After Hulu and Boxee were forced to stop working together, I began to feel that it was necessary to look closer and explain how this was one of the rare instances where the loss of Hulu wouldn't be so much of a deal breaker. However, upon closer inspection and with frequent use these last few weeks, the loss of Hulu really did create a big chasm in content.

Boxee is a media center application based on XBMC that awaits a dedicated hardware home. In alpha, this software is already more elegant and fully featured than many set top boxes are after RTM, and that's with such critical features as network drive awareness still disabled. It offers support for most audio, video, and image formats and has streaming audio and video solutions built into its interface. However, due to squabbles with content providers, some of these streaming services, most notably Hulu, had to be temporarily disabled.

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Through methods ranging from blog jottings by Apple CEO Steve Jobs some time in 2008 to press releases issued just this week, Apple is rather suddenly playing up the environmental friendliness of its PCs. In a product announcement this week for its latest consumer line-up, Apple contended that the Mac mini is "the world's most energy efficient desktop, drawing less than 13 watts of power when idle."

Announcements for Apple's new MacBook Pro, mini, and iMac also suggested that the PCs are well ahead of the curve in terms of compliance with Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) and federal Energy Star guidelines.

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Yesterday, Cook County Sheriff Thomas J. Dart filed suit against classified ad site Craigslist in the US District Court of Northern Illinois to shut down the "erotic services" section of the site, and seek redress for all the resources consumed by Craigslist-related prostitution investigation.

"To say Craigslist's 'erotic services' forum makes prostitution accessible is an understatement," opens the complaint, "Advocacy groups consider the website to be one of the largest sources for prostitution in the country."

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Those who were familiar with the Recording Industry Association of America's declaration last December that it was discontinuing its strategy of lawsuits against individuals suspected of illicit song sharing, were puzzled to learn through blog sources late yesterday that the RIAA had filed suit last Tuesday against an individual in Nebraska. Is there a particular reason for this suit; did RIAA members decide to make an exception?

As RIAA spokesperson Jonathan Lamy told Betanews this morning, the true facts are that this is no exception. The filing on Tuesday against Shaun Adams of Grand Island is actually the formalization of action the studios had already initiated against him prior to their mutual December decision.

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Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO and president, has taken up videoblogging. Like FDR before him he's seized the airwaves to dispense wisdom in the face of economic uproar. Of course, he does kicks it off with "joining the chorus of those worried about the global economy," but since when do they do things the easy way over at Sun?

The inaugural video, slated to be the first of four, lays out Sun's strategy for pressing forth with open source as a strategy, philosophy, and business advantage. He's quite confident of getting the company, which has $3 billion in cash, though these days: "I'm not worried about the future; I'm focused on its arrival date."

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The vast Zoho online applications suite is on the march to tab heaven, and the word processor is leading the pack. Version 2.0 of Zoho Writer, unveiled Thursday, throws over its previous chock-full-o'-icons interface for a menu-and-tabs look that's eventually be integrated into all of Zoho's offerings.

Those familiar with previous versions of Zoho Writer are apt to remember the three-row-deep mass of icons at the top of the browser, and may also call some of the more oblique commands in the menus (Name-Name, anyone?). That's gone. The icon stack is replaced by six tab-shaped buttons in the toolbar, each of which clicks into a well-organized menu of choices. At the bottom of the screen, at last, word and character counts join the usual authoring and page count information.

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Just about as soon as we had the latest speed figures from Tuesday's nightly build of "Shiretoko" -- a.k.a., Firefox 3.1 pre-beta 3 -- it appears the Mozilla organization has thought twice about its numerology, and decided that the new edition's upgraded TraceMonkey JavaScript engine makes it at least worth half-a-point rather than a tenth. Just a few hours ago, the organization's interim VP of Engineering submitted to its newsgroup a "proposal" -- which will probably go without opposition -- that after Beta 3 (which is already close to finalized), the next beta round will be given the designation Firefox 3.5.

"The increase in scope represented by TraceMonkey and Private Browsing, plus the sheer volume of work that's gone into everything from video and layout to places and the plugin service make it a larger increment than we believe is reasonable to label .1," wrote Shaver. "3.5 will help set expectations better about the amount of awesome that's packed into Shiretoko, and we expect uptake help from that as well."

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We mentioned back in January that Vivek Kundra, Washington DC's CTO, was a highly plausible pick to take on the top tech job in the Obama administration. Switch that T to an I, please: Thursday morning, before tackling a full day of health-care meetings, President Obama named Kundra the White House's Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO).

