Technology

It’s not all that unusual to see happen in the tech world. Startups – well start up, they get some big buzz, end up getting bought by a company with big wallets (if they don’t deadpool first) only to have the people who started the company decide it’s time for green pastures. Such is the […]

For those of you not familiar with Kiva it is a “microlender” that has developed an excellent reputation.. Along with partners in the field, that uses the power of ‘the community’ to provide microloans to people in third world countries. The loans actually come from people who join as members of Kiva and lend their […]

France’s highest constitutional authority has struck down legislation that would have seen internet users banned from the internet if caught pirating content. The French “Hadopi legislation” passed in May with the support of the music industry. The legislation, like similar laws proposed in other countries, introduced a three strikes and you’re out rule for internet […]

Microsoft recently shut down their previous attempt at providing a security software application, OneCare, due to a big *YAWN* in the marketplace. That experience though hasn’t deterred then from trying once more but this time they’ll be going with a simple free anti-virus application. Currently in private testing under the codename of Morro the software […]

Around 12:50 EST, shots were fired outside the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., reportedly wounding two people. Law enforcement officials have named known white supremacist and Neo-Nazi James von Brunn, 88, as the gunman. U.S. Park Police Sgt. David Schlosser spoke to reporters. Schlosser indicated that von Brunn, armed with a “long gun,” entered the […]

T-Mobile has made a statement regarding the investigation into hacker claims that customer data was stolen and made available to online bidders, although more questions were raised than answered. T-Mobile confirmed that some information included in the original post to the Full Disclosure mailing list is accurate, but insisted that there was no breach of […]

The US Government has started a new crack down on online poker, freezing accounts that handle the winnings of thousands of players. The Poker Players Alliance says that the US Attorney for the South District of New York instructed three banks to freeze accounts that held $30 million. Internet gambling has always been illegal in […]

So it’s the day after every Apple fanboy’s moment of tech nirvana and we get to start hearing the realistic version of what was said to all those adulating attendees of Apple’s keynote speech. Central to all the news of course was the announcement that the iPhone 3GS would be shipping on June 19th and […]

Now I have to be careful here on how I phrase this post because we sure wouldn’t want to see a Twitter–Friendfeed real-time angry fanboy rise from the dust and inundate us with all manner of death threats – or worse. So here goes – Apple needs to wake up to its new place in […]

Mark-Paul Gosselaar appeared on Jimmy Fallon’s show last night in character, as Zack Morris. Gosselaar played it straight, brilliantly, insisting that he had to change is name from “Zack Morris” because there was already an actor of the same name in SAG. Mark-Paul Zack dished on his failed marriage to Kelly Kapowski, and his ensuing […]

Earlier I wrote about how the UK based Vaserv.com was hacked and had over 100,000 sites deleted from their servers. At that time I, and other tech news sites, were under the impression that it had something to do with virtualization software from LxLabs, whose boss was found hanged on Monday morning. It turns out, […]

Well this should just get the Google fans all a ga-ga. This morning the web search giant and wannabe threat to Microsoft’s enterprise desktop dominance announced that it was releasing Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook (and they make fun of Microsoft naming of applications). This plug-in will let you use Microsoft Outlook with the […]

If you can’t embarrass people into proper recycling habits as in the case of Seattle you can always go the route of San Francisco and fine the people who refuse to sign up for the city’s recycling and composting services. On top of that you could also fine those who don’t sort their garbage properly […]

In the wake of UK-based Vaserv.com, a large internet service provider, was hit by a zero-day vulnerability that wiped out the data for 100,000 websites the man behind the virtualization software used by Vaserv.com was found hanged. The virtualization software, called HyperVM, was the web platform software from an Indian company called LxLabs and is […]

Even to this day it absolutely amazes me the degree to which people will post stuff on places like Twitter than any sane person would think twice of. It’s one thing to tell the world you’re taking a dump but it is another thing altogether different when you spread the word that you have left […]

The Chinese Government has issued a decree that all computers sold in the country must include filtering software from July 1. The software will allow the Chinese Government to filter sites it deems inappropriate on each PC, including the ability to regularly update computers with up-to-date filtering lists. The need to introduce PC based filtering […]

As the various announcements at today’s keynote at Apple’s WWDC are analyzed, considered, and gushed over, there was one announcement that has huge ramifications for another company: Palm. The touchscreen Palm Pre mobile went on sale at the weekend with moderate sales figures, but that was before Apple changed the game: the current 3G iPhone […]

