He who is slient, is strongest.

waderoush writes "On top of all the other features that it has crammed into iTunes, Apple this week added Ping, a Facebook-like social network for music discovery. It's all part of the company's plan to dominate the world of consumer media, but Xconomy argues that this time, Apple may have gone a bridge too far. iTunes, nearing its tenth birthday, started out merely as a program for ripping CDs, and has grown increasingly creaky and impenetrable as Apple has added more and more cruft, the article argues. The company won't have a stable base for its new media empire until it rebuilds iTunes from scratch — perhaps along the lines suggested by its other new product this week, the revamped Apple TV."

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Can you handle the truth?

In the past seven days, Reg Hardware reviewed many products from the worlds of consumer electronics and mobile communications.…

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That's Doctor Brown to you, says unemployed PM

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has buddied up with the Greatest Living Briton by becoming a director of the World Wide Web Foundation.…

Lucas123 writes "After a storage area network in a data center run by Northrop Grumman went down last week, crippling 26 state agencies' websites — some for more than a week — Northrop Grumman has now apologized to Virginia, saying it will learn from its mistakes in order to recover systems faster in the future. Northrop's $2.6 billion service contract with Virginia's government has come under harsh criticism in the past for service outages, along with project delays and cost overruns."

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The opposite of NIL desperandum

Seagate may be facing the abandonment of a favoured future technology as the price for hard disk drive (HDD) industry unity.…

'I've lost the ball again...'

Football minnows Bulgaria face an uphill struggle in their forthcoming clash with England, because not only will they confront some of the most talented, hard-working and successful players in the history of the beautiful game, but their opponents will be clad in a new strip created by former Joy Division designer Peter Saville.…

Evolution and management of the client computing environment

Let's face it, the desktop and laptop environment is one of the major points at which the rubber meets the road when it comes to business computing.…

Joins BoA and Visa in trials

Wells Fargo is joining the effort spearheaded by Visa to help NFC break in the difficult American market.…

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Run for your lives, kids. The ice cream man is coming!

Eric Schmidt has been portrayed as a depraved privacy pervert by the US-based ConsumerWatchdog.org, which is running an advert in New York’s Times Square that mocks the Google boss.…

Dangerous_Minds writes "Drew Wilson has been following HADOPI (France's three strikes law) a lot lately, and the latest developments are that the French ISPs and the French government are edging closer to a full-on war over compensation. The French government apparently requested that ISPs send an invoice of the bills after a certain period of time, but the French ISPs don't feel this is good enough — probably because of worries that the compensation the government will ultimately provide won't be enough. The ISPs are demanding adequate compensation, and if the government doesn't give it to them, they simply will not hand over evidence required to enforce HADOPI law. While HADOPI demands that ISPs cooperate, speculation suggests that if the government takes ISPs to court, the ISPs will simply rely on constitutional jurisprudence to shield them from liability (translation)."

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June and July not as bad as all that

The US Department of Labor kicked out its monthly jobs report, and there's some good news for once. First of all, private sector employers added 67,000 jobs last month, although the overall economy shed 54,000 jobs as the federal government winds down the 2010 census and lays off temporary workers hired to count heads.…

Execution wins. Not ideas

Open...and Shut Businesses aren't built on ideas. They're built on execution. Google didn't win because it was the first to the search market. It won because it did search better than anyone else, and devised an ingenious way to monetize it.…

Nicht ein biggie

German hackers successfully used off-the-shelf kit to extract personal data from the federal government's supposedly secure ID cards, but the government has downplayed the significance of the attack.…

In May we discussed news that producers of the film The Hurt Locker filed a lawsuit against 5,000 John Does, known only by their IP addresses at the time, for sharing the movie over peer-to-peer sites. Now, reader suraj.sun notes that subpoenas for the lawsuit are finally going out. "Qwest Communications on Monday notified a customer in Denver that the Internet service provider has received a subpoena from lawyers representing Voltage Pictures, the production company that made The Hurt Locker. ... In legal documents, Voltage Pictures has blamed the movie's relatively poor domestic performance on illegal file sharing. As of March 21, the movie had grossed $16 million domestically, but took in $40 million overall. According to reports, the film's production budget was $15 million. The film leaked to the Web five months before the movie's US debut. ... For allegedly downloading The Hurt Locker, DGW told the Qwest customer from Denver that settling the case early would cost $2,900, according to documents reviewed by CNET."

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Follow that photo!

An update for the TomTom app on the iPhone is "coming soon".…

neo12 writes with news that Hewlett-Packard is teaming with Hynix Semiconductor, the world's second-largest producer of memory chips, to mass produce memristors for the first time. Quoting the BBC: "HP says the first memristors should be widely available in about three years. The devices started as a theoretical prediction in 1971 but HP's demonstration and publication of a real working device has put them on a possible roadmap to replace memory chips or even hard drives. ... Steve Furber, professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, explained that the potential benefits lie in the fact that memristors are 'much simpler in principle than transistors. Because they are formed as a film between two wires, they don't have to be implanted into the silicon surface — as do transistors, which form the storage locations in Flash — so they could be built in layers in 3D,' he told BBC News. 'Of course, the devil is in the detail, and I don't think the manufacturing challenges have been fully exposed yet.'"

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12 months for CD & USB shenanigans

Ex-MI6 worker Daniel Houghton has been sentenced to 12 months in prison for unlawfully disclosing top secret material, in breach of the Official Secrets Act.…

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Going down for the last time

Comment This is the day that Apple lost the war for Over The Top content, not only in America, but globally. The winner can’t yet be announced, but this was the shot that Apple had to get it right, and to us it’s bungled it.…

judgecorp writes "Steady progress on inductive wireless charging. There are now certified prototypes of chargers for Blackberry and iPhone devices that meet the Qi specification of the Wireless Power Consortium, which was announced last year. The spec has advanced from version 0.95 to 1.0, too."

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Coming soon: Hypobaric chamber - The Revisiting

The Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) team is preparing to turn down the pressure with a second visit to Qinetiq's hypobaric chamber.…