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• Online video site Guba looses a CEO shortly after two of Revver’s founders (another rival to YouTube) left their company. Analysts bemoan the bursting of a video bubble pricked by $1.65 billion of Google money. More like the slow deflation of little note.
• In other Burst 2.0 news, Israeli RawSugar, a Del.icio.us clone, is no more. Willy Wonka salivates at prospect of purchasing the domain name.
• From the ‘Holy Conflict of Ethics, Batman!’ file comes the story of Wired Magazine slamming Digg. If they really didn’t like the social news website that’s fine; the problem is they failed to mention that they owned a direct competitor named Reddit. In a related story a shocked public asks ‘People still read Wired?’.
• Sure, we all know geeks are the most strapping and virile of the tech set but do we really need another ‘Sexiest Geeks of 2006‘ list? I thought being a geek was about liberation from best lip gloss competions.
• BadVista.org, a site by the Free Software Foundation, launches. It’s incredible that a group of software advocates would be so worked up over unsightly horizons. I guess everybody has to have a hobby.
• Google Mail gets a little too much egg nog, looses all the email in a couple dozen accounts, and then urinates in the bushes. Motto changed form ‘do no evil‘ to ‘bring a designated driver‘.
• I know we promised we’d stop, but the PS3 material writes itself. The latest? That in 2007 PS2 sales will exceed those of the PS3. Forget about being the best console ever. The PS3 is struggling just to be the best console at Sony.
• HD-DVD, which languished while major movie studios demand additional security measures, has had its copy protection cracked. What’s more is that the code to crack it was already freely available online. I find myself working through the 12 stages of MPAA empathy. First there was anger, then spite… After this news I’m afraid they’re almost beyond ridicule. It’s like taunting a legless dog; they’re this sad thing with only their bark left.

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(This shilling is hard work. I’m going to lie down now).

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Take Microsoft, the blogsphere, evaluation laptops (wink,wink), and a slow news week and what do you have? A perfect storm of much bluster and little consequence.

To quickly recap for those with lives:

• Microsoft is launching Vista©™® next year
• They need to get the news out because everyone is so otherwise distracted with their Zunes
• They read the latest issue of Time Magazine, got confused and thought the word blog was a misprint of flog
• Microsoft, through their PR agency Edelman, offered “celebrity” bloggers a copy of Vista©™® to keep evaluate (with a $2200 case to carry it around it, oh, and a copy of Office 2007 might have also slipped in there)
• The bloggers that didn’t get laptops complain about how those that did are morally compromised
• Others justify it while typing on brand new keyboards
• Still others that are offered machines instead mount their high horses
• After all that, Microsoft back peddles and asks for the laptops back - pretty please?
• Valleywag nominates the whole mess for Worst Marketing Campaign of 2006. Given that this year we also saw ‘Welcome to the Social’ as a straight-faced marketing pitch (Microsoft again, ironically) that is saying something.
• (Prediction) Everyone gets drunk on New Year’s Eve and forgets the whole thing moves on to more important debates: like what a tool Robert Scoble is.

Richard Blakeley, via Valleywag, has gone and done an awesome recap of the bigger 2006 tech news in one flash video (what else)? Points to those that can correctly identify all the “celebrities” herein. Bonus points if you can remember why we consider them celebrities.

One problem: it’s only a minute long, but what a minute it has been. Is there a longer version out there?

Ever wonder why that latest Linux distro doesn’t play well with your wireless card? A new report by Jem Matzan explains why:

Unrestricted redistribution of firmware files is satisfactory for some open source operating system projects like OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and many varieties of GNU/Linux, but others like Fedora Core and Debian demand an entirely free software environment, so redistribution of the firmware without the ability to modify and distribute the source code is prohibited. The standard response to this from the Free Software Foundation is to reverse-engineer the device and provide free firmware. So even though it is very difficult — almost impossible — to do it in the absence of documentation, could such firmware eventually be reverse-engineered? The development team that works on the OpenBSD operating system has a lot of experience with reverse-engineering, but both project leader Theo de Raadt and OpenBSD network driver programmer Jonathan Gray agree that such work would be impractical. Of reverse-engineering firmware and the hardware that it runs on, de Raadt told me, “We can sometimes reverse-engineer how to talk to a device… some are worse than others… but imagine reverse engineering the firmware of 300-400 devices on the market today! Behind their little ARM/MIPS buses, they are a no man’s land of undocumented-ness and bugs; hundreds and hundreds of bugs created almost all by the realities of ‘time-to-market pressures.’”

