Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones
Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance. — Phone buyers woul...
Twitter: We'll Announce Our Secret Business Model Early Next Year
“It's like the stupidest question in the world,” Fred Wilson said of the robotic query chirped at Twitter people in every interview ("But how are you going to make money?") — Given the rate at which...
Apple Enabled GPU Hardware Decoding of h.264 on New MacBooks, Pros and Airs?
Tonight, forum user MGLXP noticed that playback of 1080p high definition trailers from Apple took far less CPU time on his new aluminum MacBook (28% CPU) as compared to his old MacBook Pro (100% CPU).
Al-Qaeda Web Forums Abruptly Taken Offline
Separately, Sunnis and Shiites Wage Online War — Four of the five main online forums that al-Qaeda's media wing uses to distribute statements by Osama bin Laden and other extremists have been disabl...
Mitsubishi LaserVue 65" HDTV - We Meet Again
Images — Introduction — Kurtis and I got another chance to check out Mitsubishi's LaserVue DLP set in the early morning hours this Tuesday, and this time we were armed with some juicy, hand-picked...
Changing That Home Page? Take Baby Steps
A FEW weeks ago, Yahoo began what may be its biggest overhaul of its home page. But if you are among the roughly 100 million Americans who stop by Yahoo.com every month, the odds are that you haven't...
Google monetizes start page, vocal minority gets vocal
If you love something, set it free. Then, if you're lucky, maybe you can figure out a way to make money with it. Despite what appears to be a vocal minority that is unhappy with the changes, that's ...
Move over pinochle, Web surfing stimulates aging brains
Functional MRI brain scans show how searching the Internet dramatically engages brain neural networks (in red). The image on the left displays brain activity while reading a book; the image on the ri...
Destruction Of Bloglines Now Complete; Founder Prepares To Switch To Google Reader
Users who hadn't already left Bloglines for Google Reader and other functional RSS readers are doing so now, largely because Bloglines has stopped working and the company has done absolutely nothing …
Surprise! Venture investments falling
No one should be surprised to hear that venture investment dropped during the last three months, with notable decreases in first-time financings and Internet investment. And the worst is probably sti...
FriendFeed to add Realtime APIs next week
Play in Popup | Download — Twitter appears to have an unassailable lead in users and their resultant Follow clouds. Though Track is dead and IM is postponed indefinitely, the service has added a p...
Pressflip Founder Quits: “I'm Tired Of The Fight”
One thing investors don't really like to see is founders abandoning the startups they funded. But that is exactly what Ted Dziuba is doing with his startup PressFlip. — In a blog post Dziuba wrote ...
Some Of These Layoffs Aren't Really Layoffs
I've spoken to a lot of CEOs this week who are going through layoffs or who are thinking of going through going through layoffs. The list of those who've pulled the trigger gets longer every day, and...
Why the Kill Switch Make Sense for Android, and Not for iPhone
“Gasp!” went the collective Internet on Wednesday when the IDG News Service spotted a clause in the terms of service for Google's Android Market stating that: … In other words, Google has a built-in “...
‘Anonymous’ Member Unmasked, Charged With Web Attack on Scientology
An 18-year-old New Jersey man agreed to plead guilty to federal computer hacking charges Friday for participating in a denial-of-service attack against Church of Scientology websites, as part of colle...
Is Web 2.0 About Exploitation Or Empowerment?
Earlier this year, at the Mesh Conference in Toronto, I had the pleasure of meeting Nancy Baym, a professor of communications at the University of Kansas. She's been doing tremendous research into qu...
MacBook and MacBook Pro Performance (October 2008)
Earlier this week Apple released new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. While the biggest changes are the new enclosures and the new graphics cards, the new laptops also have a new chipset (an NVIDIA chipset...
Beijing: Smile! You're on Internet cafe camera!
By the beginning of 2009, Internet cafes in Beijing, China will take a photo of every person who passes through the doors, then enter the picture and the person's identifying information into a city-w...
Netbooks take ten per cent of Euro PC market
First Gartner and now IDC has highlighted the rise of the Small, Cheap Computer as one of key product categories keeping the European PC market afloat. — Laptops too are helping keep vendors' heads ...
New MacBook Pro: now with 20% less battery power
Apple touted some pretty decent battery life numbers at the new MacBook / MacBook Pro press event this week: up to five hours on the Pro with discrete graphics off, and four hours with it on (both sur...
The Stupidest Answer In The World
There's a great article in the NY Times Magazine section today about Obama's quest to win the white male vote which was written by Matt Bai. In it Obama addresses the “bitter quote”: … I made a boneh...