Top Items:
Jim Goldman / CNBC.com:
Apple's Jobs is (Still) Fine — You want to know how skittish Apple investors are and how little conviction they have in the company, or trust in its message, look no further than today's Gizmodo rumor fiasco. — The blog reports a serious decline in Steve Jobs' health as the real reason …
Discussion:
Tech Check with Jim Goldman, VentureBeat, L.A. Times Tech Blog, Gawker and The Mac Observer
RELATED:
Jesus Diaz / Gizmodo:
Steve Jobs' Health Declining Rapidly, Reason for Macworld Cancellation — According to a previously reliable source, Apple misrepresented the reasons behind Macworld and Jobs' keynote cancellation. Allegedly, the real cause is his rapidly declining health. In fact, it may be even worse than we imagined:
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Steve Jobs' Health ‘Totally Fine’ — CNBC (AAPL) — Conflicting reports about Apple (AAPL) boss Steve Jobs' health: A “solid” Gizmodo source says Jobs' health, not politics, is the reason why Jobs is skipping his annual Macworld Expo keynote. CNBC's Jim Goldman follows up saying that's not true …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Large Form iPod Touch To Launch in Fall '09 — We've got this from three independent sources close to Apple: expect a large screen iPod touch device to be released in the Fall of '09, with a 7 or 9 inch screen. Prototypes have been seen and handled by one of our sources, and Apple is talking to OEMs in Asia now about mass production.
Discussion:
mathewingram.com/work, AppleInsider, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, MacRumors, TUAW, MacBlogz, GottaBeMobile.com and Incremental Blogger
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
Gawker Media's Nick Denton Sells Another Blog and Puts Another One on the Block — Gawker Media's Nick Denton continues to shrink his blog empire: He has sold off Consumerist.com to Consumers Union, the nonprofit that publishes Consumer Reports. And he is in talks to sell Defamer.com.
RELATED:
Stephanie Clifford / New York Times:
Consumers Union to Buy Gawker Blog Consumerist — Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, planned to announce on Wednesday that it had acquired Consumerist.com, a popular blog formerly owned by Gawker Media. — Consumerist is one of several sites Gawker has sold this year …
Microsoft:
Microsoft Security Advisory (961509) — Research proves feasibility of collision attacks against MD5 — Microsoft is aware that research was published at a security conference proving a successful attack against X.509 digital certificates signed using the MD5 hashing algorithm.
RELATED:
win.tue.nl:
MD5 considered harmful today — Creating a rogue CA certificate — Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, David Molnar, Dag Arne Osvik, Benne de Weger — We have identified a vulnerability in the Internet Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) used to issue digital certificates for secure websites.
Discussion:
Hack a Day, Computerworld, Computerworld Blogs, Tech Beat, CrunchGear, Washington Post, Zero Day, Security Fix, InformationWeek, securosis.com, Bits, internetnews.com, hackademix.net, Obsessable, NEWSFACTOR, Errata Security, TidBITS, SC Magazine US, Mozilla Security Blog, The Register, eWeek, Engadget, GMSV, Security Research, BreakingPoint Labs Blog, Destructoid and Windows Connected
Megan McCarthy / Techmeme News:
Top 10 objectively biggest tech stories of 2008 — Unlike other news sites, our impartial and omniscient news relevance engine enables us to produce a purely objective top story list for the year. Ok, ok, that's not strictly true, in fact manual editing was even phased in recently.
comScore:
Sales during Online Holiday Shopping Season Decline by 3 Percent — Despite Weak Season Apple, Amazon, Wal-Mart and Sears Post Traffic Increases — comScore (NASDAQ : SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today reported its tracking of holiday season retail e-commerce spending …
Discussion:
VentureBeat, TechCrunch, CNET News, TechFlash, Digital Daily, Silicon Alley Insider and L.A. Times Tech Blog
Ryan Singel / Epicenter:
With Flickr Layoffs, Whither ‘The Commons’? — In mid-December, when Yahoo laid off George Oates, one of the original employees of the photo-sharing website Flickr, Oates immediately feared for The Commons, Flickr's project to have its millions of members turn their distributed intelligence to the world's photo archives.
