Hasta La Gadget!

Recently, a U.S. court approved the settlement of some major e-book publishers. The publishers had been accused of price fixing and it was accused the many publishers had lobbied to maintain unfairly high prices of the e-books they published.  While most of them chose to settle, some have decided to fight on. Among those who had agreed to settle are HarperCollins and Hachette.

Within days of this settlement, the results are already manifest in the prices of e-books on Amazon. The price of many bestselling Kindle e-books have already declined, showing that we are on the way to more accessible and affordable digital content. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Amazon announces Kindle Format 8, Library eBooks for Kindle now live,

AMD has just announced that it has become an investor in CiiNOW, a cloud gaming company that streams PC games to any client devices like computers, smartphones, tablets or set top boxes. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is very similar to OnLive and Gaikai. CiiNOW is a bit different in the sense that instead of providing a service directly to end-users, it offers a white-label platform for others to use. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: AMD LiveBox works right from a power outlet, Samsung Cloud Gaming unveiled,

Members of the well-known online hacktivist group, Anonymous, have attempted a number of high-profile cyber attacks in the recent past. It seems that the latest to go on the list of their victims is the popular web hosting giant, GoDaddy.

According to the reports that are beginning to trickle in, GoDaddy has been attacked by an Anonymous member who goes by the Twitter handle AnonymousOwn3r. As a result of the attack, millions of GoDaddy-hosted websites are reportedly down. This person says that this is not an attack sanctioned by Anonymous as a group. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Anonymous claims PSN breach, 10M accounts allegedly accessed, Apple’s leaked UDIDs: Blue Toad Publishing may be the real source,

President Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention has set a new record on the social media. During his speech, Twitter witnessed a massive number of tweets, officially declaring that it was an all-new record of the most tweets per minute.

To be specific, 52,757 tweets per minute were sent during his speech with some of his lines reaching as many retweets and quotes as 43,000! Clearly, the hype of the entire DNC also added to whip up the tweeting frenzy. In all, the convention itself attracted a total of 9.5 million tweets.

Out of these, 4 million tweets were sent on the last day of the convention alone. Incidentally, the Republican National Convention attracted as many tweets in total. During and after President Obama’s speech, topics such as Medicare and Cold War mind warp were actively trending on Twitter.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: [Study] Social media believed to be used by most of today’s burglars, Reebok Promise Keeper app uses peer pressure to help you stay fit,

When you pick up that new Kindle Fire HD this fall, one of the first things you’ll notice is an updated version of Amazon’s Silk web browser with a Trending Now section. It’s a clever trick that takes advantage of Silk’s server-based caching to find out what sites are popular among owners. That sounds good on the surface, but it doesn’t take much effort to realize that there are privacy concerns already in the air — Amazon is sharing personal web habits with a wider audience, after all. While the section is unlikely to include any identifying information, there’s no immediate sign that tablet owners can keep their behavior private, and that could create some indignation among those who’d prefer to surf in isolation. We’ve asked Amazon if there will be an opt-out escape hatch and will let you know if there’s a definitive answer. In the meantime, we wouldn’t necessarily worry. Silk shouldn’t be caching your e-mail, and it’s only likely to ever show pages that have far more traffic than anything you’d be embarrassed to show to others. As far as we can tell, your secret knitting obsession should be safe.

Update: A spokesperson has confirmed that the option to disable Silk’s caching is still available, and that switching it off will cut you out of Trending Now; that’s a very all-or-nothing approach, but it’ll likely suit those put off by the browser’s predictive approach in the first place. Secure pages are still out of the picture as well, which should keep those private Twitter messages out of the equation.

Filed under: Tablets, Internet

Amazon Silk browser on Kindle Fire tracks page visits to generate trends, isn’t as spooky as it sounds (update: opt-out exists) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 07 Sep 2012 14:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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