Testers get SP2 Release Candidate for Vista and Server 2008
Microsoft has released the Release Candidate build of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 to the public. The build can be downloaded by anyone willing to test it. — Microsoft t...
Gmail With Custom Colors
You can now make Gmail as ugly or pretty as you want - by choosing your own colors. Go to Gmail -> Settings -> Themes, and click “Choose your own colors”. This opens a window where you can configure...
Photo of next-gen Apple Mac mini in the wild [u]
A photo making the rounds on the Internet appears to conform to descriptions of a next-generation Mac mini published by AppleInsider earlier in the year. — The photo shows the rear of a Mac mini tha...
HP CEO Mark Hurd's Memo to the Troops on Pay Cuts
Here is the letter Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Mark Hurd broadcast to employees Wednesday explaining the company's disappointing reversal in outlook for the fiscal year and its plans to reduce pay and b...
Day 4 - Pirate Bay Defense Calls Foul Over Evidence
Prosecutor Håkan Roswall began the day by again referencing the case in Finland against the administrators of Finreactor. Fredrik's lawyer Jonas Nilsson requested a copy of the case notes for the def...
Apple Discontinues 20" Cinema Display, Product Refreshes Coming?
Apple has removed the 20" Cinema Display from the online Apple Store and has notified resellers that the product has been “end of life'd” and can no longer be ordered. — While it may be possible tha...
Sprint Shares Skyrocket 20% on Palm Pre Deal
Sprint [PALM Loading... () ], which also reported a narrower-than-expected quarterly loss on Thursday, saw its shares rise leap almost 20 percent to $3.25 Thursday. — The person, who asked not...
Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0
Local business owners say Yelp offers to hide negative customer reviews of their businesses on its web site ... for a price. — Send a letter — The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get...
Single Google Query uses 1000 Machines in 0.2 seconds
Google is normally quite secretive about their search infrastructure but, in a break from tradition, they have revealed that a single search query on Google can consume the processing power of 1000 ma...
Upcoming Verizon news: BlackBerry Niagara, Hub updates, Netbooks, Apex
One of our trusty ninjas just hit us up with a couple details on some of Verizon's upcoming products and product offerings. First off.. Netbooks. We've been told that Verizon Wireless will 100% star...
New bill would force ISPs to retain user data for two years
A pair of Republican legislators have introduced legislation that would require ISPs to retain user data for two years as a means of helping law enforcement fight child porn; is this latest effort nar...
Pinch Media Data Shows The Average Shelf Life Of An iPhone App Is Less Than 30 Days
There may be more than 20,000 iPhone apps out there that have been downloaded more than 500 million times, but what is the average shelf life of each app? Greg Yardley, CEO of Pinch Media …
The Presidents of the United States of America Unleash Multiple-Album iPhone App
Dave Dederer, former singer and guitarist for nineties hitmakers The Presidents of the United States of America, has fashioned quite a second career for himself as the vice president of business devel...
Your Ads, Richer
Yahoo! adds video, images and custom links to search ads — Ever since we launched pay-per-click advertising, the ads have looked more or less the same: A headline, a line of ad copy, a link. They h...
Twitter gets half the press coverage of Facebook, but a fraction of its traffic
Ever heard the phrase “why is everyone always talking about Twitter?” Well, here's the reason, maybe. The micro-messaging service is getting half of social network Facebook's press coverage …
DocStoc Does Its Part To Rid The Web Of Download Links
Document sharing site DocStoc has launched DocShots, a free service that allows publishers to convert any document on a website into a hoverable link that provides an instant online document preview.
Cameraphone with physical shutter spied
Eliminates ghosting and blurring, it's claimed — MWC Camera firm Jabil has showcased an 8Mp camera module with a physical shutter. The firm hopes it could soon make its way into smartphones. — Th...
Hacker pokes third hole in secure sockets layer
Moxie Marlinspike's man-in-the-middle — Free whitepaper - The Register Guide: Taking stock of the IT environment — Website encryption has sustained another body blow, this time by an independent h...
MTV Pioneer Launches $99 Music Videos on the Web
Verizon is sponsoring latest channel from web studio Next New Networks — Back in 1981, Fred Seibert helped create MTV. Now he'd like to recreate it on the web with a new network devoted to music vi...
Stantum's mind-blowing multitouch interface on video!
We just got a look at some amazing touchscreen interaction, running on a humble resistive touchscreen with some OMAP hardware backing it up. Stantum's technology is a software-based refinement to res...
