August 03, 2006, 5:03 PM PDT
Where the Web 2.0 jobs are
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

Want a piece of the Web 2.0 action? You can troll the standard job listings on Monster.com, Dice, or Craigslist, or jump over to the TechCrunch community and scope out its new job board, the CrunchBoard. Like the competing 37Signals job board, the value of this job board is not the number of its posted jobs nor its features (there's neither search nor even geographic filtering--yet). Rather, it's the fact that what you're likely to find on this site is nothing but cutting-edge tech jobs. You won't find those boring, stable, reliable-paycheck enterprise IT gigs here.

These two boards should also serve as good barometers of the Web industry. For the moment, the forecast looks sunny.

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August 03, 2006, 3:51 PM PDT
Internet to decide what a couple does on their date
Posted by: Tom Merritt

The author of the hilarious xkcd Web comic is pioneering a new way of dating. He's already found the person to go with, but he's letting the Internet decide what the couple should do on the date. The stunt isn't about Web fame but about testing better ways of voting.

"Voting systems are pretty important, but a lot of people don't realize their impact...While politics are important, love and adventures are what really matter. So help me put math and algorithms to good use. Pick our date. Be creative, be silly, be funny. Vote for something that sounds cool even if it's crazy. We're up for anything that doesn't get us arrested, hospitalized, cost more than we can afford, or have bad lasting consequences. "

Voting will last until Saturday, August 19, and the couple will head out on the winning date soon after.

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August 03, 2006, 2:41 PM PDT
Movie downloads on iTunes: What do you think?
Posted by: Jasmine France

The Diffusion Group recently conducted a study to determine how the general public would take to an additional iTunes download service: feature-length films in digital format. The report, titled "On the Viability of an iTunes Movie Service," has been released strategically just before the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference, for which Steve Jobs will be giving the keynote speech. As usual, speculation is running high about what new gadget the Apple head has up his sleeve this time--an iTunes movie service is among the guesses.

For TDG's full report, you'll have to plunk down a hefty chunk of change (try $1,495), but the company did release some key data regarding consumer interest in digital movie downloads. The results are predictable, with interest waning as price-per-download increases. At $10 per flick, 23 percent of broadband households showed interest in the service. The numbers declined to 14 percent at $15, 12 percent at $20, and 10 percent at $25. At which I scoff: $25 for a digital download?! One that you can no doubt not burn to DVD. No, thanks. What would you be willing to pay for a (presumably) high-quality digital download of your favorite movie? Better yet, do you think Jobs is really going to introduce such a service at the WWDC, or is it something else?

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August 03, 2006, 1:55 PM PDT
5,000 AOLers find out the cost of free
Posted by: Molly Wood

There's no such thing as a free lunch--and 5,000 soon-to-be-former AOL employees are finding that out the hard way. About 25 percent of the company's workforce will be laid off as a result of the recent restructuring that's making e-mail, instant messaging, and other services free for broadband users. Ouch. Who knew it took that many people to keep autocharging your credit card and refusing to let you cancel your service?

In other news, did you know that if you are a current AOL subscriber who's paying $25 a month for access to the elements of AOL that are about to become free, you'll actually have to call AOL to let them know you don't want to continue paying? You could keep paying, if you wanted--and then, I guess, you'd get some "tech support." You'll probably want to call today, because there might not be anyone to take your call by the end of the week.

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August 03, 2006, 1:29 PM PDT
JavaScript invites criminal hackers
Posted by: Robert Vamosi

Security researchers Jeremiah Grossman and T.C. Niedziakowski presented a talk at Black Hat outlining some of the tricks malicious attackers can play on your computer. In the demo, they showed how JavaScript could be used to scan ports inside a corporate firewall. Joris Evers from News.com wrote in greater detail about this last week.

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August 03, 2006, 1:26 PM PDT
The rise of rootware
Posted by: Robert Vamosi

In their talk at Black Hat, R^2: The Exponential Growth of Rootkit Techniques, security researchers Jamie Butler and William Arbaugh laid out a beginner's course on rootkits to kick off a day of programming around that topic. Butler and Arbaugh covered the history of rootkits, dating the awareness of the concept, which they define as any software that hides its operation from the system kernel, administrator, and security software, back to Clifford Stoll's bestselling book, The Cuckoo's Egg, in the late 1980s. Over the next 20 years, rootkits remained a quiet element in the security field, mostly affecting enterprise networks and mostly seen in user applications. Recently, however the controversy around Sony's use of a rootkit last year brought rootkits back into the news. That's bad, the researchers say. The heightened awareness and the fact that most security software can't accurately detect rootkits got spyware companies interested in using the technology to hide their keystroke loggers and other malware from users and security software alike. The researchers have dubbed this new convergence rootware. They noted that rootkits do have good uses as well as bad, making detection and remediation difficult. They cited the similarity between ZoneAlarm and the UAY rootkit from China that uses many of the same processes as ZoneAlarm, which offers kernel-based firewall protection.

