Usually I think claims like this are just shrill alarmists who can’t deal with the sexy wilderness that is the internet. In this case, however, I think they have a point. Skype porn spam is unavoidable, and there is no measure that can be taken to prevent complete strangers from hitting you with an dirty-talk contact request accompanied by an explicit picture. The Windows client, at least… → Read More
Anxious to hear the 20 new free songs Harmonix is planning to unleash come November 4th? So were we. Through the magic of the internets, we were able to track down streamable copies of 17 of the 20 songs. The only downside? For most of the songs, you’ll need an imeem account to hear more than 30 seconds – and even then, some of them won’t go past the 30 second mark. → Read More
My buddy Scott had a Storm watch for teaching. Instead of glancing at his watch while he was at the lectern he would wear an earlier model of the Storm and check the time only when absolutely necessary because the central iris closes when you’re not checking the time. This new model, which costs about $180 has updated styling and seems to mimic the Hublot Big Bang without that whole… → Read More
Starting a high tech company often means going at it alone, but eventually every start-up needs some outside help – whether from lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, or special types of vendors. And other times, a company just needs to sell things.
Unfortunately, startups don’t always know where to find help or list items for sale. To help them in these regards, we’ve added services and … → Read More
Audi is working on a system that uses Wi-Fi to communicate with traffic signals to ensure that you always hit green while going down a straightaway. The system tells drivers how fast to drive in order to make each traffic signal on the green. It will reduce idling at stoplights and make people quite happy as they tool, unperturbed, down the streets of major European capitals. → Read More
We’ve confirmed PaidContent’s report from earlier today that music startup Imeem has laid off 20 employees, or 25% of its total staff.
PR representative Matt Graves gave a now-familiar explanation for the cuts:
Given the current economic climate, we decided to be proactive in cutting costs – before we needed to – for the long-term benefit of the business.
The company did not confirm reports… → Read More
Jeez! Less than 24 hours after the G1 made its official debut, T-Mobile has let it be known that an OTA update is already on its way to knock out a few issues that have popped up since the handsets left the factory. According to a post on the T-Mobile forums, it’ll make its way to handsets as early as tomorrow: There is already an OTA update scheduled for this phone, which will be sent and… → Read More
Oh. I see. Not to sound ungrateful but I kinda thought the whole “20 free downloadable tracks” for Rock Band 2 owners might have included at least a few somewhat well-known tracks. Well it turns out that those 20 tracks are actually preselected from what MTV and Harmonix are calling the “Emerging Artist Lineup.” On the bright side, they could very well be the greatest songs in the history… → Read More
Is there really a market for this kind of storage? I can understand a ruggedized external hard drive for ruggedized laptops and such or bad conditions, but I never really thought too much of the rigors of car drives. But now that I think about it, computers operate in a pretty limited set of conditions, and a car’s internal hard drive for mp3s, GPS data and so on might go from 0 to 10,000ft… → Read More
Anybody who’s still aching for the Xperia X1 to slide its way to their region might want to look away, else see the guts of their beloved handset splayed out like some sort of science project. A gent going by Cyk1 has slapped on a pair of white gloves (classy), grabbed the closest guitar pick (hey, it’s good for unlocking latches without marring the plastic), and torn the X1 down to… → Read More
This statement from a Microsoft spokesperson, as told to Edge, has the Internet mildly interested: We can confirm that Gears of War 2 will not be available in Germany or Japan indefinitely. Then, a short time later, Microsoft rushed to clarify the statement, saying it had “no announcement” has been made regarding the game’s release in Japan. When you consider that Gears of War was the… → Read More
Lucky you. Heh. via Twitter → Read More
Okay, First things first. 74% of the poll takers aren’t fans of the new Knight Rider; not a big surprise. More importantly though, the Big Bang Theory investigation thickens as there wasn’t a clear cut answer about WTF that thing is on the apartment wall. There were two common themes from my question yesterday though: either a some sort of keyboard/piano action or an electrical… → Read More
From Brando: Millennium Series Pistol Lighter! Come with White LED and Bank Note detector. Your mission: describe the person who would buy this. I’ll send you something from the pile o’ gadgets in my office. I’m thinking female drug dealer working at a Times Square electronics store. → Read More
If Content is king then Data is its prince. And generally speaking, the more unique and difficult it is to gather, the greater is its value. A recent example of this is RepairPal which applies a narrow and deep approach to collecting data on automobile parts and repair prices in the US. The data collection is anything but trivial and requires significant manual labor, but the outcome could be a… → Read More
