Top Items:
Jesus Diaz / Gizmodo:
A Call for Revolution Against Beta Culture — I'm tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The “This will work in the next version.” The “It's in our roadmap.” The “Buy now and upgrade later.”
Discussion:
Lockergnome Blog Network, GottaBeMobile.com, CloudAve, Lifehacker, MobileDevicesToday and atmaspheric
Alex Chitu / Google Operating System:
How to Disable Google SearchWiki — Google SearchWiki lets you customize the search results by promoting, demoting and adding new pages. You can also annotate the results. Some people think that the new feature clutters Google's clean search results, without bringing too much functionality.
Eric Krangel / Alley Insider:
Amazon Courting Eggheads To Its Cloud With Free Access To Scientific Data (AMZN) — A new feature for the Amazon's (AMZN) EC2? The cloud computing community is abuzz today over Public Data Sets coming soon to Amazon's cloud. — Here's how it works: The human genome is about 3 GB in size, not counting annotations.
MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
The revenge of the $9.99 iPhone apps — When Apple's App Store first launched back in July there was a wide range of prices for individual applications. While many were free, quite a few of the early games were $5 or $10. But as time has passed, there's definitely been a trend of the paid apps …
Dan Farber / Outside the Lines:
Lifestreaming in Obamaland — Barack Obama will be the most shadowed president in history, and it won't be just the Secret Service and press corps surrounding him. — Citizens and paparazzi armed with camera phones and a variety of other multimedia devices will chronicle every movement he makes in public and post it online.
Discussion:
Beet.TV
Wall Street Journal:
Maxim Publisher Could Be Turned Over to Creditors — The publisher of men's magazine Maxim is in restructuring talks that are expected to turn over the company to creditors, in another blow to star media deal maker Steve Rattner. — The negotiations are fluid and could still fall apart …
CNN:
Verizon fires workers over Obama cell phone records breach — (CNN) — Verizon Wireless has fired employees connected to a breach of records from a cell phone used by President-elect Barack Obama this year, a Verizon source said Friday. — The source would not say how many people were terminated but said …
Eric Krangel / Alley Insider:
Rock Band Creator Eyeing iPhone Music Game, Says Tapulous Not A Threat (VIA) — Rock Band and Guitar Hero co-creator Alex Rigopulos scored part of a $300 million-plus payday when he sold his gaming company Harmonix to Viacom (VIA) in 2006, but he's not resting on his laurels.
Discussion:
Game | Life
Matthew Broersma / ZDNet:
Mac OS X targeted by Trojan and backdoor tool — Two pieces of malicious software affecting Apple's Mac OS X appeared this week: a Trojan horse with the ability to download and install malicious code of an attacker's choice, and a hacker tool for creating backdoors, according to security vendors.
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Why Mandate A La Carte Cable When It's Happening Online Already? — We've been among those who think that the government shouldn't be forcing cable providers to offer a la carte channels. While people always insist that if they got a la carte cable, it would be cheaper, the facts are quite different.
Emil Protalinski / One Microsoft Way:
What we do and don't know about Microsoft's Morro — With the details on Microsoft's decision this week to discontinue OneCare next year, as well as Symantec's and Kaspersky's thoughts on the decision, it's now time to focus on the product codenamed Morro. Microsoft has revealed very little …
Jesse David Hollington / iLounge:
Instant Expert: Secrets & Features of iPhone 2.2 (Updated) — Early this morning Apple released the much-anticipated iPhone 2.2 firmware update, adding significant new enhancements to the Maps application and podcast downloading capabilities, as well as a few other bug fixes and improvements.
