This Week In Tech stories

The original Apple-1 computer has been called the Holy Grail of vintage machines and a California man has one for sale. The computer, handmade by Apple founder Steve Jobs, was sold in small batches back in 1976. By today's standards it looks downright primitive. But Jesse Sackman knows it's also a collectors item and he wants $50,000 for his model on eBay. "It's a museum piece and in demand all over the world," said Sackman. Sackman says he's selling his Apple-1 with its original packing for financial reasons.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has been diagnosed with cancer, according to a memo sent on Monday to employees of Vulcan, Allen's company. Allen, who is a survivor of Hodgkin's disease, has been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, according to Vulcan CEO Jody Allen, who is also Paul Allen's sister.

Words like "scam," "fraud," and "arrest" filled the air during a Senate hearing on Tuesday that focused on the controversial marketing companies that allegedly dupe consumers into paying monthly fees to join online loyalty programs. Ray France, a U.S. Army veteran, testifies at a Senate hearing about how consumers are duped into paying monthly fees to join online loyalty programs. (Credit: U.S. Senate Commerce committee) Vertrue, Webloyalty, and Affinion generated more than $1.4 billion by "misleading" Web shoppers, said members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which called the hearing. Lawmakers saved their harshest rebuke for Web retailers that accepted big money--a combined sum of $792 million--to share their customers' credit-card information with the market

The numbers show that Apple is fourth in terms of reliability, as machines from the Cupertino company suffered a smidgen over 10 percent failure rate over a two-year period and an estimated 17.4 percent rate over three years. Asus, Toshiba, and Sony all had lower two-year and estimated three-year failure rates, with Asus taking the top spot at just under 10 percent over two years and an estimated 15.6 percent over three.

"Facebook's Joe Hewitt, Second Gear's Justin Williams, the long-time Mac software developer known as 'Rogue Amoeba' and other respected App Store developers have recently decided to discontinue their work on the platform, citing their frustration with Apple's opaque approval process. Continued issues with erroneous and snap rejections of applications and APIs are prompting more and more developers to shun the platform entirely. Though there are tens of thousands of other developers who have pumped out over 100,000 apps for the platform, continued migration away from iPhone development will most likely result in lower quality software."

"It seems that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center, known as C3, has replaced its '$8,000 Tableau/Dell server combination' with more efficient and much cheaper $300 PS3s. Each PS3 is capable of 4 million passwords per second, and C3 currently has 20 PS3s with plans to buy 40 more. Naturally this is only being used to break encryption on computers seized with a warrant and suspected of harboring child pornography."

it is the cluster as whole (20 ps3s) which can do 4m password attempts - Mike Chelen

Like other online pastimes, age is a strong, independent predictor for use of Twitter or other similar status-updating services. Among internet users ages 18 to 24, 37% use Twitter, up from 19% in December 2008. Roughly three-in-ten online Americans ages 25 to 34 tweet, up from 20% in December. Older adults are far less likely to be on Twitter, with roughly one-in-ten internet-using adults between the ages of 45 and 64 tweeting. The median age for a Twitter user is 31, roughly where it was in December when fewer people were on Twitter. By comparison, the median age for a Facebook user is age 33, for a MySpace user it's 26, and for LinkedIn it's 39. Read more

Perhaps in a sign of how the plague of social media has numbed us all to the value of legitimate human connections, the New Oxford American Dictionary has picked the verb "unfriend," or "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook," as its 2009 Word of the Year. At the very least, it's a testament to the ubiquity of Facebook, which now has well over 300 million members around the world. Facebook itself takes the process of "friending" and "unfriending" very seriously. It once blocked a third-party game called PackRat because it encouraged players to amass huge friends lists (good heavens! they're polluting the social graph!), banned a Burger King ad campaign that let members "sacrifice" their friends to get a free cheeseburger ("Friendship is strong, but the Whopper is stronger"), and still puts a cap of 5,000 on personal profiles' friends lists.

Sony Corp said on Wednesday that early demand for its latest electronic reader was higher than expected in advance of the holidays and shipment delays could result. A Sony spokesman said the $399 e-book reader, called the Daily Edition and geared to newspaper viewing, would be sold on a "first come, first serve basis." "The number of people that signed up ... to be notified of the Daily's availability exceeded our expectations over the last few months and we expect high demand now that it's available," the spokesman, Kyle Austin, wrote in an email to Reuters. A notice on www.sonystyle.com said that pre-orders will ship between December 18 through January 8, with no guarantee of delivery date.

There's a rounding-error bug in the camera driver's autofocus routine (which uses a timestamp) that causes autofocus to behave poorly on a 24.5-day cycle,' said Morrill. 'That is, it'll work for 24.5 days, then have poor performance for 24.5 days, then work again. The 17th is the start of a new 'works correctly' cycle, so the devices will be fine for a while. A permanent fix is in the works

"A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has."

