An Old Rocker Gets Digital
WHEN Charles Grimsdale, a British investor, started the Internet music venture OD2 in 1999, he had a hard time persuading large record companies to license their music. But when he approached the roc...
Goodbye, Passwords. You Aren't a Good Defense.
THE best password is a long, nonsensical string of letters and numbers and punctuation marks, a combination never put together before. Some admirable people actually do memorize random strings of cha...
Judge orders halt to Defcon speech on subway card hacking
LAS VEGAS — A federal judge on Saturday granted the state of Massachusetts' request for an injunction preventing three MIT students from giving a presentation about hacking smartcards used in the Bost...
The Pirate Bay Blocked in Italy
The Pirate Bay has been “censored” in Italy following an urgent decree from a deputy public prosecutor. Pirate Bay's IPs and the domain name are inaccessible, as they are blocked by ISPs all over the...
T-Mobile's Big Idea: An iPhone-Like App Store For Every Phone
Like all wireless carriers, T-Mobile needs its subscribers to start doing more with their phones than just making phone calls and sending text messages. So, perhaps inspired by the early success of A...
How To Demo Your Startup
Jason Calacanis' most recent post to his email mailing list is particularly relevant to our audience. He's spoken with 200 companies in ten minute increments as they give their pitch to be a part of ...
AntiPod
The Zune — When the Microsoft Zune digital music player first appeared, it was the latest in a long line of gizmos to which the phrase “iPod killer” was hopefully attached. And let's be clear about...
Agency sues to stop Defcon speakers from revealing gaping holes
Defcon A transit agency in New England has filed a federal lawsuit to stop three Massachusetts Institute of Technology grad students from publicly presenting research at Defcon demonstrating gaping se...
Picking Steve Jobs' Next Moves: iPods, MacBooks Yes, Tablet Maybe, TV Probably Not (AAPL)
What's up Steve's sleeve? Probably nothing radical soon — at least according to Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope, who launched coverage of Apple (AAPL) this week.
An insecurity in OpenID, not many dead
Back in May it was realised that, thanks to an ill-advised change to some random number generation code, for over 18 months Debian systems had been generating crypto keys chosen from a set of 32,768 p...
Old Online Services Never Die, They Just Fade Away
France Telecom finally pulled the plug on Minitel 26 years after it was launched in France in 1982. (Actually, Minitel is really 15 years older than that according to SEC filings, “under an advertisi...
Wi-Fi's dead; antennas live on
City worries that taxpayers could get stuck with the bill for removal - — S omeday, perhaps, they'll be ashtrays, vases or the crowning touch of Conehead costumes at Halloween. — For now, though, ...
Defcon: EFF defends MIT students' right to talk; federal court stops speech
LAS VEGAS — At the Defcon security conference, the Electronic Frontier Foundation held a press conference saying it is representing the MIT hackers who figured out how to get free rides on the Boston'...
Windows broken ... I'm surprised it took this long
So, in a stroke, two security researchers (Mark Dowd of IBM and Alexander Sotirov or VMware) at Black Hat have set browser security back 10 years and rendered Vista's security have been rendered usele...
Tape Delay by NBC Faces End Run by Online Fans
NBC, which owns the exclusive rights to broadcast the Olympics in the United States, spent most of Friday trying to keep it that way. — NBC's decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by...
Surfing Google may be harmful to your security
Defcon A well-known researcher specializing in website security has strongly criticized safety on Google, arguing the world's biggest search engine needlessly puts its millions of users at risk. — “...