How Much Data Fits On A Pin?
Researchers invent a technique that could cram 10 trillion bits onto a surface the size of a quarter. — For decades, hard-disk makers have been shrinking the electromagnetic media that store data to...
T-Mobile USA tests $50 unlimited call plan
NEW YORK (Reuters) - T-Mobile USA, the No. 4 U.S. mobile phone service, said on Wednesday it is offering a $50 per month service plan to long-time customers in San Francisco, in the latest sign that U...
Norwegian Websites Declare War on IE6
Several large websites in Norway have launched an advocacy campaign urging Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 users to upgrade their outdated web browsers. — Leading the charge is Finn.no, an eBay-like s...
Recovery.gov blocked search engine tracking
Update: As of 8 a.m. PST, within three hours of this story first going live, it appears that President Obama's Web team has (silently) pulled the robots.txt file from the Recovery.gov Web site. The s...
Valve Exec Explains How To Compete With Piracy
Last month, an exec at Valve Software noted that “Pirates are underserved customers” and said when someone realizes that, they also discover: “I can do some interesting things and make some interestin...
Why Hulu Should Embrace Boxee
For those that don't know, Union Square Ventures is an investor in Boxee and I am on the board. For the past several weeks I have watched Boxee's management try their hardest to convince Hulu that Bo...
Scientists make advances on “nano” electronics
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Two U.S. teams have developed new materials that may pave the way for ever smaller, faster and more powerful electronics as current semiconductor technology begins to reach the lim...
Turn-By-Turn iPhone GPS App Already Available in iTunes
It seems despite all the anticipation about Turn-by-Turn GPS routing for the iPhone, an App already exists in the App Store that delivers this basic functionality. — XRoad Co.'s G-Map U.S. West and ...
Sprint: Customer defections continue; Can Palm's Pre reverse the slide?
Sprint Nextel showed some signs of improvement in its fourth quarter, but is still losing customers at a rapid clip. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said the company has “high expectations” that the Palm Pre ha...
Yahoo Shows Search Ads With Images and Video
Yahoo is introducing a new type of search advertising that integrates images and video in paid listings, the company plans to announce Thursday. — Search advertising typically shows only text advert...
Commenting with Facebook Connect
Since Facebook Connect launched, we've seen over 6,000 developers make their sites more social using Facebook Connect. One of the most common features we've seen sites add with Facebook Connect is th...
Apple buying up available flash RAM supplies for next iPhone
A report issued on the flash RAM market indicates that Apple is inhaling supplies of memory components in preparation for the next generation iPhone, causing part shortages and raising the spot price ...
Privacy law call in Facebook row
The row over Facebook's change in its terms of service governing users personal data highlights the need for a privacy law, claims a leading watchdog. — The Electronic Privacy Information Centre was...
Has MySpace lost its cool?
I'm not entirely sure that Chis DeWolfe enjoyed our encounter at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The affable American, co-founder and chief executive of MySpace, was jet-lagged, having steppe...
Black hat, blank face: researchers crack biometric scanners
Multiple OEMs have positioned their face-recognition software packages and supporting laptops as offering a higher level of security than a conventional login/password system. At Black Hat DC this we...
Sharing your best practices for making money on Facebook Platform
We launched Facebook Platform to give you the opportunity to create innovative new experiences for our users, and with that gave you the flexibility to monetize those experiences in the ways you best ...
Pirate Bay Plea: Stop Hacking the Music Industry!
There can be no doubt. This week has seen a level of support for The Pirate Bay that has taken almost everyone by surprise. Sure, everyone knows it is the biggest BitTorrrent site and sure, the peop...
New HDTV Makers Enter The US Market With LCD Flat Panels Up to 82″ Part I-HD Guru Exclusive
Honeywell's 82″ LCD HDTV (Outside Dimensions 52.9″ H x 79.6″ W) — Plagued by low profits (or outright losses), sagging sales, and enormous competition …
Paid apps finally infiltrating Android Market?
We just got a tip that if you're running the latest T-Mobile G1 OS, you'll now see paid applications finally appear in the Android Market. We're in the process of booting up our G1, so we can't confi...
CBS Strikes Back at Hulu
Is this the start of a Web video war? — A day after news broke that Hulu had pulled its video content from CBS Corp.'s TV.com because of “contractual” issues, CBS fought back with a statement declar...