Continuing with the examination of the digital converter boxes, I’ll take a look at some of the other key features that consumers should consider when shopping for them. I’ll also review some of the recommendations made by Consumer Reports and CNET.

The Digital TV (DTV) Transition coming up February 19^th, 2009 can be a bit confusing. People are unsure if their television sets will be ready for the transition or if they’ll have to upgrade their systems. Unfortunately, for some consumers, they’ll have to buy a digital converter box beforehand, so that they can continue to enjoy free over-the-air broadcast TV. In this article I’ll examine digital converter boxes, what you need to consider before buying one, and which devices people are suggesting.

Roku, a company stationed in Saratoga, California, recently created a set-top box capable of competing with the AppleTV at $129 less. The Netflix player gives Netflix ultimate subscribers the ability to stream Netflix movies to their TV directly from the internet with no computer middle-man. Plus, according to Tim Twerdalh, vice president of Roku, this is only the beginning.

After much procrastination, the Federal Communications Commission has finally opened the floor for discussion into the embedded ad debate. Several public interest groups and congress members have been pressuring the company to address concerns with placing ads in programs. Although the main purpose behind the hearings will be more investigation and questioning, there is a possibility that it will impact in children’s programming more immediately.

Microsoft recently purchased the Powerset, a search engine company based in Silicon Valley that can processes natural-language questions and produces a list of answers based on Wikipedia articles. After their recent attempts to acquire Yahoo’s search engine, perhaps it’s trying to use this technology to upgrade Live.com

A new recognition system developed by the University of Bristol is helping researchers to study African penguins without tagging them. The system has a 98 percent success rate in individually identifying 20,000 penguins over the course of a month. The technology could even be expanded to observe other endangered species.

Google recently revealed a new feature that enables you to play YouTube videos, Picasa albums, and multimedia content from your computer on any device with Universal Plug-and-Play. No hardware installation is necessary. Simply add the Google Media Server gadget to your Google Desktop and you’re ready to go.

The Dare by LG is Verizon’s newest answer to the Apple iPhone threat. It has a full touch interface, an impressive 3.2 megapixel camera, a fast web browser using the 3G Verizon EV-DO Rev Network, and it comes with VZ Navigator for all your turn-by-turn direction needs. Plus, it has a customizable homepage, it’s capable of multitasking between applications, and it will be sold at $199 at Verizon stores starting next week.

Continuing with the analysis of the Firefox 3.0 browser, I take a look at some of the features and facts that aren’t really that great and add very little to the new browser.  I also observe some of the shortcomings of Firefox and take note of some of the bad press surrounding it.

Download Day came and went, boasting an impressive 8 million downloads in the first 24 hours. Today, they’ve almost doubled that number in a little over a half a week later. Now that users have field tested the new product, I’d like to take a look at some of great and not-so-great features and capabilities of the new Firefox.

A recent report released by public interest groups Free Press and Public Knowledge brought to light the “spyware-like” practices of the NebuAd company. It’s been paying ISPs to allow it to eavesdrop on traffic passing through the network. In fact, it’s been taking a more active approach by inserting packets that redirect them to NebuAd sites which force users to download tracking cookies.

The Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA) said last Friday that by demanding proof of copyright infringement, they run the risk of being unable to compensate copyright holders. "It is often very difficult, and in some cases, impossible, to provide such direct proof when confronting modern forms of copyright infringement, whether over P2P networks or otherwise,” said MPAA attorney, Marie L van Uitert.

ATI recently released its new Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 graphics cards. NVIDIA also released its new model, the GeForce GTX 280. Both of these cards are capable of calculations measured in teraflops (a trillion floating point calculations in a second) and making video games like Crysis look beautiful in HD.

Westinghouse made an announcement at the second meeting of the Alliance for Universal Power Supplies that it’s committed to supporting Green Plug’s universal power adapter technology by implementing it into its line of laptops, cell phones, and other electronics. It hopes to use the technology to cut its costs of shipping power adapters with their devices.

MediaDefender is partnering with record labels and advertisers to distribute legitimate Mp3s across p2p networks. Since its anti-piracy campaign was unsuccessful and unprofitable, it turned its attention to target advertising on popular P2P networks like LimeWire.

Websites that are listed at the top of search engine results may see a spike in traffic soon. AVG’s newly acquired tool, Linkscanner, goes into the links returned by search engines and inspects it for malware.

Microsoft, Intel, Google, and IBM came together last week to form a new non-profit organization called the "Information Overload Research Group" in a combined effort to reduce the amount of time and productivity lost to high-tech communication.