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Without 
Greenpeace, the organization with noble goals but a prickly way of going about things, has asked Facebook to stop using coal at its new data center in Oregon. Given Greenpeace’s history (seen here annoying Deutsche Bank), I should expect some attention-seeking prank if Facebook doesn’t comply. Watch out, Zuckerberg.
Only a few hours after 
Plex, the Mac OS X media center, has just made all of its competitors obsolete. A new version, dubbed Plex/Nine, will be released today at midnight EDT, and it introduces a number of new features that make it the media player for Mac OS X—and for the 
There’s a fun and charming story on Advertising Age about a woman and her friends having a fun and charming dinner together. All is well and good until 
As soon as 
The Tea Party, the “American socio-political movement that emerged in 2009 through a series of locally and nationally coordinated protests,” and known for its colorful protest signs (as seen here), hates 
Am I QuakeCon this year? No, of course not because that would have actually been fun. But I do know this: John Carmack just announced that he’s got the Rage engine running on an 
Hold onto your hats. A new version of the Zeus trojan, called Zeus3, has wreaked havoc on thousands of bank accounts worldwide, stealing just over $1 million. The best part? There’s pretty much no way to detect the trojan if it’s on your system. Hooray for humanity, right?
It’s been several days since 
<A HREF="http://www.crunchgear.com/tag/google/"Google’s in an odd bind these days. It’s far and away the biggest Internet company out there, and with that size and position comes great responsibility, to echo the sentiment found in Spider-Man. It drew heat yesterday—and rightly so—for 
You’ll soon be able to watch “Dinner for Schmucks” via 
Looks like Google and Verizon were, in fact, 
The controversy surrounding 
A newly discovered security flaw puts any device that runs 
What should happen to 
The Connecticut attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, has opened up an investigation into whether or not the deals 
“All I’ve done is compile public information into a nice format for statistical analysis.” So says the man who is being called the Facebook hacker. Ron Bowes, a security consultant who’s also an nmap developer, is under fire from certain sections of the Internet 
No idea how this will fly in court, but here we go. 
It’s no longer illegal under the DMCA to jailbreak your iPhone or bypass a DVD’s CSS in order to obtain fair use footage for educational purposes or criticism. These are the new rules that were handed down moments ago by the U.S. Copyright Office. This is really big. Like, really big.
Some more aviation news for your edification. The British-built 
You know how every month you see stories like “
Oh, what could have been. Rahul Sood, of Voodoo PC fame (now at HP), says he’s heard from people in the know that Microsoft was working on a project that would have integrated Xbox Live with a sort of Windows Live. The end goal was to have been console gamers and PC gamers playing against each other on a combined Xbox Live+Windows Live service. The reason why this project never saw the light of day? Because console gamers are rubbish. 
One hundred percent nonsense. That’s the only way I can describe the story going around talking about how teens are “getting high” while I-Dosing. I tried using I-Doser 
Famous rock band Guns N’ Roses released their latest album, Chinese Democracy, in November, 2008. It had been in development for an astonishing 15 years. That’s partially why Kevin Cogill got into so much trouble. You’ll recall that he was caught uploading tracks from the then-unreleased album in June, 2008. While he managed to dodge jail time, Cogill was given a year of probation and two months of home confinement. He was also supposed to take part in a public service announcement on behalf of the 
Online gamers received quite the scare last week when 
New York City residents will now be able to track their water use in real time. The city has installed wireless meters in The Bronx (the program will expand in the future), and residents will be able to see how much water they’re using at any given moment. The idea is to encourage people to cut down on their water consumption. “Wow, I used X-Number of gallons of water during that shower, let’s see if I can make that X-Minus-One next time.” And so on.
No worries, guys, because 
Well, well, well. 
If 
It’s free agency season in the NBA, and the only people who are more excited than the fans are the nation’s sports reporters. How easy it is to be a sports reporter in 2010! Thanks to 
Some auto racing news for your Wednesday morning. Formula One, the fancy circuit that, like 
Let's get down to business. The 
Has 
An exciting thing happened to people who actually visit 
Do you have a 
Potentially big news in the world of open source software, friends. Apparently Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution, 
I, myself, would move to the cloud if it were at all possible. And by that I don't mean move all of my vital digital services to someone else's servers, but float up into the stratosphere and just hang out there for the rest of my days. When ActiveVideo Networks talks about moving the TV-viewing experience to the cloud, they are, in fact, talking about moving servers outside of your house for your own good, enabling what they call interactive video on demand. The overall idea is to make TV-viewing just interactive enough to make it more compelling without sacrificing the "idiot box"-ness of the medium. When you're watching TV, you don't necessarily want to break out GCC simply to change the channel. 
