Friday's Foot In Mouth

According to my Lego grandfather clock, it's news time... The metric system was established in France on this day in 1799. The first Nobel prizes were awarded in 1901.

1. IBM has, in fact, sold its PC division to Chinese manufacturer Lenovo for $1.4 billion and $500 million in debt. Lenovo is now the number three PC maker after Dell and HP. There's a good history of the IBM PC at Internet News.
2. Oh crap. Even though four other movie companies have decided on the HD-DVD format for their movies, Disney has opted for Sony's Blu-Ray, ensuring that there will be a Beta/VHS style format war in the new Hi-Def DVDs. Disney said they'll start putting out Blu-ray DVDs as soon as the players are available in 2006. That's just Mickey Mouse.
3. Yahoo is going to copy Google. Again. The Yahoo desktop search tool (based on the excellent X1) will be released in the New Year.
4. The Inquirer says console games are in short supply this holiday season. The Nintendo DS is very hard to find, although Nintendo is planning to add an additional 400,000 units to the 1 million shipped to the US this year. Surprisingly, it's very hard to find Sony's two year old Playstation 2, too. Sony lauches the PSP in Japan next week, and that's going to be a quick sell out no doubt - reports are that only 100,000 will be available at launch.
5. Careful where you put your laptop. According to a study published Thursday in Human Reproduction, the habit of keeping your laptop in your lap can cause permanent sterility in men. It's the heat generated by the laptop and the positioning of the thighs. How many times have I said that?
6. A Gameboy is better at relaxing kids before surgery than tranquilizers, according to research from University Hospital in Newark. The study said "We find that the children are just so happy with the Game Boy that they actually do forget where they are."
7. Where was I? Oh yeah. Another reason to hate pop-ups: they're security risks. According to Secunia, any browser that displays pop-ups, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Safari and Netscape, is vulnerable to an injection attack that could make a malicious site look like a secure site. Turn on pop-up blocking and breath a sigh of relief.
8. The December Windows XP patches will hit Microsoft Windows Update December 14. There will be five fixes, none of them critical - how long has it been since we've been able to say that?
9. As one of its last actions before recessing for the holidays, Congress has passed a law prohibiting cell phone voyeurism. Upskirters will face heavy fines and prison time if caught. The bill only applies to Federal jurisdictions. President Bush is expected to sign it.
10. Federal regulators will meet next week to consider revising rules to allow cell phone usage aboard commercial airline flights. It's not the safety issue that concerns me, it's the annoyance factor.
11. AOL has accidentally deleted an unknown (but apparently large) number of screen names in an attempt to purge unused names from its database. The company says it will take until Monday to restore the accounts.
12. Vonage is going to follow Packet8 in adding video to its Voice over IP (VoIP) service next year.
13. Sun CEO Scott McNealy was fooled by a hoax photo that's been circulating on the net for years. Claiming the photo came from a 1954 Popular Science article on the "home computer" he noted how far we've come in 50 years. More like how far Photoshop has come in 50 years.

Listen in Friday at 8:35a Pacific for my weekly commentary on KFI 640 AM in Los Angeles.

Monday's Misteps

I'm off to Vancouver BC for the Vicki Gabereau Show, but before I go... the news! Those iPod ads are good, but home made iPod ads are better. Dickens' A Christmas Carol was first published on this day in 1843. The clip-on tie was released in 1928. The Susan B Anthony dollar was released in 1978. Saddam Hussein was captured in his spider hole one year ago today.

1. Oracle has successfully concluded its long-delayed takeover of PeopleSoft, heading off what could have been a bitter fight. Oracle shareholders will get $26.50/share - more than $10 more than Oracle's first offer. PeopleSoft's employees will get Larry Ellison as a boss. Doesn't seem fair somehow.
2. Microsoft has released desktop search software - wait doesn't Windows do that already? - to compete with Google and Yahoo. The free software comes with the new MSN Toolbar Suite and works with Windows XP and 2000 only.
3. Sony's PSP shipped in Japan yesterday and promptly sold out. The first 200,000 units were gone in hours. Sony plans to ship three million by March. The portable gaming device sports console quality graphics and can also play movies and DVDs. It's selling in Japan for 19,800 yen - about $188 US dollars. 21 games will be ready before the end of this year. Sony will offer the PSP in North America sometime next spring.

