Confirmed (via Twitter): HTC's Touch HD coming to America
Using just a few tweets on Twitter, HTC has confirmed that its Touch Pro2 is coming to North America.
The news wasn't any great surprise, really, because the press release for the Touch Pro2 did mention something about "global availability." Still, in a series of three tweets, HTC made future availability of the Windows Mobile-based phone on the North American continent definite, although without being specific about when, which carrier, or even which country.
Gmail service outage points to a hole in the cloud
A service outage that impacted users of Google services including Gmail for approximately 75 minutes early this morning, is calling attention to a potential kink in the cloud: While an estimated 113 million Gmail accounts were forced to resort to Google's new offline mode, introduced last month, a number of Google service users were also forced to wait, since Gmail also serves as the company's central source of service authentication.
The outage came at the worst possible time for users in Western Europe, including Great Britain, where users were just getting settled to work. Google Apps can work offline, though the degree of offline functionality they offer has only been increasing in small steps. Calendar functionality through Google Gears, for instance, was only introduced earlier this month, although the company announced its trend toward the "offline cloud" in April 2007.
Apple debuts a new way to pre-pay in iTunes
Apple's iTunes today opened the first iTunes Pass purchases, which lets users pay a fee up front to receive every piece of content an artist releases for a certain period of time.
While this has not officially been announced by Apple yet, a diligent Mac Forums reader located details on it in the Spanish iTunes store terms of service:
Vudu makes HD titles downloadable
Highddefinition video-on-demand service Vudu has been making an honest play at becoming the set top box that brings streaming video to the home theater enthusiast market. Today, the company has begun to offer HD movies as downloads in addition to streams.
Vudu's library of high-definiton titles is around 1,400 and downloads will cost between $13.99 and $23.99. Vudu set top boxes are all equipped with HDDs, which could conceivably fill up quickly when downloading HD movies. For example, the company's top-of-the-line STB, the XL, can hold approximately 500 standard definition titles on its terabyte drive. Vudu however, reinforces the user's account with a free cloud storage service called Vudu Vault. Archival in the Vudu Vault is currently limited to select movies, but all television content can be stored there.
OneSwarm network improves file-sharing control, anonymity
University of Washington researchers this week have released a peer-to-peer file-sharing technology that actually does, or can, limit one's sharing to one's actual peers. The client, called OneSwarm, uses a "friend-to-friend" (F2F) model that gives users extremely granular, extremely hard-to-expose sharing capabilities.
The OneSwarm technical paper, (PDF available here) submitted by graduate students Tomas Isdal and Michael Piatek and faculty members Arvind Krishnamurthy and Tom Anderson, is quite explicit in its concerns about the dangers of indiscriminate sharing. "Although widely used, currently popular P2P networks expose the sharing behavior of their users to scrutiny by third parties," the paper's conclusion states.
Citibank nearly duped by Nigerian scam
Minyanville.com's headline probably puts it most bluntly: Citibank officially dumber than your spam filter. A Nigerian man, Paul Gabriel Amos, has been indicted in New York for allegedly attempting a fraud that would have pulled over $27 million from Citibank's coffers into two dozen receiving accounts around the world.
Citibank, which received $45 billion in Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) funds from the US government last year, did not perceive irregularities with the attempted withdrawal from the account of the National Bank of Ethiopia (a real bank). Instead, the scam was foiled only when some of the receiving banks warned Citibank that they were unable to process the transactions.
Check Point checks in with 64-bit ZoneAlarm updates
The ZoneAlarm family of security software expanded on Monday as Check Point debuted three 64-bit-compatible versions of their flagship software. The company also launched an all-in-one version of ZoneAlarm combining the line's firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, and anti-spyware tech with online backup capabilities.
ZoneAlarm Extreme Security, the new suite, builds in a few features that should add a layer or two of extra security, particularly on machines piloted by the unwary and click-happy. ForceField, a virtualized browser security application introduced last year, keeps an eye on sites visited and flags things that seem dicey -- the "banking site" that isn't what it appears to be, for instance. The package also includes protective features such as (optional) private-key encryption capabilities and system-maintenance and online backup tools for tending one's more critical data.
