Oh, look, video of Modern Warfare 2 has leaked. (I’m still not sure if it’s called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 or simply Modern Warfare 2. Go figure.) It was taken at a retailer convention in Las Vegas. → Read More
Here, in this glorious land of the free and home of the brave, there is generally one thing that most all Americans can agree on: the major mobile wireless carriers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint) suck leave much to be desired. As more and more people come to depend solely on their cell phones and the related services (voice, data, multimedia), it becomes that much more important for the FCC to ensure that the wireless industry remains legitimately competitive for the sake of reliability, innovation, and most importantly, for all of us, the American consumers. Fortunately, by law, the FCC is required to report annually on the state of competition in the “commercial mobile services” market. → Read More
Great Ceasar’s ghost! A woman in Ohio is charging the double-As for breach of contract for… mum… not supplying MMS with the 3.0 firmware.
She writes in the lawsuit:
“Millions of customers, as a result of the false and deceptive representations and concealments of Apple and AT&T purchased the 3G and 3GS, waiting for the wonderful day in June 2009 when the new application would be available which would allow MMS,” the court filing states. “Unfortunately, after downloading the new 3.0 Software Update application, MMS still did not work on both the 3G and 3GS.”
The terribly named “White-Fi” is a research effort to bring WiFi transmission to the unlicensed TV spectrum — the so-called “whitespace” (get it? White-Fi!) of TV channels in the UHF band . Big whoop, right? Well, with transmission ranges up to 1 kilometer, that actually is a pretty big deal. Mesh networking is also in the works. But most interesting of all are the requirements that the FCC has imposed on White-Fi devices to make sure they don’t interfere with any television broadcasts or wireless microphones. Basically, any White-Fi device needs to immediately switch frequencies the instant it detects a signal from a television or microphone. → Read More
It seems that Snow Leopard contains some sort of anti-malware system. But what does it really protect you from? Not much.
It seems to scan for only OSX.RSPlug and OSX.Iservice and then only scans files from Safari, Mail, and a few web browsers. Usenet and Bittorrent clients are unaffected. It doesn’t even actively scan the Downloads folder. → Read More
It has been a good two months or so since TomTom announced that they were making a GPS-boostin’, speaker-totin’ car cradle for the iPhone, and we’ve heard a whole lot of nothing since. Aside from a UK retailer preorders indicating that the cradle might cost £99.00 (roughly $161), TomTom has been pretty quiet on the matter. It looks like we might be hearing more soon, though. The product has just made its way through the FCC’s torture tombs, indicating that the product is on the last leg of the development cycle. Fun fact: The TomTom cradle should work with the iPod Touch, giving it the navigation abilities generally reserved for its better connected, contract-required bigger brother. You can see all the FCC documentation splayed out here. [Via Engadget] → Read More
Notice less phishing e-mail lately? There’s a reason, hot shot: the volume of phishing e-mail has dropped from 0.79 percent of all e-mail sent to 0.49 percent. If we’re looking at just “bad” e-mail, though, phishing scams still make up the bulk: 86.9 percent of “bad” e-mail was phishing-related this month. That’s down six percent from July. → Read More
We first reported that Former Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly is running for Attorney General of California in the 2010 election. He confirmed the bid earlier this year. Kelly’s official campaign site is here.
We’ve been looking for time to sit down with Kelly to do a long form interview on a wide range of issues before giving (or not giving) him our endorsement (see our 2008 presidential endorsements here). We know his track record at Facebook, and his general politics (libertarian-leaning Democrat), but there was lots more to learn. The last thing California needs is someone like Henry McMaster taking over the top law enforcement job in the state.
The most important issue first: we want Kelly to give us (meaning me, personally) immunity in California for any crimes allegedly committed while he’s in office. Give us that and the endorsement is his, no more questions asked. His answer? Sadly, no: → Read More
Apparently it’s not okay to send West Virginia’s governor five free laptops. What a world! Governor Joe Manchin’s office got a nice four-pack of Compaq laptops earlier this month, followed a week later by a fifth machine from HP. The only problem was that nobody in his office ordered them or paid for them. → Read More
A 15-year old Belgian by the name of Salvatore is the latest victim in a series of mysterious iPhone explosions that have captured the attention of France’s and the European Commissions’ consumer affair watchdogs. Details are scarce for the moment, but according to local news reports the teenager was holding his iPhone in his hand, about to make a call, when the device suddenly ‘imploded’. The incident didn’t cause any serious injuries but reportedly gave Salvatore a headache for a couple of days. He has been promised a free replacement unit by Apple but hasn’t yet received a new phone.
There have earlier been numerous reports of exploding iPhone devices in the United States, United Kingdom and France, with most recently about ten cases having emerged in France where the official competition, consumer affairs and fraud watchdog DGCCRF has now launched an investigation to find out whether the popular Apple smartphone could pose a threat to consumers. Apple, which has sold 26 million iPhones and 200 million iPods to date, said it had been informed of the French cases, but would not comment until it had closely examined the damaged phones.
Update: Apple has now said iPhones turned in by customers in France and elsewhere in Europe with shattered screens showed external pressure that would have caused the cracking. More on Bloomberg and Techmeme. → Read More
TweetMeNews is a recently launched Twitter application that will tweet you personalized, relevant news based on your interests and preferences. The app will ask you questions about what genre of news you are interested in (business, technology, advertising, venture capital and health) and what types of publications you’d like news from (blogs, newspapers, video, magazines).
