[ music ]
^M00:00:06
>> Hi I'm Molly Wood, and welcome to the Buzz Report. This week Pakistan's internet road construction, Yahoo's ahem, buzz, and Clogging the Tubes returns. But first, it's the Gadget of the Week. The gadget of the week is the Chumbie [assumed spelling]. Check it out. The Chumbie is like a little internet beanbag. It's all soft, it's adorable. Costs a hundred and seventy nine dollars, it's Wi-Fi enabled, and you can kind of just use it to do whatever. Internet stuff. It could be a digital photo frame, an internet radio receiver, could be an alarm close, a home weather station, an RSS reader. You could use it as an iPod speaker dock with this jack back here, like a little widget server dealie. You can even put charms, Chumbie charms on it right here. So cute. Stop looking at me like that, you know you want Chumbie. Look at it. How freaking cute? And now for the news. Earlier this week the country of Pakistan attempted to censor You Tube in that country. But the misguided efforts went wrong, and the entire world lost access to You Tube for almost two hours over the weekend. And then the entire country of Pakistan was taken offline while the problem was sorted out. Now this incident points to a serious flaw in the way internet traffic routing works. Basically what Pakistan did is take the road to You Tube, and build a giant detour that took all the traffic to like a black hole in Pakistan. So then no one could get to You Tube, and Pakistan was sucking in more traffic than it could handle. So then all the world's ISPs had to close all the roads into Pakistan so they could rebuild the road to You Tube. And according to experts, this kind of rerouting is almost impossible to prevent, and it's not that hard to pull off. In fact, here's how one security expert put it to the AP. To be honest, there's not a single thing preventing this from happening to eTrade or Bank of America, or the FBI or the White House, or the Clinton campaign. So it would be like you know, if I knew somebody who had some internal access at a major international data carrier and I slipped him a couple of hundos, and I said you know, I think that N Gadget's been getting a little big for its britches. And you know, I'm not saying it happened, I'm only saying it could. In Yahoo news, the company this week launched a Dig clone that it's calling Yahoo Buzz. See that's funny to me, because a couple of weeks ago Yahoo launched this tech tracker thing on Yahoo Finance, and then they said they were starting a new daily tech news roundup called The Buzz.
>> I'm Sara Lacey, and this is The Buzz.
>> And I let it go, because like the very next day they changed the name to The Dirt. And I was like yeah boom, you better change that name. But little did I know that they were just saving the name for this new Yahoo Buzz thing. Okay and first of all, do you guys know any other words? And second, why you got to take my name for your Dig rip off? Why not just call it like Big with one G? Or you know, like Burrow. I think I'm gonna launch a little social net aggregation play and call it CNET Burrow. You can check out my sweet little bearcat mascot. Yeah, you're both going down. Okay, that was a lot of anger. Let's move on and find out what's Clogging the Tubes. Now this video was posted on You Tube on February 22nd, and it has already gotten more than 2.2 million views. It's a three year old giving an adorably precocious summary of Star Wars.
>> And Obi Kanobi [inaudible] he keeps saying Luke, learn how to do his little light up sword. He has to try to block the little [inaudible]. It blowed up Princess Lea's planet. But don't talk back to Darth Vader, he'll getcha.
>> Aww. I mean she talks really well for a kid. Who am I kidding? She's no Chumbie people, she's no Chumbie.
[ background music ]
I'm Molly Wood, and this has been the Buzz Report. Thanks for watching.
^M00:03:54
[ music ]