I feel safe in my conviction that I’ll never be using one of these Mamiya beasts, or its Leica, Leaf, or Hasselblad cousins. They’re just too… big. As medium-format digital photography becomes more capable and affordable, it eats away at the hearts of the last die-hard filmies (which I’m one of at times). After all, when you can hit the shutter and get a 160MB 16-bit TIFF… → Read More
You can chat with us during the show via AIM by pinging username “crunchtips” or call into the show at (646) 200-4163 should the mood strike you. Here’s the link for today’s show… → Read More
http://www.viddler.com/simple_on_site/e3cc97f7 Good afternoon, PSP owners. If you have yourself an 8GB or 16GB Memory Stick Pro Duo and have had some issues downloading content from the PlayStation store then you’re not alone. For some reason you’ll be prompted that your memory card doesn’t have enough room when, in fact, it probably does. Sony will be pushing out an update… → Read More
Have you heard of this trueCall device? Two Brits designed it, and what it does, or aims to do, is sit between the outside world and your landline telephone in order to weed out unwanted calls. You set up a whitelist and blacklist—all whitelisted phone numbers come through without hassle, while all blacklisted numbers are greeted by an automated “leave me alone” message. When an unknown… → Read More
I’m at home in Columbus right now and I was digging through my old papers and found this little collection of floppy disks containing all of my cracking warez. As I recall, I wrote the viruses on the VIRUSES disk from a book by Cue Publishing (??) and BlueBoy was supposed to be a wardialer and the name was based on BlueBoxing, which I read about in an article on Kevin Mitnick in PC Magazine. → Read More
Web hosting provider Rackspace has acquired JungleDisk, an online backup service, and Virtual Machine provider Slicehost in a deal designed to help bolster its offerings against top competitor Amazon Web Services. The announced acquisition price is $11.5 million in cash and stock, with the possibility of up to an additional $16.5 million depending on performance.
Jungle Disk is a file storage… → Read More
Jeez! Less than 24 hours after the G1 made its official debut, T-Mobile has let it be known that an OTA update is already on its way to knock out a few issues that have popped up since the handsets left the factory. According to a post on the T-Mobile forums, it’ll make its way to handsets as early as tomorrow: There is already an OTA update scheduled for this phone, which will be sent and… → Read More
Apple wasn’t done the other day when it released two new Get a Mac TV spots. Suprise, suprise; this new one stabs at Vista too. Got to say Apple, it’s kind of getting old. We get it, Vista isn’t all that great. Time to move on. → Read More
In a post on his blog, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis has announced that his human powered search engine has laid off 10% of its staff. Along with the layoffs Calacanis writes that the company will be doing some “smart things” to help cut costs, including outsourcing much of its editorial department to freelancers instead of in-house staff. Calacanis pegs the number of full-time staff cut at… → Read More
This is sorta neat. It’s the OWC Memory Pro Blu-ray Quad Interface—a mouthful to describe an external Blu-ray drive that can connect to your Mac or PC four ways. That is, Firewire 800, Firewire 400, USB 2.0 and eSATA. Too bad Firewire 400 is on its way out, though. The drive, which starts at $499, can read and write Blu-ray discs, DVD, DVD-RAM (that’s still around?) and CD-R/RW. → Read More
India saw 9.9 million cellphone activations in September which is 3.9 activations per second. Pretty nuts, right? The market is 310 million right now with 27.5% penetration, meaning 3/4 of the country will still be heading to the local Tata store to pick up the latest models. GSM dominates the Indian market with 75.2% of the total. It recorded a monthly gain of 7.65m in September, its second best… → Read More
AT&T just told us that the BlackBerry Bold will be released on November 4 for $299. That’s the same price as the 16GB iPhone 3G, natch. That’s the official date. No rumors, no “sources,” none of that nonsense. Be there, or not. → Read More
Bad news for Electronic Arts today, with word that the composer of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV) fight song is suing the publisher for copyright infringement. The suit, which alleges that EA used the song “Win With the Rebels,” asks for $150,000 per violation. That totals to $1,500,000 since the suit claims the song can be heard on 10 EA games. The games are NCAA Football… → Read More
When you’re a Mac you’re a Mac/You’re a Mac all the way/From your first cigarette to your last dying day. Slightly NSFW. via BBG → Read More
Google Analytics just got better. Google will begin rolling out a set of major upgrades today to the free Website measuring tool. The new features include the ability to create custom reports, better ways to look at audience segments, the ability to track and measure AdSense inside Google Analytics, an API (on it’s way), the introduction of cool bubble “motion charts,” and some user interface… → Read More
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