Ray William Johnson is a YouTube millionaire
According to the Wall Street Journal, Ray William Johnson may be the first YouTube millionaire that isn’t already a famous musician.
Under the name RayWJ, the 30-year-old now has 1.5 billion views of his videos on YouTube, and is expected to be bringing in about $1 million per year from YouTube’s ad revenue share and from sales of his merchandise.
Johnson is famous for ranting about other videos (somewhat like the shows “The Soup” or “Tosh.0″) and for bringing in famous comedians to guest star in videos. The viral star’s twice-weekly show averages around 10 million views per week.
Because of his popularity, RayWJ is a YouTube partner that makes somewhere between $3000 and $9000 per every 2 million views.
For now, Johnson still calls his videos a “hobby.”
Hitachi selling 7200rpm 4TB drives
Hitachi has announced it will begin selling 4TB drives this month.
The new Deskstar 7K4000 hard drives will be some of the first in their capacity with 7200rpm spindle speed.
Xbit explains that the “model (HDS724040ALE640) boasts 4TB capacity and uses five previous-generation 800GB platters with 446Gb/square inch areal density, Serial ATA-600 interface, 64MB cache as well as 7200rpm spindle speed.”
The new hard disk drives also use the 4K format.
Additionally, the company will offer Deskstar 5K4000 drives with slower 5400rpm speed. Those drives also use five 800GB platters and not newer 1TB plates.
For now, the higher capacity drive is available in Japan for ¥28800 ($377), an expensive price even with the baked-in “flood” premium.
RedLynx denies leaking its own game to torrent sites
RedLynx, a Finnish video game developer that was purchased by Ubisoft last year, has denied this week that it leaked its own game to torrent sites.
Their latest game, Trials Evolution, recently made its public debut via The Pirate Bay, and immediate blame was thrown back on the developers, who have been known to be pirates.
In 2009, CEO Tero Virtala admitted that the company put the first “Trials” game online, “taking advantage” of piracy: “What we did actually, on day one, we put [the PC edition of Trials] immediately on all the torrent networks ourselves.”
Virtala was quick to deny this leak, however: “We want to be clear that [leaking Trials Evolution] is not something we did ourselves.”
iPhone 5 rumor: ‘Strong NFC support’
9to5mac has reported today that the upcoming iPhone 5 will have NFC support, and developers are already building apps.
Apparently, Apple iOS engineers are “heavy into NFC” and devs are “confident enough to bet the app development on.”
What remains unclear is who Apple will partner with for its payment systems, and the report has some speculation based on recent reports and interviews.
First comes from Ed McLaughlin, the boss of emerging payments at MasterCard: “The timeline is always as rapid as it makes sense for consumers. (In regards to mass NFC adoption) That’s a combination of having a critical mass of the merchants, which is what you’re seeing right now, and getting devices into the hands of consumers. I don’t know of a handset manufacturer that isn’t in process of making sure their stuff is PayPass ready.”
McLaughlin would not specifically say Apple, however except to say, “well, anytime someone with a major base moves forward, it advances what you’re doing. So of course [Apple is necessary in NFC reaching critical mass].”
While the exec was sidestepping the question a bit, it is very clear even to the casual observer that Apple and PayPass would certainly bring NFC to “critical mass” in the next couple of years.
Nook Tablet rooted with SD card
Although the Nook Tablet has been rootable out of the box, the process was notoriously user unfriendly.
This week, the devs over at XDA have found a much easier way to root the tablet, (which still has a locked bootloader) using a microSD card. Writing some files to the microSD and booting will bring you to ClockworkMod recovery, effectively opening up the device.
AC has the instructions: “All you have to do to get the custom recovery files to boot is copy the files provided to a card, insert it into the tablet and reboot. (You don’t even have to format the card, unlike some Nook Color methods.) Once inside ClockworkMod Recovery, you can flash custom software or use another hack to get ADB file pushing from your computer. Flash the root ZIP file and you’re done.”
For now the root method works on Nook Tablets with firmware 1.4.1 or older.
Get the files and more detailed instructions here (via XDA user “Indirect”): http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=21895025&postcount=14
DOJ brings the hammer down on Megaupload
Earlier today, the U.S. government shut down Megaupload.com, one of the largest and longest running cyberlockers in the business.
Its founders and a handful of employees have been arrested, as well, and charged with copyright infringement.
The indictment and arrests come just one day after major websites including Wikipedia and Google staged anti-SOPA “blackouts.” SOPA was created to fight piracy, but has seen massive criticism due to its ability to shut down sites with very little appeal time, at the behest of media companies or other content owners.
