Tag: USA

The United States and Canada, with their early shift to daylight saving time (DST), are yet again acting as cannon fodder for other iPhone and iPod touch users around the world. Reports of DST-related malfunctions vary wildly, with some iPhone and iPod touch alarms going off early, some late, and with some working just fine. Crazily, one iPhone 3GS user says that his phone correctly jumped ...

Today the U.S. House of Representatives will be transitioning over to Republican control. To mark the event, the first speech by new House Speaker, congressman John Boehner, will be streamed live on the Pledge to America Facebook page. You will be able to watch the proceedings live even if you don't have a Facebook account – the page is open and accessible to all, as befitting a ...

Ars Technica is running a fantastic, facepalm-worthy story of patent trolling gone wild. Webvention is the patent-holder in question, and their entire operations revolve around a single U.S. patent: 5,251,294. The patent abstract opens with one of the vaguest and most terrifying sentences ever conceived: "An interactive information environment for accessing, controlling, and using information." ...

In a first that has been deemed "historic," though by who I do not know, Minnesota has become the first US state to move its communications and collaboration suite into the cloud. Last year, Los Angeles switched to the enterprise version of Gmail, but this is the first entire state to move into the cloud. (We should point out that LA has a larger population than Minnesota, however...) The ...

Now here's something to sink your teeth into: take a look at the graph above. It comes from a long series of demographic and growth reports by Inside Facebook. It illustrates that, in June 2010, only 320,000 Americans joined Facebook -- but more importantly, it shows that 250,000 of the primary 18-to-44-year-old demographic actually left Facebook. Inside Facebook says the figures could be the ...

This is an "online culture" type of post. I'm just giving you a heads up here, so you don't say I'm being political. It also contains some cuss words. You've been warned. Unamerican.com is one of the first websites that I ever thought of as "cool." I think that was back in 1999, or perhaps it was even earlier than that. It's now over a decade later, and Unamerican still seems to be going strong. ...

Yes, details so super-secret that the White House has decided to declassify and disclose them! The WSJ is reporting on the White House's new Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), a program intended to shore up the U.S. Internet defenses. The main reason for declassification seems to be due to privacy concerns -- and as always with improved security, you're going to lose a ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/01/25/sourceforge-blocks-iran-north-korea-syria-sudan-and-cuba/'; In a move that must surely strike at the very core of open source, FOSS, and the heart of GNU crusader Richard Stallman, SourceForge has now blocked all access from by countries on the U.S. 'Foreign Assets Control sanction list'. That isn't the beginning of the story though: ...

It's the story that keeps getting crazier and crazier! First Google -- a corporation! -- sticks a finger up at an entire country (the largest in the world), then it comes to light that China has been operating a vast malware-distributing espionage botnet -- and now the White House publicly comes out in favor of Google! That the American government is stepping in can only mean that the ...

Believe it or not, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, aka the Christmas or Underwear Bomber, might have been prevented from flying if his name was a little less complicated to spell. In a report summarizing the attempted terrorist attack of December 25, 2009, it is made apparent that the software used by counter-terrorist intelligence agencies is perhaps not all that great. A month before the attack, ...

Joost appears to be scaling back its game plan a bit. The Sunday Times reports that the online video platform will focus entirely on distributing content in the US, where it has the largest audience. Up until now, Joost has provided videos globally, although the content you were able to watch was determined by your country of residence. The company was founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus ...

There was certainly a lot of fanfare when Google announced that they were going to allow people around the world to watch in-season full-length games on Google Video. Well, it seems that Comcast now allows anyone in the US to stream up to 2 live games a day. When Comcast and the NHL first made this announcement, the games were only viewable to Comcast High-Speed Internet customers. This year, ...

I just got back from some much needed R & R, and since I left before the most recent Homeland Security PR campaign terror scare, I spent a lot of time on the TSA website the last few days of my vacation trying to figure out the ever-changing array of prohibited items. It wasn't much help. It seemed like they were updating the regs hourly, but the website only every couple of days, and then in ...

Let's face it: Government web site are, as a rule, a pain to navigate. In an effort to remedy that, Google has launched usgov.google.com, a specialized search engine for searching U.S. government web sites. The new site is modeled after Google Personalized Home, and indeed has most of the same features, but with an emphasis on widgets that help you keep track of government updates. For more ...

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, or USCC, is calling for an investigation into Lenovo, the Chinese company which bought IBM's PC arm last year, before the State Department closes a $13 million deal to buy 15,000 Lenovo PCs. The USCC wants to be assured that the Chinese computers, which are built in Mexico and North Carolina with components manufactured in Taiwan, are not ...