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Critics pile on HP as Moody's cuts rating

Moody's cut Hewlett-Packard's rating today, topping a day marked by a rash of critical articles about the Silicon Valley giant.

Moody's Investor Services cut HP's long-term credit rating to Baa1, three levels above junk, from A3, according to Bloomberg. The rating agency said that HP's "credit profile will remain weaker than previously expected over the intermediate term," among other reasons.

This comes in the wake of an $8.8 billion writedown related to alleged fraudulent accounting at Autonomy, the software company HP acquired last year.

And HP's core businesses aren't faring … Read more

NYC payphones get revived as touch-screen tablets

Payphones are a dying breed, which will probably make some people yearn for our simple past and others celebrate our tech-filled future.

New York City and two companies, Cisco Systems and City 24/7, announced today that they're officially commencing their plan to transform those endangered species into 32-inch touch-screen information kiosks, a.k.a. "Smart Screens," around the city, according to GigaOM.

The idea was originally introduced in April and the companies have been testing the pilot project over the last few months. Now, the Smart Screens are officially live and a handful of kiosks are … Read more

NYC's Silicon Alley badly trails Silicon Valley in startup influence

With the success of companies like Tumblr, Foursquare, and Kickstarter, New York's startup scene has gotten a lot of attention recently.

But despite the influence of those outfits and venture capitalists like Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, the Big Apple is a backwater when it comes to the world startup scene, according to a new report from the Startup Genome project.

In the study, New York City came in as just the fifth-ranked startup ecosystem in the world, trailing Silicon Valley, Israel's Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and Seattle.

To come up with its rankings, the Startup Genome -- … Read more

New York Times T'd off at Twitter font mockery

It's hard not to love the New York Times. There's so much "there" there that it's like a lover who has so many facets you can't embrace them all at once.

And yet one of those facets is that the Times is sometimes touchy.

Indeed, it has just engineered the blocking of a Twitter account, ostensibly because it doesn't enjoy the idea of the account having an avatar that includes the Times' legendary 't' -- which is something of a trademark.

For some, this might appear to be a storm in a t-cup. … Read more

Nintendo fans line up early for the Wii U

Thursday's CNET Update is ready for the next level:

Nintendo's Wii U goes on sale Sunday, and gamers are lining up early at the Nintendo World store in New York. The first in line is the Power Glove-wearing super fan Isaiah Triforce Johnson. He's been paid by corporate sponsors while waiting outside the store for nearly a month. Other fans began showing up on Monday and Tuesday.

This Nintendo World store will sell the first Wii U console at a midnight launch event. The system comes in two models, a Basic Set in white for $300, and … Read more

Pay for sexy Instagram pics, help Sandy victims

Photographer Clayton Cubitt is using some of his recent, slightly naughtier work to entice donations for Hurricane Sandy victims, but with a unique Instagram- and Twitter-based twist.

For every $200 donated to Occupy Sandy Recovery, the photographer based in New York and New Orleans releases one of his sexy #babesofsandy photos on Instagram.

So far we've only seen two storm babe shots, including one that's complete with the requisite DOLCat (drooling on laptop) and another that would would win the approval of Sir Mix-A-Lot. With a little more attention to the cause, hopefully Cubitt will need to fill a few memory cards with some more sexiness soon.… Read more

Among the top election quants, Nate Silver reigns supreme

While there's already been whole swimming pools of ink devoted to the Election Day prediction performance of polling aggregators like FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver, CNET is ready to hand out one more round of kudos to the king of the quants.

By now, anyone following the presidential election knows that Silver successfully predicted the winner in the race between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in all 50 states. That performance was one for the ages, earning him worldwide admiration and validating a polling aggregation model that had drawn mockery and ire from many pundits.

But … Read more

Verizon won't charge Sandy victims for voice and text usage

As Hurricane Sandy bore down on the East Coast last week, millions of residents were left without power, cell phone service, Internet, and home phone service. In an outpouring of support for people left stranded by the superstorm, several mobile carriers took to the streets offering free device charging stations and access to emergency wireless phones.

Verizon announced this week that it will continue to help Sandy victims by waiving all charges for domestic voice and text usage for its customers in the New York and New Jersey areas between October 29 and November 16.

"Verizon Wireless continues to … Read more

Obama's win a big vindication for Nate Silver, king of the quants

In the end, big data won.

Not the presidential election -- although there's no doubt that President Obama's victory tonight was aided by a sophisticated understanding of the American electorate born of years of analysis of voting trends and demographic shifts.

No, big data -- and its patron saint, Nate Silver -- won the battle to predict the outcome of the contest between Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Where breathless pundits brandishing equivocating polls shouted from the rooftops over the last few weeks that the race for the White House was a "tossup," or &… Read more

See Hurricane Sandy's impact on the Internet

When Superstorm Sandy struck the northeastern U.S. coast earlier this week, it brought a swath of destruction that harmed people, places, and even Internet connectivity.

Check out a fascinating video by research firm Renesys that shows Sandy's impact on New England Internet routing networks during the hurricane's landfall on October 29. The clip reveals the tremendous damage inflicted upon servers that direct Internet traffic in the area, with the greatest losses seen along the heavily flooded New York and New Jersey coastlines.… Read more