Megaupload and its owners are accused of taking over $500 million from copyright holders due to piracy, and cashing in on $175 million in profits from ads and premium subscriptions.
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Sony ready to shut down Dash
Sony looks like it is about ready to shut down its failed “Dash” experiment.
The “personal Internet viewer” alarm clocks saw some popularity when they were released but horrible reviews nailed the coffin.
Reads Sony’s site: “Beginning February 29, 2012, the Sony dash developer website (http://dash.sonydeveloper.com) will close and no longer support development of new applications. This closure includes the dash developer forum and dash developer support email address (dash-support@sonydeveloper.com) which will close on March 31, 2012. Sony dash applications will remain available. Thank you for your contributions and we encourage you to continue your development activity on Sony’s other platforms available at SonyDeveloper.com.”
The original Dash machine has a 7-inch touchscreen, 800×480 resolution, a 500Mhz processor and 256MB DDR2 RAM.
What makes the alarm clocks popular is access to 1500 apps for weather, traffic, social networking, movies, music and games.
Zappos sued over account data theft
Following this weekend’s big story on Zappos being hacked, the shoe retailer has been sued by an angry customer.
The customer claims Zappos did not properly “maintain adequate procedures for protecting customers? personal information.” 24 million accounts were compromised over the weekend in the largest breach of security since the PSN hack in April 2011.
Original Story:
Late last night, I received an email, as did 24 million other account holders, that our Zappos accounts had been hacked and we needed to change our passwords.
The popular shoe retailer owned by Amazon says that information such as names, email addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers, the last four digits of credit card numbers and encrypted versions of account passwords were likely compromised.
Zappos says all credit card numbers and other payment information were not accessed, since they were housed in a different database.
Additionally, Zappo’s discounted 6PM.com site was also hacked in the same attack. At 24 million compromised, the attack is the largest since Sony’s PlayStation Network was taken down in April 2011, compromising data on 101 million gamers.
The retailer reset everyone’s passwords, but has shut off its phone lines, meaning all customer service requests will go to email.
No Microsoft TV service any time soon says report
Last year stories started circulating about a Microsoft plan to integrate pay TV into Xbox Live. Reports claimed they were close to finalizing deals with companies including Time Warner, the BBC, and HBO.
However, it now appears they weren’t as close as originally reported and their plans have been put on hold indefinitely. It seems TV executives weren’t impressed enough to offer terms acceptable to Microsoft, and the deal fizzled.
Citing an unnamed media executive personally involved in the negotiations, Reuters says Microsoft got so far as demonstrating their TV platform in action, but ultimately decided the price of programming was too high. Their source reportedly said, “They built Microsoft TV, they demoed it for us, they asked for rate cards but then said ‘ooh ah, that’s expensive.”
Combining this new information with previous reports about Microsoft TV, it appears their plan was to provide both Netflix-style video on demand, but with more current content, and a traditional (but web-based) pay TV service. In addition, they seemed to be considering producing exclusive content of their own.
Of course this is nothing new or shocking. Like so many other industries built around legacy technology, they have fought nearly every attempt to develop new business models.
Network executives have licensed TV series to Netflix with key episodes missing, demanded Hulu block viewers who chose to watch their free shows (and commercials) on TVs instead of computer monitors. On the other side of the equation, cable providers are punished if they help paying customers extend TV service beyond the living room.
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Reviewing Bitcasa, the infinite cloud storage solution
What is Bitcasa?
Bitcasa is a start-up begun by former execs at Mastercard, VeriSign and Mozy and is the latest entrant to the cloud storage market.
What makes Bitcasa different is that the service offers you truly infinite storage, all for just $10 per month. In fact, when you add your first folder, you are told that you have over 500TB of remaining free space, and the start-up says that number is only there because Windows and Mac machines cannot display higher numbers.
How does Bitcasa offer unlimited storage?
The company’s CEO says it can offer unlimited storage, “because 60 percent of their data is identical.” Simply, when you “cloudify” a music track or movie, the chances are someone else has the same exact track or movie on their computer.
Bitcasa uses “patented de-duplication algorithms, compression techniques, and encryption” to identify duplicate files and therefore the company only keeps a couple, (or even one) of of the files in its servers. By doing so, the company can keep its costs significantly down and offer infinite storage to its users.
Is it safe?
Now that you understand how it works, the biggest question is whether the data is safe, and who (if anyone) can access it. Bitcasa says every upload is encrypted and protected on the server side, meaning no one but you can ever access it, including employees of the company or “snooping” media companies.
This is great for users who may be scared that anyone can search their personal files. Services like DropBox have admitted that employees are prohibited from accessing files, but are not blocked in any way. They may lose their jobs, but they could do so after they have taken all your pictures, for example.
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