Top Items:
Michael Liedtke / Associated Press:
Google believes $1B investment in AOL is crumbling — SAN FRANCISCO - In an assessment that could lead to a substantial charge against its future profits, Google Inc. believes its $1 billion investment in advertising partner AOL is souring. — The Mountain View-based company disclosed …
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L.A. Times Tech Blog:
Apple removes $1,000 featureless iPhone application — Eight iPhone owners have joined an elite clan: Their Apple gadget is running a program that cost nearly $1,000. — When the iPhone first hit the market in June 2007, those who paid the $499 entry price — and signed the two-year AT&T contract — owned a status symbol.
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Tom Krazit / One More Thing:
Much ado about the iPhone's ‘kill switch’ — The discovery of a “kill switch” inside the iPhone 2.0 software prompted much consternation and little fact-finding. — (Credit: Apple) — Apple's iPhone “kill switch” has prompted much hand-wringing, despite the fact that no one knows exactly what it does.
Discussion:
TG Daily, Daring Fireball, PC World, Forbes, Infinite Loop, CNET News.com, The Mac Observer, GMSV and iPod Observer
Robert Vamosi / CNET News.com:
Black Hat expels reporters in network snooping — Elinor Mills of CNET News co-wrote this story. Updated 6:50 p.m. with more detail. — LAS VEGAS—Three journalists for a French security magazine were kicked out of the Black Hat security conference after they allegedly sniffed the press room computer network on Thursday.
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Brian Prince / eWeek:
How I Got Hacked at Black Hat — A group of reporters from Global Security Mag were kicked out of the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas after stealing password information from another reporter who will remain nameless—we'll call him, me. — LAS VEGAS—So as some of you may have already read by now …
Jeff Jarvis / BuzzMachine:
A stake through the heart of the has-been Inquirer — What the hell are they thinking in Philadelphia? Inquirer ME Mike Leary just sent a memo saying they are going to hold all but breaking news for the paper and even restrict bloggers from using their blogs to work on stories in progress.
Discussion:
paidContent.org, howardowens.com, Teaching Online Journalism, The Inquisitr and Mike Industries
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Jeff Jarvis / BuzzMachine:
The myth of the creative class — As I near the end of writing my book, one lesson that has struck me is about the will of most people to create, and the new possibilities the Google age brings us. — One survey I quote says that 81 percent of us say we have a book in us.
Discussion:
broadstuff, PSFK, The Inquisitr, TomsTechBlog.com, ben barren, Broadband Politics and contentious.com
Kevin J. O'Brien / International Herald Tribune:
Facebook and StudiVZ battle over Germany — BERLIN: When Facebook sued the German leader in social networking, StudiVZ, last month, it contended that the company had illegally copied Facebook's “look and feel” with similar graphics and features. — “A great deal, if not all …
Bill Tancer / Hitwise Intelligence:
How Cuil is This? — We received numerous requests to update the daily chart from our last post on Cuil. As expected, as the initial media hype subsided, traffic to the upstart search engine has declined precipitously. — As of this Tuesday, August 5th, Cuil.com ranked as the #1034 …
David F. Gallagher / Bits:
Rumor Control: Why I Can't Put ‘Tibet’ in My Hotmail Address — A reader wrote in to say he had heard that Microsoft was not letting people choose usernames with the word “Tibet” in them when signing up for its online services. This turns out to be true, technically speaking.
Tiernan Ray / Tech Trader Daily:
Google GPhone Delayed By HTC Issues, Global Equities Says — The word from Half Moon bay is that Google's (GOOG) “GPhone” cell-phones, being built by various handset makers, could be delayed from an end-of-year introduction to sometime later in the first quarter of next year, according to Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols / Linux.com:
Linux Foundation launches killer development tool — Ask any independent software vendor what he hates most about developing for Linux and he'll tell you that it's having to develop for SUSE and for Red Hat and for Ubuntu and ... you get the idea. The Linux Foundation has just released …
Eliot Phillips / Hack a Day:
Black Hat 2008: FasTrak toll system completely broken — FasTrak is the electronic toll collection system used by the state of California. Motorists can purchase a toll transponder for ~$26 and link the serial number with a debit account to have their tolls deducted automatically.
Tim O'Reilly / O'Reilly Radar:
Al Gore Joins Web 2.0 Summit Lineup — As I wrote last month in What Good is Collective Intelligence if it Doesn't Make Us Smarter?, at this year's Web 2.0 Summit, we're focusing on how what we've learned from the web over the past decade can be applied to solve the world's hard problems.
Dan Goodin / The Register:
Black Hat organizers punt totally hackable RFID badges — Black Hat The annual Black Hat conference in Las Vegas has become one of the premier venues for exposing lax security practices that put the unwashed masses at risk. In an interesting twist, a researcher is calling out conference organizers …
Jeremiah Owyang / Web Strategy:
The Many Challenges of the Social Media Industry — Like every industry, the Social media industry is plagued with problems that for now, are slowly being solved. It's important to note the challenges in our industry in order to first identify them and eventually overcome them.
