Archive for November, 2007

Ask (reapeatedly) and you shall receive, originally uploaded by Mickipedia.

I’m not gonna lie (as Schmidt would say), the iPhone is changing the way people use mobile technology. I’ve observed many people using their iPhones and I’ve never seen people get more done on a mobile device.

Yes, net speeds are awfully slow, but once that problem is fixed I’m totally in.

This thing does it all. Blackberries just don’t hack it anymore. Touchscreen experience is the here and now and the future.

If Micki has an iPhone, so should you!

_drew

An Oldie, but a Goodie… Iggs was called in to host the Best Damn Tech Show, Period for 3 weeks while Paul went on a WalkAbout. When Paul returned, Iggs was kicked back down to the lowly rank of BarMan. He didn’t take it well.

Need to climb Everest but concerned about cell phone coverage? No more worries there as China’s largest mobile phone provider has now installed a transmission station at 21,000 ft. Says a spokesman, “the construction was very difficult”. The station was part of the Olympics initiative as they are taking the torch up to the top.

Ubuntu appears to be having an impact. Walmart started selling the $200 Linux machine (1.5 GHz VIA C7 CPU embedded onto a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB) 2 weeks ago and has already sold out. http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=926

Meanwhile the One Laptop per Child is offering a give one get one program where for $399 ($200 of which is tax deductible) a laptop will be send to a child in a third world country plus you will receive one for the child in your life. In addition, you will receive a year free T-Mobile hotspot access. http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/give-one-get-one.php

GEEK CHICK

IRIS ON THE VIRUS
Mighty Morphing Ebay Trojan

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/11/15/trojan_bayrob_morphs/

Ebay trojan (Trojan.Bayrob) has morphed yet again. This trojan loads a webserver on the victim’s computer and serves up false pages for Ebay motors and CarFax reports to fool people into giving money to the bad guys.

SCHMIDT FACED

Sony?s lackluster PlayStation 3 sales more than doubled recently thanks to the introduction of the new 40GB model and a $100 price cut on the 80GB model.

TECH IT OUT
Google is offering up to $10 mill for developers of apps for their android platform.

Sales of the Sony PS3 are up as a result of the $100 price cut from 40,000/week to 100,000 for this week. They still have a long way to go to catch up with XBOX 360 and Wii which are double the total sales.

Look out for YouTube’s “high quality video” rolling out in the next few months.

Viddler has officially announced their monetization model which we have been testing for a couple of months. If you are a publisher go and tech it out http://www.viddler.com/advertise/

Concerns over Comcasts decision to block bittorrent and other P2P’s http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071019-evidence-mounts-that-comcast-is-targeting-bittorrent-traffic.html a comcast user has actually slapped a class action lawsuit over their traffic blocking or slowing practice. Comcast denies it.

Also keep a geek eye out for Virtual Vouchers where you can buy credit through one place to use anywhere that accepts Visa (up to $1000) to help assuage online shopping fears.

SITE OF THE WEEK
www.viddler.com

Paul Flemo and Adam Plante take us on a video tour around the house, pointing out things that we love. Geek Chick Nic makes an appearance, as does Schmidt and Marc’s new band. Rock on, geeks!

iTouch mySelf., originally uploaded by Drew Olanoff.

Shut up. I know I hated Apple products forever. I still do. Except I hate them for making me want to buy them because they are oh so hot.

Anyways, I made the iPod Touch plunge. It’s pretty hot I must say.

I jailbroke it immediate using www.jailbreakme.com.

For the uninformed, jailbreak means to unlock the iPhone or iPod Touch so that you can install 3rd party apps. I wasn’t really impressed with the apps available, although Apollo was a pretty sweet IM client. All in all it wasn’t worth potentially killing my warranty so I restored it through iTunes.

I hate safari, but it works really nicely on the touch. Wifi speeds are quick and I don’t think I’ll ever check my Gmail on my laptop again. The finger scroll thingy is awesome for this. Google did a great job on Gmail and Reader mobile I have to say.

At 16 gig it doesn’t store tons, but I never seem to have a collection of music or videos over 10 gig so that’s not a big deal.

