Category: News

The folks behind Pioneer One have been busy since the show's pilot release back in June, and it seems as though their hard work is beginning to pay off. The pilot was a campy success, having won Best Drama Pilot at the New York Television Festival -- but it won instant pseudo-historical status as well. It was the first science fiction drama series to be produced entirely off of donation-funding ...

Apparently, Apple isn't the only company being emulated these days. Newswall is a feed reader that seems to be heavily influenced by Microsoft's tile-like Windows Phone 7 interface (Metro). Newswall displays a long list of tiles, each with a striking image, and each tile represents one news item from an RSS feed. When you hover over an item, a bubble with a synopsis pops up. Clicking an image ...

Google's newest official Chrome extension is sure to get a lot of use in the coming months. Assuming you've got extension-syncing enabled in a capable version of the browser, Web Clipboard brings a fully synced clipboard to Chrome, and it's pretty nice for an initial -- though somewhat buggy -- release. It copies both plain text and HTML within any Chrome tab, and secures the data on Google ...

We've seen British police use Twitter to show how busy they are these days, but it looks like the cops in Victoria, Australia have one-upped them in the social-networking arena. Victoria police were forced to use Facebook yesterday to serve an intervention order to a troll who had made locating him in real life too difficult for them. Australian paper The Age is reporting that officers had ...

The New York Times iPad app hasn't exactly been selling anyone on the future of newspapers with its extremely selection of content. Well, that's starting to change with the latest edition, which includes more sections of the paper, and even some of the Times blogs. On top of the larger number of stories, the app also includes more videos and photo slideshows. The design has also improved a bit, ...

HTCSense.com is now available for owners of the upcoming HTC Desire HD and Desire Z smartphones. It's meant to be an online dashboard for your device and includes features such as contacts and SMS sync, remote locking and wiping, app recommendations and more. The service has some neat tricks up its sleeve. There are two ways of locating your device in case you've misplaced it: you can either ...

While it's by no means a new feature, people are starting to notice what Facebook Mobile's Contact Sync actually does, and it's not pretty. At the very least, it will trash your phone's address book by overwriting it with Facebook contact info and profile pictures. More disturbingly, while it's doing that it sends your phone's entire address book to Facebook, to be hashed and badly matched up ...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced two big changes today, the newly revamped Groups being one of them. The second is that users will now have the ability to download all of their Facebook data, anytime they wish, as a big ZIP file. Expect the new feature to hit your account settings in the next few days. The option to download your data will show up in your Account Settings, just below the ...

The team at Ubuntu decided to make today a fun Friday, releasing Ubuntu 10.10 RC (Maverick Meerkat) for users to play with over the weekend. The full stable release is due to release on October 10th, so if you don't feel like running the outlandish risk of using a beta version, sarcasm intended, then you don't have long to wait for the real deal. Changes and additions in this version are plenty, ...

There were rumors about it yesterday, but today we find out that it actually happened: AOL has purchased TechCrunch, one of the biggest blogs (and blog networks) in the technology industry. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong announced the news this morning at TechCrunch's Disrupt conference, noting that TechCrunch will become part of the AOL Technology Network that includes sites like Engadget, Switched, The ...

At times, fighting with multiple CAPTCHA codes is more painful than having to hear "Party in the U.S.A." playing on the radio for the umpteenth time in a single day. I understand the point of a CAPTCHA, but there have just been too many times where the squashed, skewed letters are far too mangled to comprehend. Enter Solve Media, who think they've got a solution which is not only superior, but ...

Apple's iPad might become the white knight the ailing newspaper publishing industry has been looking for. Steve Jobs and co. are reportedly nearing the announcement of newspaper subscription plans on the iPad, bringing your daily paper to the growing tablet market. The dealbreaker, up until now, has been your personal data, which newspapers need to sell ads. Apple didn't want to give up ...

The European Union has unveiled the European Grid Infrastructure project, which will allow researchers to tap into the collective power of more than 200,000 desktop computers across 30 EU nations. That's a whole lotta computing power. As is the case with similar distributed computing projects like SETI@home, the thought behind EGI is that those 200,000 computer systems are sitting idle more ...

Seasoned Download Squad readers are probably already aware that you don't really own some of the software on your computer. You have a license to install and use it, but that's not quite the same as that software actually belonging to you. It's a bit confusing to the average user, to be sure. Thankfully, we have the court system to help us sort out all kinds of confusing matters of legality, ...

Boxee, everyone's favorite open-source underdog in the emerging entertainment-center-in-a-box market, has been using Gecko for its on-board browser for years now. That's all about to change, according to Boxee's Lead Apps Developer Rob Spectre, who told GigaOM that the team was looking to make good use of HTML5, and saw a shift to WebKit as the best way to get there. Boxee users should expect to ...