IT News HeadLines (HardOCP) 06/07/2010

The Entire Steve Jobs Email StoryÂ… It's Real
Remember the website that posted an e-mail from Steve Jobs that Apple claimed was fake? Well, the website that broke the news item says the e-mail is legitÂ….sorta. He sent us the email headers and we had some of our independent tech guys verify the email header information and then inform us whether they were legitimate. Their response was yes, that they were legitimate, and that the entire thread would be extremely hard to fake, if not impossible. After speaking with Jason and getting more background, I decided to run that story. There was an error in my write up where the last line in the article was written to be said by Steve Jobs, when in fact it was Jason who emailed that in reply to Steve Jobs. Comments
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Tech Customers Question Industry's Takeover Spree
Huge tech companies buying up small tech companies. Is this a good thing or bad thing? The world's largest technology companies have been on a buying spree, spending billions to snap up smaller companies. And often the buyers say they're doing it for their customers — businesses, hospitals, schools and government agencies. As tech companies get bigger and bigger, they say, they can offer a broader variety of products and make it easier for their customers to do one-stop shopping. Comments
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USB Coffee Cup Warmer Could be Stealing Your Data
Your USB coffee cup warmer could be stealing your data. Next I suppose you are going to tell me my humping dog USB drive isn't safe anymore either. The trio found they could exploit a weakness in USB's plug-and-play functionality. The USB protocol trusts any device being plugged in to report its identity correctly. But find out the make and model of a target user's keyboard, say, swap it with a compromised device that reports the same information - and that doesn't even have to be a keyboard - and the computer won't realise. Comments
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GliP: Great LED Interactive Puzzle
Four students came up with a great interactive puzzle that has to be seen to be believed. Thanks to Harken33 for the video. Comments
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RIAA Warns 1 Million Copyright Infringers a Year
The RIAA has sent copyright infringement notices to over one million people per year? While this sure beats their old tactic of filing a million lawsuits a year, you still have to wonder how effective this is. In less than two years the RIAA has sent copyright infringement notices to 1.8 million Internet subscribers and 269,609 to colleges and universities. Despite this staggering average of more than a million infringement notices every year from the recording industry alone, the effect on file-sharing levels seems unnoticeable. Comments
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Consumer Reports on the iPhone Signal Debate
Informal tests conducted by Consumer Reports have found that holding the iPhone 4 in your left hand does cause signal loss and dropped calls. The flip side of this story is that CR's National Testing Center hasn't been able to "reproduce the reported conditions." In my informal tests today, however, the drop had a significant effect on both call success and quality. When the phone was in the low-signal state in my hand, calls placed to it from another cell phone (a Motorola Droid, running on Verizon's network) repeatedly failed. Comments
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Intelligent Cars Will Report Accidents to Authorities
The car of the future is a dirty rotten snitch. Imagine if your car had these featuresÂ…what would it have to report about your driving? The car, which is being developed by researchers at computer chip giant Intel, will record information about the vehicle speed, steering and braking along with video footage from inside and outside the vehicle. This would be automatically sent to police and insurance companies in the event of an accident to make it easier to determine the cause of car crashes and identify the person responsible. Comments
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Google Issues Fix for Hacked YouTube
Google wants everyone to know the HTML injection vulnerability that was being exploited by hackers yesterday is fixed. The search giant says they had everything under control within an hour and the problem was completely fixed soon after. Hackers took advantage of a cross-site scripting vulnerability that enabled them to insert code onto the popular video site's viewer-comments pages, IDG News Service said in a report. The hackers apparently had it in for Justin Bieber, focusing on clips related to the teen pop star, who's set to appear tonight on an NBC television celebration of the Fourth of July and who's reportedly one of the most popular attractions on YouTube. Comments
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IBM Worldwide Marketshare Leader in Social Platforms Software
IBM today announced that IDC ranked IBM as the worldwide marketshare leader in the Social Platform market based on total software revenue for 2009. The IDC report states that worldwide revenue for the social platforms market was $369.7 million in 2009, representing growth of more than 55 percent. This is the first time that IDC has published a report on worldwide social platforms by revenue. According to IDC, social platforms emerged as one of the leading technology trends for organizations, based on the recognition that people – customers, employees, business partners, and suppliers – are looking for ways to more easily collaborate interact and share data. Comments
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Star Wars: The Old Republic Multiplayer Clip
Check out this new video, you must. Released a new gameplay video, Bioware has; hmmmmmm. Imperial troopers and breach droids abound, so we implore you to have plenty of midi-chlorians at the ready before venturing into the clip we've dropped after the break. Oh, also, it looks totally boss. Speak your mind, you must
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StarCraft 2 to go 3D in Post Release Patch
Blizzard appears to be jumping on the 3D momentum and will release a patch soon after the game's launch which will add 3D support for those capable. "We will be releasing 3D in the first few months, for those Nvidia cards and screens that support it," Sigaty told IGN (via VG247). And despite Nvidia being name-dropped specifically (and despite the fact Nvidia had a presence at the StarCraft 2 event in Seoul, South Korea where the interview was taking place), Sigaty also assured that they're "optimizing for all systems." Comments
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Google Acquires Travel Software Firm ITA
Google has shelled out $700 million for ITA, a Boston-based company that organizes airline data such as: flight times, availability and prices. Once again Google proves it does everything. Travel-related searches are among the highest-volume queries received at Google, but the company denied that it has plans to become a travel agent. The company's hub will facilitate comparison shopping and ultimately drive traffic to Web sites for online travel agents, Google said; presumably how Google News drives traffic to news Web sites. Comments
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YouTube Hacked, 4chan Hates Justin Beiber
Earlier today someone discovered an HTML injection vulnerability in YouTube's comment system. Since then, 4chan and other nefarious sites have been targeting popular videos, such as Justin Beiber's, and using redirects to shock-videos, popup banners, blank pages and scrolling text. The bug is triggered by placing a < script > tag at the beginning of a post. The tag itself is escaped, but everything following it is cheerfully placed in the page as is. Blacked out pages with giant red text scrolling across them, shock site redirects, and all sorts of other fun things have been spotted. YouTube has currently blocked such comments from being posted and set the comments section to be hidden by default, and appears to be in the process of removing some of these comments, but the underlying bug does not seem to have been fixed yet." Comments
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