While the uproar over Google’s updated privacy policy has lessened in the U.S., European officials are taking things a step further today. The European Commission has asked Google to delay implementing its new privacy policy so the matter can be fully investigated. The search giant has apparently been taken aback by the proposal.
Well, that didn’t take long. One of the largest streaming sites taken down by U.S. authorities yesterday is already back up and running on a new domain, and boy are they upset. While the Department of Homeland Security ICE division was happy to accept a pat on the back for a job well done, one of the owners of Firstrow, a sports streaming site, says he will not give up until a court shuts the site down.
An element of hacker group Anonymous announced today that it has intercepted a conference call between the FBI and UK law enforcement wherein they discuss tracking down Anonymous. The 16 minute call was recorded and has been posted on various sites, including YouTube. The FBI and Scotland Yard have confirmed their call was illegally intercepted.
Nobody in their right mind would dump their desktop or notebook PC for a smartphone, but plenty of people are willing to own both as they seek to stay connected and check email on the fly. Underscoring this point is fact that smartphone sales in 2011 skipped ahead of PC sales, and by a pretty wide margin, according to data released by Canalys.
If you can’t beat Apple’s iPad, change the rules of the game. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are taking a bath on sales of the $199 Kindle Fire and the $249 Nook Tablet, respectively, and making up for it with profits on sales of electronic merchandise (e-books, videos, music, and apps). The strategy has succeeded in moving a lot of hardware, with each company on track to sell millions of units (although the ratio of Kindle Fire to Nook Tablet sales is greatly in Amazon’s favor so far). Both tablets feature nearly identical 7-inch, 1024x600 LCDs and rely on Wi-Fi for connectivity. Which should tempt you away from the high-end tablets? Only a bloody-knuckled deathmatch will tell.
Micron Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Steve Appleton, passed away this morning after a small plane he was piloting crashed at an airport in Boise, Idaho. Appleton, 51, joined Micron not long after his graduation in 1983. He started out on the factory floor and worked his way up to the top when, at age 34, he became the third youngest CEO in the Fortune 500.
Quick question: what's the one thing you should absolutely, positively do any time you trade in or return a piece of used tech? Answer: wipe the hard drive. If you already knew that, you might want to spread the word to your friends and neighbors, because Motorola forgot to wipe the info off of a bunch of used Xoom tablets it recently sold to enthusiastic Woot.com buyers. Oops!
Dropbox has a lot of things going for it, but if you use the cloud storage service with any regularity, there's a good chance you'll bang up against the 2GB offered in the free version fairly quickly. (Assuming that you don't Gmail account chain trick outlined in our Dropbox Cheat Sheet, that is.) If you're chafing at your no-cost bonds, the service is giving you an opportunity to add up to another 5GB of space absolutely free -- if you're willing to be a guinea pig, that is.
DRM sucks. You know it, we know it, Gabe Newell and CD Projekt know it. Ubisoft apparently never got the memo however, and in the process of switching servers next week, the company will offer up yet another reason for DRM sucktitude. Thanks to that nasty always-on DRM, six games won't be playable whatsoever during the move -- single player included. Plenty of other games will have their multiplayer capabilities "impacted" during the transition, including console versions of the games.
Google's Chrome browser failed to increase its market share last month for just the second time in two years, while Microsoft's Internet Explorer added more than a percentage point, according to data by NetMarketShare. That's not the start to 2012 Google was hoping for, though there are still reasons to be optimistic about Chrome's future.Connect with MaximumPC
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