Want to get in on the whole wind power thing and maybe reduce your energy bills by even a little bit? Well sometime this fall you’ll be able to head over to your local Ace Hardware store and pick yourself up a Honeywell Wind Turbine from EarthTronics to slap up on your roof. The turbine […]

T-Mobile is investigating unconfirmed claims made this weekend to the Full Disclosure mailing list by hackers bragging that they’ve infiltrated company servers. Full Disclosure is an unmoderated forum that exists to notify people of possible security vulnerabilities. The post, reading a bit like a Craigslist ad, gives scant details of the alleged breach but offers […]

I ran across this in one of my feeds just now and it is tying in nicely with another post I am working on for later but I couldn’t resist the urge to share this with you right now. Set to the music of Don McLean’s “The Day That the Music Died” it is a […]

For those of you who haven’t placed themselves under some rock somewhere it is kind of hard to escape the fact that Apple hosted its World Wide Developer Conference today that saw line-ups around a whole city block. As usual the rumors and prognostications have been going strong leading up to this morning’s keynote speech […]

The Internet is our global backbone. While it hasn’t always been that over the past few years though I don’t think that there is anything going on in our world that isn’t in some fashion or another connected to the Net. Going forward it is bound to only become even more tightly integrated with every […]

Just to clarify one thing right off the bat so we don’t get started off on the wrong foot. I see nothing wrong at all with bloggers wanting to monetize their work, even to the point of using properly demarked sponsored posts. While other’s might factiously refer to this as evil and soulless while the […]

One of the underlying problems with Twitter is the absolute ease with which a person can set up an account using anyone’s name. This is especially common when it comes to famous people and can lead to stupid incidents of lawsuits being threatened as in the case of Tony LaRussa. In an announcement today on […]

Officials have confirmed remains and wreckage have been located in the crash of Air France Flight 447, the BBC has confirmed. Information is currently scarce regarding all details of the find, but at a news conference, a spokesperson was quoted as saying: “We confirm the recovery from the water debris and bodies from the Air […]

The one document that just about everyone dreads reading, and most don’t, has to be the Terms of Service (TOS) that we have to agree to before using their services. Even when we get notification of changes chances are most of us ignore them. We shouldn’t but we do because they have to be some […]

I use to tell software and web clients who where concerned about their security to head over to the nearest high school and start asking around for the best hacker in the school – then hire them to break your stuff. It doesn’t matter how good of a developer you are, web or desktop, you […]

On Thursday there was a story going around about a homeless shoe shiner who was told by a city worker in San Francisco that he would have to fork over $491 for a sidewalk vendors permit if he wanted to keep shining shoes. It didn’t matter that Larry Moore had only been able to that […]

The movie “Home” is a 90 minute exploration of our world and some of the environmental problems facing it. The movie, currently hitting theaters around the world, is produced by Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita, The Professional) and directed by Yann Arthus-Bertrand a noted nature photographer. However in a first for both the online world […]

The usefulness of Twitter now stands to be further comprimised by new initiatives to entice power users to tweet for cash. Anyone who uses Twitter can tell you what a royal pain it is to sift through spammy tweets in search of the interesting stuff. And now the company behind a controversial pay per post […]

Over the last couple of days I’ve been seeing a couple of posts showing up suggesting that people get ready to open their wallets soon if they want to keep using Hulu. Now for the rest of the world this won’t matter one bit because well besides the US and soon (as of September) the […]

Intel has announced that it will acquire Wind River Systems for $884 million. Founded in 1981, Wind River offers operating systems, middleware, and software design tools for development and testing of a broad range of embedded and mobile devices, including in car entertainment systems, avionics, and mobile phones. The company also provides design services and […]

No this isn’t another Craigslist post but you’d never know it from how easy it was for investigators to buy, and then illegally export, things like military grade body armor, military grade night vision goggles or even triggered spark gaps used to detonate nuclear weapons. This was just some of the military stuff that investigators […]

Microsoft has rolled out the Bing Travel, the smart grouping feature promoted in its ads and promotional videos that offers grouped hotel ratings, flight prices and more. The feature has had me confused from the day Bing launched as I was never able to replicate it in testing. As it turns out, despite launching Bing […]

