vanity

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Republican senator says video games are a bigger problem than guns.

- DMVs ban txtspeak on license plates.

- The greatest hacker T-shirts this planet has ever seen.

- Amoeba Music finally puts used, errr, rare records for sale online.… Read more

Tuesday's top tech headlines are formatted to fit your second screen:

At the Gamescom conference in Germany, Sony announced several new PlayStation games and new methods for playing. Sony talked more about PlayStation Mobile for Android devices, but we still don't know exactly when it'll hit the market or how many games will launch in the store.

And there are some perks for those that own both a PS Vita and the PS3. For one price, you can get a game for both systems, starting with "PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale," "Sly Cooper: Thieves in … Read more

Both Twitter and Facebook have offered vanity URLs personalized to users' accounts for years -- something that has been glaringly vacant in Google Plus' URLs. But, that's about to change.

Google's social network announced today that vanity URLs for profiles and pages are on their way. It has even begun rolling out a few for celebrities, like soccer player David Beckham and pop singer Britney Spears, along with brands like Toyota, Delta, and Hugo Boss.

Here's what Google product manager Saurabh Sharma wrote in a blog post today:

Did Microsoft lose itself over the past decade? Its CEO obviously doesn't think so.

In a Forbes interview published yesterday, Steve Ballmer was asked about the recent Vanity Fair article that charged poor management and bureaucracy at Microsoft with hurting the company financially and technologically over the past ten years.

Ballmer's response?

"It's not been a lost decade for me! I mean, look, ultimately progress is measured sort of through the eyes of our users," he told Forbes. "More than our investors or our P&L [profit and loss] or anything else, it'… Read more

Microsoft has grown too cumbersome and needs to be broken up, according to Vanity Fair writer Kirk Eichenwald.

Eichenwald appeared on "CBS This Morning" today to discuss his examination of what he calls Microsoft's downfall and Microsoft's lost decade.

"Microsoft needs to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up," Eichenwald said.

His article profiles the cannibalistic nature of the company and its struggles to keep its workforce motivated after its stock price stopped appreciating. In particular, Microsoft has used a system called stacking that ranks employees as exceptional, average, or … Read more

You might remember a while back when you picked your custom Facebook username. This username appears in your Facebook (vanity) URL, Facebook e-mail address, and it can even be used as your log in to save keystrokes. At the time, Facebook led you to believe that the username couldn't be changed once you picked it. Well, surprise, that wasn't actually the case.

It seems there is a one-time switch allowed, and as long as you haven't exercised this privilege yet, you're able to pick something new. If you never picked a username to begin … Read more

BranchOut, the Facebook-friendly professional network that aspires to kill LinkedIn, is branching out itself. It's pushing its pages out to their own Google-friendly URLs and giving users their own vanity domains.

If you'd like to grab your branchout name, the company has made an early reservation system available to the first 500 people who e-mail cnet@branchout.com. Send a note there and they'll send you back instructions to claim your URL, presumably something nice you can put on your resume, like branchout.com/JoeBob

I like BranchOut's positioning. It's setting itself up as the jobs network for everyone, not just for the professional class that's already on LinkedIn. CEO Rick Marini is going after classes of workers, like soldiers returning from deployment and students new to the job market, who aren't on LinkedIn and who are not about to be. Their world is Facebook. And as work and professional lives are merging, Marini wants to bring the professional network to them, instead of seeing them go elsewhere to get it, where they'll have to rebuild their connections.

"They're all playing FarmVille," Marini says of people starting job searches. He's just giving them a job network where they're already hanging out. It's priced right for these users, too: free. … Read more

AT&T will release three new BlackBerry phones running the new BlackBerry OS 7, AOL launches it own daily iPad-only magazine called Editions, and McAfee in a report in Vanity Fair reveals a new major hacking attack called "Operation: Shady RAT" that has been targeting government and private industry.

Links from Wednesday's episode of Loaded:

A widespread cyber-espionage campaign stole government secrets, sensitive corporate documents, and other intellectual property for five years from more than 70 public and private organizations in 14 countries, according to the McAfee researcher who uncovered the effort.

The campaign, dubbed "Operation Shady RAT" (RAT stands for "remote access tool") was discovered by Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at the cyber-security firm McAfee. Vanity Fair's Michael Joseph Gross was first to write about the findings. The targets cut across industries, including government, defense, energy, electronics, media, real estate, agriculture, and construction. The governments hit … Read more