Ben’s Tech Show

Written by Ben Straw

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Co-hosts for the show

Corey Charette From Average Joe Show
Dan Stebbins

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News Story’s For This Week

Hacker gets biggest prison time to date
A skilled San Francisco computer intruder was sentenced here Friday to 13 years in federal prison for stealing nearly two million credit card numbers from banks, businesses and other hackers — in what is the longest hacking sentence in U.S. history.
Max Ray Vision, 37, was also ordered to pay $27.5 million in restitution, and to serve five years under court supervision following his release, during which time he’ll be allowed to use computers only for legitimate employment or education

China Jails Man 13 Years For Running Porn Site
A man in southern China was sentenced to 13 years in jail for running a pornographic Web site, a state news agency reported Sunday, amid a national crackdown on lewd online content.The court in the Guangdong province city of Jiangmen handed down the sentence to Huang Yizhong and fined him 100,000 yuan ($14,600), the official Xinhua News Agency said.

Google to offer ‘ultra high-speed’ broadband in US
Google is spreading its wings in yet another direction – this time as a network provider, offering super-fast broadband to thousands of US homes. It plans to build a fibre-optic network offering speeds of up to 1Gbps (gigabit per second) to up to 500,000 homes.
http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/public/options

FCC Wants 100Mbps Broadband in 100 Million Homes
Almost a year after the FCC first announced their National Broadband Plan, some new details have started to emerge. Specifically: A plan to give 100 million households 100Mbps broadband.

Arizona school bus gains WiFi, students suddenly chill out and get productive
Nearly three years after an Arkansas school launched a trial that delivered laptops, iPods and wireless internet to a bus, an Arizona school district is discovering the merits of such a system — though with this one, there stands a good chance for it to go well beyond the “pilot” phase. Students in Vail, Arizona have been able to handle school assignments, engage in research and even update their Facebook status on the lengthy rides to and from school, and the suits responsible for hooking Bus No. 92 up have stated that mischief has all but subsided and the bus has magically morphed into something of a “rolling study hall.”

Olympic luge tragedy used by malware to exploit you
With the interest in the video of Nodar Kumaritashvili’s fatal luge accident at the Winter Olympics has remained high over the past few days, dominating Google Trends. But malware peddlers have quickly caught wind, and are using the video as an opportunity to spread malware to unsuspecting users.Like similar scams that spread via video, you arrive at what appears to be a YouTube embed, but are then asked to install new software in order to watch it That software is actually malware, and can wreak havoc on a victim’s computer.
Hardware anti-virus patent awarded to Russian lab
The Russian Kaspersky Lab has itself a shiny, new U.S. patent for a “hardware-based anti-virus system.” The basic idea is to run an anti-virus mechanism at a level lower than what a rootkit can penetrate.

The full patent description is as follows:

An anti-virus (AV) system based on a hardware-implemented AV module for curing infected computer systems and a method for updating AV databases for effective curing of the computer system. The hardware-based AV system is located between a PC and a disk device. The hardware-based AV system can be implemented as a separate device or it can be integrated into a disk controller. An update method of the AV databases uses a two-phase approach. First, the updates are transferred to from a trusted utility to an update sector of the AV system. Then, the updates are verified within the AV system and the AV databases are updated. The AV system has its own CPU and memory and can be used in combination with AV application.

Are your passwords protected?
Analysis of the 32 million passwords exposed last month in the breach of social media application developer RockYou – who’s applications can be used on Facebook and Myspace – provides further proof that consumers routinely use easy-to-guess login credentials.

Google says No to AU censorship
Google says it will not “voluntarily” comply with the government’s request that it censor YouTube videos in accordance with broad “refused classification” (RC) content rules.
University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt, one of Australia’s top communications experts, said that to comply with Conroy’s request Google “would have to install a filter along the lines of what they actually have in China”.

Apple looking at Fairplay DRM for its ebooks
Apparently they think that a different medium somehow deserves different treatment. I don’t think they understand that e-books, movies, music, and whatever else gets sold on a digital marketplace are all completely interchangeable as far as DRM strategy goes: you can do it, but people won’t like it, and eventually you’ll have to relent. And the fun part is that the DRM will not be effective — since the people who want to circumvent the DRM will always find a way to do so, and those who don’t want to do it wouldn’t try in the first place.

Steve Jobs to Collaborate on Authorized Biography [RUMOR]
Apple hasn’t officially commented yet, but according to The New York Times, Steve Jobs may finally cooperate on an authorized biography.Other biographers have attempted to tell Mr. Jobs’s life story without his express involvement or even consent, prompting him to respond by yanking books by the same publishers from Apple stores. Now two sources have confirmed to the Times that former Time magazine managing editor Walter Isaacson will get Jobs’s cooperation in producing an authorized biography of the Apple CEO.
iMac burns, melts, survives to tell the gruesome tale
Anders Norman of Sweden recently suffered a major house fire, but has emerged from it with some good humor and a scorched but amazingly still functional computer. He tells us that even the mouse’s scroll wheel is operational and he took a picture of the iMac displaying the local news website’s report of his home’s unfortunate demise.

Even Kingston Knocks Off Kingston microSD Cards?
Kingston appears to buy all the actual flash storage chips inside their microSD cards from Sandisk/Toshiba, yet they often still manage to undercut the microSD prices of manufacturers like Sandisk and Samsung. Of course, Kingston needs to make up the money somewhere, and the controller chip is the only other place that’s possible. So Kingston may be stretching their thresholds of controller chip quality to make profitability possible—at minimum, the impetus is certainly there.