he was in college in the late 1980s, he used to stalk his local bookstore around the same time every month, eager for the latest issue of Macworld.

Back in those days, he said, the best way to get the most recent news about what Apple was up to was to read periodicals like Macworld. Yet, with the long lead times of monthly magazines, that latest news was always several months late, Johnson said. Later, when things like CompuServe came along, he was able to compress the timeframe for getting the most up-to-date Apple news to a few days by downloading the most recent issue of Macweek.

And then along came the Web, and sites like MacInTouch.com, Apple's first site, rumor blogs, and fan sites, Johnson said, which made it finally possible to get the latest Mac news in near real-time. "Now the lag is seconds," Johnson said, "thanks to people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Steve Jobs speech."

Today, he said, many people are panicking as newspapers fail left and right, and as they see the likelihood that as a result, the crucial newsgathering role played by professional journalists will disappear with their dying employers. Yet the example set in technology journalism should give such pessimists something to feel good about, Johnson said.

And just because the impressive advances in newsgathering on the Web were seen first in technology journalism doesn't mean they won't spread to more mainstream--read: important--topics like local government, crime, and so forth.

"The Web...just has a tendency to cover technology first," Johnson said, "because the first people to use the Web were much more interested in technology than" things like school board meetings.

The point? That the model is established, and that for consumers of news, the example set in technology news should be cause for optimism, even if not for the health of the traditional news business. And the proof? Johnson pointed to politics, and the coverage of presidential campaigns.

He said that the first campaign he followed closely was in 1992. His main sources for the most up-to-date news were TV shows like CNN's "Crossfire" and magazines like Newsweek, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. At the same time, he said he watched each of that year's debates religiously and stayed up late to devour the post-game analysis on networks like CNN.

And while all of those outlets still existed during the 2008 election (except "Crossfire"), eri yoshida someone sticking to them last fall would have been hopelessly out of the loop compared to the millions of people who were obsessively glued to the Internet, which was delivering an unbelievable amount of coverage of all kinds about the election.

Johnson talked about how blogs like TalkingPointsMemo.com, HuffingtonPost.com, FiveThirtyEight.com, DailyKos, and Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish--one could determine his political bent by the sites he mentioned--served up a steady flow of breaking news and in-depth analysis never before possible during a presidential election. Add that to the fact that he could watch the debates with "a thousand virtual friends Twittering away with me" and the fact that as many as 8 million people watched President Obama's famous race speech on YouTube, and it's obvious that the political news ecosystem, like that of technology, has found a way to move past the antiquated models of just a few years ago.

"What's happening with technology and politics is happening elsewhere as well," Johnson said, "just on a different timetable."

Local news, once the lifeblood of newspapers, is unlikely to be so in the future. Papers like The New York Times can no longer afford to cover neighborhood stories that interest a small subsection of a much larger readership. Yet, it's those very issues that are of most interest to the people in those neighborhoods, Johnson said.

"Most of what we care about in our local lives is in the long tail," he said, referring to the ability of the Web to bring news about the smallest events to those who want it. And, of course, even the Times itself is now starting to cover neighborhoods with blogs.

"Five years from now, if someone gets mugged within a half-mile of my house," Johnson said, "and I don't get an e-mail alert about it within half an hour, it'll be a sign that something is broken."

And as more and more of this long tail-type of news is covered by those other than professional journalists, Johnson argued, it might well free up those professionals to work on the very kinds of stories that people worry they won't be able to do in the future: war coverage, investigations, and the like.

The key, then, will be for the traditional publications to serve the role of public gatekeepers, or filterers of the flood of information coming in from the amateur Web. And that, Johnson suggested, would be a natural task for the editors of institutions known for their authority: newspapers and TV news networks. And while the readership of physical newspapers has plummeted, the numbers for those publications' online sites has risen dramatically, eri yoshida proving that the audience is still there.

In the end, however, it will be the entire ecosystem of news that will bring the full value to news consumers. It will be social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, which can serve as link circulators, as well as large group filters like Digg and, yes, professional journalists and editors. All together, the news will get covered, Johnson said.

The problem is that what should have been a 10-year ecosystem evolution for the news business has been forced into a much more compressed timeframe by today's financial exigencies. And this sense of panic has caused us, as a society, to lose sight of what, in Johnson's view, is a very positive long-term change.

breville citrus press

On Tuesday, Microsoft released a patch for a hole in Windows 2000 and Server 2003 and 2008 that could allow an attacker to redirect network traffic to a malicious site that has been set to serve as a proxy.

The vulnerability, rated important by Microsoft, allows IT managers to set a Windows Proxy Auto-Discovery, or WPAD, entry in the DNS. breville citrus press If IE or Firefox are configured to "automatically detect settings," the browser will connect to the proxy machine.

This is a useful feature for corporations that want to set up their own proxy server for monitoring employee Web use and for security purposes. But it also could allow for a man-in-the-middle type of attack if an outsider were able to set the WPAD entry through a dynamic DNS update so that the traffic is diverted to a malicious IP address.

The patch solves the problem for systems with no WPAD entry in the DNS, by blocking future queries for WPAD. But for systems with a WPAD entry, the patch does nothing.