The United States FTC issued a statement today announcing a rare takedown of rogue ISP Pricewert, LLC. (Aliases include 3FN and APS Telecom.) Besides sounding vaguely like an obscure German-industrial band, Pricewert stands accused of actively recruiting and colluding with cybercriminals to infect computers with spyware, viruses, trojan horses, Jonas Brothers tracks, and according to […]

Met with much head scratching, search engine king Google released a new and perplexing search tool today called Google Squared. Designed- sort of, I suppose- to cut down on users having to perform multiple searches of different type (news, image, web)- Google Squared returns search results in a spreadsheet-like form that leans more toward dada […]

It would seem that a part of that massive $100 million that Microsoft has earmarked for the advertising campaign for Bing has started to flow. so far there have been three commercials that have surfaced and like the guys over at TheNextWeb.com I wasn’t impressed at all with the first one but the two follow-up […]

In a corporate-speak heavy press release this morning, Intel announced a “definitive agreement” to acquire Wind River Systems. Intel indicated a price tag of $11.50 a share for a total of $884 million- a hefty 44% over Wind River’s closing price at the bell on Wednesday. Wind River’s stock recently fell from a high of […]

Drew Olanoff, well known in the social media community through his work with ReadBurner and other startups and sites has been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. It’s staggering that such a thing could happen to such a great guy, but ultimately cancer doesn’t discriminate. I had the privilege of spending time with Drew at Gnomedex in […]

If you’ve got a Facebook account, you may have noticed the option to like/unlike ads on your profile. Digg unveiled a plan today to take this concept a step further- charging less for ads voted up by Digg users. With the new system, popular ads will get a lower cost per click rate while ads […]

A study on behalf of Nielsen’s Council for Research Excellence has claimed that the consumption of online video is massively overstated, and accounts for only a fraction of all video viewed. The Video Consumer Mapping Study found that 66% of all video is still consumed via live television, and that online video only accounts for […]

Google has launched Google Squared, a rich search feature that is meant to take the good fight to the over hyped and under delivering Wolfram Alpha. Google Squared attempts to group search results based on a query, for example American Presidents. The results are delivered in a dynamic spreadsheet layout that can be built upon, […]

As most hardcore Twitter users know, there is a very strong third party developer community that has built up around Twitter. Name your operating system and chances are you will find a dozen good desktop clients and a complete range of web mashup. At the top of the pile of desktop clients the heavy favorite […]

It seems these days there isn’t anything that you can’t post messages to Twitter from. Computer. Check. Cell phone. Check. Media Center. Check. Huh? Yes folks you can now post to Twitter while you are watching something on your Windows Media Center courtesy of MCE Zone and their free TwitterMCE plug-in. With the plug-in you […]

So everyone has had a chance to kick the tires of Microsoft’s new rebranded search engine decision-engine and not surprisingly the reviews are mixed. Putting all that aside though one still has to wonder just how they came up with the name Bing (it’s still stupid) as the brand name they wanted to use for […]

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing continues to make headlines, and not for all the right reasons. I was disappointed by the results when I first wrote about it on Monday, and that hasn’t changed; I still can’t replicate the results in the Bing demo video, and there’s no reason why that should be the case. […]

Sounding vaguely like a bunch of sleazy boyfriends, Last.fm & CBS want us to know that baby, they really, really didn’t have anything going on with the RIAA. And all that scrobbling, that was ours and it meant something and they would never, ever share it with someone who might sue us or our tweens […]

Although it made for some wildassed comedy, it’s been confirmed by one of the writers behind the show that the Eminem/Bruno stunt on Sunday’s MTV awards was staged. Scott Aukerman, the head writer for the show confirmed on his blog that the Eminem Bruno stunt was scripted. Scott says: “Yes, the Eminem-Bruno incident was staged. […]

So, Harvard Business did some Twitter number crunching and managed to slice and dice our favorite supplier of “pointless little messages” into some interesting cross sections. While anyone who dabbles in marketing, productivity, software or anything ending in 2.0 is likely familiar with the Pareto Principle/80-20 rule (80% of problems/revenue/herpes infections come from 20% of […]

In a small gathering of press this morning, YouTube unveiled YouTube XL– a new service that brings your favorite cat falling off stuff and shoddy folk cover videos straight to your TV! While online computer-to-tv streaming services and Hulu and Boxee offer content optimized for TV, YouTube videos often didn’t even really do well in […]