Om Malik is reporting that Google is making a big to build a city-wide free wifi network in San Francisco.

Google officials say San Francisco residents (and visitors) will enjoy a free 300 kilobits per second, always on connection anywhere in the city. As part of its proposal, the company says it will be offering wholesale access to other service providers, who will offer higher throughput connections to their customers. Google says it plans to use its own authentication services. (That explains the Google WiFi VPN client to some extent). The company is going to use San Diego-based WFI, a cellular network builder company to build out the WiFi network.

Mozilla has released version 1.0.7 of it’s Thunderbird E-mail Client. This update is mainly to fix security issues.

One of the problems fixed in the Thunderbird update is a Linux command line URL parsing security flaw that Secunia has rated “extremely critical”. The vulnerability could allow an attacker run malicious code on a vulnerable system, the security monitoring company said.

Mozilla has also released Thunderbird 1.1 Alpha 2.

AppleInsider is reporting that October may bring updates to the iPod line, amongst other things.

Sources believe the new players feature Toshiba’s perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) 1.8-inch HDDs, which are setting new benchmarks for data density. Toshiba has announced the drives in 40GB and 80GB capacities, with the 40GB model packing up to 10,000 songs or 25,000 photos on a single platter.

The 40GB drive features the largest single-platter capacity yet achieved in the 1.8-inch form factor, according to the company. Meanwhile, an 80GB version of the drive stores double the amount of data via two 40GB platters.

There has been a lot of talk about Apple porting iTunes over to other platforms and hardware, and one of the big rumors was a version of iTunes for Sony’s PSP. Sony has been one of the sticking points when it comes to the iTunes Music Store, but it seems that they would be far more interested in working with Apple if it benefited their own products in some way. Well, if there was a version of iTunes for PSP, and if people could buy songs from the iTunes Music Store directly onto their PSP, that might give the PSP more value, which would be a good thing for Sony.

Some people are claiming this is fake. I don’t know enough about the PSP to know. What do you think?

Inspired by the PSPupdates site I decided to a simpler version of what newly “downverted” PSP owners should know in order to start enjoying the fun homebrew scene in legal ways without much or any knowledge of what they should do.

“So what do I need to know?” – Patience young Padawan, we shall get to that in the next paragraph.

First of all, you need to know where to actually get your programs from. I recommend the pspupdates and PSP-Spot sites.

You can connect your PSP to your PC by two means:

• a USB cable with the following two sides* (*pictured below)
• a Memory Stick Duo reader (see froogle I guess)

(In case you’re connecting your PSP to the PC via USB cable you need to turn it on, go to the “Settings Menu” and select “USB Connection” with your USB cable connected before or after (of course).

Third, you need to know where to put the files. The files should all be placed under “X:\PSP\GAME” (where X is of course the letter the PSP was given on your computer).

The programs usually come zipped or rar’ed and when you extract them you will usually have one of the 3:

• all of the necessary folders so you just need to drag and drop to the root of your PSP (or Memory Stick Duo)
• two folders with names such as “EXAMPLE” and “EXAMPLE%”
• One file called EBOOT.PBP

In the case of the latest one, to install the program you need to first create two folders with the same name, except one has an % at the end and copy the EBOOT.PBP file to both of them.

In case of the second, you just need to copy the two folders to “X:\PSP\GAME”.

If you wish to read some tips on what you can with your PSP continue reading for a mini FAQ.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dell is known for low prices, but they are trying to turn that image around, or atleast grab some new customers that don’t like the cheaper products Dell ships out.

And while expensive Desktops and Laptops are nothing new, Dell said its new XPS line would be sold at higher prices and larger margins than its Dimension and Inspiron lines. With laptops starting at $2,700 and desktops starting at $1,100 you will sure notice a big difference in your pocket. Let’s just hope the people that buy these machines notice a difference in gaming and other power hungry applications.

“This will be our Lexus,” said Will Townsend, a Dell senior manager who gave reporters an early look at the machines.

Mike George, vice president and general manager of Dell’s consumer business in the United States, said: “It will appeal to the real technology enthusiast who understands what a dual-core processor is. But it will also appeal to a growing market that we see as underserved – the technology-oriented family.”

Radio Satellite, not the prettiest of websites, has a comparison between XM and Sirius satellite radio. Living in Canada without a car, I have not experienced either service, but I think knowing the ins and outs of what you are getting before you buy it is probably a good thing and good comparisons are hard to find.

And with about 6.2 million subscribers between the two services, it looks like the technology is doing alright.

If anyone uses either of these technologies, I would love to hear your experience with them.

Using FEAR, the creators of the popular series Red Vs Blue have released the start of a new series called PANICS, or People Acting Normal in Crazy-Ass Situations. The first episode is available, and is pretty funny.

I recommend checking it out.

I highly doubt they will ever be able to do this, but Microsoft is looking at speeding up the Vista boot time to around 2 to 3 seconds. Its a nice idea though, and if they improve boot speed, I am sure many people will be impressed. I am not one of those people though. I would happily wait two minutes for my system to boot if it was as solid as a rock, never crashed and could not be infected with viruses or any other malicious software, but that’s just me.

