Technology News

Lawyers, Nations Clamor for Google Wi-Fi Data

Source: All About Jazz
June 12, 2010

A hard drive with perhaps several hundred gigabytes of internet surfers private data resides under lock and key in a Portland, Oregon, federal courthouse.

Regulators and private lawyers across Europe and the United States are demanding, and in some cases obtaining, access to data that Google sniffed for the past three years from unsecured Wi-Fi hot spots across the globe. The requests are coming in some of the eight proposed class actions targeting Google that have cropped up across the ...

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Flickr Loves Facebook

Source: Michael Ricci
June 12, 2010

Social photo-sharing site Flickr has, at long last, added some much-need social networking integration to its online service. You can now simultaneously post your photos to Flickr and Facebook.

Only photos you set as “public" will appear on your Facebook Wall, however, as the new sharing options respect your photos' privacy settings. But don't be confused if you start seeing double-posts of Flickr photos once you enable this new feature: this supplements, but does not replace the native Flickr sharing ...

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Decibel: Music Metadata on Steroids

Source: HypeBot
June 11, 2010

Remember pouring over album liner notes to learn who played that great sax solo on the new Stones album? OK maybe you're too young for that, but there have probably been times when you wanted to learn more about the track you were listening to.

New startup Decibel trys to solve that problem by replacing the usual title, album cover art, artist name, and track length with 150 fields of metadata including things like bacgkorund singers, genre, and ...

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Google Seeks U.S. and European Support on China Censorship

Source: Michael Ricci
June 11, 2010

Google Inc. may have pulled its search engine out of mainland China, but it's still pressing U.S. and European governments to take a stand on censorship as an unfair barrier to free trade.

The Internet giant's top lawyer, David Drummond, said Wednesday that pressure from Western nations is “the only way that it's going to change, that this tide of censorship or this rising censorship is going to be arrested," according to an Associated Press report. Google has been trying ...

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The Defense of Computers, the Internet and Our Brains

Source: Michael Ricci
June 11, 2010

If you're reading this blog post on a computer, mobile phone or e-reader, please stop what you're doing immediately. You could be making yourself stupid.

And whatever you do, don't click on the links in this post. They could distract you from the flow of my beautiful prose and narrative. This is is the alarm currently being rung by some in the bell towers of technology. There is a lively discussion and some concern that computers, the Internet and multitasking ...

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ArtistData Has Now Made 3.75 Million Updates

Source: HypeBot
June 10, 2010

Adds 7 New Syndication Partners

ArtistData recently delivered the 3.75 millionth syndicated update on behalf of its artist members. They've also made their syndication offering more powerful by adding 7 more sites to their official list, bringing the total number of sites who pull content from them to 28.

“ArtistData is clearly becoming the industry's hub for artist generated content," says company President Brenden Mulligan. “Our amazing partner sites are focusing more on their core value proposition and less on ...

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21st-Century Technology Has Caught up to '70s-era Quadraphonic Recording

Source: All About Jazz
June 9, 2010

Hear and Now: “Dismal failure" may be the kindest way to describe quad.

To music fans for whom even cassette tapes are a quaint throwback, here's a real obscurity: Quadraphonic sound systems were an experiment launched in 1970. Music came out of four speakers spread around the room--guitars over there, vocals over here, drums all around. In a perfect world, the listener would hear what it was like to be inside the studio as the songs were recorded. But the ...

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Apple Shuts Down Online-Music Service Lala

Source: Michael Ricci
June 2, 2010

Apple quietly shut down Lala on Tuesday. It acquired the online-music service last year. Gives no indication of plans.

When visitors and members attempted to access Lala on Tuesday, they found a placeholder page, saying, “The Lala service has been discontinued as of May 31st, 2010." It didn't provide any other information on the page. Speculation abounds over what Apple has planned for Lala. Since the site streamed tracks through the user's browser, some are wondering if it will become ...

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