rupert murdoch

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Justin wanted to like the modern take on The Rockettes at Friday's showing, didn't.

- Father of SMS reflects on 20th anniversary of first text.

- News Corp shuts down The Daily.

- These companies hate your guts.

- StickNFind Bluetooth stickers are the best idea you didn't think of.

- Apple trying to patent wireless charging.… Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- The view from inside 'The Daily.'

- Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users.

- A smartwatch that talks to your iPhone.

35 really terrible words recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary.… Read more

The Daily, News Corp.'s iPad-only news application, said today that it is laying off 50 employees, or nearly a third of its work force.

The app will also see a number of changes, losing its own sports reporting and trimming its opinion content. It will also switch to a portrait-only orientation. The changes were first reported by AllThingsD.

The cuts underscore the difficulties involved with launching a news service, even for a company with the heft of News Corp. The Daily launched in February 2011 with a lot of fanfare, and held the hope that consumers would pay … Read more

News Corp. has put The Daily, the iPad publication it introduced last year as "a digital savior" of newspapers, on probation, The New York Times reported.

The news and entertainment giant is trying to decide if the publication, the company's first daily publication created specifically for the tablet, could turn around losses that were estimated at roughly $30 million a year, according to unnamed sources.

This comes weeks after News Corp. founder, chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch confirmed that the media conglomerate would separate its publishing assets, including The Daily, from its fast-growing entertainment assets.

With a phone-hacking scandal still hanging over the head of News Corp. in Britain, Rupert Murdoch's international conglomerate is facing new hacking allegations in Australia.

According to the Australian Financial Review, e-mails and internal documents allegedly show that a "secret unit" inside News Corp. committed acts of corporate espionage against rival pay-TV services that may have resulted in the collapse of one company.

As part of the proof presented by the paper, editors there have posted to the Web more than 14,400 internal documents belonging to News Corp.

If the allegations prove true, News Corp. would … Read more

Peter Ha takes a cab straight to our studio from the airport, so we'll forgive him if he drops a few expletives during today's recording. He also received an invite to an Apple event in San Francisco next week, so it looks like the West Coast can't wait to welcome him back!

Peter deals in tech news everyday at The Daily so we'll start things off with an offbeat chat about the 2011 Razzie nominations, an awards tribute to the year's worst movies.

No surprise here, but Adam Sandler broke the record with 11 nominations for his "performance" in "Jack and Jill."… Read more

Rupert Murdoch was so looking forward to the launch this weekend of the Sun on Sunday, when suddenly a little more bad news was tossed at his mood.

For Cherie Blair, wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has decided to sue Murdoch's News International. Yes, she too believes that her phone was hacked by unscrupulous, prying journalists.

The Guardian reveals electronically that she is not only suing News International, but also Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator whom the News of the World allegedly employed to interfere with the telephony of many famous people--as well as of some … Read more

One of America's most respected newspapers has come out on the side of copyright owners by supporting a controversial antipiracy legislation, which the technology sector has sworn to defeat.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial section today published a piece called "Brake the Internet Pirates." The paper said that the creative industries are being threatened by abusers "who hijack [the Internet's] architecture." The Journal wrote that regardless of what critics say, that is all the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would do.

"SOPA merely adapts the current avenues of legal recourse for infringement … Read more

The White House raised concerns yesterday about controversial antipiracy bills being debated in Congress and one way to measure how furious some copyright owners are with President Obama is to read the Twitter posts of Rupert Murdoch.

"So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery," wrote an obviously angry Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., one of the biggest media conglomerates in the world.

The Senate is debating the Protect IP Act (PIPA) while the House is doing the same with a similar bill, the Stop Online … Read more