A month and a half after Google and the leading trade associations for publishers and authors withdrew their proposed settlement over Google Books, the parties on Friday filed a new version of the agreement. The hope is that this new draft (now weighing in at 165 pages) will respond to the many objections to the original version, particularly those from the U.S. Department of Justice. Significantly, the revised settlement excludes books published outside the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. And the registry that will collect royalties on sales of out-of-print works whose copyright owners are unknown will now act independently of Google. Some privacy concerns were also clarified. But I doubt that those who screamed the loudest will be satisfied with the changed document.

"A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has."

AOL said on Thursday that it plans to reduce its workforce by a third over the next several months. The company, which is based in New York but maintains a large campus in the Dulles area, employs about 6,900 people. The company is hoping to get as many as 2,500 workers to participate in a "voluntary layoff" program set in early December.

Activision says you should "expect" paid-for online models such as those in World of Warcraft to make the transition to other games, including Call of Duty. Speaking during yesterday's BMO Capital Markets Conference (which sounds fun), Activision Blizzard CFO, Thomas Tippl said that while WoW's model is difficult to replicate, players should expect new monetization models for its other games soon. "It's definitely an aspiration that we see potential in, particularly as we look at different business models to monetize the online gameplay," said Tippl. "There's good knowledge exchange happening between the Blizzard folks and our online guys."

Modern Warfare fansite bashandslash.com recently reported that Infinity Ward is removing dedicated server functionality from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. With dedicated servers and the server browser that comes with them replaced with custom-built matchmaking, PC gamers will have an online experience functionally identical to console players. Among other things, this means that clans can't run their own servers with their own mods and rulesets for their own private (or public, if they feel like crushing some scrubs for giggles) use.

a great point from the article - ""We're just prioritizing the player experience above the modders and the tuners," says West. He points toward the mounting feedback IW has received from PC fans of Modern Warfare who couldn't find a decent server to play on between all of the cheaters, the insular communities, and huge skill level disparities that the original game's community fractured into. "We thought maybe it would be cool if the fans could play the game," he laughs." - Chris Heath

Vote for TWiT!

ok so voting has opened... don't forget to vote! - Chris Heath

Last month Skype was in talks to acquire VoIP startup Gizmo5. It was a perfect backup plan in case all that IP litigation didn’t work out. – Gizmo5’s SIP infrastructure could theoretically replace Skype’s proprietary P2P back end. After the Skype settlement, though, Gizmo5’s strategic value to Skype sort of plummeted. In the meantime, Google bought them, say multiple sources with knowledge of the deal, for around $30 million in cash. The deal is done, say our sources, and will be announced shortly. Gizmo5 is a good fit with a number of Google products. Google Talk allows voice calls between users but has no PSTN link to allow incoming or outbound calls to real phones. Gizmo5 does this well already.

Now Rupert has promised to do exactly that. He claims that he's going to take all of News Corp's websites pay-only and have them removed from Google when he does. You know what? He's lying. But I think it'd be entertaining if every reporter who interviewed him, for the rest of his life, said, "Hey, Rupert, when are you going to take all your company's websites out of Google?" It'd also be hilarious to get the CEOs of the various pieces of Rupert's empire to comment on whether they want all their company's materials invisible to search engines.

First-day sales of Activision Blizzard Inc.'s "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" broke records, raking in an estimated $310 million in North America and the United Kingdom alone. The video game went on sale all over the world on Tuesday, but Activision provided figures Thursday only for North America and Britain. The company estimates that it sold about 4.7 million copies of the game in the first 24 hours in those markets, making it the biggest-selling launch in the history of entertainment. The latest installment in the "Call of Duty" action franchise was expected to at least match last year's "Grand Theft Auto IV," which was the most successful video game release in history and at the time may have been the top entertainment launch ever.

Britney Spears' Twitter and MySpace accounts have apparently been hacked. Messages on her Twitter profile Thursday purported to be from the 27-year-old pop star and claimed she worshipped the devil. The handful of unusual messages were deleted after Spears' management regained control of the account. Her Twitter feed boasts more than 3.7 million followers and is updated by herself and her "team" of handlers. A message Thursday apologized for "any offense the hacker's messages caused." Spears' MySpace account was taken over at about the same time. Hacked messages have gone out from Spears' Twitter account before. This time, Twitter users appeared to suspect something was up. The subject "donthackbritney" was one of the most popular topics on the site Thursday.

i just find this funny... and i wonder how many of the tweets were actually from her.. when the account opened they said that she would periodically tweet personally and that her people would mostly post... - Chris Heath

- YouTube says starting next week it will support the same high-resolution video that can now be seen on flat screen TVs. The online video unit of Google Inc. said Thursday it will support video playback in the full high-definition format known as 1080p, upgrading from the current 720p. After engineers tested its system, YouTube spokesman Chris Dale said the company is not worried about infrastructure problems or higher costs associated with supporting bulkier files. Videos uploaded from regular users will still have a 10-minute limit, although the maximum file size will likely get a boost from 2 gigabytes. Videos that had already been uploaded at 1080p will be automatically re-encoded to play back at the higher resolution.

