Latest News - Page 2977

This morning we covered a back and forth between Microsoft's Adam Orth and Xbox fans over Always-on DRM. Orth was quite disrespectful and in my opinion, very unprofessional. This afternoon, Microsoft issued an official apology to Xbox fans over the tirade.

The statement from Microsoft reads:

It looks as though the Austin, Texas could be getting Google Fiber. Google and the City of Austin have an announcement planned for this Tuesday, April 9. Sources in the city seem to think that the announcement relates to broadband, most likely meaning Austin will be getting Google Fiber.

There are definitely other explanations than Google Fiber. Google could be planning to test out same-day delivery, open a new office, or any number of things. But Google Fiber is somewhat likely. Austin did fairly well in the original contest for Google Fiber and Google has contemplated expanding outside of Kansas City.

Every now and then a story comes along that makes you laugh out loud. For me, this is certainly one of those stories. Google has started receiving takedown requests of pages that contain a copyright holder's original takedown request. These robotically-generated requests are submitted because the original takedown request features the URL that was originally taken down.

It's rather hilarious and also ironic. In the picture above, you can see one of the takedown requests submitted by Fox asking for a ChillingEffects.org link to be removed. That link points to a previous Fox takedown request.

The system is clearly broken. Google is now handling over 20 million takedown requests per month and it shows no sign of slowing down. But just how we fix the DMCA isn't clear. Both Google and the movie studios have their own ideas and they are, of course, mostly contrary to each other.

GSMAreana has received some pictures from a tipster that are allegedly of the upcoming iPhone 5S. The pictures depict a radical departure from the current iPhone 5. They actually line up with a patent application approved by the US Patent Office last week, which could indicate they are real. Or the "tipster" could have crafted some pictures to match the application. First, the application picture:

As you can see, the patent application features a curved screen and curved back. Noticeable absent is the typical Home button. Now, take a look at the pictures sent in:

We encourage you to not take these pictures as the iPhone 5S that will be launched this summer. This could be a prototype or it could be the real thing. It could also be a render that someone has made from the patent image.

A new malware has been discovered by Kaspersky labs. The new malware spreads through Skype and turns the victim's computer into a Bitcoin miner. The victim's machine is then fully loaded to mine Bitcoins which is how the malware author makes money from the software.

The malware currently has a low detection rate. Kaspersky now identifies the malware as Trojan.Win32.Jorik.IRCbot.xkt. The malware is downloaded from a server in India. Once on the victim's machine, it pulls down more files from Hotfile, one of which is a Bitcoin mining application.

Bitcoin mining, explained more in-depth by Bitcoin, is a processor intensive task. The victim's CPU will be fully loaded mining Bitcoins, which are then given to the author of the malware. These Bitcoins are then used to turn a profit.

Microsoft's next generation Xbox has long been rumored to feature Always On DRM protection, and after recent events with SimCity and Diablo 3, many gamers are seeking to put an end to that sort of DRM. Yesterday Microsoft Employee Adam Orth took to Twitter to vent his frustrations with the anti-DRM crowd.

Orth, a Creative Director at Microsoft, went on a tirade blasting opponents of Always On DRM saying "Sorry, I don't get the drama around having an "always on" console. Every device is now "always on" that is the world we live in, ending the tweet with the hashtag, #dealwithit. This led some people to point out the debacle that EA recently went through with SimCity and asking what happens when the internet goes out.

Orth replied, "Electricity goes out too." This led to a follow up reminding Orth that some locales such as rural areas are often not well connected and do not have internet connections at all. One tweeter said: "You've lived in LA, SF, Seattle... Very Connected places. Try living in Janesville, WI or Blackberg VA." This prompted a kind of insulting reply from Orth of, Why on earth would I live there? He then set his Twitter account to private.

Crowd funding website Indiegogo was hit by a DDOS attack by an unknown source after YourAnonNews posted up a fundraising campaign. YourAnonNews (YAN) is attempting to raise funds to develop and host a new website that is similar to a newswire for Anonymous news. Apparently someone didn't like the idea.

It's not clear where the DDOS attack originated from and Indiegogo hasn't been exactly forthcoming about the attack. Slava Rubin, founder of Indiegogo, apologized for the outage and offered an extension to any campaigns ending this week: "Any campaigns scheduled to conclude this week will have the option of extending until Sunday by contacting our 24-7 Customer Happiness team."

