Just add it to the list. Hotel rooms, offices, residencies and now taxi cabs. Visitors to China will be closely watched, monitored and recorded. As the U.S. State Department has said: All visitors should be aware that they have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public or private locations. Microphones have been installed in most of Beijing’s 70,000 cabs. Integrated with GPS, the system can… → Read More
The Summer Olympics begin tomorrow (time zone permitting), but you’re stuck in the office all day long and can’t watch. Not so! Using some of the same methods we discussed a few months ago, you can watch your favorite sport—I’ll be watching football (soccer) from the many watering holes in and around Barcelona—as it happens, in real time. Note that NBC is showing damn… → Read More
The International Olympic Committee has filed a lawsuit in California accusing at least six websites of selling illegitimate or nonexistent tickets. Reuters has reported that the ticket scam is international with victims in multiple countries. While the IOC is taking action, it appears unlikely that replacement seats will become available. Tickets for events in the host city of Beijing completely… → Read More
http://www.theonion.com/content/themes/common/assets/videoplayer/flvplayer.swfThe Beijing Olympics: Are They A Trap? We asked Peter Ha what this was all about and he smiled wryly and winked, inscrutably. → Read More
After more pressuring China has, again, agreed to open the Internet for the press during the Olympics. After getting an earful from journalists arriving in Beijing to find the Internet not open, as previously promised, the International Olympic Committee exerted some pressure on the government, which once again promised to open the Internet and allow the press to report freely on the games. → Read More
British science journal Nature is reporting new findings for the Antikythera Mechanism, tying the Olympiad to the ancient calculator. The device, discovered in a shipwreck well over a hundred years ago, has been thoroughly studied in since the discovery but modern technology has uncovered even more secrets. When a date was entered via a crank, the 2,100 year old mechanism (containing at least 30… → Read More
On Friday we wrote about how NBC were partnering with Microsoft and others to use the Olympics coverage as a test-bed for researching new user habits in viewing content between online, television and mobile. The web experience at NBC is powered by Silverlight, also giving Microsoft its first large-scale opportunity to gain distribution for the new web platform. It seems that there are very high… → Read More
The Beijing Olympics begin August 8, but just remember what happens to the guy in first place. via fusioned.tumblr.com → Read More
We’ve got a man on the ground in San Francisco and we’re getting some nice pictures of protesters and miscellaneous people at the ceremony there. Looks like there are a lot of sightseers and people are generally having a good time — not the bloody melee you’d expect at a civil rights protest in the Bay Area (or at a Tibetan Monastery – ouch!). We’ll keep you… → Read More
If you’ve been wanting to climb mount everest, but were afraid to be without your Blackberry for five days, China’s got your back. The great red burgeoning superpower’s largest cellphone provider has just installed cell towers to cover the mountain, all the way to the summit. Ostensibly this is to ensure coverage for the 2008 Olympic’s torch relay, as the torch’s path… → Read More
With the Olympics coming to Beijing, China next year, electronics manufacturers know it’s time to step up to the plate and to offer something ridiculous and expensive to commemorate the event. Samsung today announced a special version of the P318 Anycall phone in a stunning 18-karat gold paint job.Combined with the black finish, it looks like an alright phone, especially next to the D&G… → Read More
There’s something rotten in the state of LG. It seems the Korean manufacturer is having some trouble offloading its plasma TVs, with sales last February down some $35 million compared to the previous year. To be fair, it does appear to be a general trend in the TV industry, with LCDs being cheaper to produce at larger and larger sizes. (It used to be that LCDs larger than 42 inches were… → Read More
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