Daily Archives: July 16, 2009

Paul Taylor Apple blocks Palm Pre iTunes synchronisation

July 16, 2009 10:57 pm by Paul Taylor

One of the features that made Palm’s recently launched Palm Pre smartphone stand out in an increasingly crowded market was the ability to sync non-copy protected songs with Apple’s iTunes software.

Much to the chagrin of Apple, Palm’s engineers had figured out a way to build iTunes synchronisation into the Pre – something no other smartphone maker (other than Apple) had managed to do.  This achievement was perhaps not so surprising since many had been recruited by Jon Rubinstein, who helped develop the iPod at Apple before joining Palm in 2007. Read more

Posted in Consumer Electronics, Hardware, Mobile, Software, Telecoms |

Chris Nuttall techfile 16.07.09

July 16, 2009 7:05 am by Chris Nuttall
  • Twitter is facing death by a thousand cuts – well, at least 310, anyway. That is the number of confidential internal documents that Mike Arrington of TechCrunch says he has been supplied with by an anonymous hacker, who obtained the information from a Twitter employee’s account with Google. The leak has caused red faces both at Twitter, which also revealed that personal internet accounts of co-founder Evan Williams had been hacked before, and Google, which defended the security of its Gmail and Apps services.
  • The PC market is looking up. Sales were stronger in the second quarter than industry analysts had predicted, suggesting that the industry could be bottoming out as consumers begin to spend more. Worldwide PC sales slipped only 3.1 per cent by volume from a year earlier, about half the retreat expected by market researcher IDC and less than half of the first-quarter’s 6.8 per cent drop.

 Read more

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Posted in Computers, Hardware, Internet, Mobile, Software |

David Gelles John Gapper: Little laptops snap at the oligopoly

July 16, 2009 6:01 am by David Gelles

The FT’s John Gapper says the most influential piece of personal technology to emerge in recent years did not come from Apple, Amazon or Research in Motion. Instead, he points to the Asustek’s Asus Eee PC, which created the category now known as “netbooks”.

Few analysts grasped the significance of the Eee because they did not think that people in the developed world would buy a not-very-powerful device with a tiny screen and a small keyboard. Meanwhile, US companies from Dell to Microsoft and Apple gazed studiously elsewhere. Read more

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Posted in Consumer Electronics |

Chris Nuttall Dot organisation

July 16, 2009 12:36 am by Chris Nuttall

Maija Palmer and Richard Waters report on plans to expand dramatically the number of top-level web domains:

“A representative of the Pope has written to Icann with concerns over how it would ensure that sensitive religious domains – “.catholic”, “.muslim” or even “.god” – would not fall into the wrong hands. Public interest groups, meanwhile, fear that the changes mark part of a more general rewriting of the rules of the internet that could see free speech lose out to commercial interests.” Read more

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Posted in Internet |

Joseph Menn Cyber-attack investigation has leads but no suspects

July 16, 2009 12:29 am by Joseph Menn

The probe of the cyber-attacks on US and South Korean websites last week has turned up a number of suspected command computers, including a possible “master” server in the UK.

But researchers assisting the US government in the unusually intense inquiry still put the odds of an arrest at well under 20 per cent. Read more

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Posted in Computers, Internet |