Author Archive | Ed Oswald

Dumb Crook Logs into Xbox Live on Stolen Console, Gets Caught

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 28, 2009 at 10:44 am

Here’s a tip for you folks out there planning to steal somebody’s Xbox 360: don’t log into their Xbox Live account and start playing games online. That’s exactly what 22-year-old Jeremiah Gilliam of Bronx, N.Y. did, allowing the police to track his IP address to his grandmother’s home.

When Pelham, N.Y. detectives arrived at the house, they did not only find the victim’s Xbox, but also “dozens” of pilfered electronics, ranging from video games to laptops, 53 items in total.

It is believed that Gilliam may have stolen the goods from as many as 200 break-ins across New York’s Westchester County. He was already under investigation for 13 robberies where he broke into unlocked cars, say police.

Gilliam is charged with grand larceny. No word on whether the grandmother will be charged since her home housed the stolen property.

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AT&T Pulls iPhone Online Sales in NYC Metro Area

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 28, 2009 at 8:35 am

If you’re looking to buy an iPhone in New York City, better be ready to visit your local Apple or AT&T store. The carrier has pulled the phone from its online lineup, and is giving little if any reason as to why it has done so. It appears to also be unavailable in Westchester County in New York and also in NYC’s New Jersey suburbs.

The Big Apple is one of AT&T’s problem spots when it comes to its network, and many have blamed high concentrations of the iPhone in the city for the problems. I guess the easiest way to fix this would be to attempt to slow down sales of the device there and hope that it keeps the problem from getting any worse.

“We periodically modify our promotions and distribution channels,” was all AT&T gave Consumerist’s Laura Northrup when she asked for official comment. A online sales reprsentative went further, saying the company  doesn’t “have enough towers to handle the phone.” There’s your answer, folks.

One has to think that Apple must be pretty upset right now. It now appears to be AT&T’s strategy to shut down sales of the iPhone in an area if its network can’t handle it. So who’s next? San Francisco? Philadelphia? Los Angeles? If this move isn’t an argument to trash the AT&T exclusive agreement ASAP, I don’t know what is.

Only a matter of time before Verizon makes fun of this one…

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Blu-ray’s Last Chance to Shine

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 24, 2009 at 11:45 am

I think Sony’s finally gotten the picture: either drop your prices, or forget about Blu-ray ever catching on. Data from NPD is showing that player sales in 2009 stand to increase 54 percent over last year, thanks in part to an effort to bring player costs down to near the $100 price point ($79 at Walmart Black Friday) for the holiday shopping season. Consumers now can reliably find a player for under $200, something that was somewhat difficult this time last year.

Player costs have dropped at about the same rate as DVDs did, falling from a high of $800 at launch in 2006 to an average cost of $221 on Black Friday according to research firm Envisioneering Group. Chief among the reasons for the drop appear to be a marked drop in component costs, allowing prices to fall.

However, the deep discounts on Black Friday seem to be significantly more than what happened with DVDs, and probably has a lot to do with a realization that time is running out for Blu-ray.

Let’s face it: the format probably has one more Christmas season — two at most — before streaming media becomes a serious competitor in delivering high-definition to the home. Already, companies are moving along with their plans (take Apple’s rumored television service for example), and I feel I can say with some confidence that by Christmas 2011 there is going to be quite a solid fooprint for ultra-fast broadband, i.e. fiber optic to the home and the like.

Streaming HD is the next logical big thing — the overhead costs are far lower than producing discs and the players that play them: all that is missing is the capable broadband connection. It’s coming, however, and should be here sooner than we think. The window is closing for Blu-ray and its closing fast. It may have won the battle against HD DVD, but in all likelihood its going to lose the war.

One positive that may keep Blu-ray around longer? Internet integration. Most of the players coming out these days offer more and more net-enabled functionality, such as the ability to use Netflix and so forth. This is essential as the shift to streaming media continues. But it may already be too late, and the format’s fate sealed. Whether or not this was Sony’s fault is something that will certainly be debated in the years to come.

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Twitter Looks to Geotagging With Mixer Labs Buy

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 24, 2009 at 10:15 am

Twitter said late Wednesday that it had acquired Mixer Labs, a company specializing in geotagging services for applications. It appears that the company would use Mixer’s technologies to improve its own geotagging functionality that it just launched for developers in mid November, and something that many mobile Twitter clients had been doing long before the company jumped on the bandwagon.