AT&T to spend $1B on global network, business services this year
With a planned expenditure of $1 billion this year, AT&T intends to keep building out its global network -- as well as that of IBM -- while also delivering new services and network-based applications to businesses of all sizes.
Through an expanded agreement with IBM inked in 2007, AT&T and IBM are now teaming up on providing networking and computer-based services and applications to multinational corporations on a platform that increasingly integrates the global networks of both vendors. However, AT&T's $1 billion investment will also support many new services for customers of its own long-time global business network.
Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrades: Difficult, but not impossible
It shouldn't surprise many testers that Microsoft has shrewdly closed the upgrade channel for users who will -- probably sooner this year than later -- be making the switch to Windows 7. Many who had chosen to steer clear of Windows Vista and hang on to Windows XP -- by all rights, a decent operating system, at least for Service Pack 3 users -- are pondering the nightmare scenario of having to upgrade to and validate (which usually means, pay for) both Vista and Windows 7, if it so happens that Windows 7 proves to be desirable or simply necessary.
This led us to thinking: Windows Vista can run without being purchased and activated, albeit for a limited time (usually 30 days). During that time, it behaves as though it were a fully operational trial edition (except for the Ultimate SKU, where several of the "Extras" aren't available except after validating). But it doesn't take a month to install an operating system; so what if a valid XP user could simply borrow the promotional edition of Vista, if you will, to make the skip over to Windows 7?
Find out where TV's 'white spaces' are, online
A new Web site at ShowMyWhiteSpace.com is aimed at giving consumers, businesses, and government agencies comprehensive information and interactive tools for using the wireless "white space" TV channels opened up to the public by the FCC last fall.
Launched today, the Web site already includes a tool for finding these open TV channels anywhere in the US. In a visit to the site, Betanews noted that you can search for the white spaces by either street address or x-y coordinates.
Futuresource: 82% of Blu-ray discs are 'pipeline fill'
Market research company Futuresource today released its Blu-ray disc market outlook for 2009, and projected sales to exceed 100 million units as players come down in price. This would represent another in a series of vast leaps in market size.
In the US in 2008, Blu-ray disc sales grew 320% to a total of 24 million units. Sales of 100 million would represent a 416% growth.
California video game law beaten back again
California Speaker of the Assembly Leland Yee (D - San Francisco) is a doctor of developmental psychology responsible for a California Law passed in 2005 that criminalized the sale of violent video games to children under 18 and called for stricter labeling for games rated "M" by the ESRB.
Shortly after the bill's passage in 2005, video game industry representatives filed suit in the District Court. Judge Ronald Whyte deemed the law unconstitutional and blocked it from taking effect.
AOL makes a move on Craigslist's classified territory
AOL Classifieds, which launches today in the US and Canada, allows sellers to post listings free, just as Craigslist does. (The service makes money from selling increased-visibility ads, sort of the way eBay makes money from the featured-auction option.) A UK version of the service will launch in the near future.
The service is powered by Oodle and aggregates listings from over 80,000 sources and 250 partner sites, many of them intensely local in orientation. Higher-profile members of the Oodle network include the Washington Post Express, Military.com Classified, MySpace Classifieds, Etsy, LiveDeal, and Local.com Classifieds.
AOL's Bebo becomes more of a SocialThing
By consolidating some of its acquired technologies, AOL now hopes that folding together functionality from two of its recent acquisitions will ease the pain.
AOL bought Bebo back in March 2008 for $850 million. The service, which is similar to Facebook or MySpace, skews young and is most popular in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. In August, AOL picked up SocialThing, which is a "lifestreaming" service -- that is, it aggregates status updates and other information posted by friends on multiple social networks. FriendFeed is a lifestreaming application, and the Flock browser has lifestreaming functionality as well.
Novell lays off openSUSE Linux developers
Even before the proverbial ink was dry on last week's interoperability deal between Microsoft and Red Hat, Linux competitor Novell laid off a still unknown number of employees involved with the open source openSUSE community.
The openSUSE community has included volunteer developers in addition to paid employees of Novell, a major rival to Red Hat in the Linux space which forged its own interoperability pact with Microsoft in late 2006.
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