Universe’s Tech Blog

I’ll be back (and posting) on Friday.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was recently at the Seoul Digital Forum and he was asked to define Web 3.0 by an audience member.

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Workaround enables Netflix ‘Watch Now’ titles to be decrypted, saved

Looking for a new way to use FairUse4WM? Have a Netflix account? If so, go on and roll your sleeves up, as a crafty (and acrimonious) fellow has managed to find a workaround that enables you to not only decrypt the DRM-laced “Watch Now” movie files, but save them to your hard drive for future viewing. Admittedly, the process is somewhere between painless and potentially frustrating, but the gist of it involves Windows Media Player 11, FairUse4WM, Notepad, a Netflix account, and a broadband connection. Through a series of hoop jumping, users can now strip the “Watch Now” files free of DRM and watch them at their leisure and on any video-playing device they choose. Granted, there’s certainly issues of legality mixed in here, but where there’s a will, there’s a way. [Warning: Read link language potentially NSFW]

Bring Down Internet Explorer In Six Words
Marcion writes “Some handy Japanese guy called Hamachiya discovered a bug in Internet Explorer. Under certain conditions, an asterisk when used as a wildcard can crash IE as soon as the user attempts to go to another page.” The article claims the “five HTML tags and a CSS declaration” crash IE7 as well as IE6, but I couldn’t get IE7 to fail. This page says that as of June, IE6 was at about 37% market share and IE7 under 20%.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Handheld computer maker Palm hopes to rally Linux software developers behind its upcoming Foleo laptop computer. Some analysts say Foleo has the potential to become the first mainstream computer powered by the open-source Linux operating system.

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Spening on internet advertising will reach $61.98 billion, and will surpass newspapers to become the nation’s leading ad medium in 2011, projects private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson in its 21st Communications Industry Forecast released today.

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A US web firm is preparing to launch an ambitious internet search engine it hopes will eventually track down the names of the world’s six billion people. Spock.com says it has already indexed 100 million people and is adding a million names per day by invitation-only.

read more | digg story

Steve Jobs announced an updated version of the video editing application iMovie to go along with iLife 08. Calling it “a completely new way of editing video,” the Apple CEO called it “startlingly better.” Jobs says it’s designed to be able to put together a movie in 30 minutes. It has a completely new user interface, too.

read more | digg story

According to Xbox spokesman Major Nelson, the only thing that the update is doing is preparing systems for wireless guitar controllers (the kind used by Rock Band and Guitar Hero III), saying the regular update that adds features is still coming later this year.

read more | digg story

Nintendo loves filing patents. The most recent one of note is this, a description that seems to combine the Wii-mote with the Game Boy:

read more | digg story

INF: Posting to Wordpress from FeedDemon

To publish a post in FeedDemon to Wordpress:

* Within a news post, click the right-pointing arrow under the post title and select Blog this News Item | Configure Blog Publishing Tools
* Click Add
* Enter a descriptive name
* Copy the following URL into the <strong>Command line or URL</strong> field:
http://{your website address}/wp-admin/post-new.php?text=$ITEM_DESCRIPTION_PLAIN$&popupurl=$ITEM_LINK$&popuptitle=$ITEM_TITLE$

You will need to customize the URL by replacing {your website address} with your blog path. If your blog is in a subdirectory, be sure include that as well.

In Brief: The Halo 3 Limited Edition Xbox 360 console …
The Halo 3 Limited Edition Xbox 360 console will emerge in September for $399.99. [Press Release]