Today in Tech: DRM Breaking is Legal, Wi-Fi is Cracked, Kmart meets Android, and 15 Minutes on YouTube

YouTube’s 15 Minutes

I just wanted to start off today’s article by saying that YouTube has extended its video limit to 15 minutes. This is because they have improved on their Content ID software, which is a software that looks at content to see if it is owned by someone else or not.  Feel free to start uploading videos up to 15 minutes now.

Google is Dead

Baidu, the biggest search engine in China, is now heading to Android.  As we all know, Google has been having some trust issues with China.  Even when they weren’t, they were losing the Chinese market to Baidu.  Baidu looks very similar to Google, which is why many Chinese people had no problem using Google on their Android powered phone, but now that Baidu is going mobile, Google is doomed.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Qantas airplane company is being sued.  On one of their airplanes leaving Australia, a women went deaf.  This women, who wears hearing aids, went deaf when someone’s 3-year-old baby leaned over his armrest and let out a scream so loud that it made her already-bad-ears bleed.  When the bleeding stopped, the women, who name is Ms. Barnard, found her self deaf in that one ear.  She was taken to a local hospital, where a professional stated that she was in deed deaf in one ear.  She later sued Qantas, the airline she was riding, but the case got settled out-of-court.  See this post by lockergnome.com blogger Ron Schenone.

Playlist Bar in Youtube

Google has released a new feature on Youtube that when you play a video in your subscription box, it will make a bar at the bottom of the page appear.  This bar lets you scroll through all the videos in your subscriptions, and turn on/off the automatic next video in subscription box play.

Snake Game in YouTube

Recently, a hidden snake game was found on YouTube.  You know, the game where you are a snake and you have to eat these little things, and doing so makes you grow larger.  Well, it has been found out that if you hold the left arrow key down on a video using the new bar at the bottom, while the video is paused, it will make a snake game to appear.

SSD Magic

A new SSD drive called UltraDrive MX SSD came out today.  This drive, produced by a company named Super Talent,  has a feature that allows you to use it either as an external SSD drive, which would connect by USB, or an internal SSD drive, which would connects via the SATA II connection protocol.  This drive is available is sizes of 60GB, 120GB, 240 and 480GB.  It will start shipping in November.

Nintendo DS Sinks

Nintendo has reported that they lost 2.2 billion dollars this quarter.  This is the first time Nintendo has had a quarterly net loss for the last two years.  Many think this is related to the dramatic decline in hand held sales from this past June.  It doesn’t really surprise, since everyone either owns a DS, DS Lite, or DSi and sees no reason to upgrade to the next version.  OK, maybe original DS owners should at least upgrade to DS Lite.

Kmart is Back – and With Vengeance!

Kmart, a company owned by Sears, might be making a come back.  Kmart has been having some financial trouble, but the world’s geeks might put that to an end.  Kmart is going to start to sell exclusive, and affordable, 7-inch Android tablets, according to this article by ZDNet.  This tablet, which is going to be called the GenTouch78, will be running Anroid 2.1 out-of-the-box. It has an as-of-now unnamed 800MHZ processor, 256MB of RAM, 2GB of built in space, 800×400 resolution size, built-in WiFi, upto 720p videos, a SD/MMC memory expansion slot (which allows up to 16GB), and a TFT-touchscreen (TFT is the back lighting that normal LCD screens use.)  It will also include a carrying case.  It will cost $150.

Wifi is Cracked

Md Sohail Ahmad, an AirTight Networks technology manager, discovered a hole, codenamed Hole 196, in WPA2, the strongest form of IEEE 802.11, also known as Wifi, encryption.  The crack works as following: an internal malicious insider, who would be someone on the same network as you,  can decrypt over the air private messages from other users on the network, inject malicous traffic, and compromising other devices on the network using certain open source software.  According to this snippet from the original PC World post on this:

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) derivative on which WPA2 is based has not been cracked and no brute force is required to exploit the vulnerability, Ahmad says. Rather, a stipulation in the standard that allows all clients to receive broadcast traffic from an access point (AP) using a common shared key creates the vulnerability when an authorized user uses the common key in reverse and sends spoofed packets encrypted using the shared group key.Ahmad explains it this way:WPA2 uses two types of keys: 1) Pairwise Transient Key (PTK), which is unique to each client, for protecting unicast traffic; and 2) Group Temporal Key (GTK) to protect broadcast data sent to multiple clients in a network. PTKs can detect address spoofing and data forgery. “GTKs do not have this property,” according to page 196 of the IEEE 802.11 standard.

ASUS Goes Android

Google just can’t stay out of the news today!  Do any of you remember Duncan’s video on the three ASUS tablets? The tablets he mentioned are: the  the e-reader called the Eee Tablet, the tablet device called Eee Pad 121 which will be running Windows 7 and the tablet device called Eee Pad 101TC which will be running Windows CE 7. Wll ASUS has decided to put Android on the Eee Tablet 101TC instead of Windows CE 7.

Question of the Day

I’ve decided to start a Question of the Day on my Today in Tech articles.  Today’s question: What PC are you?  Now this isn’t a Mac vs PC type of thing, this is a are you a HP, Dell (Alienware is Dell, too), or Asus or Apple (I say Apple instead of Mac because Mac is only the OS run on Apple computers.) or an Acer (Acer owns eMachines and Gateway), or Lenovo etc. type of think.  “Leave your creative responses in the comment section below.”  Also, see if you recognize who originally said that quote.

Thanks for Reading!

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