Latest Technology News

Someday, somehow, Twitter or one of the other social-networking services will release a tweak to its interface that every user will love and no user will whine about. We'll all be dead by then, of course, but for now the latest changes to Twitter give as little legitimate reason for complaint as anything we've seen lately.

The Following and Followers sections have been changed to expand the user's options for keeping track of who's following and what people they're following are up to. There are two views for each section -- List, which shows username and real name, and Expanded, which shows all of that plus location and their last tweet. In addition, in the Followers list you can see which people also follow you. (Why isn't that offered in both? We may never know.)

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With as many set-top boxes as there suddenly appear to be in the home video market, as long as any one of them has a strong central feature, it could be the one that becomes a household name. Look at TiVo, Slingbox, and AppleTV: Each of these built a TV-based ecosystem around a single unique feature: TiVo's was the DVR, Slingbox was the place-shifting concept, and AppleTV was iTunes.

Now, IPTV startup Myka has designed its own media center STB, focusing on BitTorrent as its winning central feature. And while it doesn't carry all the functions one would expect in a home theater PC (HTPC), it offers enough power and functionality to be considered a little more than your run-of-the-mill set top box. Like the title says, if you're a little bit lazy...you could even consider Myka a pre-built HTPC. Betanews got an exclusive look at this new device.

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Download Firefox 3.5 Final for Windows from Fileforum now.

It's a trend we're noticing more and more with folks who use Web browsers: Google Search is becoming so ubiquitous that people are comfortable with typing a query rather than referencing a bookmark, to relocate a page they remember. It saves them the trouble of having to save the page in the first place. You think I'm kidding? Two of the search phrases that land Google users on Betanews most often are "beta news" and "Betanews."

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BlackBerry Tour, the latest smartphone from Research in Motion, will be heading to Verizon on July 12 for $199.99 in two different forms: one with a camera and one without. The device was officially announced earlier in June on both Verizon and Sprint, but Verizon is the first carrier to offer a launch date.

Also known as the 9630, the BlackBerry Tour is a world phone with voice support in over 220 countries and push e-mail support in 175. It is equipped with GPS and can also be used as a tethered 3G modem (2100 MHz UMTS/HSPA, or 800/1900 MHz CDMA/EV-DO Rev. A) for Verizon Mobile Broadband Connect Subscribers. With BlackBerry as the dominant brand in enterprise smartphone deployments, the ability to buy the latest model with no built-in camera is crucial for secure work environments where no cameras are allowed, especially including government installations.

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On schedule, the Mozilla organization has now officially released its Firefox 3.5 Web browser to the general public, containing the first stable version of its TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. Since Firefox is essentially a JavaScript app in and of itself, the overall performance of the browser on all platforms we've seen should be visibly, and in some cases dramatically, improved over Firefox 3.0.

Naturally, Betanews is beginning its first round of performance tests on the final build of 3.5, especially to see whether that last boost of speed we saw in the final private preview builds was integrated into the final product. We'll let you know what we find out later today.

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While Swedish company Global Gaming Factory X looks to turn the Pirate Bay into a legal business, the torrent tracking site's founders have taken the wraps off of their HTML5 project site called The Video Bay, a streaming video service in the vein of YouTube and, what else, The Pirate Bay.

Even though The Video Bay has been in development for two years, it is still extremely rough. The team recently rolled out an "extreme beta" version (like a public alpha) which carries the warning: "Don't expect anything to work at all." Indeed, even the site itself doesn't load for all the traffic it's currently shouldering.

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This morning, China's Xinhua news agency announced that the country's IT ministry has decided to indefinitely delay the rollout of its "Green Dam for Escorting Children" Internet filter software, which was supposed to have been mandatory for PCs sold in that country beginning tomorrow. This after reports that the software -- whose code US-based software firm Solid Oak software claims was pilfered from its own filter products -- didn't actually work very well in real-world tests.

As Reuters reported earlier this morning, prior to China's announcement, Garfield the cartoon cat was a particular target of Green Dam's image filter, as was the face of actor Johnny Depp. However, actual pornography managed to get through just fine.

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We spent some enjoyable time earlier this week playing with TweetPsych, a site that puts linguistic analysis algorithms to work figuring out just what's with the most compulsive Twitter users out there. Currently in beta, the for-entertainment-only analysis still provided us with some amusing insight into Twitter talk -- and into the brains of three Betanews staffers.