4. Firefox use rose 34% in the US last month according to WebSideStory. Internet Explorer still has 90% market share web wide, although it's now below 50% on this site.
5. The US Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether P2P file sharing services like Kazaa and Grokster are liable for aiding copyright infringement. The court agreed to hear the music industry's appeal of a Ninth Circuit court decision that Grokster and Streamcast were not liable because they didn't exercise control over the music swapped using their service. This is gonna be the big one.
6. A Manhattan housing court judge has been offered for sale on eBay, with free worldwide shipping included. The posting, from a disgruntled former litigant, was quickly pulled, but not before 21 bidders raised the judge's price to $127.50.
7. Robbers in Texas were scared off from a home invasion by sounds from Grand Theft Auto. "The police in the game were staying, 'Stop, we have you surrounded. This is the police.’ The burglar, unknowingly, thought this was the actual police and panicked," according to the Galveston DA.

Listen in Tuesday at 6:45a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KGO 810 AM in San Francisco. Friday midday I'll be on The Vicki Gabereau Show on CTV in Canada. (We only tape on Tuesday.)

Monday in the Middle

Post CES and pre-MacWorld. Is there anything more to say? Well I'm going to say it anyway. Indian tea first arrives in the UK on this day in 1836. The first subway opens in London in 1863. Oil is discovered in Texas in 1901. The 45 was introduced in 1949 (ask your parents). First passenger jet flight in 1951. Clara Peller first asks "where's the beef" in 1984.

1. Microsoft says that patches for the three critical Windows flaws I told you about last week will hit Windows Update next week.
2. Mozilla and Firefox have security problems of their own. One hole makes phishing schemes easier, another allows a buffer overflow exploit in the newsreader, and a third involves predictable temp file names in Thunderbird and Firefox.
3. There will be no live coverage of Steve Jobs's keynote address tomorrow at MacWorld. Apple will delay the webcast until 6p Pacific and it's rumored that no reporters will be allowed to transmit comments during the speech. This might kill our planned chat, but I'll file here immediately after.
4. The iHome media center is one rumor that's clearly a hoax, but lawsuit against Think Secret seems to confirm the rumor of a sub-$500 Mac and solid state iPod. The suit claims that the information posted on Think Secret in November and December of this year, and earlier, could only have been obtained by someone who had signed a confidentiality agreement with Apple. I'm looking for the iWork package featuring a new word processor and Keynote 2.
5. In the blogger world this counts as a massive merger. Six Apart, aka, the people who wrote Movable Type, aka Ben and Mena, have purchased Live Journal.
6. According to the Wall St. Journal, Comcast is planning to offer voice over Internet service to 15 million of its cable customers this year, and to all 40 million customers within 18 months.
7. Forget the moo-cow, I want a µcard. The Mu-Card alliance of Taiwanese solid state storage companies is promoting a new format that will hold two terabytes of data. The spec should be final next month with production beginning shortly after.

Listen in tomorrow at 6:45a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KGO 810 AM in San Francisco.

Tuesday's Twitterings

N ewslicious. Finally, I know how to get where I'm going, thanks to the new Google Maps. Friedleib F. Runge, father of paper chromatography, was born on this day in 1795. Science fiction author Jules Verne was born in Nantes, France, 1828.