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August 03, 2006, 12:33 PM PDT
Gear up for Gears of War in November
Posted by: Will Greenwald

The long-awaited Xbox 360 sci-fi shooter, Gears of War, will finally hit stores on November 12. This "Emergence Day," as it's being called by Microsoft, will finally give game-starved Xbox 360 owners one of the big-name games they've been waiting for. With Halo 3 barely visible on the horizon, Epic Games' Gears of War is one of the biggest games coming to the Xbox 360 in the foreseeable future. The game will be available in a standard edition for $60 and a deluxe edition for $70. The deluxe edition will have a making-of DVD, an art book, and a shinier game box.

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August 03, 2006, 11:57 AM PDT
Mycroft: human-powered grid computing
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

Mycroft is a new system that takes tasks that can only by done by humans, breaks them down into tiny subtasks, and sends them out to users through Web advertising banners. It's like the SETI at Home Project, except the grid of intelligence resides in the unused compute cycles between peoples' ears instead of on their PCs.

The Internet is an effective global work-distribution network, and this is not the first time a company has tried to use it to spread work around. Elance, for example, is an effective tool for outsourcing and offshoring tasks. Amazon's Mechanical Turk (cleverly tagged "artificial artificial intelligence") offers any Web user the opportunity to pick up small tasks and get paid for the work. And human "answer engines" such as those from Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft can be more effective than machine-powered search engines.

Mycroft's biggest difference is the degree to which it breaks down tasks. For instance, it can be used for human-powered OCR, but instead of asking users to spend minutes or hours transcribing pages of text, the Mycroft user will see just a few words at a time (the system will run each task against multiple users to ensure accuracy). The tool can also be used to categorize photos (see also The ESP Game) and to do translations.

Mycroft users are paid not in cash, but in credits that can be applied towards goods and services, such as magazine subscriptions. Or they can work for free--founders Judd Antin and Benjamin Hill point to the Wikipedia as proof that some people will contribute knowledge for nothing more than the fun of it.

The company will charge companies for the work its users perform on their behalf. It will have to buy ad banners to get the tasks out there, but Antin and Hill say the math works--they'll make more from the fees they collect for their users' work than what it will cost them to buy the ad placements. Also, they're sure that Mycroft will be able to get tasks done much more quickly than other outsourcing services.

I can't wait for these ads to surface--it will be nice to see advertising units that can directly benefit the people who see them instead of just trying to sell them stuff.

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August 03, 2006, 7:39 AM PDT
Apple partners with GM, Ford, and Mazda for iPod integration
Posted by: Kevin Massy

Apple is teaming up with GM, Ford, and Mazda to offer iPod integration in those manufacturers' vehicles for the 2007 model year. The partnerships--announced to CNET Car Tech this morning by Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of worldwide iPod product marketing--will mean that iPod connectors will come as options on all 56 GM models, all Mazda models, and most Ford models.

GM and Ford are expected to begin offering iPod support on their U.S. models later this year, while Mazda will offer integration on its entire global 2007 lineup. The new partnerships mean that iPod integration will be available in 70 percent of new vehicles in the United States for the 2007 model year, according to Joswiak, who said that iPod integration represented the "natural progression of audio in cars."

As with existing iPod partners, such as BMW and Acura, the new partners will offer glove box-mounted connectors to enable iPods to be simultaneously charged and navigated and controlled via the car's stereo or steering wheel buttons. According to Nancy Phillipart, GM's executive director of accessories, the iPod connectors will be offered as dealer-installed options at a price point of around $160 plus installation charges, and will only be available on cars with XM Satellite Radio modules. News.com has more details on how Ford and Mazda will handle the integration in its full story here.

Note: our original report said that iPod integration would be a factory-installed option: we've subsequently learned from GM and Ford that it will be dealer-installed.

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