Top Items:
Sam Diaz / Between the Lines:
AT&T offers $100K reward in fiber optic vandalism; notes second incident — updated below: — No matter all of the advancements in wireless and mobile technology, at the end of the day, we're all still connected to a big wire somewhere. Early this morning, we discovered that one of those big wires …
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Mercury News:
San Jose police: Sabotage caused phone outage in Santa Clara, Santa Cruz counties — Police say someone intentionally cut an underground fiber optic cable in south San Jose, causing a widespread phone service outage in southern Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties today that included disruption to 911 emergency phone service.
Marguerite Reardon / CNET News:
AT&T uses Twitter during service outage — Want to find out why you suddenly don't have Internet access or cell phone service? You might want to check out the social-networking site Twitter. — It seems that Twitter was one of the main ways that phone company AT&T has been communicating …
Joseph Tartakoff / paidContent.org:
Microsoft Breaks Up Its Live Labs Group — Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is downsizing its high-profile Live Labs group, which was created three years ago to speed up innovation in the company's online business, paidContent.org has learned. — The group, whose mission has been to hatch new ideas …
Discussion:
Microsoft Watch, The Register, Industry Standard, Brier Dudley's blog, All about Microsoft, CNET News and TechFlash
Saul Hansell / Bits:
Time Warner's Unlimited Bandwidth Plan: $150 a Month — Time Warner Cable has modestly softened its proposal to impose bandwidth limits on all of its broadband data customers. Landel Hobbs, the company's chief operating officer, has just published a post with the new price tiers for a test of the plan it will conduct in four cities.
Devin Coldewey / CrunchGear:
TechCrunch Tablet makes an early debut — Leaks are always hardest when they hit at home. Now we know how Apple feels. The party responsible for the leak has been penalized severely (whipped with wet spaghetti), so believe us when we say this kind of thing won't ever happen again.
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Kaspersky Lab Weblog:
The neverending story — Last night the Kido (aka Conficker/ Downadup) botnet kicked into action - what everyone's been on the lookout for since 1st April. — The computers infected with Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Kido (aka Conficker.c) contacted each other over P2P, telling infected machines to download new malicious files.
Discussion:
Digits, blogs.ft.com, ReadWriteWeb, eWeek, ITworld.com, CyberCrime & Doing Time, Threat Level and Zero Day
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Elinor Mills / CNET News:
Researchers say Conficker is all about the money — The Conficker worm that has infected millions of Windows-based computers will likely be used to send spam and steal data much like one of the nastiest botnets on the Internet does, researchers said on Thursday after finding links between the two worms.
Discussion:
TECH.BLORGE.com, Zero Day, Ed Burnette's Dev Connection, F-Secure Antivirus … and Lifehacker
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Who Will Be Twitter's Bestest Search Friend? Google and Microsoft Engage in Yet Another Pick-Me Face-Off. — [UPDATED: With added information about range of product discussions.] — In this digital era's version of “Spy Vs. Spy,” Microsoft and Google find themselves in yet another sharp-elbowed battle …
Discussion:
Industry Standard, eWeek, Search Engine Land, CNET News, Mashable!, Silicon Alley Insider and TechSpot
Ina Fried / CNET News:
Time for an audit of Microsoft's ‘Apple Tax’ — Microsoft puts forth a ‘tax return’ showing the cost difference between a Windows PC or Mac purchase. However, CNET News' Ina Fried suggests auditors take a close look at the itemized deductions. — Microsoft is back touting the “Apple Tax” …
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Brandon LeBlanc / The Windows Blog:Avoid the Apple Tax - Cash in on the value of Windows
Discussion:
Technologizer, AppleInsider, All about Microsoft, Bob Caswell, Apple Watch, Ars Technica and Computerworld Blogs
Tricia Duryee / mocoNews:
Research In Motion Quietly Hires A Key iPhone Designer — BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion has scooped up Don Lindsay, who according to one report played a big role in the iPhone user interface. In his new role, he will be charged with “creating” the VP of user experience, according to his updated LinkedIn profile.