Fast On and Off: A Windows Vista computer starts and shuts down as quickly and reliably as a television, typically within 2 to 3 seconds. Windows Vista processes login scripts and startup programs and services in the background so you can start working right away. You’ll also shut down and restart your computer less often by using the New Sleep state, a simple one-click on and off experience which not only reduces power consumption, but also delivers and protects user data.

BusinessWeek.com with a look at commercial companies looking at utilizing BitTorrent technology for their media distribution needs.

The idea? Gather movies, music, games, and software from Hollywood studios and indie producers alike and distribute them to consumers. BitTorrent would generate revenue either by selling ads within the content or charging a fee for the files.

I think that this technology, used by many online media groups doing Podcasts and IPTV, will be quickyl adopted by more popular media streams as they see the usefulness of it. I am amazed more groups have not picked up on it already.

I’ll keep this as short and sweet as I can with just a small warning: This downgrader works, but that does not mean there isn’t any risk in using it so use at your own risk; nor ForeverGeek nor the creator of it will be responsible for it’s misuse.

Steps to use the MPH downgrader:
- Create an UPDATE folder in PSP/GAME/ folder of your memory stick
- Copy EBOOT.PBP (update 1.50) in /PSP/GAME/UPDATE folder
- Unpack MPHDowngrader.zip
- Copy overflow.tif in your PSP/PHOTO/ folder of your memory stick
(make sure you have changed your background to frame_buffer.png as explained in the toc2rta exploit.)
- Copy h.bin in root of your memory stick
- Copy index.dat in root of your memory stick
- Plug the AC adaptor

What you do next is go into the Photo Menu on the PSP and it will show some jumbled text, which is normal. Wait about 30 seconds and then restart your PSP.

From there you will now have a new file in your PSP?s root directory called ms0:/index.dat.bak. In the next step you will go to you Game Menu, Then Memory Stick, and then Launch ?PSP Update ver 1.50.?

It will then ask you to downgrade and lead you along to installing. Here is where I got scared. It installed to 99% then errored. This is OK. Restart your PSP and reboot it. It will come up with another error which is OK as well. Restart it again and you will have PSP firmware version 1.50. Enjoy, and welcome to the world of legal homebrew, not piracy.

Grab the downgrader.

Grab the 1.50 update eboot.

Remember: use this at your own risk, and if you enjoy any software you try: support it!

Alan has an article up about an evening with Marissa Mayer (Product Manager for Google), and there are some really cool facts listed in the article.

1. The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.

2. Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.

Somre pretty funny and interesting little facts, a very fun read. I highly suggest checking it out.

Google is celebrating its 7th Birthday today.

Google opened its doors in September 1998, and we’ve been pursuing one mission ever since: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. For our seventh birthday, we are giving you a newly expanded web search index that is 1,000 times the size of our original index.

It is amazing at how far the company has come in seven years.

Okay, so there are some interesting features in this screensaver by Microsoft, but a beta? Who really wants to test out a Beta screensaver?

Anyways, here are the details from Microsoft:

Stay on top of news, weather, and e-mail with the next step in the evolution in screen savers. With the MSN® Screen Saver (Beta), you can display your photos, click news headlines, check the local weather, display your friends’ photos and blogs from their MSN Spaces, and set up your own RSS news feeds.

Tracking RSS Feeds on a screen saver is kinda cool. I could have my computer just site there running showing me the latest news. I have not tried it out yet… I am afraid of what Beta means for a screensaver.

You would think that when launching a product, especially a world wide release, that you would take a team of lawyers and computer geeks and have them scavenge the world looking for what could be trademark problems.

Google is having problems again with the Gmail name as a company in China is now having problems with the name.

Techdirt with the story:

The latest, however, is in China, where a Beijing company is offering web-based email under the Gmail name with a logo that looks quite like Google’s. However, in this case, the company notes that they launched their Gmail (including the logo) long before Google launched Gmail. Of course, even if that’s the case, Google may have a decent case of trademark infringement on the logo. It’s clearly designed to look something like the Google logo (not the Gmail logo) — with the same “G” and a similar font for the other letters.

Microsoft is launcing its own competition to Adsense and Y! Publisher Network.

Their first steps were to launch what they call adCenter in France and Singapore. What adCenter allows advertisers to do is to target specific demographics using information obtained from Hotmail and Passport users. The ads will only be on Microsoft sites at first, but later they hope to expand their advertising network to compete against Yahoo, and Google.

“The launch of adCenter in France and Singapore is a great first step to delivering on our global vision to connect advertisers to consumers in a much more meaningful way,” said Yusuf Mehdi, senior V.P. of MSN Information Services & Merchant Platform.

This means that they will be able to target ads based on location, gender, age, and even time of the week. Looks like TGIF ads might be all the annoyance soon.

If Microsoft has no information on the visitor it will display ads based upon keywords.

MSN currently uses ads by Yahoo and has not yet said what they plan to do with the Yahoo ads, but everyone knows they will eventually get rid of them, though they are contracted with Yahoo until 2006.

Testing in the USA will begin during October.