Comcast is well on its way to becoming the least popular company since "We come round your house and corrupt your savegames Incorporated". This recently came to a head with the story of geek Phil Shapiro, who’s moving out of his apartment because they’re switching to Comcast.
Mobile phones are the modern cockroach – there are millions of them, you can’t keep them out no matter how hard you try, and if you hear one in the cinema you’re going to be pretty upset. A portable new device that jams handsets at the push of a button is selling like hotcakes, despite serious concerns about legality.
Two California State University students face up to twenty years in jail for hacking the academic record keeping software to raise their grades. It might be a cute plan in an eighties movie (WarGames, anyone?) but in the real world that’s called unauthorized computer access, wire fraud and conspiracy. Which aren’t cute – and when you’re going to jail for two decades, you better hope you’re not cute either.
In a move which proves that their different departments don’t even have each others phone numbers, Sony has announced plans to release a compact cut-price PS2 in 2008.
Blockbuster have announced that they’re going to stop bothering online competitor Netflix, and instead concentrate on trying to rent people movies. This decision was brought on by the fact that they haven’t been making very much money doing either while they tried to do both.
Chain stores like Target are famous for reducing prices and cutting costs wherever possible, but running a fashion show without any models might be a bit extreme. That’s exactly what Target will do next week though, using holographic technology to take their place.
In a move straight out of an internet cliche, the US Navy are deploying robot boats which could be used to hunt pirates. Life used to imitate art – now it’s imitating web cliches, leaving us with no option but to destroy all computers or kill ourselves before the furry Harry Potter slash fiction arrives. Or the robot boats kill us.
The infamous Storm worm has seen a surge of activity this Halloween, spread by spam promising the "most amazing dancing skeleton", but delivering a trojan which puts the computer under the control of the storm botnet.
Jeff Zucker, chief of NBC Universal, took the stage at Syracuse University for questioning. While there he made the position of NBC Universal quite clear: they’re not making enough money, and it’s everyone else’s fault.
Southern California may be doing a credible impression of Hell, with over half a million acres of blazing inferno, but it’s set to become a wireless haven as AT&T promises to offer three weeks of free wireless connection in hundreds of hotspots for refugees.
Only a true geek would go walking and think "Look at all this energy I’m wasting". Maybe it’s because they stereotypically have less energy to spend before shortness of breath sets in. Whatever the inspiration, a new product in development by CSIRO (Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) could harness that energy to mean you never run out of batteries again.
Google attracts hordes of bloggers and opinion-shovelers uploading ten sourceless articles a week in the hope they’ll be the one to correctly guess what happens. A flock of seagulls trailing a ship – noisy, annoying, they all look the same and they feed on the scraps left by people who are actually going somewhere. Here I list top five things people like to say about Google, in the hope that we can all agree these are now officially “Done”.
Microsoft are seeking to crack into the lucrative family market with the XBox 360 Arcade, a new model of XBox that went on sale earlier this week. Bundled with simple, family friendly games like Pacman and Uno, the device hopes to earn some of the market share currently dominated by the Wii.
The new Sandisk TakeTV will allow users to display computer files on a regular television set. The simple device uses a USB connection to a computer and a plug-and-play interface on the TV, allowing users to enjoy their shows on something other than a computer monitor.
Apple have announced that one in six iPhones sold (that’s over a quarter of a million handsets) has been cracked to allow connection to networks other than AT&T, and that’s just counting SIM hacks. Including software modifications that allow the use of unauthorized software the number is thought to be twice that.
A server belonging to a major online advertising company has been hacked and used to infect computers visiting otherwise ‘trusted’ websites through the embedded ads. 24/7 Real Media Inc, the advertisers in question, have so far refused to comment on the issue.
NBC have canceled their YouTube channel in preparation for the launch of their own video site, Hulu.com. Experts fear that the loss of official support could delay the arrival of new episodes of The Office on YouTube by up to a minute.
Windows news Mac news iPad news iPhone & Touch Mobile technology news Tablet computer news Buying guides PS3/Wii/Xbox 360 Green technology Photography