Mixer’s GeoAPI is used in non-Twitter applications, and it appears that it will continue to be even under new management. “We will continue to give new API keys for GeoAPI.com,” Mixer Labs said in a blog post announcing the acquisition. Twitter founder Ev Williams also seemed to suggest that the company was looking to merge the two company’s efforts while maintaining Mixer’s already established customer base.

Geotagging is a nifty feature for the mobile tweeter, although Twitter’s current setup doesn’t really make it too useful. The only way a location can be given in a tweet is through the tweet itself. It would be nice if Twitter embedded this information into the message itself just like it does the client information (i.e. “posted 1 minute ago from web, etc.), and maybe that’s an initial first step with this.

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Denial of Service Attack Takes Out Several Online Retailers

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 24, 2009 at 8:39 am

A denial of service (DDoS) attack Wednesday on the servers of DNS provider UltraDNS took out several major websites, including retailer Amazon, for almost an hour on Wednesday. The company provides DNS services for Amazon, Wal-Mart, Expedia, and a host of other sites, and the attack rendered these sites unreachable even though they were not attacked directly.

Of course, this attack is even more noteworthy considering it came during the waning days of the holiday shopping season, and likely put a brief kink in the shopping plans of a few last minute shoppers.

The attack occurred at around 4:45pm Pacific time, and was directed at Neustar’s servers (the owners of UltraDNS) in Palo Alto and San Jose, Calif. Neustar was able to detect it quickly and counter it somewhat, lessening the overall impact. Even so, websites served by either company became unusable for much of that hour until the attack subsided. Most sites were back to normal by 6:00pm.

Some are suggesting the attack may have been more widespread: other sites that are not serviced by UltraDNS were said to be experiencing problems as well, including the online game Second Life.

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Is the US Beginning to Log Off the Internet?

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 23, 2009 at 1:00 pm

Data from Harris Interactive seems to indicate that weekly Internet usage may be peaking, indicating that the dire predictions of the death of interpersonal communication as predicted by some communications scholars (mine in college included!) and your Mom and Dad may be a little premature. Since 1999, when Harris first began tracking weekly Internet usage, the number has been for the most part steadily increasing from 7 hours to a peak of 14 hours last year.

The biggest jump was from 2007 to last, and this likely had a lot to do with the explosion in growth in social networking sites. Twitter and Facebook, both very time-consuming if you get heavily involved in the status update side of things, both saw dramatic growth in this period. Additionally, a very competitive presidential election probably contributed to added time online as well, Harris speculates.

No surprise that the most active age group online is those 30-39 years old, spending 18 hours a week online on average. Again no surprise that those 65+ are spending far less time connected at 8 hours. Either way you slice it, if you have a computer you’re likely online: Harris reports a 98 percent of computer users have an online connection, or about 184 million adults.

Will these numbers still go up? It’s likely they will as more services move to the Internet (video, etc.) But it does look like the rapid growth in Internet use is slowing considerably, both in the numbers logging on and time spent. There’s probably several ways one could interpret Harris’ findings.

Yes folks, it’s good to log off sometimes: I know that because I sit here in front of a computer 30+ hours a week blogging and writing. After awhile you just need to disconnect. Then again, I find myself on my iPhone if I’m not on the computer, so maybe I’m never truly disconnected…

(Image from “Wall-E,” copyright Pixar, Inc.)

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Sub $100 Tablet on Tap from OLPC by 2012

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 23, 2009 at 11:42 am

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) officials on Tuesday outlined an ambitious program to bring a tablet PC to market within two years at a price of less than $100. This would be combined with efforts to upgrade and bring down the cost of the current XO laptop which has become the effort’s signature product.

An upgrade to the current model is due at a $200 price point next month. This will be followed by a touchscreen version of the XO laptop in 2011 at a price point of around $150, and finally the tablet which would make its way to market the following year.The tablet would be made of flexible plastic and would be a drastic departure from the current design of the laptop, officials say.

OLPC has struggled recently as the company was forced to lay off 50 percent of its workforce earlier this year. This likely had a lot to do with the worsening economy, which hit the tech sector fairly hard. But the initiative is trudging on, determined to complete its mission of providing technology to children in the developing world. Admirable, but of course a bit costly.