1. Watch out Intel and AMD. Forget the G5. IBM, Sony and Toshiba unveiled details yesterday of a new microprocessor that contains the equivalent of eight CPU cores around a central coordinating core based on PowerPC. The Cell processor, in development since 2001, starts at over 4 gigahertz, has nearly twice the transistors of the Pentium 4 and can deliver 10 times the performance. Look for it in the new Sony Playstation 3, TVs from Toshiba, and IBM high-end workstation computers coming later this year. Apparently there are several operating systems already running on the Cell in the labs, including Linux. With its PowerPC heritage, it shouldn't be hard to port OS X to it - now that would be a killer product.
2. The FCC released a list of web sites that send cell phone spam on Monday. The sites have 30 days to stop or face fines of $11,000 per violation.
3. The Superbowl spurred the sales of 1.4 million TVs according to the TV Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, many of them high-end flat screens.
4. Microsoft will release 13 patches for Windows XP today, including nine critical updates. Make sure to run Windows Update.
5. But don't believe an email claiming to be from Microsoft with an attached "security" program. It's spyware from Romania, one of many scams circulating the net right now taking advantage of Microsoft's announced "Windows Genuine Advantage" program. Microsoft says it never sends out updates via email.
6. The record industry has hit a new low. They're suing a dead woman. According to her daughter, the 83-year-old West Virginia woman hated computers. According to the RIAA, she traded 700 pop, rap, and rock songs online under the screen name smittenedkitten. The RIAA says they'll drop the case.
7. University of Calgary students will be learning how to create spam and spyware. The university already has a course on virus creation. Now why didn't they teach that kind of stuff when I was in school. Oh, yeah. Because you can't create spam with a slide rule.

Friday Fishbowl

I'm hopping a plane to Orlando this morning for the PMA conference. I'll be covering digital photography announcements there for DigitalCameraInfo.com. Watch for my video pieces. Meanwhile, here are today's top tech stories.

1. Microsoft is planning to give away its new anti-spyware program, cleverly named Microsoft AntiSpyware. The beta is free right now, and according to Bill Gates at this week's RSA security conference in San Francisco, it's going to stay that way. Unfortunately, it only works for XP and Windows 2000. Gates also announced a new anti-virus product by year end and an update to Internet Explorer for Windows XP SP2. IE7 will go beta this summer with improved phishing protection.
2. Meanwhile, Microsoft is recalling 14.1 million Xbox power cords, saying that there's a fire risk. The recall applies to Xboxes manufactured before Oct. 23, 2003. I'll live dangerously.
3. Former US cybersecurity and counterterrorism advisor, Richard Clarke, also at RSA, when asked his opinion of the new Microsoft security products replied, "Given their record in the security area, I don't know why anybody would buy from them."
4. Panelists speaking at RSA said that cryptography is good at protecting the content of messages, but can't be counted on to protect content for very long. , Carter Laren, security architect at Cryptographic Research noted, "Anyone designing content protection should design for failure and if it fails update it."
5. The next two stories underscore Laren's point. The SHA-1 hash algorithm, used for digital signatures (I use it to sign all my eamil via PGP), has apparently been cracked.
6. According to the LA Times, Apple and Napster are taking potshots at their respective digital rights management technologies. Steve Jobs sent recording company executives an email Tuesday morning pointing out that Napster's new all-you-can-eat music service, Napster-To-Go had been cracked. Napster CEO Chris Gorog replied with an email Tuesday afternoon that linked to a site offering a crack for the iTunes Music Store's DRM. Gorog wins this round. All protected music is susceptible to the Napster-To-Go crack - it's essentially recording the analog output as you listen to the song. iTunes FairPlay has been cracked fair and square by DVD Jon and software to strip out the copy protection is widely available.
7. The New York Times is buying About.com for $410 million - that's 23 time earnings.
8. The creators of the TCP/IP protocol that powers the Internet won the computer industry's Nobel Prize. Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn were given the ACM Turing Award and a $100,000 prize.
9. The European Parliament has rejected software patents and called on national parliaments to debate the subject for another year to come up with a better proposal. The EC now decides whether to accept Parliament's recommendation.

Listen in Friday at 7:45a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KFI 640 AM in Los Angeles. Tune in Saturday at 7:40a Eastern for my weekly visit with John Donabie on 1010 CFRB Toronto. And, of course, listen to my show live from Orlando this Saturday and Sunday, 11a to 2p Pacific on KFI, Los Angeles.