In his brief statement, Obama cited Kundra's depth of experience and commitment to lowering the cost of government tech operations, and said that Kundra was charged with a key role in "making sure our government is running in the most secure, open, and efficient way possible." In addition to his tenure in DC, Kundra served as Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, taught tech at the University of Maryland, and held executive positions at Evincible Software and Creostar. (Image courtesy dc.gov.)

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Book retailer Barnes & Noble today announced it has purchased Fictionwise, the company which runs the e-Bookstores Fictionwise.com and ereader.com, in its move to launch its own e-book store this year.

Fictionwise is one of the country's largest independent sellers of e-books, and supports a number of formats, including Palm, PocketPC, Hiebook, Mobipocket, eBookMan, Adobe, MS Reader, and WinCE, several of which are supported by Amazon's Kindle. The site also offers free eReader software for Windows and Mac OS, as well as software for Palm OS, Symbian S60 and UIQ, and Windows Mobile devices.

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A series of comments filed yesterday with the US Federal Communications Commission on behalf of the National Association of Broadcasters and the TV industry's technology research laboratory, the Association for Maximum Service Television (MSTV), came to the conclusion that educating the American consumer about the existence of the digital TV broadcasting switch (now set for June 12) is no longer a serious problem. Much more serious, they condend, is the real possibility -- one which broadcasters are apparently just now addressing -- that certain viewers including those on the outskirts of analog broadcasting signals' coverage areas may suddenly find themselves without service.

"To strike an appropriate balance, stations that are predicted to lose two percent or more of their analog viewers as a result of a change in their geographic coverage area should have the flexibility to design the best way to communicate information, over-the-air, of this potential loss to their viewers, and, importantly, how to obtain specific information," reads the comments of the two industry leading groups (PDF available here). "We would support having these stations include in weekly on-air consumer DTV initiatives of their choosing a notice, such as: 'a small percentage of current viewers using an antenna to view this analog station may have problems receiving this station's digital signal; you can go to www.AntennaWeb.org to determine this and to see what outdoor antenna type will best serve your specific geographic location.'"

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UPI reports that a civilian employee of the New York Police Department has been charged with burglary, grand larceny, and computer trespass after disabling security cameras and stealing eight backup tapes from a warehouse on Staten Island. Anthony Borelli, the accused, is the former director of communications for the NYPD pension fund, and the tapes found in his home contain Social Security numbers and direct-deposit information for 80,000 current and retired officers.

The police potentially affected are receiving letters warning them that their personal information may have been violated. Leaving aside the wisdom of stealing from 80,000 cops, the department could have spared itself a great deal of grief simply by encrypting the data. As Credant senior VP Michael Callahan pointed out Thursday, "Eight backup tapes with heavily encrypted data on them have a resale value measured in tens of dollars, whereas with 80,000 identity theft kits on them in readable format, the value starts to skyrocket into the hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars category."

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At the Greener Gadgets Expo last week in New York City, executives for Dell and Intel touted a variety of "green" benefits for newer computer processors and laptop screens. But in another session, a product designer took the computer industry for to task for forcing users into frequent and costly replacements of PCs and software, whether for the sake of "green computing" or other reasons.

Processors such as Core 2 Duo that use Core Microarchitecture produce substantial energy savings for customers over the old Pentium 4 CPU, while also reducing carbon footprints, contended Stephen Harper, Intel's director of environment and energy policy.

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It is now well-established that social network Facebook was built up from the idea (if not the actual code) of HarvardConnect, which later became ConnectU. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was sued for stealing the idea of Facebook from HarvardConnect, which he briefly worked on as a student.

So when Facebook announced yesterday that interface changes would soon be rolled out, which will turn the user's page into a real-time update feed of his friends' activities, many assumed this move was to replicate some of the more popular functionality of microblogging service Twitter, and remove some of the luster from that popularity. This idea is largely due to repeated rumors of an attempted Twitter buyout by Facebook.

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While Palm announced yesterday that its Treo Pro will be coming to Sprint on March 15, Alltel Wireless announced a day later, though it gets the device first. The number five US mobile operator, now owned by Verizon, began offering the 3G Windows Mobile 6.1 Treo today as a web site-only purchase. As with Sprint, Alltel's Treo Pro will cost $199.99 with a two-year contract and related rebates.

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Last year, leading analysts including IDC gave the PC industry a baseline number on which to base its growth projections. That number, at about this time last year, ironed itself out to about 12%. By the spring, it looked like the real number would be 15%. But projections like these almost always presume that the same factors that impact the industry in the current quarter, will be carried on into the next one, and the next one, and the one after that.

As we all know now, the tremendous decline in both business and consumer orders resulted in 2008 ending up pretty much where it began, almost as if there wasn't a year's worth of data at all: flat for the year after a shipment decline of more than 11% in just the fourth quarter.

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