While you were out: Thanksgiving blogwatch roundup

Welcome back, your humble blogwatcher missed you. To bring you up to date, here's a quick pick of stories you may have missed. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers offer around the turkey sandwiches, eschewing bogus talk of Cyber Monday.

By Richi Jennings. November 30, 2009.

Your humble blogwatcher selected these bloggy morsels for your enjoyment. Not to mention Bill Gates taking a support call...

    Arnold Kim heard a rumor about an iPhone 4G on field test:

iPhone developer Pandav has ... spotted usage records for an unreleased iPhone in their app's analytics. ... In this case, "iPhone3,1" was first spotted in Pandav's usage logs in November. This "iPhone3,1" identifier does not match up with any shipping iPhones. The last iPhone released to the public was the iPhone 3GS which carries the identification string "iPhone2,1".

...

This seems to be the first time that it has been spotted "in the wild". Apple similarly began testing the iPhone 3GS (iPhone2,1) back in October of 2008 about 8 months ahead of its launch. At the time, the usage was similarly focused in the San Francisco Bay Area where Apple is located.

Brad Sams has the "canceled" Family Guy Windows 7 bumpers:

Not long after announcing the deal Microsoft pulled support ... because of "riffs on deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene and incest". ... The clips ... attempt to show off how easy and powerful the operating system is with a Family Guy twist.

Michael Arrington alleges his own personal opinion:

Video Professor continues to be angry that I called them a scam. ... Just one of a bunch of scams that were making their way into social games on Facebook and MySpace. But now we’re focused on them like a laser.

...

Needless to say, people who get this stuff either don’t read fine print and are charged, or try to return it. There are hundreds of user complaints about refunds not being paid. 271 complaints to be exact, on RipoffReport alone. ... Here’s an easy way to determine if something is a scam – would users pay for it if they knew exactly what they were buying? ... When Video Professor sent me an email after my post arguing that they weren’t a scam, I replied “It’s a huge ****ing scam. And you know it.” Which pretty much summed up my position on the matter.

Martin Bryant eyes the porn in the Android Market:

Apple keeps ‘adult-only’ content off the iPhone. On Android there are no such restrictions and one company has taken that to its natural conclusion by launching the world’s first mobile store for porn.

...

No matter what you think of pornography, there’s no doubt that it’s a huge business. Regardless of the technological breakthrough; videos, software, mobile phones – the porn industry has been quick to take advantage of it. The biggest surprise here is probably that it’s taken so long to for an adult app store to arrive.

Wikimedia's two Eriks deny that Wikipedia is running short of editors:

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages”. ... It’s understandable that media will look for a compelling narrative. Our job is to arrive at a nuanced understanding of what’s going on.

...

There are methodological challenges with determining the long term trend of joining and leaving. ... Studying the number of actual participants in a given month shows that Wikipedia participation as a whole has declined slightly from its peak 2.5 years ago, and has remained stable since then.

Ernesto van der Sar notes the Mininova BitTorrent tracker's going legal:

Mininova, the largest torrent site on the Internet, has removed all torrents except those that were uploaded through its content distribution service. Mininova’s founders took the drastic decision after they lost a civil dispute against Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, and were ordered to remove all infringing torrents from the site.

...

The implications of Mininova’s decision will have a huge impact on the BitTorrent community. The millions of Mininova users and uploaders have to look for a new home, but perhaps even more importantly, Mininova had the largest collection of user-submitted torrents that were used by dozens of smaller torrent indexers.

Creative commons wild turkey photo used with kind permission of Scott Bauer, USDA Agricultural Research Service, Bugwood.org.

So what's your take?

Get involved: leave a comment.

And finally...

• Can I talk to that William fellow? He was so helpful.

 

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