Comcast vs. Level 3 vs. Crow vs. Cat

Hi, I'm Molly Wood, and welcome to the Buzz Report, the show about the tech news that everyone's talking about. This week, it's a big huge Internet fight, Verizon and the inevitable iPhone speculation, and the most insane animal fight you ever saw. But first, it's the Gadget of the Week. The Gadget of the Week is the Playboy hard drive. The publisher of the iconic magazine will release 56 issues of Playboy, dating back to 1953, in digital form. You'll get more than 100,000 pages of articles and 650 issues all on a single, ultra-portable, 250 gigabyte hard drive. [Hahaha, she said hard drive. ] And now for the news. This week, a huge fight exploded over streaming video content on the Internet. Sort of. In one corner, there's Comcast, a humongous internet service provider. In the other, there's Level 3, a humongous Internet backbone provider, which a few weeks ago agreed to host and deliver Netflix's streaming video to Comcast and other ISPs. Now, as near as we can understand the exchange, Level 3 was like, "Hey, Comcast, this streaming Netflix stuff is wicked popular. We're gonna need to send like five times the traffic to you that we used to, with that whole free traffic sharing agreement we have." Then Comcast was all, "That's gonna clog up our Internet tubes. Bandwidth is expensive. You going to help pay for this?" Level 3 said, "Um, nope," to which Comcast replied, "Sucks to be you, then. And our CUSTOMERS. HAHAHA." And Level 3 was like, "MEDIA! COMCAST IS VIOLATING NET NEUTRALITY!" In truth, it's your basic money-related baby fight, and regardless of who's right and who pays whom, there's one thing you can bet on: you and me will almost certainly will get stuck with the bill one way or the other. Yay! In other big Internet fights this week, the whistleblower site Wikileaks unleashed a massive data dump of confidential U.S. State Department diplomatic cables. Everyone in every government condemned the leaks, and various hackers launched denial of service attacks against Wikileaks until their Web host, Amazon, finally took them offline. And Interpol went after the founder, Julian Assange, over sexual assault charges that kind of keep appearing and disappearing ... the whole thing is just crazy, and shady, and morally ambiguous as hell. And here's the thing. Mainly, the big "reveal" was stuff like how Libya's Moamar Khadafi has a "voluptuous blond" nurse with him all the time, one cable said Kim Jong Il was "flabby" and "old," and Silvio Berlusconi is a total Putin butt-kisser. I guess maybe the thing Wikileaks wanted the world to know is that global diplomatic relations proceed with all the seriousness and dignity of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Thanks for that, guys. In gadget news, the Microsoft Kinect system is the surprise holiday shopping hit of 2010, with 2.5 million units sold in less then a month. Sony's PlayStation Move appears to be moving (har har) much slowly, and CERTAINLY doesn't have the same buzz ... because once again? LOOK AT IT. Can you say marital aid? We've been through this, Sony. [Beavis: she said marital aid] Verizon will launch its LTE-based 4G network this weekend! Faster data speeds for all! Well, for 38 major markets and 60 major airports. Verizon says you can expect download speeds that are 10 times faster than 3G -- for now, only on USB modems. Data plans start at 50 dollars a month for 5 gigs of data, or 80 for 10. And Verizon says it will start rolling out 4G devices in the middle of next year. And no, I'm not ignoring the device everyone is WONDERING about ... 4G iPhone? Omg? Omg? Omg? And finally, let's have a look at what's Clogging the Tubes. This week, it's the Crow vs Cat vs Cat streetfight, which had almost 2 million views just 5 days after it posted on YouTube. Check it out. See, without the music, that is just a plain old catfight video. But with it!? Scene from Mortal Kombat. Just goes to show you the power of a musical score. [hehe, she said score.] And that's the Buzz Report for this week, everyone. I'm Molly Wood, and thanks for watching.