E-Commerce News: Tech Blog

HBO Swings iTunes Deal With Some Premium Pricing

Tuesday - May 13, 2008

Leave it to the network that brought us Tony Soprano to break Apple's iTunes video pricing model. The Time Warner subsidiary and Apple on Tuesday announced that some HBO programming is now available at the online store, with a few shows priced at $2.99 per episode. Apple is selling episodes of "Sex and the City," "The Wire" and "Flight of the Conchords" for $1.99 each; episodes of "The Sopranos," "Deadwood" and "Rome" are priced at $2.99. The company is also offering entire seasons of these shows for sale. [More...]

Breaches Make a Mockery of PCI Security Standards

Tuesday - May 13, 2008

The restaurant-slash-arcade-slash-bar Dave & Buster's is the latest U.S. outlet to suffer a breach of its credit card processing system. Hackers based in Ukraine and Estonia -- assisted by a guy in Miami -- installed packet sniffer malware at the point of sale systems in several D&B outlets. [More...]

Social Net Data Portability: Too Much Information?

Monday - May 12, 2008

It seems as though everyone wants to be both social and portable these days. Google, Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace all have recently trumpeted their latest efforts at openness. Are they really the same? In some cases -- Yahoo and Google, primarily -- the OpenSocial framework is providing a set of standards to ensure interoperability among the applications themselves. [More...]

P2P and P4P: The Tangled Web We Weave

Wednesday - May 7, 2008

It was Monday morning, and Haiyong Xie was running late. His flight to Los Angeles had been delayed, and then he had to face LA's beastly morning traffic. Xie, of Yale University, was on his way to the P2P Media Summit at the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel to take part in a panel discussion about the P4P Working Group. [More...]

CinemaNow: The Phone Is the Box Office, Not the Theater

Tuesday - April 29, 2008

The online delivery of movies and TV content is encumbered by a tangle of digital rights management, copyright and technological issues. The cell phone's proper place in the whole landscape is one of many difficult questions the industry's trying to sort out. With its new offering, CinemaNow proposes that the cell phone work as a sort of portable box office. [More...]

The Foul Flavor of Force-Fed Vista

Friday - April 25, 2008

Costco and Sam's Club are rationing rice. Friday's reported incident in the Persian Gulf probably has more than a few paranoid individuals stocking up on gasoline. And to top it all off, Microsoft's cutoff date for Windows XP is coming in two months, a decision that's left over 165,000 fans of the OS so upset that they were willing to devote a full three seconds of their lives to sign an online petition to save XP. [More...]

Al Gore's Sudden Case of Secrecy

Thursday - April 17, 2008

When the former vice president of the United States gives a speech at a major technology conference in San Francisco, you'd expect to see a story about it the next day, or -- since it was a technology conference -- later on that same day. You'd see a run-of-the-mill story in the Chronicle, marvel that Gore's still going on about that global warming stuff, then move on to the sports section. [More...]

The PC of Doctor Moreau

Thursday - April 17, 2008

Here's why I can't have nice things: Sometimes I like to tinker, and when I do, I can't stop swimming out of my depth. Nothing in my home is safe from a screwdriver, or worse. Not my car, not the thermostat, not the guitar amp, nothing. My "nice" PC has seen its fair share of registry edits to the operating system -- don't even ask about the test mule. [More...]

Don't Kill the Blogger

Tuesday - April 8, 2008

Here I am tempting fate. Risking my life. Writing a blog post. Bloggers are living on the edge, suggests Matt Richtel. It's harrowing having to come up with all those ideas and translate them into words. The hunger for cyber scoops robs them of sleep. The endless hunt for eyeballs is a merciless slog. [More...]

Live From RSA: Getting Ready for the Security Smackdown

Monday - April 7, 2008

It's quiet on the streets of San Francisco today, the first day of the RSA Security Conference, being held at the Moscone Convention Center south of Market Street. Traffic on the streets is light, so either the cops are doing a good job redirecting the crazy San Francisco traffic, which in this area can almost rival that of New York, or the gloomy economic news has trickled down to the streets. [More...]

The Beauty of Not Asking Permission

Tuesday - April 1, 2008

Last year, when Viacom visited YouTube and spotted shows from MTV, Comedy Central and other content producers it owns, it decided to act quickly -- and the only quick reaction a company of Viacom's size is capable of in that sort of situation is to sue. Only after many months did other giant TV networks put the finishing touches on Hulu, a site that does basically the same thing that YouTube had been doing. [More...]

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