Chad's News

Several national governments are taking exception to the high level of security provided to Blackberry users. These governments want to be able to intercept and read messages from their citizens, but the Blackberry security protocols are just too good. And the manufacturer, Research In Motion (RIM), isn’t willing to degrade the security. As a result, the United Arab Emirates has decided to suspend several Blackberry services within its borders, and other countries are considering following suit, including India and Lebanon. An imminent shutoff in Saudi Arabia was averted only after RIM agreed to set up a local server in that country.

All I can say is that I’m grateful the founders of our country insisted on the First Amendment.

Link #1: http://arstechnica.com/…

Link #2: http://dailycaller.com/…

Bill Snyder of InfoWorld has written a scathing article about Dell and its decline from once being the gold standard of customer service. Knowingly selling defective computers is not the best way to retain a loyal customer base, but that’s only a symptom of systematic changes in how the company does business.

Link: http://infoworld.com/…
(via Slashdot)

I was concerned to learn that Oracle will be purchasing Sun Microsystems, especially since Sun owns MySQL, a direct competitor of Oracle’s database software. MySQL is very popular, and I’m not sure what would happen if Oracle should decide to discontinue it.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Update: The acquisition has been approved Sun’s stockholders, so now the purchase is waiting on regulatory approval.

For many years now, chip maker AMD has been the only real competitor to Intel, but more recently AMD has not been able to keep up. On Oct. 7th, AMD announced it will split into two companies, one to design chips and the other to fabricate them. Supposedly this will keep them competitive, but let’s take the move for what it really is—a desperate attempt to keep up with Intel. I hope it works.

Link #1: http://apnews.myway.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

Link #2: http://arstechnica.com/…

Link #3: http://www.nytimes.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Computer retailer CompUSA will be going out of business after the 2007 year-end holiday season. Be on the lookout for discounts and sale prices.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Advertisers are moving away from the tech print media and towards blogs—in large part because the blogs are more specialized, thus allowing ads to be better targeted.

Link: http://www.forbes.com/…
(via Slashdot)

On May 16th, Engadget posted a blog entry stating there would be significant delays for upcoming Apple products. Seven minutes later, massive sell-offs caused Apple’s stock to drop by over $4 a share, reducing its market capitalization by $4 billion. Here at Chad’s News, we monitor Engadget on a weekly basis for stories of interest, but I had no idea they were -that- influential. What’s worse, however, is that their source (an email from inside Apple) turned out to be a hoax. The email was from within Apple’s mail system, but the facts were incorrect.

Note that the two stories below differ in their facts by about a dollar of stock price drop, so you be the judge.

Link #1: http://www.techcrunch.com/…
(via digg)

Link #2: http://www.washingtonpost.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

Satellite radio giants XM and Sirius have decided to merge. They still face regulatory approval, however, before the merger can go forward. Even though it smacks of a monopoly, I believe this will be a good thing for the listeners.

Link: http://news.yahoo.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Link #2: http://investor.sirius.com/…

Kodak, still reeling from the collapse of the film industry, is entering the inkjet printer market with a novel scheme: cheaper ink. The prices, $9.99 for black and $14.99 for color, are about half of what I used to pay for my Epson cartridges. The printers themselves are a bit more expensive—probably because they’re not selling them at a loss to gain ink customers—but the extra cost will be recouped over the long term.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Link #2: http://www.kodak.com/…
(via The Consumerist)

This week’s big news is North Korea setting off a nuke Google’s decision to purchase YouTube, a highly popular video site. Internet analysts, as well as anyone with an iota of common sense, have been predicting the implosion of YouTube. A vast majority of the content uploaded to YouTube is copyrighted, and the internet community has been holding its breath, waiting to see who would file the first lawsuit of the many that are expected. But we may all be disappointed. YouTube announced a deal with multiple music labels to provide music videos and other content free of charge—so it will no longer be necessary to upload pirated copies. In addition, Google must have some plan to avoid the lawsuits. Why else would they pay $1.65 billion just to take on a huge liability?

http://arstechnica.com/…

In an update to an earlier post on fires caused by defective laptop batteries, Sony has finally decided to do a recall. This makes sense, as Sony is the battery supplier for the laptop manufactuers that are experiencing problems—it’s really been Sony’s fault from the beginning.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/…

The CPU maker AMD will be purchasing the graphics card/chip maker ATI, pending ATI shareholder approval. This acquisition has led to all kinds of speculation, including combining a CPU and GPU on the same chip. In addition, there are questions about how this will affect AMD’s relationship with other graphics companies (e.g., Nvidia), as well as ATI’s relationship with Intel. More details are available in the official press release (65KB PDF).

http://arstechnica.com/…