Hey PC game publishers, want to know how you can eliminate piracy? Give us the option of renting the games! We were discussing in the chat room a little while ago how fantastically awesome it would be to be able to rent games from Steam. Allow me to explain.
The last time 
It is an absolute miracle that I have never had a virus, trojan, or other form of computer bug on this PC. I mean, if 
I had myself a bit of a field trip yesterday, going over to Reebok's fancy gym on Columbus Avenue in New York to try out their new 
I guess Apple is serious about gaming now. It just announced, as one of its many iPhone “pillars,” the development of GameCenter, which our man on the scene, Greg Kumparak, described as “Xbox Live for the iPhone.” Match-making, leaderboards, achievement points, the works.
Good news for 
The beauty of the Internet is that it demands instant analysis of every single development to come out of Peoria. The 
This is the lede, verbatim, from a story that appeared in The Hill yesterday: "The Internet allowed extremists to contact, recruit, train and equip the suspect responsible for the attempted Flight 253 bombing on Christmas Day 'within weeks,' a top Pentagon official told lawmakers Wednesday." What's the implication, that because someone used the Internet to plan something, something bad, we should get rid of it? Fine by me, believe me.
Consumer Reports has a new report on which computer company has the best tech support. 
Right around the time the world's financial markets started to collapse, back in 2008, RealNetworks, the folks behind RealPlayer, 
If I may, I'd like to play devil's advocate to something I wrote 
As far as XBMC forks go, Boxee certainly appears to have the most heat. It has VC money pouring in, flashy deals with content providers, and you'll soon be able to buy 
There was plenty of talk ever since Lehman Brothers exploded in mid-2008 about how would consumers cope. Would they keep buying widgets in the face of insane job cuts? Would they keep buying, but only at a fraction of what they had in the past? Let's take PC sales, a pretty good barometer of where the average person is. (It's a big purchase, but not like buying a car or house.) Shipments of new PCs jumped 15 percent in the fourth quarter of last year. That's worldwide, by the way, and much higher than the people who expect things expected. This is good news.
Do not expect 
It's almost January 1st, 2010 and we've been mulling over our favorites of 2009 - and the previous decade. Here we present another installment in our "Of the Decade" lists.
The aughts were a great time for gamers. The decade began auspiciously with the launch of the PlayStation2, and is ending quite nicely with a Nintendo victory that would have been thought impossible a few years ago. More people than ever are gaming, and the business has grown to enormous size. We've chosen the following games as the best representatives of this decade of gaming.
It's been a running theme for the past few years, and as more and more people get faster Internet connections, and as video compression technology continues to improve, we're going to be hearing a lot more about it. I refer, of course (of course!), to illegal streams of live sporting events. Whether you're firing up TVAnts on Sunday to watch Arsenal take on Aston Villa, or trolling USTREAM for a live feed of WWE's Royal Rumble, or looking for MMA-TV to watch this month's UFC pay-per-view, you are, in fact, breaking the law.
Not only are you breaking the law, but you may even be taking money away from the companies/teams/sports you purport to support. But is that all there is to it?
There's a pretty interesting report that was just published today entitled “How much information?” It was put together by the Global Information Industry of the University of California at San Diego. It looks at the year 2008 and tries to quantify how much information the average American consumes across all forms of media: TV, newspaper, Web sites, radio, you name it. When you crunch all the numbers, it looks like the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of data every single day. (That's 3.6 zettabytes in total.) That's a lot, yes.
You 
We're only about five weeks away from Christmas, so now's as good a time as any to talk about (drum roll, please) e-books. Amazon kick-started the e-book market (with apologies to earlier e-book readers) with the introduction of the Kindle in the fall of 2007. Two years later, Barnes and Noble, IREX, and Sony announced new or updated e-book readers of their own.
The question becomes, which e-book reader is right for you? The truth is, they're all very similar, so it should come down to what books their compatible book stores carry. Oh, and price, of course.
As of next Tuesday, November 17, you'll be able to access 
Not that every media outlet on Planet Earth doesn't already have all of the details, but Team CrunchGear (Jimin and I... we're right up there with The Mega Powers) is here at Barnes and Noble's big reveal here in New York. Technically, we're at Pier 60 right along the Hudson River. Not that you care.
