Daily Archives: October 29, 2010

Chris Nuttall Google TV – too buttoned up for the living room

October 29, 2010 6:26 pm by Chris Nuttall

Getting to know Google TV involves familiarisation with 80 buttons on Sony’s remote control, compared to just three on the recently launched Apple TV.

The extra 77 buttons, plus function-key combinations, sum up how, in trying to combine a full web experience with regular television, Google and its partners have added a complexity that may intimidate many consumers.

I reviewed Sony and Logitech’s Google TV units in the Personal Technology column in Friday’s FT Business Life section and compared them with rival systems. An extended breakdown of how Google TV shapes up against the competition is after the jump. Read more

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Posted in Personal technology |

Acer’s unfortunate clear.fi analogy

October 29, 2010 6:04 pm by Robin Kwong

What Acer’s clear.fi does is, unfortunately for their marketing people, not easy to explain clearly. We took a shot at doing so when Acer first announced it in May, and on Friday it was JT Wang, Acer chairman’s turn at the world’s number two PC maker’s third quarter results conference.

Clear.fi, which automatically sets up a local area network between Acer devices, is intended to make it easy for users to access their photos and videos across different Acer products. It is such a big part of Acer’s new push to add software and services to their core hardware offerings that it will be installed on every single device Acer ships starting next year. Read more

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Posted in Asia, Hardware |

David Gelles Facebook partners with DST rival Yandexr

October 29, 2010 1:37 am by David Gelles

Results from Facebook pages will soon begin appearing in Yandex, the leading search engine in Russia. Yandex.ru will also get a Facebook widget on its homepage.

It’s another example of search engines gaining access to the growing trove of information on Facebook’s social graph, and making search a bit more social. Just two weeks ago, Facebook deepened its ties with Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.

But the partnership also puts a wrinkle in Facebook’s relationship with investor Mail.ru (formerly known as Digital Sky Technologies). Mail.ru and Yandex are rivals, competing aggressively for eyeballs in Russia’s booming internet market. Read more

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Posted in Social |

Joseph Menn Computer attacks silence Vietnam opposition

October 29, 2010 1:12 am by Joseph Menn

A computer virus has infected more than 10,000 machines and directed them to connect with and attempt to overwhelm online forums critical of the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party, security researchers said on Thursday.

The resulting denial-of-service attacks on a handful of sites show how such programs are increasingly being used to target opposition voices.

Similar attacks have been waged on anti-Russian sites operated from conflict zones in the Caucuses and on some more mainstream sites run by politicians at odds with the Kremlin.

Researchers at SecureWorks, who dubbed the new virus Vecebot, said they couldn’t prove that it was unleashed by the government or someone working for it. Such software is rarely traced to an author.

But they noted a piece of interesting timing. On Oct. 19, a Vietnamese blogger using the name Dieu Cay was to be released after serving a 30-month sentence. Read more

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Posted in Asia, Computers, Internet, Security, Software |