Well, I'm kinda a day late with this, but as I have explained to mouser, this week has been a heavy workload so I have had no time on my hands to do this, anyhow, I hope you all enjoy this special, extended Edition of the Weekly Tech News!
-Stephen
Verizon, Vodafone dent Google's Nexus One hopesThe Nexus One might have been a bridge too far for Google.
It's a nice phone, but Google's Nexus One won't change the world if it's not available on the biggest network in the U.S.
(Credit: CNET)
There's perhaps no other project as important as mobile computing at Google, save of course the need to preserve Internet search dominance. But Google's mobile ambitions took a hit Monday as two key parts of its Nexus One strategy failed to come to pass.
First off, Vodafone announced it will be...
Read More...Today's green news: Electric vehiclesCar maker gets in on home energy; GE, Nissan team on smart charging for electric cars; Better Place swaps electric taxi batteries in Tokyo and signs deal with....
Read More...Apple sued over iPhone's liquid sensorsLawsuit claims technology is faulty, which could lead to false positive results and Apple denying warranty coverage...
Read More...Senator calls on FTC to tackle social-net privacyNew York Senator Charles Schumer has come out swinging against new announcements by Facebook that modify how much member data is shared with third-party companies, suggesting that the Federal Trade Commission needs to promptly address the issue of social-network privacy.
A press release from Schumer's office announced that he has written to the FTC to ask that the agency "examine the privacy disclosures of social-networking sites to ensure they are not misleading or fail to fully disclose the extent to which they share information...(and) provide guidelines for use of private information and prohibit access without user permission."
This was prompted by the new products and services unveiled by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the social network's annual developer conference, which took place in San Francisco last week. The big showcase at F8 was the "Open Graph," which aims to forge firmer channels of communication between multiple social-networking sites. In conjunction, Facebook rolled out something called "Instant Personalization," which lets users easily share the bulk of their personal profile information with third-party companies.
According to Schumer, frequent changes to social-networking privacy policies can be extremely confusing for users, and that the FTC currently does not regulate this at all.
"Hundreds of millions of people use social-networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter every day," Schumer said in a press release. "These sites have helped reconnect old friends, allow families from far away to stay in touch, and created new friendships; overall they provide a great new way to communicate. As these sites become more and more popular, however, it's...
Read More...McAfee to compensate home users for bad updateHome users affected by McAfee's virus update fiasco last week may be entitled to compensation, according to the company. But no word yet on whether that also applies to business customers....
Read Forum TopicNew BlackBerries Juice Up WiFi Callingesearch In Motion on Monday unveiled two new BlackBerry smartphones and a voice over WiFi feature to its voice technology. The new devices are the BlackBerry Pearl 3G and the BlackBerry Bold 9650. The new BlackBerry Pearl 3G measures 4.25 by 1.96 by 0.52 inches and weighs 3.3 ounces. It has a 624 MHz processor with 256 MB of flash memory and a microSD/SDHD memory card slot that supports cards of up to 32 GB capacity. Other Pearl 3G features are an optical trackpad and a keyboard; a media player for videos, pictures and music; and dedicated media keys...
Read More2013: The Year Tech as We Know It ChangesThe market is in a planning cycle, and analysts are being asked to take a look in their crystal balls and describe what 2013 will look like. Clearly, we will have more bandwidth, 3-D TV will be ramping, and most of us will either be using tablet devices for something or moving to the next big thing...
Read More...Facebook's Open Graph: Now Everyone's the Center of AttentionAt its f8 developers' conference in San Francisco last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented his vision of a cross-site social platform whose developmental state may already be quite far along. Essentially, he sees a kind of online social sphere wherein anything one communicates that he likes gets channeled to Facebook, where that like becomes a public fact...
Read More...Can Robotic Repairmen Neutralize Windows 7's Annoyances?At about this time last year, we received some skeptical comments from folks who questioned whether it was wise for Betanews to declare Windows 7's automated troubleshooting system one of the new operating system's Top 10 features -- #8, to be specific...
Read More...Why Doesn't Linux Dominate in the Developing World?There's no doubt FOSS is steadily gaining popularity in government circles, as evidenced most recently by the United States White House's own decision to adopt -- and even contribute back to -- open source Drupal. A proposal from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, meanwhile, suggests that certain regulation-mandated submissions should be required to be written in Python...
Read More...IBM's Nanoscale World Map Could Guide Chip DevelopmentIBM researchers in Switzerland said they've come up with a patterning technique that lets them create structures as small as 15 nanometers. One nanometer is a millionth of a millimeter. In comparison, a human hair is between .03 and .25 mm thick. Using the nanopatterning technique, the researchers have created a three-dimensional replica of the Matterhorn that's 25 nanometers high...
Read More...NASA Observatory Sheds New Light on SunTwo months after the launch of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, its first images are now arriving back on Earth with more detail about the sun than has ever been seen before. Some of the images from the spacecraft reveal in new clarity the material streaming outward and away from sunspots..
Read More...Hawking: Aliens are out there, likely to be Bad NewsRenowned physicist Stephen Hawking has repeated his long-held belief that intelligent aliens are likely to exist, and that a visit by them to present-day humanity would probably have unfortunate consequences for us.
Publicising a new documentary he has made for the Discovery Channel, the legendary boffin told the Times at the weekend:
“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational... If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be...
Read More...Boobquake fails to destroy planetPlanet Earth has not (yet) been destroyed by today's terrifying Boobquake experiment - one Indiana student's response to Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi's insistence that immodestly dressed women provoke earthquakes.
Sedighi recently declared: "Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupting their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes."
Well, Jennifer McCreight decided to put this to the test, and attempt a critical mass of immodesty primarily involving a load of women flashing a Richter-tempting amount of jub.
She declared: “On Monday, April 26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own. Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I encourage other female skeptics to...
Read More...Users' passwords exposed by SplunkSplunk, a kind of Google for business technology that boasts it can help reinforce your security, has exposed the accounts of major customers to hackers following a web site slip up.
The passwords of customers on Splunk.com were revealed after some debug information leaked on to its production servers. The debug code exposed users passwords to Splunk.com as clear text, the company said.
Splunk has reset all affected users' passwords in what it called an "abundance of caution", and purged the log files and indexes of users' active sessions on Splunk.com. It advised customers to change the temporary password as soon as possible.
Also, Splunk urged those who used their Splunk.com password on other systems or web sites to also change those passwords.
That should mean around half of Splunk users affected should have to...
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