Geek Squad get their man and woman...

ars technica is reporting that two PC owners who chose Best Buy's Geek Squad to do repairs to their PCs have ended up in hot water over their hard drive contents. In one case a young woman who hired the Geek Squad to swap a hard drive out of her machine, is being targeted by the RIAA for alleged file sharing. The second customer finds him self in much deeper trouble after a Geek Squad member found child pornography on his hard drive and tipped off police. The Fayetteville, Arkansas Police found child porn images along with "a commercial video clip of child pornography, and two video clips of minor females changing into swim suits that appeared to have been taken by a hidden video camera," according to the US Attorney's complaint. The man who crossed State lines with the laptop has been sentenced to 135 months in jail and a $10,000 fine. Geek justice is served!

Public curtain raised on Joost

Joost, the video dream site of Skype's Janus Friis and Kazaa's Niklas Zennström opened it's doors to everyone today, shedding it's beta status. Up until now the free, advertising supported, site was available only to those who could score a private invite. With content providers like Viacom, who brings MTV, BET, Comedy Central, and a limited selection of movies from Paramount, and CNN and MLB on board there is content worth looking at. ars technica's Jacqui Cheng thinks they have a challenge on their hands, particularly in signing on more content providers and finding a hardware partner to move the shows to the TV. This may be true, but it seems to me that the folks who know the television model will be all over this as it's virtually what they have now... easier for them to wrap their heads around than many of the newer ad models.

Considering a wireless network?

If you are in the market for a wireless network you many wish to take a look at ars technica and their roundup of 802.11n routers. They've completed a fairly comprehensive look at 3 offerings from competing manufacturers and weigh in on the pros and cons of each device. I was a little disappointed to see that my Netgear Rangemax fared the worst in ars technica's review. Considering that I've had mine for a year or more and that it was an upgrade from 802.11b, I really have no complaints. The range is exceptional in my experience and the only problem that I've encountered is that my neighbours have all jumped on board the wireless band wagon, and the space has gotten a little crowded. Ever since I switched channels to something less busy, I have been extremely happy and the Rangemax has preformed very well. One of the knocks on the device, according to ars technica, was it's performance at close range, I have not personally encountered that as the devices I have nearest the router are all wired to it. If I'd had this review to consider when I made my purchase decision I may not have gone with Netgear, but in short I am quite satisfied at the moment.

Skype blackout

ars technica is reporting a major Skype outage that has been acknowledged by Skype in a statement "Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours." Skype has also temporarily suspended the download of the Skype client. They also say that if you leave your client running you will be automatically logged in when the outage is resolved.

This e-mail message will self destruct in 10, 9, 8,...

ars technica has an interesting post about BigString an e-mail service that allows you to send self-destructing e-mail messages. This could be the answer for those unfortunate souls who send e-mails at 4:00 am after the bars have closed or who forgot to spell check before they hit send to that job prospect! Maybe Conrad Black is the behind this little operation... or should have been aware of it! Anyway, I've not yet tried it but according to the site, "BigString allows a user to easily send, recall, erase, self-destruct and modify an email after it has been sent." Further they describe the service as "Our unique “Edit Sent Mail” feature allows you to recall, erase, add or delete attachments and self-destruct your emails after they have been sent." ars technica says that it works by basically storing an image of the e-mail, on BigString's servers, that the receiver gets a link to and the sender can at a preset interval or on a whim have the e-mail recalled, edited and resent, or self-destructed. The service apparently also allows you to track the e-mail as it is opened and forwarded elsewhere. Interesting concept, I'll give it a try and chime back later on what I think.