I really want to see what Apple allows developers to do with the iPhone SDK. If it is truly open ala Facebook and Google’s Open Social, then it’ll be my next phone.

Typing without a keyboard is a beyatch and I’ll use the touch to get used to it.

My only 2 gripes are the lack of a mail app and no flash on the browser. Are you freakin kiddin me? Apple says flash eats up battery life but so freakin what.

I hate you Apple.

I lurv you Apple.

_drew

News
From the who gives a shit files, apparently “Tom” Anderson the cofounder of MySpace has set a precedence for lying about ones age on the site. According to his profile, he is 32 but records have uncovered that he is actually 37. Michael Arrington from Techcrunch was outraged “If you can’t trust the founders to be truthful in their profiles, how can you trust what anyone says on the site.”

Rumor has it that Google and Verizon are in talks to offer the long-speculated GPhone system. Could it be that Verizon are kicking themselves by not agreeing to Apple’s stipulations over the iPhone? This may their way at getting some form of redemption. Verizon are well known for their restrictions on phones so this rumor may be a signal that they are willing to open things up – it’s tough to imagine. http://techdirt.com/articles/20071031/093942.shtml

Meanwhile Google are looking to roll out Gmail 2.0 which adds some interesting new features. Proported to be faster and more convenient…we wonder if it will finally be out of beta.

Schmidt Faced
Schmidt’s cheap

irus on the virus

Mac porn trojan
(URL: http://www.theregister.com/2007/10/31/in_the_wild_osx_trojan/)
OSX.RSPlug.A
A new trojan for the Mac is out. This one uses social engineering to accomplish it’s goal as it requires the admin password in order to install.
Users on a dubious site are prompted to view a video. The video appears to be a quicktime mov, but is actually a link to a trojan installer. The user when attempting to view the mov, are informed that they will require a special codec to play the movie file, and are provided a link to download the “codec”. What the user is actually installing is a virus known as OSX.RSPlug.A which is a DNSChanger. The site hijacks web requests made to EBay, PayPal, and a few banking sites. So later when a user goes to login to his EBay account, he is unknowingly providing his login credentials to a phishing site. The main thing here is that Macs have been targeted by h4x0rz. As Apple begins to increase their market share, this will become more common. Much of Apples security reputation comes from the fact that almost no one writes virus that work on Mac. Apple has not made any statement about the virus.

Virtual Stripper trojan tricks pervs to aid hackers
(URL: http://www.theregister.com/2007/10/31/captcha-busting_trojan/)
Users play a “game” where a stripper removes clothing when users successfully enter distorted text into text box. The distorted text is provided by the hackers and is coming from bots that are trying to create online accounts at various websites. The bot encounters a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) image and sends it to a server which sends to an active game session. The user types the letters in plain text for a glimpse of more skin, and the bot is provided the text bypassing the CAPTCHA check. Evil Genius.

Tech it Out
From the Kick me in the Ass for not buying stock files. Google shares are now sitting nicly above the $700 per share mark
Hulu have launched a private beta for those who bothered to sign up and the others who are considered special people.

GPhone, originally uploaded by azrainman.

Today, the Goog (Google) announced that there is no GPhone. But there will be thousands of GPhones instead. Huh?

Basically, Google has formed an alliance of cell networks and phone manufacturers to create an open platform for cellular phones.

Of course, Google will be front and center, so there will be Gphones. But not manufactured by Google. Smart move. Apple is the king of hardware, Google would rather let other people handle that mess, and just put their cool stuff on it.

How does Google do it? Amazing. With their announcement of OpenSocial, which is basically an open platform to build applications to integrate with every major social network (minus Facebook for now), they’re doing it again with the mobile market.

“Alliance” and “Open” are common themes in the Google domination plan lately. Microsoft is notorious for being closed off. Google is simply taking the opposite approach in a huge huge way.

Google is evil. Don’t fall for it. But that’s fine. They’re not more evil than Microsoft is, and at least Google is doing it by the book and letting everyone else do their dirty work. A web monopoly is upon us and rest assured that the zillion lawyers over at Goog have their asses covered.

Evil and smart. And you can’t hate them. You just can’t.