IT managers who install the patch could be given a false sense of security that any compromised systems have been fixed, said Tyler Reguly, senior security research engineer at nCircle, who contacted Microsoft and wrote a blog post about his concerns the same night Microsoft released its update.

In a blog post the following day, Reguly said a Microsoft representative told him the company chose to leave existing WPAD entries untouched because it is not possible to differentiate legitimate WPAD entries from ones loaded by an attacker.

But Microsoft could at least have included a pop-up message in that instance, warning users that the DNS has a WPAD entry, and maybe even ask if they want to keep it or block it, Reguly said.

"I understand the need to preserve functionality, but not at the cost of sweeping security issues under the rug," he wrote.

In response to the concerns, Microsoft issued a more detailed technical note on the update on Friday that said the company didn't want to impair functionality and chose not to risk breaking any administrator configurations in the possibility that the WPAD was not legitimate, even if it means an attack would continue to be effective.

"This is indeed not a scenario the security update, or any security update released by Microsoft aims to address," the Microsoft note says. "Security updates are intended to help protect the system against future exploitation, and don't aim to undo any attack that has taken place in the past."

The note then provides instructions for how an administrator can validate the IP address assigned to the WPAD entry in the DNS.

In a telephone interview with CNET News late on Friday, breville citrus press Reguly remained disappointed with how Microsoft implemented its fix for the problem.

"They could have done things to mitigate the fact that they chose function over security," he said. "They also could have modified DNS so you couldn't do dynamic updates with WPAD."

ralph wilson

When President Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act into law 11 years ago, he predicted it will "protect from digital piracy the copyright industries that comprise the leading export of the United States."

The DMCA turned out to be much broader than that. ralph wilson This week, an e-book Web site said Amazon.com invoked the 1998 law to prevent books from some non-Amazon sources from working on its Kindle reader.

Amazon sent a legal notice to MobileRead.com complaining that information relating to a computer utility written in the Python programming language "constitutes a violation" of the DMCA, according to a copy of the warning letter that the site posted. MobileRead.com is an e-book news and community site.

MobileRead.com forum moderator Alexander Turcic said in a post on Thursday that although he did not believe the program violated the law, the site would "voluntarily follow their request and remove links and detailed instructions related to it." Turcic said that, contrary to Amazon's claim, his site never "hosted" the software.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.

The author of the software in question, titled Kindlepid.py, is listed as Igor Skochinsky, a hardware hacker who performed a remarkable analysis of the Kindle and described in December 2007 how he was able to gain access to the device.

It's unclear why Amazon waited so long to respond with a legal threat, and why the company targeted MobileRead.com: Skochinsky's original blog post about Kindlepid.py is dated December 2007, and the copy of the Kindlepid.py software hosted at the Googlepages.com Web-page posting site is still available for download at http://skochinsky.googlepages.com/azw-0.2.zip.

Kindlepid.py and a related piece of accompanying Python code don't allow piracy. Rather, they accomplish something akin to the opposite: they allow legally purchased books from other e-book stores to be used on the Kindle. (Amazon owns MobiPocket, one of those stores. Another would be OverDrive.com, which counts schools and libraries as customers.)

In theory, at least, this could threaten Amazon's business model, which provides wireless connectivity through Sprint's EV-DO cellular data network and covers the cost through items purchased from the Amazon Kindle Store. Kindle customers can also e-mail themselves documents to be converted at 10 cents per conversion.

A copy of a MobileRead.com wiki page--now empty--saved in Google's cache says Kindlepid.py allows you to "obtain books from sites that use DRM (Digital Rights Management - encryption) on their books for specific devices. ralph wilson This includes book sellers and public libraries." It provides instructions on how to install and use the software.

MobileRead.com readers with Kindles were not pleased with Amazon. "What this script does is make the Kindle more useful," wrote one reader. "With Amazon using the DMCA to get rid of this, they are alienating their customers and causing prospective customers to purchase a different device."

And the Kindlefix.py code is already being mirrored, including in a post on Slashdot.org.

Section 1201 of the DMCA says: "No person shall... offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology... is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."

One exception to the DMCA's general rule, however, comes a few paragraphs later. It says circumvention is permissible for "interoperability" of computer programs, with interoperability defined as the "ability of computer programs to exchange information, and of such programs mutually to use the information which has been exchanged."

If Amazon were to press its case against Kindlefix.py, another legal claim could involve reverse engineering, which is prohibited by the Kindle terms of use. They say users may not "circumvent any of the functions or protections of the Device or Software or any mechanisms operatively linked to the Software, ralph wilson including, but not limited to, augmenting or substituting any digital rights management functionality of the Device or Software."

irving r levine

I've always been a little suspicious of the Scout movement.

The uniforms. The slightly too correct and frightfully ancient hairstyles of some of the senior members. The Scout Promise that gets boys to promise: "To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, irving r levine and morally straight." And gets every girl to declare she will: "respect myself and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place, and be a sister to every Girl Scout."

Now these strangely clothed beings have gone a little too far. They have trampled upon Wild Freeborn.