Seeing as though we're not live, I thought I'd offer my take on what's going on. Jimin is on pics, so full props to him for bringing a camera.
First impressions... well, they're playing what I can best describe as Chicago house music. And there's all sorts of blue mood lighting. It's a very festive atmosphere, and with good reason: e-books are the future, so they say, and if Barnes and Noble screws this up, and cedes any more ground to Amazon and its Kindle, well, yikes. Early indications, however, are that the Nook won't stink on ice. Silly name, but what are you gonna do?
Another day, another e-reader. Toady's is the Plastic Logic Que, which is pronounced like the letter that falls between P and R. I, however, will henceforth pronounce it like the Portuguese word for “what,” and the European Portuguese pronunciation at that. (Sorta sounds like “quh.” It's a movement!) Plastic Logic seems to be aiming it at the business market, which I don't think we've really seen before.
I spoke to Matt Sharp, founder and frontman of The Rentals, a few weeks back as a result of my weird fascination with film photography. (Incidentally, I have 
Embattled ratings company Nielsen has published some Internet findings that may interest you. (If not, go make a sandwich or something.) The big finding is that mobile access to the Internet has jumped 34 percent compared to last year, and it looks like women, teens and, yes, seniors make up the bulk of that increase. The mobile Internet: not just a place for 20-something men anymore. Darn.
Poor RIM. One or two analysts lower your stock rating from “buy” to “neutral” (or the equivalent), and then your stock drops some 16 percent. You know who to blame, too: it's those busybodies at Apple and Palm, what with their iPhones and Palm Pres eating into your bottom line. (Never mind that your own “iPhone killer” was sorta meh.) What is RIM to do?
Writing a book in 2009 is a tricky thing to pull off. Never mind the research, the interviews, or the writing, but then you have to face facts: who reads in 2009? Unless you're Dan Brown or Stephen King or Glenn Beck, odds are your book, no matter how thorough or well-written, isn't exactly going to fly off the shelves. What will fly off the virtual shelves, though, is an iPhone App. You see where I'm headed.
Adam Penenberg, who's a contributing writer over at Fast Company magazine (and an old professor of mine from back in my NYU days), has developed an iPhone and Facebook App called “Viral Loop” to help raise awareness of his latest book, Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves. Let's take a look.
It has come to my attention that the music industry 
You get the feeling that Palm had something to hide today. On the surface that makes no sense, considering it officially announced the Pixi, the company's second webOS-based phone, this morning. (The company's first webOS phone, the Pre, launched to much fanfare last May, owing to an almost Bill Goldberg winning streak-like level of hype.) But as you're already aware, Apple had an announcement or two of its own today, including the inclusion of a digital camera on the iPod nano. It's unfortunate, but Apple events are really the black holes of this industry: on Apple event days, no other tech news can escape out into the wild. That is to say, unless your company name is Apple, Inc., you'd be better served laying low for the day, and make any announcements later in the week.
Watching the news come in yesterday about the 
When was the last time you read your AT&T contract? If you answered “never,” then may I suggest you take two minutes to look this over. That's right, unbeknownst to you, you just lost the ability to enter into a class action lawsuit against the mobile phone carrier. High five!
Sorry, but 
Years ago, London ruled one-fourth of the world's population. Now? Training its civil servants how to tweet “issues of relevance or upcoming events.”
The UK's Cabinet Office 
New iPods usually come out in September, right? There or thereabouts, at any rate. Well then maybe we should look into 
“As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between. But a little whining from Apple isn’t going to stop Microsoft from running the ads.” Looks like Devin was right, as he often is. Microsoft has updated the “Laptop Hunter” ad that had annoyed Apple, and now it's much more benign.
Click through to see the video. You'll notice that the lines have changed somewhat. In the original version, the lines were, “This Mac is $2,000, and that's before adding anything... Why would you pay twice the price?”
Now the line is, “"It seems like you're paying a lot more for the brand.”
The brand isn't mentioned by name, of course.
This is a video featuring 
So I just bought 
Well look at that, 
There's a 
Dearest CrunchGear readers: I recently had the honor and privilege of speaking to Karen Dyer, who is not only the voice of Sheva Alomar, from Resident Evil 5, but who also did said character's motion capture. I hope you enjoy it on this day, our day of freedom.
Obviously, “K” is for Karen, and “N” is for Nicholas. With that...