Wall Street Journal:
Musician Finds a Following Online — Word-of-Mouth on Blogs and Other Sites Attracts Fans — and a Record Deal — In late 2006, Justin Vernon, a musician in Eau Claire, Wis., recorded nine songs while staying at his parents' hunting cabin in northern Wisconsin after a breakup with a girlfriend and his long-time band.
en.apa.az:
Nokia phones with the portrait of Stalin begins to sell in Moscow — Moscow-APA. Nokia mobile phones with the image of Joseph Stalin appeared in the sale in Moscow shops, APA reports. The cost of such phones, depending on the model ranges from 1000 to 60000 rubles.
Zach Epstein / Boy Genius Report:
Early New Year's gift from BGR: T-Mobile release schedule revealed, BlackBerry Curve 8900 included — Maybe one of our ninjas was feeling inspired by that crazy new Dick Tracy watch LG has in the pipes because he decided to go super-sleuth and dig up the goods on T-Mobile's upcoming release schedule for January and February, 2009.
Katie Marsal / AppleInsider:
Piper sees dull Macworld, new form factor iPhone by spring — With Apple chief executive Steve Jobs skipping out on this year's Macworld Expo, investment bank Piper Jaffray isn't holding high hopes for new product announcements outside a pair of refreshed Macs, but said in a report Tuesday …
Ilinca Nita / Unwired View:
Phenom Watch Phone launched, touchscreen and MP3 player included — Ever heard of the Phenom brand (no, not the AMD processors)? If you haven't, the US-based Phenom Communications surely wants you to, as it has just launched the Phenom Watch Phone. — Yes, another new watch phone …
APC:
Apple prepping a quad-core MacBook Pro? … Apple's mid-October refresh of its notebook line left a curious gap at the top end of the card, with the 17 inch MacBook Pro missing the make-over of its 15 inch cousin and the 13.3 inch MacBook. — That could be about to change next week …
Discussion:
TechSpot, TheAppleBlog, Gadget Lab, APC, MacBlogz, MacRumors, CNET News and MacDailyNews
Matthew Lasar / Ars Technica:
Martin drops porn filtering from FCC free wireless broadband plan — Kevin Martin, the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, called Ars Technica today to let us know that he has revised his proposal to roll out a free (and smut-free) wireless broadband service.
Michael Calore / Epicenter:
Ambient News Brings RSS to You, No Subscription Required — Lazy people, listen up. Now there's an RSS news reader made just for you. — Over the past two weeks or so, I've been playing around with some new, experimental Firefox add-ons that explore new ways of aggregating headlines of news stories on the web.
Adam Frucci / Gizmodo:
Game Consoles Sucking Up $1 Billion in Energy Costs Per Year — According to a study by the National Resources Defense Council, Americans use up about $1 billion worth of energy per year powering video game consoles, enough to power the entire city of San Diego.
Discussion:
Destructoid
Brad Stone / Bits:
Adobe's Flash and Apple's Safari Fail a Privacy Test — In the new browser war, privacy is a crucial battleground. — Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Apple's Safari all compete to give users the most control over their online identities and the best protection …
Shira Ovide / Digits:
John Malone Quietly Dumps IAC Shares — Why has John Malone been dumping his shares of IAC/InterActiveCorp in the past two weeks? — The company controlled by cable industry pioneer Mr. Malone in recent weeks has sold roughly $17.5 million worth of IAC stock, including a 193,000 share sale reported Tuesday.
Jack Loechner / MediaPost:
Most Media To Suffer Retrenchment in 2009 — According to a new report by FitchRatings, the company forecasts that the contraction in output among the major advanced economies will represent the steepest decline since the Second World War, with GDP in the U.S. to decline approximately 1.2%, while inflation is forecast to be 2.7%.
Allen Stern / CenterNetworks:
Did Digg Really Improve Their Ad Targeting? — Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider has an investigative post today where he analyzed the advertising that is running on Digg. At the end of his investigation, he noted that Digg is clearly running targeted ads now because he viewed ads that matched three of Digg's categories.
Anton Kast / Digg the Blog:
Dupes & ongoing updates to Digg's promotional algorithm — We wanted to address some complaints about weaknesses in our duplicate detection mechanism and provide some insights on upcoming changes to the Digg promotional algorithm. I head up Research and Development at Digg and my team …
Discussion:
VentureBeat
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
Tough Love For Microsoft Search — Back in June, I spoke at Microsoft as part of a regular series for those involved with its webmaster tools group and anyone generally interested in search. My talk was called “Tough Love For Microsoft Search,” and I covered various reasons why I felt …