Universal Pictures Australia which launched Steven Spielberg's 1993 action/adventure Jurassic Park 3D in select cinemas across most of Australia yesterday (but not my home state of Tasmania) have announced to retailers the impending home video release of the movie on 3D Blu-ray.

The movie, which has received a new transfer and full restoration before 3D conversion by Burbank studio StereoD, will be released in Australia on June 6th, some five weeks after the U.S. Blu-ray release. The sole new additional feature, an eight minute featurette entitled "The World of Jurassic Park" is joined by the film in 2D on the second disc, along with an Ultraviolet digital copy.

Based on the best-selling book by Michael Crichton, the production ushered in the digital age, with dinosaurs convincingly brought to life by George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic facility which was sold to Disney at the end of last year. The movie, once the highest grossing picture of all time before being surpassed by James Cameron's Titanicin 1998. Whilst ticket pre-sales have been strong, the first grosses are yet to come in.

At today's Facebook Home event Mark Zuckerberg and crew debuted Facebook Home, a new home-screen UI designed for Android devices that completely transforms your smartphone experience. Instead of focusing on apps, the new Facebook Home lets you focus on staying connected to people.

Chat head solves the age old problem of do you answer that text you just got or finish what you were doing. Chat head displays a little circular icon over your content that notifies you when a friend messages you. By tapping on your friends face, it will open the chat dialogue over your current "window."

Once you are finished with the message, simple tap again and it will return to the bubble-like icon. Chat head works with both Text Messaging as well as Facebook Messenger and which service you are using is denoted by the color of the chat's text bubbles. Green signifies a SMS conversation while blue represent a Facebook Messenger chat - just like how messaging works with Apple iMessage.

It looks like @evleaks was spot on once again. At the Facebook Home event, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook has teamed up with AT&T and HTC to design a smartphone that was based around Facebook Home. HTC's Peter Chou stepped up on the stage and proudly presented the HTC First.

The HTC First is a very sleek and very minimalist looking Android phone that was solely designed with Facebook Home in mind and will come in four colors. "It's the only phone that has Home pre-loaded and optimized. That means you're going to have a unique experience", said Chou.

AT&T's Ralph de la Vega then took the stage to talk about AT&T's role in the Facebook Home experience. "This is going to be the best Facebook mobile experience ever, and it's going to be people-centered. We bought into that," he said. "What I like about the First is that it's an LTE device, as you would expect. This phone has the most immersive experience I've ever seen."

The Facebook Home press event is just about done. As we've already covered, there is no new Facebook phone. What is new is the "Home", which is a new UI to replace the home screen of your Android device. The big part of it is "Cover Feed" which automatically shows you a stream of your friend's content from Facebook, as soon as you turn on your phone.

Mark Zuckerberg announced that Home will be available for download on a few Android devices on April 12 in the Play Store.

The devices supported initially include the HTC One, HTC One X / One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III, Samsung Galaxy S4 and Samsung Galaxy Note II.

At this morning's Facebook Home event, Mark Zuckerberg debunked recent rumors that Facebook is building a phone. He cited that a great Facebook smartphone would only sell 10 million to 20 million devices, which would equate to reaching just one to two percent of its users.

Instead, Facebook "Home" is an entire user interface in the form of a suite of apps for your Android phone that focuses on people rather than apps. When you start your phone, you get a new home screen called "Cover Feed", which is an automatic scrolling feed that is generated from your friend's activities.

Cover Feed is the foundation of Facebook Home, and is very clean and refined. "There's no Chrome here, no nav, it's all content based." said Adam Mosseri, Director of Product at Facebook. He went on to say, "Typically, all you see is a clock and a snippet of an email or calendar. With Home, we offer more value with that screen."

The developers of the vastly popular Star Wars game Jedi Outcast, have released its source code in the wake of yesterday's closure of LucasArts. The development company has also released the source code to the games sequel, Jedi Academy, as well.

In a statement Raven said:

Just as web developers across the world were settling down to enjoy the good life, Google and Mozilla have walked in the door and thrown a wrench into their smoothly running machines. This morning both Google and Mozilla announced that they are moving their browsers to new rendering engines.

