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 events that bore, apps that thrill, and
machines that molest.
But first, it's the Gadget of the Week.
The Gadget of the Week is the LG Star.
Let the cell phone spec wars begin.
THIS bad boy, according to
Engadget, will feature a DUAL-CORE Tegra 2 chipset, 1080p video recording, an 8 megapixel camera
AND a front-facing camera, and it will run stock Android Gingerbread without any crapware.
We're hoping
for a 2011 release of this MINIATURE FREAKING SUPER COMPUTER.
Plus, it appears to have a handy-dandy belt clip.
Nerd phone!
Slash supercomputer!
36 minutes of battery life, standard.
In the news this week, Apple held an event to announce that the Beatles catalog will, at long last, be
available on iTunes.
And by "long last," I really mean long PAST the point where anyone who wants the
Beatles in MP3 form doesn't already have it.
It's funny, I think we first brought this up on the Buzz Report
in 2006.
The lawsuit standing in the way was resolved in 2007.
The entire Beatles catalog came out on a
USB drive in 2009, if you HAD to have digital copies and didn't want to rip your own CDs.
Which most
people did.
It's funny.
It's kind of like a micro-metaphor for the entire music industry, how it took literally YEARS to
wade through its pissy licensing agreements and arguments and finally give us cheap, high-quality paid
downloads long after we'd all either pirated songs or just ripped our CDs onto our iPods, and deprived them
of the chance to have made millions of dollars in the meantime.
History does have a way, doesn't it?
By the way, I think Ringo Starr had the best commentary by far on the whole thing.
In the Apple press
release, he said, "I am particularly glad to no longer be asked when the Beatles are coming to iTunes."
Amen, Ringo.
Amen.
In other news, just a day after the disappointing Beatles business, Apple announced it had finally approved
the official Google Voice app.
The approval had been held up for more than a year, Apple said because the
apps duplicate functionalities on the iPhone.
You know, like the functionalities you pay AT&T for so much
every month?
Those ones.
Now, though, incredibly, you can sign up for Google Voice and use it to send
free text messages, make cheap overseas calls, use one phone number for everything, and get your voice
mails translated into text.
Yeah.
NICE.
Maybe Apple was just trying to throw us a bone since, you know, no one cared about Hey
Jude.
We'll take it!
In other announcements we're not sure if we care about, Facebook announced a new unified inbox
messaging dealie-ma-bob called Facebook Messenger.
Everyone will get a facebook.com email address
that's tied to the public name you use on Facebook.
So, everyone now knows your email address.
BUT,
Facebook's inbox will only show you messages from your friends, no matter how you got the messages --
text, instant messages from all kinds of clients, e-mail, or Facebook email.
It'll use social filtering, kind of
like Google's Priority Inbox, to keep out spam or messages you're not likely to respond to.
That dripping sound you hear is spammers and hackers salivating over the possibility of reaping 500
million public email addresses from Facebook and going to fricking TOWN.
Facebook is rolling out
Messages slowly, though, so I'm sure they'll, uh, have that all figured out by the time we all get this.
Ha.
Ha.
Ha.
And finally, let's have a look at what's Clogging the Tubes.
This week, it's the TSA backlash.
The Internet,
including me, is revolting over so-called naked imaging scanners that show incredible detail about your
body and may or may not eventually cause skin cancer.
And if you want to opt out of the naked cancer
scan, be prepared for a physical "pat-down" that amounts to more than you should EVER do on a first date.
Result?
Twitter feeds, online petitions, videos of screaming toddlers being flat-out molested by TSA
agents, blog posts galore ...
your basic Internet mutiny.
And even ...
brutally accurate cartoons.
�these special X-rays focus all of their energy on the skin, rather than dissipating it throughout the entire
body?
Yes, but these machines are designed to use a very small amount of x-ray radiation.
Are the machines tested to make sure they are not leaking extra radiation, the way medical x-ray machines
get tested?
No but you don�t have to worry because this is brand new technology.
Ha ha ha.
Hey, HOME OF THE FREE.
Can we put a stop to this now, please?
And that's the Buzz Report for this week, everyone.
I'm Molly Wood, and thank you for watching.
I don�t feel very safe going somewhere alone to get groped by a stranger.
If you�d like, your husband can come into the room and watch a stranger grope you.
Can he record it, to make sure nobody abuses me?
No, if he attempts to record security procedures, he will be arrested.
