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5:20 PM ET, November 4, 2007

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
John Markoff / New York Times:
I, Robot: The Man Behind the Google Phone  —  A RETINAL scanner emitting a blue glow monitors the entrance to Andy Rubin's home in the foothills overlooking Silicon Valley.  If the scanner recognizes you, the door unlocks automatically.  (The system makes it easier to deal with former girlfriends, Mr. Rubin likes to joke.
T3:
It's official: iPhone 1.1.2  —  We get some hands-on time with version 1.1.2 of the Apple iPhone firmware, courtesy of our UK iPhone.  —  In the UK, November 9th is D-day for everything iPhone.  One detail about this date strikes the fear of god into iPhone hackers, however …
Discussion: Gadget Lab, Gizmodo, Gadgetell, WinBeta and Digg
RELATED:
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
iPhone v1.1.2 breaks jailbreak — coming to the UK on Friday  —  When we first got our hands on the UK iPhone back in September, it was already running the 1.1.1 firmware.  The same firmware which helpfully bricked a number of hacked iPhones Stateside upon later release.
Discussion: 9 to 5 Mac
Hiroko Tabuchi / Associated Press:
PCs being pushed aside in Japan  —  TOKYO - Masaya Igarashi wants $200 headphones for his new iPod Touch, and he's torn between Nintendo Co.'s Wii and Sony's PlayStation 3 game consoles.  When he has saved up again, he plans to splurge on a digital camera or flat-screen TV.
Matt Richtel / New York Times:
Devices Enforce Cellular Silence, Sweet but Illegal  —  One afternoon in early September, an architect boarded his commuter train and became a cellphone vigilante.  He sat down next to a 20-something woman who he said was "blabbing away" into her phone.  —  "She was using the word 'like' all the time.
John Leyden / The Register:
AOL spammer gets two years in the slammer  —  Everything you need to know about Virtualization at The Register's eSymposium  —  A New Jersey man has been jailed for more than two years after he was convicted of sending millions of junk mails to AOL members.
Discussion: Reuters
Dick / Burning Questions:
Saturday Subscriber Count Drop?  —  If you saw your subscriber count drop precipitously in your Saturday, November 3rd summary from FeedBurner, the reason is that specific subscriber stats from Google Feedfetcher were offline because this service was apparently out late with friends on Friday night …
Randall Stross / New York Times:
Why Google Turned Into a Social Butterfly  —  FACEBOOK is an island.  A most convivial island, with one's classmates, friends, workmates and family members close at hand.  An island that since May has been enlivened with entertaining fauna and flora in the form of minisoftware applications.
Discussion: Social Media
Andy Plesser / Beet.TV:
New Media Investor Alan Patricof: "This old guy can pick 'em," Fortune  —  Earlier this week, I interviewed venture capitalist and longtime media investor Alan Patricof at the paidContent future of business media conference at the Waldorf.  —  Alan's fund is paidContent's sole investor.
Discussion: paidContent.org
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
NYTimes Blogrunner v. TechMeme  —  On Thursday we covered the official launch of the NY Times Blogrunner product.  Blogrunner was specifically positioned as a Techmeme-like blog news aggregator, albeit with a human touch to help pick good stories when the algorithm isn't quite up to the task (Techmeme is 100% algorithm based news).
John Timmer / Ars Technica:
Graffiti as password: secure and memorable  —  One of the largest security challenges many organizations face come from the most basic aspect of security: user passwords.  Humans simply have a limited capacity to remember otherwise insignificant streams of letters and digits; as a result …
Micro PC Talk:
VAIO UX490 (finally) announced and on sale  —  More than a month after Amazon debunked rumors surrounding the release of a new UX, Sony has finally put the much awaited UX490 up on their site for sale.  It actually looks like a great deal too.  As previously mentioned …
Suzanne Nam / Forbes:
The Jonney Machine  —  Intel pushed and prodded.  Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) came in right at the end.  How Taiwan's Asustek built its cheap laptop for grown-ups.  —  A year ago Jonney Shih was searching for a breakthrough.  The Taiwan company he has run since 1994 …
strategis.ic.gc.ca:
The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada  —  Description: Industry Canada undertook a music file sharing study during 2006-07 to measure the extent to which music downloads over peer-to-peer file sharing networks …
RELATED:
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
Canadian Study: Piracy Boosts CD Sales
Discussion: TechSpot News, Neowin.net and Digg
 
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 Techmeme Sponsor Posts: 
Channel 9:
Defrag Tools: WPT - Command Line  —  Andrew Richards, Chad Beeder, and Larry Larsen continue walking you through the Windows Performance Toolkit (WPT).
Cloud Foundry:
Static.com Adds Hadoop Support for Cloud Foundry  —  In this guest post, Jake Farrell, CTO for Static.com, explains how the major shift in the hosting industry towards platforms for high developer productivity …
Rackspace Blog:
Love, Magic, & APIs  —  I will confess, I am old enough to remember my GeoCities page.  Don't hate.  It was amazing, it was... this transformative moment in which I took real, actual information, and transformed it into something visible and memorable.
Hortonworks » Blog:
Getting the most out of business analytics  —  One of the most prevalent uses of Hadoop architecture by enterprises is to create business intelligence and analytics tools that can be leveraged to identify areas …
Unison's blog:
“Yammer sucks”  —  Not to be mean to Yammer, or anything — it's a very good tool for some use cases — but that's what a customer told me recently (and others feel the same way).
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 More Items: 
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life:
Google OpenSocial: Technical Overview and Critique
Antone Gonsalves / TechWeb:
LCD, Plasma TVs Found Highly Reliable
Discussion: Engadget and Gizmodo
Sean Michael Kerner / internetnews.com:
Microsoft Denies Nigerian Linux Scam
Discussion: The Open Road and Slashdot
Dan Goodin / The Register:
Masked thieves storm into Chicago colocation (again!)
 Earlier Items: 
Andy / AndyDickinson.net:
Video Workload survey results
Jean Yung / Online Journalism Review:
Painting with the palette of the Web: a pointillistic approach to storytelling
ClickZ:
CEO and Three Top Execs Ousted at WebTrends
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:
The day in government snooping  —  Journalists were already rattled …

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
It's Official: Yahoo Is Buying Tumblr For $1.1B, Vows To Keep It Independent

Hamilton Nolan / Gawker:
Jann Wenner's Kid Is the New Head of RollingStone.com

 
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