TechFast: YouTube Upgrade, Green Luxury Cars, End of Internet as We Know It

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Google upgrades YouTube with Irish video company purchase

Google has bought Irish video technology company Green Parrot, in the hope it can use their code to sharpen, straighten, and generally tidy up a lot of the video content that gets uploaded to YouTube. What you see is no longer what you got. Look out for more on this story later today, on Techland

Link: Paid Content

An electric Rolls for super-rich greens

Let’s face it, if you’re wealthy enough to afford a Rolls Royce, you’re probably wealthy enough to not worry about ever-increasing gas prices. But if you’re rich and you have a green conscience (it happens), you might want to grab yourself one or two electric-powered Rollers. The prototype device has two electric motors and just as much drive power as a 12-cylinder engine. Even the Rolls Spirit of Ecstasy symbol is lit up with an LED. Euw.

Link: Reuters

A new look for Chrome

Hey look, Google gave Chrome a new icon while we weren’t looking. Shiny and 3D is clearly out this season. Matt and 2D is the new thing. Oh, and that’s not the only change; Google is also going to drop support for its Gears plugin, because not enough people use it.

Links: CNet and CNet

Tweet more securely

For the security-conscious among you, Twitter’s latest announcement will be most welcome. It’s pretty good news for everyone else, too. From now on, your Twitter settings page displays an option to always connect to the site using a secure “https” connection – the same kind of connection you use for online shopping or banking. It means that your data is encrypted from the moment it leaves your computer. The upshot? Now you can use Twitter in Starbucks without worrying that someone might sniff out your password.

Link: Twitter blog

The internet is over

Here’s a great opinion piece from The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman, summing up his experiences at this year’s SXSW festival in Austin. What has he learned? That the internet as a “thing” is done. The boundary between online and offline has vanished.

Link: The Guardian