Google next up on the witness stand?

With all of the hype and media attention (online anyway) surrounding The Pirate Bay’s trial, many individuals and groups had their eyes “opened” to one of the many widespread uses of the internet.  Now I’m not talking about piracy specifically, but more about file sharing in general – legal and illegal.  It seems that copyright holders and the world’s court systems are trying to increase their death grip on each respective industry they cater to by pushing politicians and local/national governments harder and harder or more laws that benefit the copyright holder.  Looking at TPB’s method of indexing, hosting, and indexing illegal content, many copyright holders, music labels, etc. are now starting to look at Google and assume that they do the same thing.  Could Google be up on the witness stand next?

Tweet your day away at work and never get caught!

Ok, this is by far the coolest Twitter related news I have seen in most likely ever.  Are you such a Twitter junky that you risk your job, income, house, family, etc. on letting the world know about your life in 140 or less characters?  If so, now you can do so a bit more safely and confidently.  SpreadTweeter is an ingenious program that will disguise you Tweeting habits by way of a fake Excel looking window.  Instead of the usual flashy and graphic rich appearance of pretty much every other Twitter app, SpreadTweeter brings extreme simplicity and office appearance to the popular micro-blogging service making work Tweeting less dangerous.  What versions of Excel does it mimic and how easy is it to install?  The answers to that and so much more are just inside.

AT&T resorts to “spamming” your Blackberry homescreen with unwanted crap/bloatware

Besides having one of the less then super Customer Service ratings as well as a beyond crappy tiered broadband planned roll out, add spammer to AT&T’s list of not so great business tactics.  Spamming you say?  Would you prefer “bloatware”, a term typically used to describe the extreme excess amount of useless trial apps that litter many new PC’s?  Either way it isn’t good.  Generally to make a few extra dollars, wireless carriers will sign deals with certain developers or mobile software companies by featuring their apps on devices such as Blackberries.  The only problem with this is that the added “service” comes as a distraction and annoyance to many customers.

Sony Ericsson CS8 coming to a T-Mobile store near you

Mobile photographers and T-Mobile customers will now have something to let their inner artist shine forth.  The Sony Ericsson CS8 has just mades its way through the FCC’s oh so secretive halls bringing to T-Mo some pretty serious digital goods underneath the hood.  What kind of goods?

• 8.1 Megapixel
• GPS
• WiFi (No UMA?)???
• Stereo Bluetooth
• FM Radio
• Your typical T-MO USA spectrum coverage plus 1700/2100MHz UMTS/HSDPA

You’ll notice the “No UMA” after WiFi.  For whatever reason, UMA is not supported by this model.  Why, again, I don’t know.  It seems like a pretty solid option and is pretty stupid whatever the reason is to leave out of one of T-Mobile’s higher end cellphones.  Oh well, hopefully the rest of the feature set makes up for it.  Aside from the list above there isn’t anything too earth shattering do get all drooly over.  Disappointed?

Source: Boy Genius

Bluetooth 3.0 + HS now considered “Official”

Bluetooth has been one of those technologies that has had a more or less loyal following.  While many will discount as useless except for it’s cellphone/headset pairing abilities, will now have a new reason to lust after the once laughed at wireless technology.  Wire haters and lovers of the Bluetooth will leave work happier today knowing that higher speed close range wireless transfers are on their way.  The Bluetooth 3.0 + HS standard will offer many benefits over the now instantly outdated and pokey Bluetooth 2.1 including dramatically faster transfer times and speeds, meaning that instead of your basic headset pairing and a few small file transfers, your entire hard drive is now more or less opened to short range wireless freedom thanks to Bluetooth 3.0′s reliance on the super fast 802.11 protocol shared by many other wireless devices.  What else is this new technology to bring?  More info to keep you drooling is just inside…

Leopard 10.5.7 coming very *Very* soon…according to Nvidia product page

OS X 10.5.7 has been the talk of the Apple world for the last several weeks, and for good reason.  This last major update before Snow Leopard is set to bring a slew of bug fixes and minor performance improvements to the slightly older yet still highly capable operating system.  Nvidia as many of you may not know, recently annouced their new Quadro FX 4800 graphics cards for Macs.  What do I tie these two topics together?  Well, the release of the Quadro FX 4800 more or less confirms an imminent 10.5.7 release.  Again you ask “Why?”  The observant few will notice that under “Drivers & Downloads” on Nvidias site, one of the requirements for the new graphics cards is Mac OS X 10.5.7.  Surely Nvidia wouldn’t announce, market, and release a graphics card that has to have an operating system and patch that doesn’t exist yet – though stranger things have happned.  So, coupled with the countless other “10.5.7 imminent release” articles you see around the web *just google it*, this more or less confirms that very soon we will be seeing some new Leopard specific downloads in Software Update.  I for one am not super excited.  Sure updates are great and all as they bring new features, however Snow Leopard is just around the corner, and that will be much sweeter.

Source: TUAW

Real-time widgets coming to an Android 1.5 homescreen near you…soon

Android users who have been clamoring for real homescreen widgets can soon clamor no more as Google has updated the Android 1.5 SDK AppWidget framework allowing homescreen widgets.  What kind of new and geeked out things can you do with said widgets?  Things such as weather information, email previews, stock information, control music playback, link to other full featured apps and so much more.  While Android pretty much had a sleeper year last year, 2009 and even early forcasts for 2010 show a strengthening movement on the Android front.  I for one am excited.  Are you?

Source: Mobile Burn, Android Authority, *Image Source: Tech.Blorge*