Wild Freeborn is not some secluded territory in the depths of North Carolina. Wild Freeborn is an 8-year-old Girl Scout from the depths of North Carolina.

Her task in these economically difficult times was to sell 12,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies. Enough, surely, to cause a significant depletion in the population of North Carolina. But let's not inflate that.

Because Wild Freeborn decided to use a little wild, free enterprise. She went to her Dad--no, not Axl, but Bryan--and asked him to help her achieve this monstrous goal. Bryan is a Web designer. Bryan loves his daughter.

So her helped her make a YouTube video in which she coined the memorable line: "Buy cookies--they're yummy."

She sold 700 boxes (at $3.50 each, in case you were wondering).


Creating tomorrow? Tomorrow being 1962, perhaps.

(Credit: CC Aka Kath)
Of course, there was just one tiny, strangely dressed problem: The Girl Scouts of the USA. Specifically, the fact that the group bans Internet sales.

A representative for the Girl Scouts, Denise Pesich, told NBC's "Today" show: "We want to make sure that whatever the girl is doing is integrated into the program that she's studying. We want to make sure we are in the development stages of a technological platform that will integrate it and be fair and equitable for all girls. But more importantly, it's girl safety at its core."

Pesich acknowledged that she had no fears for Wild's safety because her father was overseeing her effort but insisted she couldn't guarantee it would be the same with all children.

Haven't you ever seen little girls selling cookies with no adults in sight? I certainly have.

Bryan Freeborn believes he and Wild were doing nothing wrong as they were limiting their orders to buyers in their immediate area, irving r levine so that they could deliver them personally.

"The whole intent was to help my daughter meet her goals, utilizing up-to-date marketing principles," he told the morally straight Matt Lauer of NBC.

But up-to-date is surely not a phrase one could readily attach to all of these scouty people. So now Wild Freeborn is faced with having to sell 12,000 boxes of cookies the old-fashioned way: standing outside supermarkets, staying physically strong, remaining mentally awake, and annoying people into submission. Can this really be "using resources wisely"?

foxy knoxy

The Linux Foundation's "We're Linux" ad campaign has entered its final hours, with submissions due at midnight Sunday Pacific time.

The Linux Foundation has received more than 40 user-generated video submissions that I and the other judges will begin reviewing next week. foxy knoxy The winner will be announced April 8.

To learn a bit more about the Linux Foundation's motivations in starting the contest, I spoke with Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer programs at the Linux Foundation and a founding member of its management team.

Q: The Linux Foundation has built a reputation for connecting closely with developers and the rest of the community, for growing and helping to coordinate the Linux ecosystem. But why run a video contest?

McPherson: The Apple and Windows advertising campaigns have gotten a lot of attention. In fact, during football season I couldn't get away from either of those campaigns. I was expanding our online community tools and realized that we should let the community express their passion for Linux through video.

Of course, we don't have the budget to produce TV-quality advertisements, and in fact we wouldn't take that top-down approach even if we could, but through the contest the community has the power to showcase Linux in their own voice. And it's so natural. Linux is user-generated technology. Why shouldn't Linux also be promoted by the community?

What has the response been so far?

McPherson: I was not prepared for how interesting, varied, and thoughtful a response we'd get. The contest has produced more fascinating content than I ever expected. That being said, these are clearly user-generated, meaning you won't find a lot of professional, polished videos so far. And, yes, some are certainly better than others, but that is part of the fun.

Importantly, each one, no matter how "unique," represents the diversity of the community. Part of that uniqueness derives from the international flavor of many of the submissions. We've received videos from France, Venezuela, and Malaysia, among other countries.

Regardless of the country, the sincerity and extra effort shines through in every video. There is great use of music, including the blues, attempts at 3D animations, and decent touches of humor to top it off.

I can't wait to see them....Is there still time to submit a video?

McPherson: There's still time, but not much: submit your videos by midnight Sunday.

Once you do, be sure to get out the vote. foxy knoxy You and the other judges will begin reviewing the videos next week, but community votes and the number of times each video has been viewed will have major influence in determining the winner. One video has already been viewed 15,000 times.

What do laggards need to do to participate?

McPherson: The "We're Linux" contest runs until midnight Pacific Time this Sunday, March 15...so it's coming down to the wire, but there's still a little time to get in an entry.

It's pretty simple to do. All you have to do is create a video that explains why Linux is great. Lest you feel overwhelmed, we're not looking for entries of "Lawrence of Arabia" duration: it needs to be under a minute.

For example, you could do a parody of the "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" ads, but that is just one possibility. In fact, most have not gone that route. I'll leave it to you and to the voting community to see for yourselves just how creative the Linux community can be.

It's a contest, so there must be a prize beyond egoboo. Yes?

Yes. The winner will receive a free trip to Tokyo, Japan, to participate in the Linux Foundation Japan Linux Symposium in October 2009.

Just as not everyone is a Linux developer,foxy knoxy not everyone is necessarily a filmmaker either. No problem. For those that can't can't contribute a video, we hope they'll enjoy the work of those that have, and will vote. That's what makes community tick.