“Nobody’s Watching”, a pilot made for last year’s upfronts that was never picked up, is being put back into development by NBC after gaining attention on YouTube.

Source: Slashdot

Claiming that he found a video camera hidden in the ceiling of a sperm bank’s “donation room,” a Los Angeles man is suing the firm for negligence and emotional distress. Ken Rigberg, 27, charges that he discovered the pinhole camera during a June 2005 visit to Pasadena’s Pacific Reproductive Services.

Source: thesmokinggun.com

Thק program, known as “Johnny” works both on snippets of video, as well as trailers, half-hour episodes, or full-length movies. The site receives a watch list of copyrighted movies and other materials from the MPAA, and cross-checks it against its hosted video.

One of the keys that enables the process to work is the fact that Guba accepts video in a variety of formats, but transcodes it into its own file format. The automated process, which routes the video through the Guba servers, allows the company to create a hash during the process.

“Johnny” takes a series of snapshots, not of the video, but of the video hash, recorded every few minutes, and turned into a signature file. As new videos are uploaded, the files are cross-checked against the signature files.

“Even if it’s a clip, we’ll catch it,” Myers said. A longer clip, which offers more opportunities to sample, is easier to detect. Even if the clip isn’t immediately identified as a copyrighted video, however, the file can be flagged for human review

Source: extremetech

Dell grappled with apparently severe overheating problems in scores of notebooks for at least two years before it announced a recall of 22,000 notebooks last year, according to a source close to the company.

The source allowed CRN to review documentation of investigations into the notebook problems, and the source said that documentation was supplied to Dell executives.

The evidence, which included photographs of damaged notebooks, came to light in the wake of reports of one Dell notebook exploding in front of cameras during a conference in Japan.

The documentation included detailed evidence, on a notebook-by-notebook basis, of which component areas suffered the brunt of the overheating.

Source: CRN

Across the front line between Lebanon and Israel, bloggers hiding in bomb shelters and watching from rooftops are trading terrifying experiences, bitter barbs and words of sympathy.

The postings on Web logs, online journals, are a rare forum for communication between two countries that had no open border even before the latest war, no flight connections and working phone lines only in the direction from Israel to Lebanon.

Source: Reuters

Apple’s U.S. notebook market share has doubled to 12% after shipping 1.33 million Macs in the quarter. Apple also shipped 8.11 million iPods, topping analyst estimates, for a net income of $472 million

Source: Slashdot

Advanced Micro Devices Inc., the No. 2 supplier of computer processors, is close to a deal to buy graphics chip maker ATI Technologies Inc. for $5.5 billion, a source familiar with the situation said on Friday.

Any such deal would shake up the processor industry, which is witnessing a battle over market share between AMD and larger rival Intel Corp.

ATI is one of two major graphics chips makers, along with rival Nvidia Corp., and is a big supplier of chipsets—the cluster of secondary chips and interfaces that surround a computer’s processor—to both AMD and Intel.

Unless talks break down, a deal could be announced as early as Monday, the source said.

Source: eWeek