Tech News 4/3/2007

Today?s stories making the rounds.

PC World Editor Quits Over Apple Story Colleagues at my former outlet, PC World magazine, have told me that Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken quit abruptly today because the company’s new CEO, Colin Crawford, tried to kill a story about Apple and Steve Jobs.

PC World editor resigns over apparent ad pressure Award-winning Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken of PC World resigned Tuesday over disagreements with the magazine’s publisher regarding stories critical of advertisers, according to sources.

Harry McCracken takes a stand for editorial integrity, leaves PC World in protest Just read over at Epicenter that PC World Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken quit in protest today because the magazine?s new CEO wanted to spike a ?whimsical article? titled ?Ten Things We Hate About Apple.?

Google, Wordpress Also Forcing Hex Code Takedowns? Digg isn’t the only major website to have forced users to remove a banned HD-DVD hex code: Google is doing it too. On April 27, an unnamed user received a takedown notice from Google stating that one of his publicly-available Google Notebook pages contained material that infringed a copyright. The material? A sequence of hex codes used for decrypting HD-DVD movies. His notebook item linked to a Digg page covering the banned code.

Along the same lines, you can get a shirt with the key printed on it, just to show your friends who write the AACS DRM crap. click here

45% of Europeans watch TV online A new study from Motorola has found that an amazing 45% of Europeans now watch television online. Joost is huge and a killer app over there, still waiting on my invite.

FCC Chairman Martin to Telcos: No Blocking Iowa Calls BREAKING: FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Thursday that the commission told large telcos to stop blocking calls into numbers for the Iowa-based free calling operations, threatening punitive actions if the carriers didn?t comply.

A History of Revision Part 5 Wow, look at that - a casual passerby with no connection to Zango whatsoever happened to leap into the fray and defend them. Unfortunately, this is where it all goes hideously wrong. Zango is trying to change their wikipedia entry to make it sound better, they actually changed adware to computer software, hahahaha. Losers.

OLPC project clarifies: no plans for Windows support Late last week the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project had a media event in Cambridge, and while I couldn’t make the event, I did tape a video interview for the BBC on the project. During my preparation I kept coming across these claims that Microsoft and OLPC had partnered to put Windows XP Starter Edition on the OLPC, and according to one report, this was being done to get the XO laptop into US schools. None of this jibed with what I had been hearing from sources, so I decided to look into it further. As it turns out, a number of new outlets, including the AP, mischaracterized the situation.

Pipes Adds Interactive Yahoo! Maps, KML Support (and More) First, we added a interactive Yahoo! Map to the run page of any Pipe containing GeoData. Second, we added an additional output renderer which allows Pipes containing GeoData to be emitted as a KML file.

Frengo Raises $5.7 Million Series A Round Redwood City based Frengo, a mobile social networking startup targeting the growing SMS/ TXT market, have completed Series A funding of $5.7 million.

Thoughts on Silverlight I was at MIX this week speaking on a panel about web services. Obviously, the big announcements there were around Silverlight, so I?ve been getting emails asking what I think. No matter what happens, everyone wins.

Webcomic: Why I can?t go see ?Spider-Man 3′ Funny, but true.

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