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Ready for a Netflix button on your remote control?
Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: Corporate News, Home Entertainment, Internet, Movies,
Netflix today announced that streaming from Watch Instantly movies on your TV will be even simpler, as they've struck deals with several device makers including Dynex, Haier, Memorex, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, and Toshiba that will see a dedicated Netflix button added to the remote control. Starting this spring, new devices will apparently come with a remote that features the Netflix logo prominently, giving one-button access to the service. This will include some Blu-ray disc players and Internet connected TVs. According to the company's Chief Product Officer: "No more turning on the TV, going to a home screen and searching for the Netflix icon. With the Netflix one-click remote, it's simply a matter of pushing the Netflix button to instantly watch any of the vast selection of TV shows and movies available to stream from Netflix." The company has been working steadily to increase its reach, and is now available on almost any connected device one can think of.
Read More 
| Yahoo! News
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Top 10 most read Gear Live stories of 2010
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Wearables, Features, Internet, Mods / Hacks, Software,
Sure, we've given you a list of our top 10 most read stories of 2010, but we figured we'd go a bit more broad than that. We also thought it would be interesting to give you a look at the top ten most read stories on this site this year, period, regardless of what year they were posted. We must say, we're just as surprised as you are at what did (and didn't) make the list! Click on through to check out the full list!
Click to continue reading Top 10 most read Gear Live stories of 2010
Skype, other VoIP, may be illegal in China
Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: Internet, Software,
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According to a story in China's major newspaper, People's Daily, it appears that the Chinese government has declared all VoIP solutions not provided by the government's own China Telecom and China Unicorn to be illegal. This would make Skype, the most popular VoIP service, illegal as well. So far, Skype denies that it has been banned, and users in China keep using the service, but if the government were to apply this new rule, this would be a major drawback for Chinese users, and westerners traveling to the country.
Read More | People's Daily
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A week after the biggest Skype outage in recent memory (it lasted around 24 hours,) the company CIO posted an interesting rundown of how and why the failure occurred, giving a glimpse as to how Skype works behind the scenes. On Wednesday, December 22, a Skype server handling offline messaging became overloaded, resulting in delayed messages. Due to a bug, a version of Skype for Windows did not process those delayed messages correctly, which made them crash. This led to around 25% of the total Skype supernodes, the clients directing connections and logins in the Skype network, to crash. Since Skype clients have protections built in so that they do not overload the systems they run on, the large amount of crashed clients being restarted caused a massive load on the network, causing more supernodes to shut down to protect themselves. Almost the whole Skype network was thus brought to a halt. Check out the post to view more details, and how the Skype team brought everything back online.
Read More | Skype
100 most searched terms on BitTorrent
Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: Internet, Movies, Software,
At the end of the year, search engines publish their lists of most search terms, indicating what the trend online is. From a more underground source however, TorrentFreak has compiled their list of top 100 search terms on BitTorrent for 2010. They got their search data from KickassTorrents, one of the top 10 BitTorrent sites, with a few hundred of million searches per year. The top search term ended up being "Inception", followed by "Iron Man 2", "2010" and "xxx". All 100 top terms are shown on their site, but it's clear what people go to BitTorrent sites for. Most of the words are movie titles, followed by porn keywords. Notably, Microsoft Windows 7 picked up the 20th spot.
Read More | TorrentFreak
Skype goes down for millions of users
Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: Corporate News, Internet,
Skype suffered a major outage yesterday where many users, possibly millions, were left without service. It started early in the morning, with people finding that they were unable to login, see their friends list, or place calls. At first, Skype tweeted that they were looking into the issue, but it soon became clear that the problem was affecting a large number of people, for several hours.
Skype put up a blog post in the afternoon to explain what the situation was, and how it was a problem affecting many users that caused the number of supernodes, those systems that are used by the Skype network to connect calls and process logins, to be taken offline. They added that they are working on creating "mega-supernodes" to take over that role and rectify the problem. According to their estimates, voice calls should be functioning within hours, but video calls and group features may be down longer. This may end up being one of the most serious issue that the company has had in the past several years.
Read More | Skype
FCC approves net neutrality rules, not good enough
Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: Corporate News, Internet,
Yesterday, a major decision passed through the FCC as it voted on new rules that will govern the sticky issue of net neutrality in the US. Net neutrality has been a wildly debated subject for years, with everyone from content web sites, Internet providers, wired and wireless networks, and organizations representing end users being all over the map on this subject. Some wanted the government to pass new regulations that would prevent Internet providers from say, slowing down your access to Netflix just because they have their own video site that they want you to use instead. Others argued that if the government does get involved, it could bring much more trouble for the Internet as a whole than the benefit it would add. Others still argued that the free market will handle itself, and that no rules should be added.
So far there had been no real decision either way, with the FCC, the body mandated to govern those things, not having made any clear decision. This changed today as the institution passed a set of rules that help define this. The rules are quite complicated, but suffice it to say pretty much everyone who isn't a big business is unhappy with them. On one side, the new rules do prevent Internet providers from blocking or slowing down access to competing web sites, but it does allow content providers to pay networks to have access to a fast line, bringing their data in priority. Many say the rules are too broad and vague, and fail to address some points. It also leaves a lot of freedoms to wireless providers to, for example, block access to specific apps on your cellphone.
While the debate rages on however, it's important to recognize that these rules simply give formal authority to the federal government to regulate these issues, it doesn't directly change the rules of the game for companies. The new rules will go into effect next year, and could still be blocked by Congress. They are also likely to be challenged in court by any of the parties involved in the discussions.
You can help show your support in the fight for net neutrality at Save the Internet.
Read More | WSJ
When Google introduced phone call capabilities in Gmail back in August, they promised that calls to the US and Canada would be free until the end of the year. Now, Google posted on their blog that they will be extending that period of free calling for another year, throughout 2011. They are doing it in the spirit of the Holidays, and hoping it will help people stay in touch in 2011. In case you haven't tried it yet, you can access the feature by turning Google Chat on in your Gmail account, on the left side of the screen, and then click on the "Call Phone" feature. From our experience, calls are not always as high quality as something like Skype, but you certainly can't beat the price.
Read More | Google Blog
Add true retweet functionality to Tweetie for Mac with ReTweetie
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Internet, Software,
We know a ton of Mac users who use Tweetie for Mac as their desktop client of choice. However, since Twitter acquired Tweetie, they've kind of put the desktop client on the back burner. It still works and all, but newer features like lists and retweet are sorely missed. However, thanks to developer Nick Paulson, there's now a free SIMBL plugin that forces Tweetie to use Twitter's native retweeting functionality. We highly recommend it for all Tweetie users out there.
Read More | ReTweetie
Google Chrome now has over 8,500 extensions
Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: Google, Internet, Software,
Last week, Google put up a blog post with some statistics on their Chrome browser. Of note, the browser now has over 8,500 extensions and 1,500 themes, which have been installed over 70 million times. They also describe some of the latest updates the browser has had such as the sync feature, better HTML5 support and new APIs for developers. Google also promises that they will not be slowing down the amount of new features. On the roadmap they say new APIs will be added for things like the omnibox and pinned tabs, as well as download management and network interception. With the release of the Chrome Web Store this week, Google is clearly positioning themselves as one of the top players in the browser market.
Read More | Google Chrome Blog
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