I for one am super curious as to how these folks are going to pull this off. I know you can’t tell much from pictures, but that looks like an awfully advanced device. How are you going to be able to build something like that for $100? I understand that advancements in technology these days are moving faster and faster, but we don’t even have products like this available to the general public right now, much less underprivileged kids around the world.

Hopefully this isn’t going to end up as vaporware, but right now it sure looks like it.

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Amazon Kindle DRM Broken, eBooks Set Free

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 23, 2009 at 9:49 am

An Israeli hacker going by the handle “Labba” claims he has found a method which breaks the copyright protection on the Kindle, allowing the user to transfer eBooks purchased on the device as a PDF to another device. Kindles use a proprietary format “.azw” which prevents transfer to another device.

Not all books for Kindle include DRM — Amazon leaves it up to the publisher to decide whether or not they would like to protect their content. It is likely the company will rush to patch the hole opened by the hacker, although it was not immediately responding to requests for comment Wednesday.

The hack was developed as an entry to a contest on hacking.org.il, where participants were tasked with finding a way to open up the AZW format to allow it to be read on other devices. The hack took about eight days for Labba to complete. The hack is actually an application that is installed onto the device, which then converts the files to the mobi format. Be forwarned though that Amazon has apparently already pushed out code for the Kindle that breaks these scripts, although it is reported it does not auto-update the device.

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comScore: Blizzard a Boon to Online Shopping

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 22, 2009 at 2:16 pm

Research firm comScore said Tuesday that the blizzard that socked the Northeastern United States with one to three feet of snow did not prevent holiday shoppers from going about their business: they just did it online instead. Retailers pulled in some $767 million in sales on December 19 and 20, up 13 percent from last year.

The full week also proved to be profitable: a one week sales record was set with shoppers spending some $6.8 billion online, up six percent from a year ago. Good news for retailers, some of which expressed concern that the timing of the snowstorm could have put a serious damper on what is traditionally the biggest shopping weekend before Christmas.

“Consumers have clearly continued to spend online later into the season this year,” comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said. “Retailers have been very aggressive with late season promotions while informing consumers that they could still get their purchases shipped in time for Christmas, and these tactics seem to be paying off.”

What also could be helping is anecdotal evidence that retailers are not panicking like they did last year, cutting prices early which in turn cuts into profits. I’ve heard quite a few shoppers complain that the deals “just aren’t as good as last year.” Well, this year retailers have gotten a lot smarter in managing inventories, thus meaning less overstock to get rid of at the end of the season.

So here’s a question for our Northeast US readers. Did you stay in and shop online?

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Obama Taps Former Bush Adviser to Fill Cybersecurity Post

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 22, 2009 at 10:30 am

The White House said Tuesday that it had appointed former Bush cybersecurity adviser Howard Schmidt as Obama’s new Chief of Cybersecurity. Schmidt would serve on the National Security staff, and would work closely with the President’s economic advisers to ensure efforts do not hinder economic progress.

“Howard is one of the world’s leading authorities on computer security, with some 40 years of experience in government, business and law enforcement,” Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Assistant to the President John Brennan said.

Obama is acting on a promise made in May when he announced the creation of the post. The Adminstration sees cybersecurity as vital to national security, and it makes sense: increasingly the country’s enemies are turning to digital means to launch their attacks.

The recent example of Iraqi insurgents hacking into our Predator drones is certainly a good example of why we need to get more serious with the threats we face in cyberspace.

With the appointment, the White House is also making an effort to get the citizenry to become proactive in keeping themselves secure. A few boilerplate suggestions have been posted to the White House blog.

“Cybersecurity matters to all of us – and it’s our shared responsibility to mitigate the threats in this space,” spokesperson Macon Phillips wrote.

Schmidt’s appointment is also seen as a compromise between factions who have debated the course the Administration should take. Some are worried that extra regulation could harm innovation, while others are looking for swift action to prevent future attacks.

Putting someone in with business and government experience makes sense. Schmidt had served in executive positions involving security at both eBay and Microsoft prior to his involvement with the Bush Administration. Thus, he will have experience with both sides of the argument and may be able to bring everyone together easier than a political hack or some business leader with no government experience could.

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