My Technologizer column for TIME.com this week is about the state of cable TV channels and shows on the Internet. It’s spotty–Time Warner Cable and Cablevision have introduced apps that turn iPads into portable TVs, but the entertainment industry doesn’t appear to be thrilled with that fact. And even though a high percentage of the …
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Startup Aims to Ease the Pain of Email Attachments
Attachments. Email wouldn’t be the same without them, but who among us can honestly hold up their hand and say out loud: “Attachments! I love ’em!”?
Exactly.
Attachments are painful. They lurk among your email messages, filling up your storage quota and generally being annoying. There must be a better way.
That’s what the guys …
Security Expert: Sony’s Network Was ‘Unpatched and Had No Firewall Installed’
Sony, Sony, Sony. This ought to add yet another level to the PR nightmare that’s become the PlayStation Network breach.
In a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing yesterday, Gene Spafford, a professor at Purdue University and executive director of the school’s Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and …
The Wall Street Journal’s Version of Wikileaks is Now Open For Secrets
The Wall Street Journal appears to be the first major news outlet to get their own Wikileaks-style portal up and running. They’re calling it The SafeHouse, a haven where tippers can submit various forms of documentation anonymously.
The site states they’re looking for “newsworthy contracts, correspondence, emails, financial records or …
Chimps Know Who They Are When Playing Video Games
For humans, associating with video game characters is second-nature. I ducked. I jumped. I fell off a cliff and died.
As it turns out, chimpanzees are capable of similar associations. At Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute in Japan, scientists discovered that chimps become aware of their digital avatars when playing video …
Over-the-Air: Future iPhone, iPad Updates May Not Require iTunes
As Apple gets set to reveal details of the next major overhaul to the iOS software used on the iPhone and iPad, there’s been some speculation that future incremental updates to the operating system may be pushed out directly to devices instead of having to be downloaded into iTunes first.
That’d be a relatively trivial feature to add, …
Anonymous to Sony: We Don’t Condone Credit Card Theft
Yesterday Sony told a U.S. House of Representatives Committee that the culprits behind the PlayStation Network outages were none other than hacker collective Anonymous, the group responsible for the takedowns of websites like Visa.com and Westboro Baptist Church late last year. But the puzzling saga took another sharp turn this morning …
LastPass Users Urged to Change Their Last Password
If you use LastPass, the secure password storage service, listen up: you need to change your master password there as soon as possible. Turns out it wasn’t, unfortunately, the “last” password you’d ever need after all.
The LastPass team noticed something weird happening with their servers yesterday – data was flowing in and out in a …
Facebook and Google Reportedly Looking at Deals with Skype
Reuters has reported that Facebook and Google want to get involved with Skype, after the company has delayed going public. The company is still expected to go public during the latter part of this year.
Both companies are looking to form individual joint ventures with Skype, according to two unnamed sources. Both talks are supposedly …
Warner Bros. Buys Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes
If you thought it was impossible for entertainment juggernaut Warner Bros. to have even more under its belt beyond the WB Network and – of course – the Harry Potter films, then a little announcement today might persuade you otherwise.
With ambitions to expand its digital rollout, the company has agreed to purchase popular …
Who’s Cleaning Up the PSN Debacle for Sony?
Remember that scene in Pulp Fiction where Harvey Keitel’s character — the nicely-named Winston Wolf — comes in to help assassins Jules and Vincent tidy up an especially messy murder? “How come I’m on brain duty?!”
Well, it looks like Sony has called in the equivalent of three Winston Wolfs to begin cleaning up the security mess that …
‘Mass Effect 3’ Delayed Until Next Year
The final installment of BioWare’s sprawling space opera apparently needs a bit more time in hyperspace, as the EA-held dev studio announced that Mass Effect 3 won’t be out until the first quarter of 2012.
In a statement that went out on Facebook and BioWare message boards, executive producer Casey Hudson said:
“Today we have
…