This article was just written over at TheNextWeb. I didnt want to just rewrite the article for everyone so here is what they said. I was wondering if anyone has any answers, mainly because this is a Gmail account and could affect millions of people.
BBC Watchdog is British TV program that investigates viewers’ reports of problematic experiences with traders, retailers, and other companies around the UK. A recent investigation has discovered that wi-fi hot spots across the country are not secure – leaving tens of thousands of users at risk of fraud.
In this particular case they reveal how easy it is to hack into someones GMail account over Wifi, sending emails and changing their password. According to Danny Sullivan who shared the link on Twitter, if he’d signed via secure https, he’d probably have been safe – can anyone verify?
ScreenTunes is a free search tool that helps users find where a song has been played in any piece of professionally-produced video content. You just type in the name of the song and it tells you all the films and TV shows in which it’s appeared. You can then listen to the track right from the results (using Grooveshark), or purchase the track on iTunes or Amazon’s online stores.
Along with acting as a search tool for individual songs, ScreenTunes can be used to look up a track by its lyrics. This also works on entire movie titles, so you can type the name to get a quick track list.
ScreenTunes is a very hit and miss service at the moment and I noticed it takes a lot time to actually load the Grooveshark section at times. Additionally, I noticed there are still lots of searches that yield zero results, I guess they will build their catalogue size over time. Clearly you get better results if it’s a mainstream track, but it’s surprising to see how many places any one song can end up.
Voddler is a new video startup that launch back in private beta back in July 2009. Currently it is rumoured that only 1,500 people have access to the site, so we wanted to run through the service for everyone else.
Voddler won’t be launched officially until sometime this fall, and then only in the Nordic countries for starters. The agenda is to go global, though.
Voddler aims to do for movies and TV series what Spotify is doing for music. Although in private beta Voddler already seems to be getting a lot of buzz in Scandinavia, so we hope to let everyone else know about it.
Voddler is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, Voddler will also be providing a Linux-based box with a pre-installed client that you can easily connect to your TV to get that home cinema feel.
Here below is a screenshot of the latest design of the landing page, designed to work best on widescreen televisions.
Movies are of course a lot more bandwidth-intensive than music. How well Voddler works for you will depend on your Internet connection. To get 1080p HD quality you should have an 8 Mbit/s connection, for 720p HD quality you should have a 5 Mbit/s connection, and for DVD quality you should have a 2.5 Mbit/s connection. Contrast this with Spotify which only has to deal with music streaming and therefore works just fine with a mere 256 kbit/s connection.
There have been a lot of people reporting about the Pirate Bay’s new video site, Techcrunch UK, Mashable and Boy Genius, but the story was broken by the leading site in the Torrent space, TorrentFreak.
The basics of the story are as follows, the Pirate Bay team has continued developing its video streaming site – which will open up to the public within 5 years. On The Video Bay users can share video clips without having to worry about getting them taken offline due to copyright violations, true Pirate Bay-style.
The Pirate Bay team themselves announced about 2 years ago that they were working on a video streaming site, but we had no idea when we would actually see something. Pirate Bay Spokesman Peter Sunde agreed that it might take a while before the site goes live and told us that “it will be done when it’s done, in the future, in like a year or five.”
Bing the new search engine from Microsoft launched on the 1st of June and since then they have been getting a lot of hype and even people moving over to use their service. I personally cant see the difference between Bing and Live.com in terms of results, if anyone can let me know how they are different that would be great.
Anyways, Microsoft has just launched the first advertisement for their new search engine Bing and here it is!
Reddit the content voting service that was purchased by Conde Naste has announced the launch of Reddit TV. Several other recommendation and voting services have already launch specific TV sections, but for Reddit this move was definitely needed and I think its a great move.
There are so many user generated video sites available on the internet these days, but sometimes you might not want to see user generated content. Thus, I thought I would put together a very quick list of the best places to view the news online as if you were watching it direct from your television at home.
Livestation – Livestation is a free downloadable video players that streams live news, events, shows from some of the world biggest media companies. Livestation includes services like the BBC, CNN, Fox, MTV, Al Jazeera and more. The service is easy to download and it great to use. The player itself can be changed to any size and you are able to add additional news and radio sources that can be found on the Livestation website.
BBC iPlayer – The BBC iPlayer has been around for quite some time now, and even though they got a lot of harsh press at launch they have been quitely improving the service and it actually now isnt that bad. The iPlayer is a great place to head when you are looking for what has been happening from around the world in the last few days. On the iPlayer they have a dedicated section to BBC News in which will keep you up to date with the major headlines.
Hulu – Hulu is a partnership between News Corp and NBC Universal. Hulu is for USA users only at the moment and it allows them to watch their favourite TV shows, movies and of course news programs all for free. Hulu was born when News Corp and NBC werent happy with the revenues they were receiving from YouTube, so they formed a strategic alliance and launched a free online television service that has been growing at a rapid pace. Hulu has a dedicated news section which allows users to view news from major USA sources as well as smaller sources like Cnet.
As Mashable has reported this morning, Joost has now moved to a web based version. If you don’t know what Joost is, it is basically a television streaming service but without the ads. There are hundred of channels to choose from and you are able to watch programs straight in your browser.
Joost has channels in a variety of sectors, old television programs, sports, news, music videos and more. It is totally free to watch and can be viewed from any country in the world, unlike Hulu.
When you head over to the site all you need to do is register and then download the plugin that launches the application within your browser, and thats it.
For the last few months I have been testing out a new online TV service called LiveStation. LiveStation is an interactive live TV platform, which allows users to watch tv stations in one simple platform and with perfect streaming quality.
Currently, Livestation is in private beta and has already signed content deals with Bloomberg, Euro News, France 24, Russia Today, Aljazeera and the BBC. The technology they have developed is world class. Due to the platform being straight forward it should also be possible to add a lot more content channels in a variety of genres and every across on to radio.
Currently we have 10 invites free to send to Crenk readers, so simply just leave a message and I will send out invites across.
Pitchfork TV is now live. What are my first thoughts! Well the site itself has a very simple design (as you can see from the image below), it has a main window on the left side to actually show the videos and then a scroll bar on the right for navigation. What does annoy me though is that the scroll bar size is limited on the page. At the moment the site is just like a basic YouTube channel. It doesnt have actual live shows or interviews, it is just basic recorded performances from selected artists and also recordings from live events. So nothing too special here.
Pitchfork,tv launches this Monday. Yesterday, the regular Pitchfork site offered a few behind-the-scenes segments as a primer, and it announced that Monday’s lineup will include an exclusive Radiohead performance. Listening Post got a preview and has a thorough post on the upcoming site.
It has been about 3 months since Revision3 launched the new version of their site and now they have been acquired. Techcrunch reports that in Episode 143 of Diggnation: Hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht announce the sale of Revision3 to Fox News at about the 2:05 mark. Rose says “Well, ah, we basically have a big announcement for everyone. Revision3 has been acquired by a bigger company. We’ll be moving to Fox News.†He added “I’m thinking of getting a fox tattoo, its kinda part of my signing bonus, if i do it i get a little extra money.â€
It’s an early (very early) April Fool’s joke, of course. Jump to the 3:45 mark. They are clearly playing off a story from two weeks ago, spread quickly via a credulous Robert Scoble Twitter message, that CNET had acquired Revision3 for $58 million. Bloody April Fool’s jokes. I think the American companies take it a lot more serious than any others. Well it was a nice way to get publicity and damm it, i fell into the trap!
