Ipad Revival

Sony is soon to announce that it will be challenging Apple’s new IPad.  The revival product will have all the  capabilities of a netbook, a Sony Reader and a PSP, the company’s handheld gaming device.

Sony will also be making a new smartphone.  The phone will contain Sony Ericsson mobile technology and capable of playing PSP games – to compete against the iPhone. Both devices are expected to work with Sony Online Services, an online store due to launch in March and sell music, movies, books, and other downloadable applications for mobile products.

Both these products will be launch sometime in 2010.

Verizon Added Skype

In a huge move, Verizon announced that it was adding Skype available to its 90 million wireless user.  Those with smartphones and the right data plan can now make unlimited calls to hundreds of millions of Skype user worldwide, beginning next month (March).

These calls will go over Verizon’s network, not using cellphone plan minutes.  Minutes would be deducted to use Skype to call regular phone numbers in the US.

Super Bowl Ratings

Super Bowl game featuring the New Orleans Saints versus the Indianapolis Colts on February 7, 2010 was watched by more than 106 million people.  That means it was the largest watched television event on television surpassing the 1983 finale of MASH television show.

The previous Super Bowl featuring Arizona and Pittsburgh was seen by only 98.7 million people compared to the 105.97 million last night.

Most Popular Passwords

According to a new analysis, one out of five Web users use a simple, easily guessed password like “abc123,” “iloveyou” or even “password” to protect their data.

After examining a list of 32 million passwords that an unknown hacker stole some interesting information was revealed.  About 20% of the people use the same passwords.  That suggests that hackers could easily break into many accounts just by trying the most common passwords.

Some Web sites try to thwart the attackers by freezing an account for a certain period of time if too many incorrect passwords are typed. But experts say that the hackers simply learn to trick the system, by making guesses at an acceptable rate, for instance.

To improve security, some Web sites are forcing users to mix letters, numbers and even symbols in their passwords. Others, like Twitter, prevent people from picking common passwords.

Still, researchers say, social networking and entertainment Web sites often try to make life simpler for their users and are reluctant to put too many controls in place.

Even commercial sites like eBay must weigh the consequences of freezing accounts, since a hacker could, say, try to win an auction by freezing the accounts of other bidders.

Overusing simple passwords is not a new phenomenon. A similar survey examined computer passwords used in the mid-1990s and found that the most popular ones at that time were “12345,” “abc123″ and “password.”

Why do so many people continue to choose easy-to-guess passwords, despite so many warnings about the risks?

Security experts suggest that we are simply overwhelmed by the sheer number of things we have to remember in this digital age.

Here is a list of the top 32 passwords:

1.  123456

2. 12345

3. 123456789

4. password

5. iloveyou

6. princess

7. rockyou

8. 1234567

9. 12345678

10. abc123

11. nicole

12. daniel

13. babygirl

14. monkey

15. jessica

16. lovely

17. michael

18. ashley

19. 654321

20. qwerty

21. iloveu

22. michelle

23. 111111

24. 0

25. tigger

26. password1

27. sunshine

28. chocolate

29. anthony

30. angel

31. FRIENDS

32. soccer

What is a tablet?

What exactly a tablet?

Some say a computer just needs a touch-sensitive screen to be a tablet. Others say a person should be able to write on it with a pen. Still others say it’s screen size that’s important — tablets must fit somewhere between phones and laptops. For some, it’s partly the keyboard — a tablet should have one of those.

Break off the keyboard, leaving only a touch-screen device, he said, and the gadget falls into another buzz-worthy category: the slate.

Blackberry Outage

Last night, BlackBery users in North American expereince one of the longerst BlackBerry outages in recent years.  If you were one of the unlucky people who experienced this outage you were not alone.

Message delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption. Phone service and SMS services on BlackBerry smartphones were unaffected. Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure.

This was the second outage in with a week.  For a company know for providing a reliable phone, this news is a bite of a concern to me since I depend on my BlackBerry for my business and work emails.  RIM (Research In Development), the company that makes the BlackBerry prides itself on near perfect uptime statistics voes to correct the problem.  Hopefully they get it right.  Because it really sucks when I lose my ability to text, check my emails and surf the web with my phone.

Apples Comes to Rescue

Apple is AT&T ’s knight in sinny armor.  After being rated as the worse wireless carrier in the 2009 year, and then losing their legal battles with Verizon Wireless over television commercial ads, AT&T needed some good news.

The good news came in the form of Apple.  Apple has launched a serious of commercial touting not just the iPhone but also AT&T’s ability to handle both voice calls and data at the same time.

In one of the spots, the voiceover says: “Say you’re on a call, and your friend wants to know…” (cue the friend) “…what time’s the movie?” The finger taps up movie showtimes on the screen, and the voice returns: “You can tell him … all without ever leaving the call.”

In another example from the second ad: “Say you’re on a call with a client, and he asks…” (here’s the client) “Did you get my e-mail?” The finger taps to open the message, and the voiceover says, “You can say, yep, got it right here.”

After a few more examples comes the capper: “Can your phone and your network do that?” Cue the Apple and AT&T logos.

It will be interesting to see if these ads help AT&T’s imagine at all.  Cause at the end of the day, its going to be the services that are provided and not the quality of the television commercials.

Screen of Death

Were you affected by the latest Microsoft update?  Miscrosoft announced yesterday that it is looking into its latest security updates.  For those affected, they are left with a black desktop and little else on their screen.

“The symptoms are very distinctive and troublesome,” Prevx said. “After logging on there is no desktop, task bar, system tray or sidebar. Instead you are left with a totally black screen and a single My Computer Explorer window.”

However, those far, Microsoft is saying that they cannot locate the problem nor replicate it.

A Microsoft representative said that the company continues to recommend that customers “test and deploy” the November security updates.

“Based on our investigation so far we can say that we’re not seeing this as an issue from our support organization,” the representative said. “The issues as described also do not match any known issues that have been documented in the security bulletins or (knowledge base) articles.”

So if you are amoung the few people affected by this update, please notify Microsoft.  We need to get to the bottom of this.

Monday Sales Rises

It is being reported that sales online after the Thanksgiving holiday were up 20% compared to 2008.  The news has spark online retailers to continue to offer more and more offers online.  So if you are looking good deals for that hot new flat panel tv, start checking online.

One word of caution.  If you are ordering online, make sure you figure out the correct model for your dream tv.  Then compare it to the model being offered online.  Some of these bargain might be for the older model and not the latest model.  If that doesn’t matter to you then you will be happy with the deal that you can find online.  That is not to say that all the deals are for older models.  Just check to make sure you know what you are getting and what is being offered.

Airline Fine For 6 Hour Delay

The Department of Transportation finally fined Continential Airlines and ExpressJet for stranding passengers for nearly six hours last August.  How much was the fine you ask?  $100,000.00 was the fine slapped on their unconsciousable asses.

But they weren’t the only ones.  The company that handled the grounds operation of this debacle also got fined $75,000.00.

You can’t just leave people in a plane for 6 hours.  They left 47 passenagers on the dam plane.  The crew on the ground would not let the people off the plane.

The passengers of Flight 2816 were kept waiting nearly six hours inside the cramped regional airliner amid wailing babies and a smelly toilet even though they were only 50 yards from a terminal. The captain of the flight repeatedly pleaded to allow the passengers to deplane and enter the terminal.

In the morning they were allowed to disembark. They spent about two and a half hours inside the terminal before reboarding the same plane to complete their trip to Minneapolis.