There’s much more in the report. It’s corporate littering of the hardware landscape - it reminds me of the 1971 anti-littering campaign with the tear-stained Indian. But where’s the geek parody? Where are the crying geeks? We need a tearful geek psa stat! Who will rise to the challenge!?

Hat tip: The Great Giga (Om)

The RIAA has been able to bully everyone from Napster to the recently deceased with the long arm of litigation. Apparently, however, the Russians were too busy with their vodka and faux lesbian pop acts to be bothered to pass anti-piracy legislation. It’s a quirk that makes AllOfMP3, a Russian based DRM-free music download site, faux legal.

Major credit cards have stopped accepting payments for the site and international trade talks have centered on shutting AllOfMP3 down. However, the site continues. With more lawyers than sense the RIAA fell back into its old routine. They sued AllOfMP3 for $1.65 Trillion. To put that in perspective that’s roughly six times the gross national product of the entire Russian country. And you thought the lines for bread were long now.

Lesser comrades would wither like a dissent in a Siberian gulag, but not AllOfMP3. TechCrunch notes that the site continues to be defiant:

“AllofMP3 understands that several U.S. record label companies filed a lawsuit against Media Services in New York,” an unnamed “senior company official” stated. “This suit is unjustified as AllofMP3 does not operate in New York. Certainly the labels are free to file any suit they wish, despite knowing full well that AllofMP3 operates legally in Russia. In the mean time, AllofMP3 plans to continue to operate legally and comply with all Russian laws.”

Zing! Not even Red Dawn portrayed New York as a soviet region. Oh, troublesome international sovereignty!

Todd Bishop, the Seattle PI’s Microsoft Reporter, has a great roundup of Microsoft videos available online. When you’re as large as the Redmond software giant there apparently are plenty of opportunities to do awkward commercial parodies (not unlike this place):

While we’re on the top of Billy G., it’s important to remember he’s got a whole drawer in the ghosts of geeks past file cabinet.

Breaking news via the Great GigaOM himself says that Seattle based Jobster will be cutting up to half its 145 workforce in 2007. The company raised tens of millions of venture capital but still hasn’t gained mind market share in the minds of job seekers or providers.

The Pros:

• That Joster waited until after the holiday season to let people go. It’s pretty easy to do, but that puts them ahead of AOL in my book.

The Cons:

• This is the third Emerald City startup to ‘realign its workforce’. The others included Blue Dot and Vizrea (mental note, don’t name a company that rhymes with diarrhea).
• People close to Jobster describe the situation as ‘fluid’. Don’t insult people’s intelligence. Call it what it is without the marketing speak and we’d all be a lot better off.

Not to make light of layoffs but does anyone else fine it ironic that employees of a job matching website are now jobless? Would they be more inclined to use Jobster’s services, or less?

If you happened to be one of those well adjusted folks who took time off for your self (or were snowed in at the Denver airport) here is the latest in tech foibles from the last week:

• New papers leaked show that Facebook’s founders turned down a $1.6 billion offer from - you guessed it - Yahoo. While we question Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s common sense we have to give props to the man’s moxy. The article mentions he used to pass out business cards that said “I’m CEO . . . bitch”. - TimesOnline.co.uk
• Peter Gutmann, a computer science professor at the University of Auckland (New Zealand), declares the Windows Vista security specification the longest suicide note in history. Sure, the security model is incredibly anti-consumer and enterprising hackers have already figured out how to permanently bypass Vista calling home to the mothership activation. I just want to know how many suicide notes Gutmann has studied. What was the previous record? Is there a benchmark for long goodbyes? Or is this more pandering by another so-called suicide note expert?
• Gizmodo declares that everyone hates the PS3. We ask what took so long? Given that even gas stations in rural Minnesota have gotten into the act its probably time to jump off that wagon. It’s a shame; Sony seems determined to make that ride of corporate blundering into hardware obscurity damn entertaining.
• Joel Spolsky, software commentator grand-pu-ba, took it upon himself to figure out just what the heck Steve Gillmor is talking about in a recent post. Three hours and several decoder rings later Joel comes to the conclusion that Steve is blowing smoke. He then promptly unsubscribed from the RSS feed.
• Wikiasari, a search engine from the guys who did Wikipedia, is announced and promptly proclaimed as a ‘killer app’ by CNet. It’s kind of funny - I seem to remember the folks at Google being banned from talking to CNet reporters for a year. Could CNet be practicing some journalistic spite?

There’s a reason that the modern sub-species of erectus-geekius isn’t portrayed as the strong, virile class of human that they are. Mostly because our fore fathers weren’t. As a public service we at Militant Geek are pointing out this potentially painful past lest we repeat it:

Hat Tip: Dethroner