The Windows SMB (Server Message Block) protocol has had problems ever since the discovery during the OS's public testing phase of a supposedly show-stopping bug that could, according to some sources, cause Windows 7 to blue screen.  Now another SMB bug, which throws Windows 7 into an infinite loop forcing a reset, has reared its ugly head. The bug was publicized by researcher Laurent Gaffie on the Full Disclosure mailing list.  According to Tyler Reguly, Lead Security Research Engineer of security firm nCircle, the vast majority of home users are unlikely to be threatened by the bug.  The bug's main route of attack occurs when you type in the IP of a server in the search box and accidentally navigate to a Windows Share on a malicious server.  As most casual users are unlikely to have a clue how to navigate to server shares or even know what server shares are, chances are they won't be affected. The vulnerability applies to both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.  Currently there a

Psystar has lost the case against Apple for cloning the Mac OS. A federal judge favored Apple in an order issued on Friday by ruling that the Florida Company Psystar violated Apple’s copyright as well as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) when it installed Apple’s operating system on Intel-based computers. Apple took Psystar to court 18 months back on charges of copyright infringement and DMCA violation. According to the case filed by Apple, Psystar has violated its distribution right by offering and selling Mac OS X on Psystar computers to the public. They included that its Mac OS X end user license agreement allows people to install the OS on Apple computers only. Psystar admits that it has distributed Mac OS X but advocated their side under the Section 109 first-sale doctrine., which states that “the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, t

I am more sympathetic to Apple in this as they doesn't enforce a license key. - Johnny Worthington

agreed johnny - Chris Heath

The headline result: simpler is better (not to mention probably cheaper to produce). Participants in the study looked at 52% of ads that contained only text, 52% of ads that had images and text separately and 51% of sponsored links on search-engine pages. Ads that got a lot less attention included those that imposed text on top of images (people looked at just 35% of those) and ones that included animation (it might seem movement is attention-grabbing, but only 29% of these ads garnered a look).

When Yahoo! switched off the servers for GeoCities, the Web posting service, on Oct. 27, some 7 million of the Internet's first websites went dark forever. The bulk of these were people's personal home pages, which were pulled offline with no backup and no permanent record of those users' frenetic early forays online. Related Specials Top 10 Google Earth Finds Specials The 50 Best Websites of 2009 Specials Planning for Retirement At Any Age More Related Ridley Scott to Make The Forever War Now a ragtag effort by several groups of budding computer historians is feverishly — and angrily — trying to bring as much as they can back online. Founded in 1995 and bought by Yahoo! four years later, GeoCities had become a relic, and not a particularly pretty one at that. The site was one of the first to offer home pages to the masses, letting users reserve a plot in a digital city — entertainment sites lived in Hollywood, for example — and then build, well, whatever they wanted. This was the

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan brought criminal charges Friday against two men for allegedly being the technological brains behind Bernard Madoff's multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, and suggested charges against others could follow. The case against two former computer programmers, Jerome O'Hara and George Perez, may help fill in key blanks in the timeline of how Mr. Madoff, who pleaded guilty to fraud earlier this year, masterminded a scheme that has cost thousands of investors more than $20 billion. The complaint hints at other unnamed "co-conspirators" at the Madoff firm who are now being targeted by prosecutors.

Rodney Bradford, 19, was released from Rikers Island after 12 days behind bars when a Facebook message to his girlfriend showed he was at his father's Harlem apartment on Oct. 17 - not robbing two men in Brooklyn.

After years of speculation and "proof of concept" devices, Dell officially unveiled its first entry into the smartphone market with an Android-powered device set for China and Brazil. The Mini 3 smartphone is somewhat reminiscent of Apple's iPhone with a full touchscreen interface, but Dell did not release full specifications for the device. The company did say the handset will be powered by the Google-backed Android operating system, and it will be coming to the carriers China Mobile and Claro. More Mobility Insights WhitepapersSolutions for 21st Century HealthcareThe Forrester Wave: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Platforms, Q3 2009 WebcastsAsia-Pacific Managed Network ServicesIntegrating Virtual Servers And The Data Center Network ReportsHTML 5 Starts Looking Real (Dr. Dobbs)Hybrid Clouds Videos Former U.S. President Bill Clinton addressed thousands of online entrepreneurs from around the world gathered for the third APEC Business Advisory Council SME Summit in Hangzhou, China.

The future of Google's plans to scan and sell millions of books online could begin to take shape Friday. Google Inc. and book publishers are expected to show a federal judge in New York a new settlement in the copyright lawsuit over Google's book-scanning project. Monday had been the deadline for a new deal, but they got an extension to Friday. The case involves Google's plans to scan millions of books and make them searchable and available for purchase online. Google reached a $125 million settlement with publishers that would give Google digital rights to the works. But the Justice Department pressed for revisions, to take into account the power Google could have over book prices as it amasses such a huge online library.