Week In Review 31W2009
Mobile: Ericsson is obviously full of cash as it snatched the CDMA and LTE units from Nortel’s corpse for $1.13B. On more LTE news, Verizon will run trials during 2009 which is good news for people without iPhone contracts. AT&T made fools of themselfs (again) by claiming jailbroken iPhones can be used in cell tower terrorism. My first reaction to this is “huau. is your network that crappy ??”. My second would be, “i’m pretty sure a cell tower terrorist would go for a much simpler mobile than the iPhone, but hey, whatever rocks your boat”.
Wii sales are sliding. That doesn’t stop Nintendo from still owning half the living room market and totalling destroying Sony in the handheld market. Lets not forget that according to a number of reports Nintendo is the only one of the 3 that actually turns profits on unit sales.
The RIAA helpfully reminds us “bought” DRMed music is not actually expected to work forever. Cause you know, that would be too much hassle for them. Meanwhile the FSF reminds us copyright is not all bad like the Pirate Party would lead us to believe. It’s true kids, there’s no GPL, MPL, BSD and Artistic without copyright.
This has been a “good” week for news. The majority of PC laptops come with Computrace LoJack on the BIOS just in case your laptop get “misplaced”. It just so happen Computrace LoJack is a vulnerability in itself so it can contributed to your information being, well, lojacked. Meanwhile, Apple keyboards are too smart and have enough processing power to run a keylogger. Remember when keyboards just went click ? ATI Video cards (take that NVidia!) are powering the fastest MD5 collision system to date. (AT&T would say video cards can be used by md5 terrorists). And the happy fun news of the weed, scammers (or more likely publicity stunters) installed a fake ATM at Defcon where it obviously got spotted pretty fast.
In censorship news, the Australian Govt decided the Great Australian Firewall test was success despite failing
Going off tech into biotech, Boing Boing ran a story about douchebag companies trademarking South American native crops and then proceeding to levy tax on them.
