Top Items:
Randall Stross / New York Times:
Goodbye, Passwords. You Aren't a Good Defense. — THE best password is a long, nonsensical string of letters and numbers and punctuation marks, a combination never put together before. Some admirable people actually do memorize random strings of characters for their passwords …
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Does Google Have An Organic Growth Problem? — Google pulled in $5.37 billion in revenues last quarter, and $1.25 billion in net profits (nearly ten times what Yahoo made last quarter). Yet behind the consistently amazing financial performance, a few chinks are beginning to appear in Google's armor.
Harry McCracken / Technologizer:
eBay: It's a Gamble! — This I know: A brand has definitively jumped the shark when it's turned into a slot machine. It's happened to That Girl and Blondie (the comic strip, not the band) and poor Dean Martin, who isn't around to give a yay or nay to gambling devices based on his likeness.
Fred Goodman / New York Times:
An Old Rocker Gets Digital — WHEN Charles Grimsdale, a British investor, started the Internet music venture OD2 in 1999, he had a hard time persuading large record companies to license their music. But when he approached the rock musician Peter Gabriel about putting his music catalog online …
Discussion:
Guardian Unlimited
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Picking Steve Jobs' Next Moves: iPods, MacBooks Yes, Tablet Maybe, TV Probably Not (AAPL) — What's up Steve's sleeve? Probably nothing radical soon — at least according to Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope, who launched coverage of Apple (AAPL) this week.
Brian Stelter / New York Times:
Tape Delay by NBC Faces End Run by Online Fans — NBC, which owns the exclusive rights to broadcast the Olympics in the United States, spent most of Friday trying to keep it that way. — NBC's decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country …
Discussion:
Joe Duck, Mashable!, Life On the Wicked Stage, Geek News Central, Social Media, Smalltalk Tidbits …, paidContent.org and NewTeeVee
Janko Roettgers / NewTeeVee:
Vatata: Chinese P2P TV Coming to Set-Top Boxes — Chinese P2P solutions provider Vatata, whose similarly named P2P streaming platform Vakaka we wrote about last year, has developed a set-top box solution to bring a Joost-like P2P TV experience to the living room.
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
The Pirate Bay Blocked in Italy — The Pirate Bay has been “censored” in Italy following an urgent decree from a deputy public prosecutor. Pirate Bay's IPs and the domain name are inaccessible, as they are blocked by ISPs all over the country. Whether these blocks will be very effective …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Defcon: EFF defends MIT students' right to talk; federal court stops speech — LAS VEGAS — At the Defcon security conference, the Electronic Frontier Foundation held a press conference saying it is representing the MIT hackers who figured out how to get free rides on the Boston's subways.
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Christina Warren / TUAW:
Found Footage: ‘I Am Rich’ walk through — Apparently, eight people actually bought the famed “I Am Rich” iPhone application. If you weren't rich stupid lucky enough to buy the app, or if you are merely curious what the fuss was all about — the above “guided tour” is for you.
Dan Goodin / The Register:
Surfing Google may be harmful to your security — Defcon A well-known researcher specializing in website security has strongly criticized safety on Google, arguing the world's biggest search engine needlessly puts its millions of users at risk. — “Google is and will be and always has been vulnerable …
Discussion:
Mashable!
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes / Hardware 2.0:
Windows broken ... I'm surprised it took this long — So, in a stroke, two security researchers (Mark Dowd of IBM and Alexander Sotirov or VMware) at Black Hat have set browser security back 10 years and rendered Vista's security have been rendered useless (PDF of paper here).
