What a day! Surely, this is a day that will live in infamy. Not because of the release of iTunes 9.2—that’s solid. Nor is it because Apple managed to sell 600,000 pre-order iPhones despite the fact that, somehow, nobody was actually able to buy them. No, it’s a terrible day because Dan Moren got sick and so he has had to relinquish the controls of the Remains-o-tron to me. Onward:
ABC has doubled the number of ads in its iPad app; ABC.com will be next (VideoNuze, via MocoNews which begat The Consumerist)
If you’re busy watching every single episode of “Lost” on your iPad while you’re on the treadmill, get ready to walk for a couple of extra minutes. According to Albert Cheng, EVP/Digital Media for Disney/ABC, the company has ramped up the number of ads in its iPad player to somewhere between two and a half to three minutes of ad time per hour-long show. That’s double the previous amount, but it’s still a fraction of the 20 minutes of advertising if you watched that same show on the ABC television network without a DVR to skip the ads entirely.
YouTube video editor (Google Operating System)
YouTube has introduced a new video editor that lets you link excerpts of videos you’ve uploaded to the service into a complete whole. No, this isn’t rerun news—YouTube added a video editor in 2007, but it was so slow and buggy that the company ended up leaving it on the cutting room floor. Consider the Pandora’s box of fan-made “Star Wars”/”Star Trek” mash-ups opened wider.
Hacker group responds to AT&T, leader held by FBI (TUAW)
So, that shadowy group that discovered the AT&T 3G iPad data leak? They are most put out that AT&T threw them under the bus in the New York Times. But you know what’s worse than being besmirched in the Gray Lady? Having your house raided by the FBI, which is what happened to Goatse Security spokesman Andrew Auernheimer. He’s apparently now in the pokey, charged with multiple counts of possession of a controlled substance. But look on the bright side: Auernheimer and his group have done such good work that they’ve gotten all the world’s major media outlets to print the word “goatse.” (If you don’t know what it means, trust me on this: DO NOT LOOK IT UP ON GOOGLE. Thank you.)
Ministers banned from using iPhone (Computerworld UK)
You think your corporate IT department is bureaucratic? Try the IT department in a national government. All other petty bureaucrats are rank amateurs compared to the UK government’s Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG), which has barred all government ministers from using the iPhone and declaring BlackBerry the only authorized mobile device. Basically, all the iPhone-toting new ministers in the UK’s recently-elected Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition have been told to give their phones up. Will the new government stand for this sort of backward policy? Who’s really in charge, the IT guys or Prime Minister David Cameron? Someone needs to get these issues addressed at the next Question Time.