Episode 1165

The rumor mill has it that Amazon wants to give its Prime subscribers a free Kindle. Like, all of them. We think that fails the sniff test, but we might be hypersensitive because of the ridiculous rumor mill that briefly killed off the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi this week. Oh, and Google's working on fixing Buzz. Thanks, Google. --Molly
==Stories Covered==
====Top Stories====
=====No Show Monday!=====
Google to make Buzz changes based on userfeedback
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users-and-improvements.html
Brief Macworld 2010 overview
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/02/11/urnidgns852573C400693880002576C800034E18.DTL
http://www.macworld.com/article/146297/2010/02/bos2010_winners.html
The iPad that launched a thousand apps
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/02/12/ipad-buzz-launched-1600-new-apps/
====Other Stories====
TiVo to unveil new DVR on March 2?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10451817-1.html
Rumors of Palm Pre/Pixi deathgreatly exaggerated
http://www.cnet.com/8301-17918_1-10452140-85.html
Amazon Wants To Give A Free Kindle To All Amazon Prime Subscribers
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/12/amazon-wants-to-give-a-free-kindle-to-all-amazon-prime-subscribers/
Slight dip in Google’s January searchmarketshare
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10452235-265.html
Video Game sales still struggling – Mass Effect 2 takes silver as Jan. sales slip 13% -NPD
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6250305.html?tag=latestheadlines;title;2
====Kickers and Science====
FAA Data Shows Exploding Batteries Are Rare, SmallRisk
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/02/11/2252214/FAA-Data-Shows-Exploding-Batteries-Are-Rare-Small-Risk
==Voicemail==
Andrew on what it takes for him to buy an iPad
Michael aka MC Fisticuffs on Tom’s prediction
==Emails==
Tom,
Heard you guys ask about a template for a DMCA counter template. With my recent dealings with OnLive I found just that:
http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca/counter512.pdf
Ryan Shrout
PC Perspective
----
Hey Tomolito(?):
Regarding episode 1163 and Read Write Web thing, just thought we’d
mention something we’ve been talking about for about two years.
Facebook = AOL circa 1997. Think about it…
1) It has its own mail/messaging system? Check.
2) It has chat? Check.
3) It’s feared as a place for online predation? Check.
4) It’s valued well beyond reason? Check.
5) Most importantly: Companies advertise their page on AOL/Facebook
instead of their website? (“Visit us at AOL keyword ‘Chevy’.” or
“Visit us at Facebook.com/Chevy”) Check.
Who knows, maybe Facebook will try to buy a studio. :)
Thanks, guys, and keeping on buzzing!
Mo & Vij
The Boys From Boston
PS – Welcome back, Molly! Your rants are like manna to our ears.
----
Dear Buzz Crew,
I love the show. But lately my favorite new gadget (Droid Eris) has been getting dissed on your show. First you talked about multi-touch on the Nexus ONe and how none of the other Android phones have multi-touch. Well actually, my Droid Eris has always had multi-touch in the browser and the photo album. Then Tom suggested Molly get her mom a Droid Eris because it is not as advanced as the Motorola Droid That made it sound like a glorified texting phone! It is true that the Motorola has 2.0 and the Eris only has 1.5. It “DOES” pretty much everything that the Motorola Droid can do and it is rumored to be getting 2.1 by the end of March. Thanks for listening to my “Tina Rant”!
Tina in Omaha
----
Jamoto, 
I need to rant about this. I am a developer of a free iphone
XMPP client called Monal. I was really excited to hear that Facebook
finally opened up their network to XMPP clients after promising it for
years. I raced home to try it out and discovered that they had done
probably one of the worst implementations ever. The chat does not use
SSL encryption unlike almost every other server. Better yet, they
decided to use an authentication scheme called Digest-MD5, which aside
from having varying implementations and compatibility problems was
DEPRECATED by the IETF in January 2009 ( https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-sasl-digest-to-historic
) because it can be cracked. Facebook has just opened up a gaping
hole in their security. Someone at facebook needs to be fired.
The link above explains many of the problems with Digest-MD5 but this
is the best one.
8. The cryptographic primitives in DIGEST-MD5 are not up to today’s
standards, in particular:
A. The MD5 hash is sufficiently weak to make a brute force
attack on DIGEST-MD5 easy with common hardware.
B. Using the RC4 algorithm for the security layer without
discarding the initial key stream output is prone to attack.
-Anu
the programmer in Boston
==After The Credits==