Hasta La Gadget!

One of the most regrettable changes Detroit faced in the last year was a significant rise in homicides. 379 murders had taken place in the city as of Dec. 30, the Detroit News reports.

It’s about a ten percent increase over the 344 murders that occurred in 2011, a milestone that had already been surpassed by Thanksgiving of 2012.
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ST. LOUIS, Mo. (RNS) A scruffy-looking man walked up and down St. Louis’ antiques row trying to peddle an old Bible to store owners, but several thought something was amiss.

Kenez Jakovac of Hammonds Books said he felt the same way, but paid the man $30 for the Bible on Dec. 23. Jakovac said he believed the Bible was worth $500 to $1,000 and he suspected it might be stolen.

He said he did an Internet search the day after Christmas and found a Post-Dispatch story about a special Bible stolen from St. Johns Lutheran Church just days before Christmas services.

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Where were you during the great Netflix outage of Christmas 2012? If you were home attempting to enjoy your holiday break by attempting to access Netflix, then you know it was impossible to access its Instant Streaming service as it was completely crippled due to Amazon’s issues with their ELBs. It looks as though people who are on holiday break between today and tomorrow to celebrate the coming new year will have to go without their Netflix fix as the service has been experiencing extended outages for the majority of the day.

The reports of Netflix’s downtime have come in through a number of sources including Sitedown.co and DownRightNow, with the most vocal reports coming directly from Twitter users who were hoping to cuddle up with a good movie on their day off from work.

As of now, Netflix has yet to officially announce the downtime through their official channels, but we’ll keep an eye out for any changes throughout the day. For now, it looks like you Netflix users will have to find your entertainment elsewhere until Netflix gets over this current outage. Might we recommend YouTube?

[Update: Netflix has released this official statement in regards to today’s service disruption:

“We are experiencing some technical difficulty with the Netflix DVD Web site, which as a result may not be available for all members. Our engineers are working to address this issue. Netflix streaming is not impacted.”]

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Elephant Eats Chinese Tourist’s iPhone In Thailand Park, Fun’s ‘We Are Young’ Covered By Old Computer Parts,

If you’re a Foursquare user, you know users have complete control over what they share to other users and publicly. One thing its users won’t have control over is the way the service displays your name through its service as Foursquare is announcing some policy changes today that will go into affect in 2013.

One of the first major changes to the service will be how your name is displayed throughout Foursquare. Starting in 2013, your complete name will be made available for all to see, this includes both users of Foursquare as well as online. If you’re one of those people who absolutely need their privacy when Foursquaring their life up, you can always change the name you give the service as the only way it knows who you are, is if you give them your full name.

Another major change in Foursquare will be in the way businesses can access check-in information. Before the change, businesses were only able to see up to three hours of check-ins. In 2013, businesses will be able to see “a lot more” check-ins, which we can only assume will be days worth of check-ins instead of three hours worth.

Hopefully with Foursquare laying out its upcoming policy changes for all to see, it won’t suffer the same fate as Instagram, even though the changes Foursquare is making to its service seem to be nowhere near the monetizing changes Instagram was attempting.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Michigan Passes Law To Protect Social Network Accounts Of Employees From Employers, Google Removes 2 Billion Fake Views On YouTube,

While webOS is no longer officially around, thanks to HP‘s merciless hack and slash last year, developers are still keeping the operating system alive with the Open webOS initiative. We’ve already seen ASUS’s Transformer Prime tablet boot up on Open webOS, but it looks like the Google’s own Nexus 7 Android tablet has been given the webOS treatment as well.

The seven-inch Android-powered tablet built by ASUS from a partnership with Google was the premiere launch device for Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and it’s now been unofficially webOS-ified thanks to the tablets open-source roots. While it’s a mostly unstable port at this point, a few key features appear to be working just fine, including the WiFi and web browser.

webOS Nation notes that the developer behind the Nexus 7 port got it up and running in about a week over his winter break from college — not a bad feat if you ask us, and it makes us forgive the fact that it’s not quite a stable build yet, since a lot of the essential features are still missing.

While there’s no doubt that webOS on the Nexus 7 is a downgrade in functionality compared to running full-blown Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, it’s nice to see webOS continue on, even if it’s in an unofficial manner and only runs on a few devices currently. Hopefully we’ll see more from the Open webOS team in 2013.

[via webOS Nation]

Nexus 7 gets Open webOS port, still not a viable replacement is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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