Good piece by Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson explaining how the U.S. government was able to take down Megaupload, a company theoretically headquartered in Hong Kong: Megaupload wasn’t just some Hong Kong enterprise that “happened” to be used by US residents. The site had leased more than 1,000 servers in North America alone; 525 were at Carpathia Hosting and were located in Virginia. Between 2007 and 2010, Carpathia received $13 million from Megaupload. (Cogent Communications in the US supplied a few additional US servers and bandwidth.)
Author Archive | Harry McCracken
Life is Not a Picnik: Google Closes Its Cool Photo-Editing Service
Okay, it looks like Google really is serious about its oft-stated plans to focus on fewer services and do them better. (Also known as “more wood behind fewer arrows.”) It’s announced that it’s shuttering even more offerings, and one of them is Picnik, the excellent online photo editor which it bought in 2010.
The closure isn’t abrupt or catastrophic. Google is giving Picnik users plenty of warning–the service isn’t going away until April 19th–and they’ll be able to download their photos. But unlike some of Google’s shutdowns, closing Picnik isn’t a tacit acknowledgment that a service never found an audience. (I never heard of Google’s Gmail Message Continuity and Social Graph API until the company said they were going away.) Picnik is popular, and it’s good, and the world will be a sadder place place without it–at least for folks who already know and love it.
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They’re Not Ultrabooks. They’re Notebooks
Donald Morrison Melanson of Engadget has a nice piece making a point that resonates with me: There are some nice Ultrabooks, but it’s silly to call them Ultrabooks, as if they were something other than thinnish laptops. The tech industry loves to come up with new buzzwords and to declare new categories of stuff. But I’ll bet that consumers–even if they end up buying lots of Ultrabooks–won’t think of them as something discrete and new.
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Google’s Risky Gambit
My latest TIME.com Technologizer column: Why Google’s new search/social mashup, Search, Plus Your World, is so unsatisfying. At least to me.
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Reminder: Motorola is Not Part of Google
I keep forgetting that Google, which agreed to buy Motorola Mobility last August, doesn’t yet own it. In fact, anti-trust regulators in both the U.S, and Europe are still going over the deal. Which means that we still don’t know what the implications will be of Google owning one of the largest makers of Android-based devices.
It is, by the way, fascinating how many sites reported the merger as a done deal the moment it was announced in August. Nope. Months later, it remains a proposed deal, and the chances that t won’t go through, while not huge, are more than zero.
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My First Few Questions About Apple’s Education News
Judging from the turnout for our live coverage of Apple’s education event–which was much sparser than for something like the iPad 2 announcement–a lot of tech enthusiasts lost interest in today’s news when they figured out that it didn’t involve any new hardware. That’s a shame. The news–a new textbook-friendly version of iBooks, a free book-creation tool called iBooks Author, and a spiffier version of the iTunes U courseware app–has as much or more potential to make its mark on the world as any new iPad or iPhone could. Everything looks really, really cool.
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Join Us for Live Coverage of Apple’s Education Event
At 10am ET this morning, I’ll be at the Guggenheim Museum here in New York for Apple’s education event, liveblogging the whole thing at technologizer.com/appleeducation. Doug Aamoth of TIME will join me with color commentary–and I hope you’ll be there, too.
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The Times of Kodak’s Life
So Eastman Kodak has declared bankruptcy. Right now, Twitter is like a wake for this most beloved of American companies. I refuse to speak of Kodak in the past tense, though: bankruptcy protection is not a death sentence, and when it says, as it does in its press release, that it intends to “emerge a lean, world-class, digital imaging and materials science company,” I’m rooting for it to do exactly that.
But like everyone else who grew up shooting Kodak film–often in a Kodak camera–I’m feeling wistful about the brand and what it’s meant to me and the world. How about watching a few vintage commercials, including two versions of the once-famous tear-jerker “Turn Around” and ones starring the Nelsons, the cast of Bewitched, Michael Landon, and Bill Cosby?
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Alienware’s Mini-Gaming Machine with Rotating Logo
I’m not in the market for a desktop PC. In fact, I don’t expect to buy another desktop PC, ever. But if I were, this new Alienware box would be tempting.
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AMD Readies Ultrabook Competitor
Think that Ultrabooks–which generally go from $900 to $1400–are too pricey? AMD wants to bring the price down to $800, says Digitimes’ Monica Chen. (Machines based on its chips will have to be called something other than “Ultrabooks,” though–that’s Intel’s moniker.)