Top Items:
Ryan Block / Engadget:
MacBook Air review — It fits in a manila folder, you can slide it under a door, and if you threw it hard enough you could probably chop someone in half with the thing. It's the thinnest, and if we may say so, the sexiest laptop around today: the MacBook Air.
Eric Bangeman / Ars Technica:
Spectrum auction starts, draws over $2.7 billion in first-day bids — Auction 73, the long-awaited 700MHz spectrum sell-off, got under way yesterday as the Federal Communications Commission conducted two rounds of bidding by the 214 qualified bidders. Action was brisk, although none …
Discussion:
Wired News, DSLreports, IP Democracy, Computerworld, Furrier.org, IDG News Service, Epicenter, Digital Daily, Bloomberg and Reuters
RELATED:
Dan Meyer / RCR Wireless News:
700 MHz auction ends first week of bidding at $3.7B — Los Angeles generates interest in the fourth round — The Federal Communication Commission's auction of 1,099 wireless licenses in the 700 MHz band headed into an early weekend break having garnered more than $3.7 billion in potential winning bids.
Shel / Global Neighbourhoods:
An Open Letter to the Twitter Guys — To: Evan Williams & Biz Stone — I am a huge fan. You are two good guys. Twitter is the most addictive thing I've experienced since I quit smoking in 1987, and it's so much better for my health. I have built a multinational circle of friends because of Twitter.
Ionut Alex Chitu / Google Operating System:
Google Reader Shows the Published Date — Besides a new favicon and a confirmation dialog displayed when you mark all the posts as read, Google Reader now shows the published date of a post in a tooltip. Next to the snippet, Google Reader displays the date when the post was indexed by Google, not the date when it was published.
Allen Stern / CenterNetworks:
Would You Pay $1 For A Feed? — Before you read this article, I'd ask that you ignore how things are today, I want you to free your mind of the current model so you can fully absorb what I am going to suggest. With that said, here we go. — What if blogs and journals offered a full feed …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Super Panel At Davos: The Future Of Mobile Technology — Fortune Senior Editor David Kirkpatrick led a power-packed session at Davos this afternoon called The Future of Mobile Technology. Panelists included Google CEO Eric Schmidt, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer …
Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Latest Test for DMCA Safe Harbors: Warner Sues SeeqPod — Warner Music Group has sued SeeqPod (complaint, 500k PDF), a “Web 2.0” music search engine (combined with embedable playlists, etc, etc) that has been gaining in popularity in recent months. — This is the latest in a string of lawsuits against Web 2.0 companies.
Discussion:
Bit Player, Techdirt, TechCrunch, It's Rishi, WebProNews, Listening Post, mathewingram.com/work, Threat Level, Mashable! and p2pnet
RELATED:
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Smartphones Patented... Just About Everyone Sued 1 Minute After Patent Issued — This past Tuesday, the US Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent on “a mobile entertainment and communication device." Reading the patent, you realize it describes the quite common smartphone.
Discussion:
Engadget
Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post:
Bush Order Expands Network Monitoring — Intelligence Agencies to Track Intrusions — President Bush signed a directive this month that expands the intelligence community's role in monitoring Internet traffic to protect against a rising number of attacks on federal agencies' computer systems.
Techland:
Are domain names recession-proof? — By Paul Sloan — Global markets are in a state of panic. Credit markets are all but closed. And recession fears are everywhere. But at the conference I attended in Hollywood this week, called DomainFest, you'd have little clue that the financial world was melting down.
Discussion:
Domain Name News
I, Cringely . The Pulpit | PBS:
Repeal Denied — When will Moore's Law be repealed? For the 30+ years I have been in and around the computer industry I have heard that question asked. The reason is obvious: this seemingly magical doubling of computing power per dollar every 18 months has been taking place since …
Larry Shaughnessy / CNN:
Double amputee walks again due to Bluetooth — WASHINGTON (CNN) — Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua Bleill lost both his legs above the knees when a bomb exploded under his Humvee while on patrol in Iraq on October 15, 2006. He has 32 pins in his hip and a 6-inch screw holding his pelvis together.
Steve Lohr / New York Times:
Belt-Tightening, but No Collapse, Is Forecast in Technology Spending — In the consumer economy, the Main Street shopper leads the way. In the corporate economy, big technology buyers like Monte Ford will determine the arc of business spending in the coming months.
MG Siegler / ParisLemon:
Google Maps Turns Recent Edits Into Voyeuristic Experience — In a move that kind of reminds me of Google's attempt to make a strange interactive experience out of watching what photos people post to Blogger (but much less creepy), the Google Lat Long Blog yesterday announced that you can now watch …
