WORLD REVIEW
Social networking giant MySpace's announced mission to kill Apple Inc iTunes is almost complete; MySpace Music, partly owned by the major music labels who control airtime - plus McDonalds, State Farm (insurance), Sony Pictures and Toyota - will let MySpace people stream music and send it to their friends; one teensy-weensy problem is that you can't actually own the music, transfer it to your iPod or computer or even buy it, although a link to Amazon will let you buy a song at a time, just as if you had logged on to iTunes in the first place. Sony Ericsson and Omnifone of England opened an online yuppiephone music service that will devastate and ruin the paltry Nokia Music Store in Europe before the Apple iPhone even gets a foot on the dying continent - they said.
 |
| This main Shiite web site and hundreds of others of Shi’ite Muslim leaders and schools, mostly in Iran, were attacked and defaced by the hard-line Wahhabi-Sunni hackers calling themselves ‘Group-XP’. The coordinated attacks left anti- Shiite grafitti on the sites, but did not attempt to close them to surfers. |
Speaking of MySpace friends, Barack Obama has about five times as many as John McCain, and the same thing on Facebook; researchers Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism said that the effect on the November 4 US election of this will be, well, 13-year-olds still can't vote.
The US yuppiephone network T-Mobile showed off the very first Googlephone, built in Taiwan and running on the open-source Android platform; it should be on sale in about a month.
Internet hackers wanted no publicity but forcefully stated to al-Qaeda that all your cyberspaces are belong to us; the hackers took down the terrorist group's main As-Sahab Media Foundation web site on September 10, ensuring that a promised anniversary celebration of the 9/11 attack on the US didn't happen. European hackers told the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) that all your boson are belong to us; the Nerds of the "Greek Security Team" broke into the web page of a Nerd of the physics company Cern, which runs the large hadron collider; they defaced the man's web page, and though they got nowhere near the Doomsday Machine, Cern cut off Internet access to the collider's site anyhow; the nerd-on-nerd nerd-violence is unprecedented, at least since the Jets took on the Sharks; surely it is a sign of the Apocalypse when geeks collide - at a collider?
SanDisk indignantly turned down the offer by Samsung to try to buy it; no one would sell themselves for $5.85 billion, SanDisk said; er, although every company has its price.
A report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project concluded that almost all young people - 99 per cent of boys and 94 per cent of girls - play video games, nearly two-thirds of them with family or online friends; that raises the question: If everyone plays video games, is gaming dangerous?
Attention government ministers - researcher and anthropologist Mimi Ito specifically cautioned old people against negative stereotypes about video games, and in fact, as fellow researcher Jesse Schell said: "If more parents would take the time to play the same things their children are playing - or even better, play with them - it would benefit both parents and children."
Chinese space engineers moved a Long-March IIF rocket and the Shenzhou-VII spacecraft into position for launch from the Jiuquan Space Centre in Gansu province; Shenzhou-VII is to carry three astronauts, one of whom will be the first Chinese to walk outside in space.
The InternetNews.com service claimed that Microsoft has pencilled in June 3, 2009, for the release of its Windows 7, the Vista-killer; the first beta versions will be handed out at the Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference in late October.
Speaking of everyone but Apple, the new Google mobile maps are made especially for the coming Android-based Apple-killing Google phones of course; but they also are made so they work on pretty well every smart-type phone but one - yep, the Apple iPhone.
Google and General Electric formed a coalition to lobby for government energy policies that Won't Be Evil while profiting wind-power sellers GE. Internet snoops Nielsen Online said the new Google Chrome browser got an impressive two million downloads in its first week; that is almost as many downloads as the new Firefox got in its first two hours.
Yahoo! posted a blog entry urging all webmail users to strengthen their passwords; this had absolutely nothing to do with the easy cracking of a Yahoo! Mail account of US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Online research firm Hitwise determined officially that "Sarah Palin" was the most-searched political term on the Web, two per cent of all searches, with "Barack Obama" second at 1.9 per cent; the surprise is that the Alaska governess was only in the spotlight for two weeks of the four-week Hitwise study; in mid-August, YouTube had 300 videos of Mrs Palin, today it has more than 130,000 and climbing.
Asked what John McCain had ever done for US markets, an election aide held up a BlackBerry and said: "The telecommunications of the United States, the premier innovation of the past 15 years, comes right through the commerce committee.
"So you're looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create;" Luckily the mainstream media were on the case and after only a few hours of research, The New York Times was able to assure the world and highly sensitive people from the Great Frozen North that, "The original BlackBerries were made by a Canadian company, Research in Motion."
Prev
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
Next
