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 …
RELATED:
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.
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 …
Narcissistic Infarction:
Did Arrington actually pull off the CrunchPad WiFi tablet? — When he announced it a few months ago, I thought there was a slim chance that Arrington's CrunchPad would come to fruition. A $200 12" touchscreen with WiFi and Firefox seemed pretty difficult to imagine.
Discussion:
Gizmodo
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 …
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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 …
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, AppleInsider, CNET News, Silicon Alley Insider, ITworld.com and Engadget
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, Engadget, TechSpot, Crave, Unwired View, pocketnow.com, dailywireless.org and Electricpig.co.uk
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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:
blogs.ft.com, eWeek, CyberCrime & Doing Time, ReadWriteWeb, ITworld.com, Zero Day and Threat Level
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Brandon LeBlanc / The Windows Blog:
Avoid the Apple Tax - Cash in on the value of Windows — With the ailing global economy, I am looking at ways I get better value for my money. One way I can do this if I need to replace a computer is by avoiding the “Apple Tax.” — Microsoft sponsored a new whitepaper (PDF) …
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Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:Microsoft revisits ‘Apple tax’ ahead of Tax Day
Discussion:
go ahead, mac my day
Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
The price-gouging premiums of Time Warner Cable's data caps — Time Warner Cable is expanding its test markets for paltry Internet data caps. Ars breaks down the obscene price per gigabyte that the company thinks is “fair.” — Time Warner Cable, stung by online criticism of its paltry traffic caps …
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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
Todd Bishop / TechFlash:
Bill Gates and friends apply for electromagnetic engine patents — Bill Gates has always been fond of his cars, but new patent applications suggest Microsoft's founding geek is becoming even more of a gearhead. Gates is listed among 10 inventors on a series of filings seeking patents …
Benjamin Wayne / Silicon Alley Insider:
YouTube Is Doomed — YouTube, that incandescent tower of video Babel; monument to the sloughed-off detritus of our exponentially-exploding digital culture; a Technicolor cataract of skateboarding dogs, lip-synching college students, political punditry, and porn; has reached the zenith of its meteoric rise …
Yahoo! Search Blog:
BOSS Update: Delicious, Advanced Language, and News Capabilities — Today we're adding several new tools to the Yahoo! Search BOSS developer war chest: Delicious content, advanced language capabilities, and news sorting functionality to the BOSS news service.
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 …
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.
Jason Kottke / kottke.org:
Extreme borrowing in the blogosphere — In the past week, both Joshua Schachter and Matt Haughey published articles that were excerpted in the Voices section of All Things Digital, a web site owned by Dow Jones and run by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of the WSJ.
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.
Svetlana Gladkova / Profy:
Twitter Is Huge? Yes. Twitter Is a Popular Marketing Tool? Probably no. — Twitter sometimes looks like it has been here forever with everyone seemingly using it everywhere and for just about every purpose. And of course we have all seen various marketing and promotion techniques employed …
Gmail Blog:
New in Labs: Sender time zone — Let's say your girlfriend sends you an angry email. It's mostly about how you behaved at the party last night and then left for a business trip without saying goodbye. You read it from the other side of the globe, jet-lagged after a 12 hour flight.
Discussion:
TECH.BLORGE.com, TechCrunch, Obsessable, TG Daily, PC World, CNET News, CloudAve, AppScout and Traffick, Thanks:atul
Claire Cain Miller / Bits:
Yelp Gives Small Businesses a Louder Voice — Small businesses will soon feel a little more love in their love-hate relationship with Yelp, the review site. — Yelp will begin allowing small business owners to respond publicly to reviews they think are incorrect.
Joshua Topolsky / Engadget:
T-Mobile announces April 21st “private launch event” in NYC — Well well well. Well. What do we have here? Apparently the cats and kittens over at T-Mobile have something special planned on Tuesday, April 21st. We've just gotten a very brief email letting us know that something was going down, but without any other detail.
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.
Investment Ireland:
Big Fish Games expected to create up to 100 jobs in Cork — Big Fish Games — Leading Online Games and Entertainment Company to establish European Headquarters — Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mary Coughlan, TD, announced jointly with Jeremy Lewis …
Discussion:
Brier Dudley's blog
MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
Twitter has real business partners — and fake ones — Like a lot of people, I read the story about Twitter backing its first UK ad partner yesterday and thought it was a pretty big deal. Names like Universal Pictures, Virgin Media and Gorillaz were all mentioned as using the service known …