Discussion:
BlackBerryNews.com, ITworld.com, Engadget, AppleInsider, CNET News and Silicon Alley Insider
Tim Conneally / BetaNews:
You're a Mac, you're a PC...Now it's our turn, says Linux — The Linux Foundation has announced its own ads that extol the virtues of open source. — The Mac vs. PC viral video and advertising war continues to rage, but now Linux has gotten involved. The nonprofit Linux Foundation began …
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Ryan Paul / Ars Technica:Linux Foundation CEO: Linux is “fastest growing platform”
Discussion:
ithinkdifferrent
Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:
Yelp lets businesses set the record straight with owner comments — Yelp is trying to make business owners a little less cranky about getting dissed on the popular review site by allowing them to respond publicly to reviews they believe are inaccurate. — The site, which is best known …
Discussion:
New York Times
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Miguel Helft / Bits:
YouTube in Music Video Deal With Universal — YouTube and Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company, said on Thursday that they had reached an agreement to create a new online hub for music videos called Vevo. It will be the latest of many efforts by YouTube, which is owned by Google …
Telegraph:
Pete Waterman: ‘I was exploited by Google’ — Pete Waterman, the force behind dozens of multi-million selling chart hits, claims he is being “exploited” by internet giant Google. — The 62-year-old said the Rick Astley classic Never Gonna Give You Up, which he co-wrote and which was the subject …
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
How and Why to Block the DiggBar — Last week Digg released something they call the DiggBar, which both serves as a new interface for Digg and doubles as a URL shortening service. The way it works is that you just add “digg.com/” at the beginning of any URL, and Digg creates a short URL in the form of digg.com/1234.
Thanks:atul
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Eric M. Zeman / Phone Scoop:
Bluetooth 3.0 Is Ready for Prime Time — The Bluetooth Special Interest Group is set to announce the Bluetooth 3.0 specification later this month. Bluetooth 3.0 will feature dramatically increased speeds, allowing for the transfer of large video files, music collections and photo libraries wirelessly ‘within seconds’.
Discussion:
SlashGear, Obsessable, IntoMobile, TechSpot, pocketnow.com, Unwired View, Engadget, dailywireless.org, Crave and Electricpig.co.uk
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Josh Lowensohn / CNET News:
Domain Pigeon now finds open Twitter names — Domain Pigeon, the domain finding service that lets you search and browse unclaimed domains, now does the same thing for Twitter usernames. It shows you which names are unclaimed, and puts some of the most recent or popular additions on the front page …
Thanks:mrinaldesai
Matt McGee / Search Engine Land:
Yahoo Loses Toolbar Deals; Search Share To Drop? — The Wall Street Journal reports that the loss of two agreements with computer makers could cost Yahoo as much as 15% of its search traffic in the next 12-18 months. — Early this year, HP made Live Search the default search toolbar on its computers.
Daniel Burka / Digg the Blog:
Digg Search: Now With 99.987% Less Suck — An apology is due - until today, Digg's search has been pretty terrible. I'm really excited to announce that our search no longer sucks. In fact, I think it's awfully good but you should try it out and judge for yourself.
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
iPhone To Get Qualcomm's ‘FLO TV’ Mobile TV — One reason that Qualcomm's FLO TV mobile television division has had a slow start: It's only available on select phones that have a special chip inside them. That's currently about 9 phones of roughly 100-plus in the U.S. market …
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
BBC Gets Ready for BitTorrent Distribution — Like many broadcasters today, the BBC is open to experimenting with online video distribution, allowing viewers to watch shows online. However, due to complex copyright issues people are not generally allowed to share or remix the videos - until now.
Thanks:mrinaldesai
Douglas MacMillan / Tech Beat:
Does Facebook's Business Plan Include Premium Memberships? — The world's largest social network sometimes gets flack from bloggers and industry pundits for not having much of a business model. It's true that for now, Facebook is more focused on growing its number of users - which passed 200 million this week - than its bottom line.
iPodNN:
Unibody concept migrating into iPods? — Apple may be exploring the concept of a unibody iPod, a freshly-exposed patent application implies. Apple began incorporating unibody designs into its products in October of last year, with the introduction of new MacBooks and MacBook Pros.
Aidan Malley / AppleInsider:
Apple to disable .Mac website tools in July — MobileMe subscribers using legacy .Mac website tools have been warned by Apple that the .Mac Groups and HomePage features will be discontinued in July, leaving existing pages live but taking away the ability to edit or update them.
Microsoft:
Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification for April 2009 — Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification issued: April 9, 2009 — Microsoft Security Bulletins to be issued: April 14, 2009 — This is an advance notification of security bulletins that Microsoft is intending to release on April 14, 2009.
Discussion:
MSRC, Ars Technica, InformationWeek, ITworld.com, Zero Day, Bink.nu, eWeek, CNET News and SC Magazine US
