Right On Technology

Many moons ago I came across this strange thing called bit-torrents. I quickly found that bit-torrents allowed anyone to find anything on the Internet (not that I ever used it for nefarious purposes ). One of the best sites that ever came along was The Pirate Bay. It quickly became won of the largest bittorrent sites on the Internet with a reported 25 million peers in it’s hay day.

As many know the rise and fall of The Pirate Bay has been a long one, including many legal battles that finally caught up to the folks in Sweden who ran the site. However, The Pirate Bay is not dead just yet. While it is true that the bittorrent will no longer be active that is because they are switching to a new trackerless solution called DHT. The crew recently posted the following:

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.”

The DHT system is much more decentralized and harder to track who is downloading what. It also means that when a tracker goes down the entire site won’t get hit.

The future of TPB is unclear. They have appealed their copyright infringement case and the appeal has been postponed until next summer. So, at least for the mean time, TPB is still around. Smoke em if you got’em.

There is little question that Twitter is the second most popular social networking site on the Internet behind Facebook. As more and more folks “discover” Twitter and how useful it is the more popular this tool will continue to be. However, for the first time the (U.S.) visits have declined for month-over-month. That decline was an 8% decline for the month of October. Comscore estimates that Twitter’s visitors went from 20.9 million visitors in September to 19.2 million in October.

Now, let’s put this in perspective, Twitter’s growth from October 2008 to October 2009 was a crazy 1,271% growth and their global visitors are at 58.4 visits per month, so there is still a lot to be optimistic about. This could be part of the motivation for Twitter to release many of their new features like the retweet button, geolocation feature and their new lists, which are really cool.

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Today I booted up the old Mac and noticed a gift from Apple, a new update! This is officially Mac OS X 10.6.2 for Snow Leopard. The biggest part of this update is that Apple finally decided to address a major bug that would cause guest accounts to delete part of your OS. I guess 2 months and 7 days since first reported is better then never.

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In one of the more exciting rumors I’ve heard in a while, Peter Kafka is reporting that Apple is possibly floating a deal to the various networks that would allow users to pay $30 a month rate to have on demand access to all TV programs.

The good news is that this deal would not necessarily be tied to any piece of hardware such as the oft-rumored Apple Tablet or AppleTV. The content would simply be tied to your iTunes account, thus you could access the content through any device that had iTunes.

The real question here is can Apple get the networks on board? While networks often claim they are excited to look at new revenue streams, in reality they never really want to because they don’t want to threaten the subscription fees they receive from cable and satellite providers such as Time/Warner or Comcast. I can especially see Fox and NBC balking at this idea because they want to launch some paid form of Hulu and they might worry about canabalizing sales.

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Introducing the “Little Buddy Child Tracker” an interesting device to be sold by Best Buy. This compact device can be placed in a backpack or pinned to a child’s clothes and then transmits data back to parents using global satellites to track the whereabouts of the child.

While devices like this have been around for a while, they have typically been rather expensive, anywhere from $200-500 dollars. The Little Buddy will sale for only $100, so it is a real alternative to obsessive parents who want to track their children’s every move.

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Want your own nuclear reactor? That might be as far off as you think (well, maybe it is, but regardless . . .). Apparently Toshiba has begun developing what it calls a small nuclear reactor designed for both developed and emerging countries.

This nuclear reactor, called the Toshiba 4S has some big advantages over the traditional nuclear reactor. Namely, it is very compact, it has minimal monitoring and maintenance requirements and comes with an automatic shutdown feature for safety purposes (always a good thing).

Reportedly both Mitsubishi and Hitachi have also developed similar concept reactors that output anywhere from 350,000-600,000 kilowatts. Not to shabby.

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One of the best times of the year for the tech enthusiast (read geek) can be the Christmas season and specifically Black Friday. We often see new product releases, new operating system upgrades and all sorts of fun new gadgets, video games and DVDs released just in time for the shopping holiday.

One of the best days for shopping (if you are looking for deals) of course is Black Friday. Black Friday, the first shopping day after Thanksgiving is usually chalk-full of great deals just to get customers in the door. Of course, you usually have to put up with thousands of other clamoring customers who also all want that same deal. Last year I got up at 3:00 in the morning (in Branson MO no less) and drove to the local Wal-mart and stood in line to get an $80 dollar Blu-Ray player and a sub-$100 GPS system. I felt that it was worth the pain, but often the key is coordinating where the best deals are so you can make sure you get the most of your crowd-packed Black Friday.

To that end, I’ve compiled a list of some of the top web-pages that track which stores are offering great deals on various products. So, in no particular order:

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Look out Kindle, Barnes and Noble is set to introduce their new “Nook” e-Reader! So far the e-book industry has been dominated pretty much by a single player, Amazon. The Kindle is far and away the best device for reading e-books and the selection of books is also hard to beat. The biggest downfall of the Kindle so far is the price point. While they have recently dropped the price of the Kindle to $279, which is a good start, the initial $400 price point was such that only the true early adopters could really even think of purchasing the device. Also, the device is good, and e-ink is a great concept, but it’s pretty much a proprietary device that allows very little outside of reading books and newspapers (for instance you can’t even surf the Internet with it).

So, enter the new Barnes & Noble “Nook” (the supposed name, all though this is unofficial so far). You can see pictures of the beauty here. The Nook will feature two separate screens, a top e-ink screen and a separate bottom screen which should feature multi-touch very similar to the iPhone. Best of all, the price point is rumored to respectable $259. True, it’s only $20 cheaper then the Kindle, but it features both multi-touch and, presumably, Internet access.

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A few days ago a Techcrunch reader alerted the site that he had found a “chromeos” folder on their Chromium build site. Google quickly removed the folder, but not before Jonathan Fredrickson could snatch the files and download them. The initial impressions so far are pretty positive. The OS itself looks and feels very similar to the Chrome browser, which makes sense.

One must wonder how happy Google is about this revelation, they can’t be too happy that details and actual builds of the OS are already getting out. On the other hand, that was pretty careless of them to place the entire OS on a publicly accessible folder. Also, it’s open source, so what can they really do? Not much.

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This is somewhat speculation at this point, but there are heavy rumors indicating that T-mobile is going to make a big push at rivals Sprint, Verizon and AT&T. Rumors turn around a 3 prong attack that could turn the best little cell phone company into a monster cell-company.

The first part of the attack of “Project Dark” or “Black” (depending on who you ask) comes from their heavy push of Android based phones such as the Motorola CLIQ and the Samsung Behold II. These beautiful, feature rich smart phones will be able to compete with the iPhone and the Palm Pre, Google is out to control the world through Android. T-Mobile was the first to offer a G-Phone, and while it wasn’t perfect (in fact there were many flaws) we got our first taste at the open, Android based platform, and it was impressive.

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