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Comment Re:Natural selection (Score 1) 480

by __aashqr1992 (#35124632) Attached to: Android Tablets Were Born Too Soon
The moto xoom will be $800, with all the bizarre tweaks noted above (like the wifi requiring a cell contract), and there's no certainty it won't be locked down in the same way motorola phones are. In addition, it isn't even released yet- let's actually take a look at something before we recommend it. Also, trusting Motorola not to intentionally obsolete your gadget within a year is optimistic considering their past behaviour.
Piracy

The Pirate Bay Sinks And Swims 347

Posted by CmdrTaco from the whac-a-mole dept.
mikael_j writes "This morning the German ISP that had been hosting The Pirate Bay's website and search engine shut the site down. A few hours later the website was back up, this time with hosting provided by the Swedish Pirate Party, which issued a press release (in Swedish) explaining why they have chosen to host The Pirate Bay."

Submission + - Most Browsers Can Be Uniquely Fingerprinted (eff.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The vast majority of people surfing the web leave behind digital fingerprints that can be used to uniquely identify them, research released Monday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggests.

Using a website that compares visitors' browser configurations to a database of almost 1 million other users, EFF researchers found that 84 percent of visitors used setting combinations that were unique.

Submission + - Political Party act as new ISP for The Pirate Bay (google.se)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After the recent verdict by a German judge vs. the old ISP of the famous torrent site The Pirate Bay, TPB now has a new host: The Swedish Pirate Party
Games

Submission + - How PC game modders are evolving (wired.co.uk)

Submitted by Lanxon
Lanxon writes: Wired has a lengthy investigation into the state of PC game mods, and the amateurs keeping the scene exciting in the wake of draconian DRM placed on many PC titles by major studios. It highlights a number of creatives, such as Scott Reismanis, founder and editor of Mod DB, and his community-driven alternative to Valve's steam — Desura — which is "a distribution system and, like Steam, will sell games and champion indie titles. But the way it handles mods makes it even more exciting."

Comment automated diagnosis (Score 1) 1

by __aashqr1992 (#32250640) Attached to: Avatars - the docs of the future?
Automated diagnosis by what looks like a yahoo cartoon. What could possibly go wrong? I know that doctors these days rely on a host of expert systems, but issues of malpractice, misdiagnosis, and just plain bad bedside manner mean this is probably a bad idea. Doctors are already complaining about people attempting to diagnose themselves.

Comment heh (Score 1) 2

by __aashqr1992 (#32250594) Attached to: Sony to start charging for "premium PSN"
Sony moving the goal posts regarding products and services people are already committed to? surely some mistake.. That said, the summary states 'sony have announced' whilst the linked article says 'rumours of', so take the misleading summary with a pinch of salt.

Comment Past record (Score 1) 1

by __aashqr1992 (#32250560) Attached to: Can Microsoft make Hotmail cool?
Based on what they've managed with Bing? Probably not. besides, I don't want *cool* webmail - I want short loading times, high uptime, and the ability to access my mail however and whenever I want. If Microsoft had done that when everyone and their dog had a hotmail.com address, there may well never have been a gmail.
Microsoft

Submission + - Can Microsoft make Hotmail cool? (skunkpost.com) 1

Submitted by crimeandpunishment
crimeandpunishment writes: With all the stories about changes and improvements in email services, one name has been conspicuously absent: Hotmail. But now Microsoft wants to change that. The company is making its biggest overhaul of Hotmail since buying the service 12 years ago. Microsoft hopes the changes...which include automatically sorting incoming email into categories and making it easier for both receiving and sending videos & photos....will help Hotmail pass Yahoo as the most popular web mail service in the U.S. Hotmail is number one worldwide.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Sony to start charging for "premium PSN" (vg247.com) 2

Submitted by ranulf
ranulf writes: Sony have announced at E3 that they intend to start charging for "premium PSN" now, even though they've long started that one of the PS3's advantages over the 360 is that they offer PSN for free.

They're selling this as you getting a free PSN game each month from a choice of "2-4 games", which should make the premium PSN effectively free if you already bought a game every month.

There's no mention of whether they intend to keep a free version of PSN, or what functionality might be removed to encourage people to move to the premium PSN other than free games.