N: Well, first off congratulations. Resident Evil 5 was a big hit. It sold something like 4 million copies.
K: That's what I hear!
N: Excellent. But before we get into the game, I just wanted to bring up something I saw on your bio. It says here you're known for your circus skills, and I just wanted to say how that awesome that is. And I wanted to ask, where do you study that? Because I don't know if your average community college offers that type of training.
The Palm Pre—you may have heard of it—comes out on Saturday, but all sorts of media “outlets” have already published their reviews; I don't know when our review will go up. And since it's my feeling that most of you already assume the phone is “good,” I've gone ahead and collected a few excerpts of the more critical points. You know, the part of the review that goes something like, “Now, the Palm Pre isn't perfect; we found a few problems with it. And they are...” That part. So let's get on with it.
From the 
A new survey shows that 1 in 4 Americans 
Oh, Internet! This here is a silly video showing a future version of the Amazon Kindle, the Kindle 9 XXXD. Why, it's so big it can't possibly be practical to use!
And, for the record, I could have sworn I saw this same concept—examine what a current gadget will look like in the future, to humorous results—on 
Thenew iTunes pricing scheme is set for an April 7 launch, says the Los Angeles Times. They do good work over there. Apple hasn't revealed this date publicly, but April 7 is supposedly what Cupertino is telling record labels. Remember: prices now top out at $1.29 for popular songs. Think Britney Spears—she's still popular, right?—Lady Gaga, anything with Auto Tune, etc. This country, I swear. (Although, let the record show, I do like Taylor Swift, which makes me a complete hypocrite and a half-idiot. And I'm not even talking about, “Wow, she's hot,” I actually mean I enjoy her music.)
One of the highlights of last week's SXSW show, aside from seeing the Austin Crew again (hi, guys!), was when I spent some time talking to a few of the guys from Rhapsody, just like I did last year. The conversation touched a number of topics, but the one I found most interesting for us here at CrunchGear (and, maybe, for the broader TechCrunch audience) was the changing notion of music ownership. That is, now that most of us are at least familiar with streaming, on-demand music from pick-your-service (Imeem, Pandora, Spotify, Rhapsody, etc.), will people still see music as a “thing” that they'll own, or more like a service that they'll tap into whenever the need arises? Will people still want to (CLING TO) own a finite number of MP3s on their iPod, or will they prefer to have their music on The Cloud, using a device (say, the iPhone) that can call upon any song in The Cloud's database at will? A sort of, “Shoot, I wish I had that U2 song on my iPod right now” versus, “Here, let me stream that U2 song for you.” And, if people are becoming more comfortable with this type of music consumption, where does that leave traditional, download-to-own services like iTunes and Amazon MP3? The things we think about!
Here's a fun hypothetical. Let's say you're Palm, and you've poured untold sums of money and time into 
There's something wrong with CBS Radio's press release announcing the launch, complete with silly “countdown,” of 92.3 Now FM in New York City, a contemporary hit radio station that will replace K-Rock on Wednesday, March 11, at 5:00pm. (Contemporary hit radio, in plain English, means garbage pop songs, distinguished by their use of auto-tune and use of lowest-common-denominator song-writing.) CBS Radio Senior Vice-President of Something or Other, Don Bouloukos, is quoted in the release as saying, “Our assets in the country’s No. 1 market include among them the best known brands in the business. From the most listened to news and sports stations in the country, to the classic sounds of WCBS FM and the adult contemporary styling of Fresh 102.7, CBS RADIO offers something for everyone in the market – including young adults who are using the radio to discover today’s most popular music as featured on 92.3 NOW FM.” [Emphasis added, obviously.] And that, friends, is why the radio business, as we know it, is truly doomed. No, Mr. Bouloukos, young people are not turning on their radio to discover new music; they're certainly not sticking around to listen to new music on a commercial radio station. No, sir, that's what the Internet is for, and thats why your business has no future.
Well done to the Authors Guild! Amazon revealed last night that the 
How much time do you spend online, America? [Waits for answer.] That's funny because the average teenager 
So there's this site Out There called 
Imagine you're at your wedding doing the ol' “
Go to Metacritic, which is destroying the video game industry, by the way, and check out the Tomb Raider: Underworld's 
Did you hear the news? Craigslist is completely broken now, unless you use it for things like “finding apartments” or “selling stolen goods.” Why? The site has 
Do you remember how, earlier in the year, New York's attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, 