Google has announced that it has forked the popular WebKit engine off into a more "manageable for chromium" engine called Blink. Google says that Blink will focus on speed and simplicity, and will still hold true to its WebKit roots. Opera, who just switched to WebKit says that they will follow Google's lead and fully embrace and contribute to Blink.

In a blog post, Adam Barth, a Software Engineer at Google said:

Around six years ago, a rumored sequel to Doom was talked about, but it didn't excite id and Bethesda envisioned according to Bethesda vice president of marketing and publications, Pete Hines.

Kotaku have reported that the game was then thrown in the bin, with Hines backing up this claim stating that id Software refocused their efforts into a new version of Doom 4 that promises to meet the uber high expectations of the game and the Doom franchise. Hines has said that when they're ready to talk about it, they'll let people know.

The problems reportedly lie within id Software itself, which is described as a company that was once full of the world's best talent, but lacks direction. Politics and mismanagement all played a negative role at the company, with executives more focused on getting Rage shipped in 2011 rather than pay attention to what was happening with Doom 4 - how that happens, I just don't know.

AMD's representitive believes that NVIDIA may be bitter over Sony's choice to go with AMD in the PlayStation 4. His reasoning? A statement by NVIDIA's Tony Tamasi saying how the GTX 680 outperforms the PlayStation 4. He added that the 680 had been out for a year and a half.

AMD's director of ISV relations Neal Robinson responded:

A new Nexus 7 from Google could arrive as soon as this coming July, if rumors we are hearing are true. Reuters is citing two separate sources that claim that Google is preparing to ship roughly eight million new tablets by the end of the year.

The sources say that the new Nexus 7 will feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon instead of an NVIDIA Tegra 4. One source says that we could see a the new Nexus 7 drop down to the $150 price point, while the other stated that $200 was the magic number.

If these rumors are true, then we will most likely see the device surface at next month's Google I/O event, which has been sold out for months. Last year's event saw the original Nexus 7 unveiled as well as a demo of Google Glass.

BlackBerry is hoping to convince Android and iOS users to switch over to the dark side by offering up a demo of key BlackBerry 10 features through a new HTML5 web app. Dubbed BlackBerry Glimpse, the app walks users through 10 demonstrations that include the BlackBerry Hub, Screen Share, Time Shift and the unique BB10 predictive keyboard.

I tried out Glimpse on my very dated Sprint Motorola Photon 4G and the "demo" felt more like a slideshow that used gestures to control rather than a true interactive demonstration. The keyboard demo was so fast that I barely caught what it was trying to illustrate.

Not all was bad though, I actually do like the UI that BlackBerry has created. It does have a very Android feel to it which is something that I prefer. Will this "demo" cause a mass migration to BlackBerry 10? I doubt it, but it is a pretty cool marketing idea. If you would like to try it out for yourself head over to the Source #2 link below.

Forty years ago today, then Motorola exec Marty Cooper walked out of his office, met with a reporter on the sidewalk in front of his office building and proceeded to make a world-changing phone call to the CEO of Bell Labs (a division of AT&T).

This event was most likely one of the top 3 most significant phone calls in the history of the world, as it was the very first cellular phone call ever made. Sure there were car phones at the time, but this was a completely mobile, hand held all-in-one device. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X that Cooper used went on to be known in pop culture as "The Brick" because it resembled one in both size and weight. The 2.5lb device would set you back a cool $3,995 and featured a single line LED text display.

Fast forward 40 years and Google now owns Motorola's mobile division and modern smartphones are tens of thousands of times more powerful. Instead of being limited to the uber rich, now even the poorest people communicate via cellular phones. If you were wondering, in the first cellular call Cooper said to the Bell Labs CEO "I'm ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end."

According to ZDNet's sources, Microsoft's upcoming Windows Blue will be known as Windows 8.1 to the public. As you can see in the screenshot below, the operating system is clearly labeled as "Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro." It looks like Windows Blue could be similar to the service packs of yesteryear.

The update appears to follow along the lines of Windows Phone 7 and 7.5. Windows RT is said to be known as "Windows RT 8.1." Microsoft envisions Windows 8 as a multiple selling season product meaning these refreshes every year or so, somewhat like how Apple updates Mac OS X in that they have 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8 each with their own codename.

It's not clear whether Microsoft intends to charge customers to update, though I would venture to guess they will charge a fee. If I had to guess a number, I'd guess $20.