The site, developed by Dan Zarrella of HubSpot (home of the addictive Twitter Grader), builds a "psychological profile" of a given Twitter user based on his or her last 1,000 tweets by running the text against two algorithms that look not at what topics people are talking about but at the cognitive processes they seem to be using. The RID (Regressive Imagery dictionary) algorithm sifts texts for their primary (free-form, associative, creative), secondary (logical, problem-solving), and emotional content, while the LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) algorithm matches words against 82 language categories that can roughly estimate the writer's mindset. The LIWC is a widely used linguistics database; the RID is less so.

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Pandora silenced abroad, which LimeWire gains an exec

Monday, June 29, 2009 • The strikes and gutters of digital music advanced another frame on Monday, with users in France reporting that their Pandora feed is gone while LimeWire scores an executive fresh from TotalMusic.

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With a statement telling visitors, "We've been working on this project for many years. It's time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die," the proprietors of The Pirate bay confirmed on Monday that they expect to be acquired by Global Gaming Factory X. It's a Swedish firm that wants, according to its ownership, "to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site."

The acquisition, which would lead to GGF operating The Pirate Bay site, is expected to close in August according to GGF. Profits from the sale, according to The Pirate Bay, will go to online projects expanding freedom of speech, information and access.

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To cut down on electronic waste and increase interoperability, ten mobile phone makers have signed a European Commission Memorandum of Understanding that commits them to using Micro USB as their standard mobile phone charger and data connection by 2010.

Many of the companies that signed the agreement, which include Apple, LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Texas Instruments, are members of the OMTP Forum which agreed on standardizing micro USB for charging and local data exchange last February.

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Last year, Sprint and Clearwire consolidated their WiMAX businesses in the Clear 4G wireless network, which was partly funded by investments from Google, Intel, and cable companies Time Warner, Bright House Networks, and Comcast.

Today, Comcast officially became the first Clear reseller among the investors, launching its "High Speed 2go" WiMAX subscription service in Portland, Oregon. The cable company announced that there will be further rollouts in Atlanta, Chicago, and Philadelphia later this year as well. The plan is similar to the Sprint 4G service the carrier announced last March.

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This is the week that the Mozilla organization is expected to unveil what may very well be the most significant half-point release in its history: the 3.5 edition of the Firefox browser. While Betanews tests confirm the new version literally blows away its own predecessor in terms of speed, operating two-and-one-half times faster in page rendering and functionality on average, your own eyes will tell you it's a much faster browser.

And those same eyes will tell you that Google Chrome is already a much faster browser, by virtue of a supremely fast V8 JavaScript engine that its developers have been refining since version 1 made its debut last year. In recent Betanews tests, the Chrome 3 beta has overtaken the stable release of Apple Safari 4 as the fastest Web browser publicly available, posting a performance index score that's 83% faster than Firefox 3.5 RC3 on Windows XP SP3. So while Firefox has made extremely significant gains, it may take open source developers until version 4.0 for it to catch up with Chrome in the speed department.

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The last possible effort by movie studios such as 20th Century Fox and cable television producers, including CNN and Cartoon Network, to forestall cable service providers such as Cablevision from providing their customers with DVRs with full commercial-skipping control, was silently shot down this morning in the final session of this year's US Supreme Court term. As a result, last year's ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals stating that Cablevision's DVR service did not violate copyright law, stands.

That August 2008 ruling had overturned an earlier District Court ruling in March that had been a victory for the studios. Their argument was that when a cable service provider lets its customers record and play back shows at the headend -- using the provider's own storage rather than a local DVR -- that constituted a retransmission, which was contrary to the terms of service.

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The two-year old "PSP Phone" rumor has been resurrected yet again, this time because of a weekend article in respected Japanese business journal Nikkei Shimbun. The article says Sony now has plans to set up a PSP Phone development team in July which will be comprised of Sony Ericsson and SCE workers.

Rumors of a PlayStation Portable-branded Sony Ericsson device began when a 2007 patent application for a gaming phone was filed by the joint venture. The device in the patent is designed with a 90-degree pivoting screen not unlike the LG VX9400, and d-pad style buttons rather than the traditional numeric keypad. Earlier this year, a Christmas 2009 launch date for the device was rumored as well.

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