Hi, I�m Molly Wood and welcome to the Buzz Report � the show about the tech news
that everyone is talking about.
This week, yes, Virginia, Macs can get malware; the war
on Sony goes on, and one of the easiest punchlines in tech is soon to be history.
Forever.
But first, it�s the Gadget of the Week.
First up, it�s the Gadget of the Week.
The gadget of the week is the new Barnes and Noble Nook Simple Touch Reader.
It�s
meant to be kind of a Kindle killer -- it�s a smaller Nook with a black and white e-ink
screen like the Kindle, but it�s a touch screen.
So, basically, if you still want your books
to look like books, there�s a Nook for that.
That was a lot of rhyming.
The new Nook
costs 139 dollars, like the Kindle, and has built-in WiFi but no 3G.
And I gotta say, I
remember when Barnes and Noble announced it was making an e-reader, and SOME
PEOPLE thought that was kind of silly, and the first one was NOT good, and SOME
people thought they were doomed.
Well, those people are suddenly thinking about
buying a new Nook.
So, enjoy that last laugh, Barnes and Noble.
And now for the news.
Apple had a bit of a malware scare over the past couple of weeks.
An annoying little bit
of malware called Mac Defender started making the rounds on Mac computers in the
early part of May.
It mostly just generated porn pop-ups, nothing super malicious.
But it
was actually Mac malware in the wild.
Which, like, no one was willing to believe and
Apple certainly wasn�t interested in publicizing.
Macs don�t get viruses, people.
Support
reps leaked internal information about how Apple actually told customer support not to
provide ANY help at all if the customer said they were infected with Mac Defender.
Which is just about the time that the media storm got bad enough that �
Apple finally put up blog post telling users how to remove Mac Defender malware and
hopefully avoid it in the first place.
So, thanks for that.
Listen, I would imagine there will
be more attempts to deliver malware and Trojans and other nasty things to Mac users in
the future, and um, Apple?
You might not be able to handle that with the same old long
silence and then magical solution from on high that you�re used to.
Because if the next
piece of badware steals passwords or credit card info?
That shit is just not gonna fly.
Poor Sony just keeps getting hacked.
The company had to report this week that
personal data from almost 10,000 users were stolen from two of its sites, one in Canada
and one in Greece.
Sony said only emails, passwords, and phone numbers were stolen -
- only -- not credit card information, and that the sites weren�t part of the main Sony
network.
ALSO, the company said Sony sites in Indonesia and Thailand were hacked,
but no information was stolen.
What are their server passwords, 1-2-3-4-5?
Come ON,
guys.
Although, it is surprisingly hard to feel sorry for Sony.
I mean � remember that time they
made their music CDs secretly drop root kits on your computers?
Go look that one up.
But, seriously.
Lulz hacker types?
Maybe that�s enough.
I mean, if you keep this up, you
might get �
� things like the French president calling for a more �regulated� Internet to keep things
�civilized.� He was speaking at the e-G8 forum, a get-together about the Internet and its
effect on global commerce.
He seemed, generally, to indicate that Net neturality was a
bit naive, intellectual property rights are king, and everyone just needs to be
�reasonable� about things like France�s three strikes law, which lets private industries
accuse citizens of piracy without due process, and can result in those citizens being
kicked offline completely.
The European Union, by the way, rejected the idea of a
nationwide three-strikes law.
So, see, �civilized� and �reasonable� do tend to mean
different things to different people.
But merci, anyway, Monsieur Sarkozy.
And finally, tech unicorns are officially an endangered species.
The white iPhone came
out, and now � Duke Nukem Forever has gone gold.
That means the code is DONE,
the game discs are being burned, the trailers
are out, the marketing is happening.
June 14th, people.
The date is SET.
What could
POSSIBLY delay it now?
Too easy.
And that�s the Buzz Report for this week, everyone.
I�m Molly Wood, and thank you for
watching.