TweetMeNews then analyzes data, including your Twitter feed, and uses a proprietary algorithms to send you stories that match your interests and behavior. TweetMeNews’ co-founder Brett Hellman says that the startup even checks your feed to make sure not to send your news that you’ve already received. You can choose for the service to send you up to ten stories per day.
In theory, the idea sounds great. But as a blogger, I need news fast. I tested the service out and it sent me a Tech news story from yesterday, which isn’t terribly helpful when it comes to receiving breaking news. Other news firehoses, like Techmeme’s are far more valuable to me when it comes to reporting breaking news throughout the day, because it’s fast, comprehensive and varied. But for users who aren’t concerned with the speed of breaking news, TweetMeNews could be a useful Twitter-focused news service to add to the mix. → Read More
A bit of a corollary to yesterday’s story of an ACLU lawsuit designed to ascertain more information about laptop border searches. The Obama Administration has put a whole bunch of new restrictions on the practice, some of which should may the “don’t search me” brigade. → Read More
If you groaned a groaning groan at the announcement that the PC version of Tiger Woods would be online-only, cheer up. I played around with the beta for a while yesterday and came away impressed. → Read More
Spotify, the legal streaming music startup that has wowed even Mark Zuckerburg, has now had its iPhone app approved by Apple, and now awaits an appearance on the App Store. How did they get an app approved which streams thousands of music tracks on demand and which potentially competes with iTunes? The short answer is no-one is saying quite how, but it’s pretty easy to surmise that iTunes won’t be affected since the app will only work for paying Spotify subscribers, who currently pay a premium subscription which currently stands at €10 a month in Europe. In which case Apple’s policy of blocking apps that duplicate native apps (like iTunes) would not apply. The green light from Apple now leaves the way open for Spotify to launch in the US, as it’s been planning, and attempt a massive change in the music industry for the record labels that have invested in it. No mean feat. An Apple spokesperson has now confirmed the app is poised for launch in the App store and Apple “has been in constant communication” with Spotify prior to the launch. So TechCrunch would just like to say: we told you so. As we pointed out when we reviewed the developer version of the iPhone application, Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek has said all along that they “have a great relationship with Apple” and Apple has already approved several other music services such as Lastfm, Deezer and Pandora. In addition, he said “we’ve spent significant time and resources to ensure we’ve stuck to Apple’s developer guidelines point by point.” In other words Spotify had pretty much bet the farm on this app being approved and they would not have done so had they not got got the nod from Apple that the app was highly likely to be approved. Here’s a official video of the app in action: Spotify is now valued at €170 million, or about $242 million, with a post money valuation of around €200 million. That means the company has roughly doubled in valuation from a year ago, when investors bought stock at a €100 million post money valuation. That’s not to say Spotify doesn’t have its sceptics. As our own Sarah Lacy, recently wrote, there are at least six “leaps of Faith” VCs have had to get over to invest in the startup, which has yet to leave Beta. CrunchBase Information Spotify Information provided → Read More
TweetMeme, the quickly-growing site that lists the most popular links on Twitter, is launching an overhauled version today that the startup is calling TweetMeme V2. The company says that today’s release includes “a total rewrite” of its scoring system, which will likely affect how quickly and what type of stories appear on the site.
Given that the site isn’t live yet we can’t test the new engine, but TweetMeme says that the new ranking engine will provide “more varied and better quality content”, which will be helped in part by a new kudos scoring system that can change the weight of individual Twitter users. The site is also introducing an improved filtering engine, a new comment system (you’ll now be able to take a comment on the site and retweet it), and a flagging system that lets users bury bad entries. A more robust analytics package will also be appearing next week. → Read More
While it is well known that I once did a burlesque show under the name TrickleStar in Weimar Germany, many of you don’t know that TrickleStar is also a system for shutting down idling hardware next to your TV or PC. I’m here to tell you, my kleine Kuchen, that it’s really great.
Think about your own sad situation: you have a computer or TV that you turn off. The constellation of devices that orbit these central devices remain on or in a standby state. The TrickleStars solve that problem by turning everything off when the main items are off. → Read More
We’ve got good news, and we’ve got not-so-good news. The good news: PhoneArena just got their hands on 6 screen shots showing off a handful of devices making their first appearances in Verizon’s inventory system. The not-so-good news: They don’t really answer any questions. In fact, they raise more questions than they answer – but we still love us a good leak! A couple of devices that have already been confirmed (or, at least, are pretty much undeniable) make an appearance; namely, the Storm 2, Touch Pro 2, and Omnia II. Outside of phones that highlight the fact that everyone is just strapping some form of “Two” onto the names of their popular handsets and calling it a day, the Samsung Convoy and two mystery Palm devices also show up: the P101, and the P121. We can assume that one is the Pre – but what’s the other? The Palm Eos, perhaps? → Read More
A 15-year old Belgian by the name of Salvatore is the latest victim in a series of mysterious iPhone explosions that have captured the attention of France’s and the European Commissions’ consumer affair watchdogs. Details are scarce for the moment, but according to local news reports the teenager was holding his iPhone in his hand, about to make a call, when the device suddenly ‘imploded’. The incident didn’t cause any serious injuries but reportedly gave Salvatore a headache for a couple of days. He has been promised a free replacement unit by Apple but hasn’t yet received a new phone. → Read More
And here we have yet another Apple tablet rumor to be bandied about all the livelong day. According to Gizmodo, “a source that has always been 100% reliable” says that Apple may be working on 13- and 15-inch tablets (aside from just the rumored 10-inch one) and that one of those tablets was seen running a full-fledged version of OS X 10.5. → Read More