More coverage at http://kotaku.com/5541120/rumor-premium-version-of-playstation-network-unveiled-at-e3
Science

Submission + - Avatars - the docs of the future? (silicon.com) 1

Submitted by pinkgadget27
pinkgadget27 writes: The brains at MIT have been busy it seems — coming up with ways we'll be getting treated for health problems in the future. Forget the personal touch of seeing a doctor, avartars are much more efficient! Patients would see an avatar first who can find out some of your symptons — and even diagnose you! there's also touchscreens where patients and docs cn interact together to choose the medicine dose and what medicine to take (not sure this is wise letting the common folk have a say!) and there's iphone apps to remind you when to take meds. Cool tech and cool pics of avatars :)

Submission + - German court kicks Pirate Bay off the net (pcworld.com)

Submitted by Xemu
Xemu writes: The district court in Hamburg ordered bandwidth provider CB3ROB to discontinue service to one of it's customers, the Pirate Bay, on grounds of copyright violations. This has caused the infamous torrent site to go offline. Spokesmen for the site has said that they have a backup plan and expect to come back online within hours.

Submission + - PirateBay goes offline (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by sitkill
sitkill writes: Piratebay has been brought offline when a group of heavyweight Hollywood studios obtained a preliminary injunction against Piratebay's ISP provider, CB3ROB Ltd. This has results in the Piratebay.org being inaccessible for the last few hours. From the original source,

"It appears that Columbia Pictures, Disney Enterprises, Paramount Pictures,Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros. have obtained a preliminary injunction against CB3ROB Ltd from the Regional Court of Hamburg. The injunction, which was granted without an oral hearing, states that the CB3ROB company (and its Managing Director Mr. Sven Olaf Kamphuis personally) are hereby prohibited from connecting The Pirate Bay website and associated servers to the Internet."
Apple

Submission + - Apple sells apps that don't actually *do* anything

Submitted by apraetor
apraetor writes: This app, like many others in the Apple App Store, claims to do things which are patently untrue. In addition, the claims are things which the iPhone OS SDK outright bans developers from doing. For example, the app claims to repair battery capacity issues. Meanwhile, the SDK allows only polling the battery's current charge % and state (i.e. charging, full, discharging). An email I sent to Apple's App Store support last week has gone unanswered.

This app is such bs. It doesn’t actually *do* anything. The “features” it claims are all built-in to iPhone OS anyway. It relies on the naivety of users for sales; it is unfortunate that Apple, which purports to “approve” apps for customer protection, lets dishonest developers openly deceive those same customers for profit. The developer claims that the app “performs maintenance” to restore lost battery life, but the iPhone SDK documentation makes it clear that 3rd party apps can do nothing other than display the current charge of the battery, and the charge status.
“Magical battery-fixing junk”
This app claims to increase your iPhone volume.. yet another piece of Apple-approved deceptive advertising.
Businesses

Submission + - YouTube and the New Creative Class

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Kevin Yen, the director of strategic partnerships for YouTube, writes for Cnet that five years after YouTube's birth, the site exceeds 2 billion views a day and a new creative class of budding, do-it-yourself media moguls is emerging who have transformed their fledgling businesses into successful and profitable online brands. For example with only a small band of regular employees — just 40 staffers — Mekanism has built a reputation as "marketing's twisted troubadours, with a particular talent for attracting the wandering eye of the fickle youth market." YouTube personality Phil DeFranco, a frequent Mekanism collaborator, has the seventh most popular channel on YouTube and beats 'Larry King Live' and 'The O'Reilly Factor' in daily audience. "We give companies a fun way to engage new viewers with excellent click-throughs and exposure," says DeFranco adding that "some YouTubers in 2010 will make seven-figure incomes." Yen writes that content creators and distributors determine the cost and availability around their content charging $5.99 the first week, $2.99 a month later, and then migrate to an ad-supported model to sustain demand and broaden their audience. The model is still in its earliest stages with some content owners able to use a "self service" tool on YouTube to charge for access to their videos but consumer habits are changing and "the money is already starting to come. The question really is, who is positioned to capitalize on it? ""

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