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TechTalk Media Group

Founded in 1996, TechTalk MediaGroup publishes a growing network of online consumer magazines and radio programming.

Our online magazine system is built around four main market segments: HomeServices, LifeStyle, Finance and Medical.

Our HomeServices publications include Appliance.net an online magazine with a companion public forum with reviews of gadgets, small and large appliances. Remodel.net and HomeOwner.Net.

Our LifeStyle group publishes Bicycle.Net, one of the fastest growing, most respected publications covering professional cycling. Other magazines published in our LifeStyle group include Bride.Net and Maternity.Net

Our newest magazine group, under the MedicalCare.Org brand will include a full family of consumer and medical professional magazines and communities like Cardiologist.Org, Dermatologist.Org, Oncologist.Org, Pediatrician.Org and Endocrinologist.Org.

Our Finance/Insurance Group includes LifeInsurance.Net, Refinance.Net, Finance.Org, AutoInsurance.Net, HealthPlan.Net

Our Network of websites is internally owned and controlled, includes over 3000 market specific and locally focused online publications with millions of page views monthly.

George Orwell, Project Gutenberg and Amazon.com

Amazon Offers Refund for Deleted Copies of Orwell Novels

“Big Brother” apologizes as Amazon offers affected customers gift certificates or replacement copies of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-four” and “Animal Farm”, which were deleted without explanation earlier this summer.

Covered earlier in George Orwell’s 1984 and Other Books Go Down Project Gutenberg’s Memory Hole

Internet Killed the Magazine Star: PC Magazine Goes Digital

PC Magazine dropping print for online

PC Magazine, which has documented the explosive growth of the personal computer since 1982, announced on Wednesday that it was dropping its print edition next year and going online only.

PC Magazine publisher Ziff Davis Media, which recently exited Chapter 11 bankruptcy, said in a statement that the final edition of the iconic magazine would be the January 2009 issue.

Ziff Davis said PC Magazine, which has suffered a steep drop in advertising as scores of competing publications cropped up on the Internet, will go “all-digital” at PCMag.com.

“Moving our flagship property to an all-digital format is the final step in an evolutionary process that has been playing out over the last seven years,” Ziff Davis Media chief executive Jason Young said.

“Since 2000, online has been the focal point where technology buyers get their information and technology marketers are directing their dollars to drive demand and build their brands.

“We have been carefully preparing for this step and are fortunate to have a digital business that has the scale, profit, and opportunity to carry the brand powerfully into the future,” he said.

PaidContent.org, which covers digital media, said seven employees will be laid off as a result of the closure of the print edition of the magazine. The Ziff Davis Media statement made no mention of any job reductions.

PC Magazine is the latest US publication to drop its print edition and move to a Web-only format.

US News & World Report, long the number three newsmagazine in the United States behind Time and Newsweek, announced earlier this month that it was abandoning print for the Web and the 100-year-old newspaper the Christian Science Monitor announced plans recently to do the same.

Samsung Sivercare Washer

Here’s a great story from Appliance.Net talking about one of the coolest uses of precious metals around. Getting the smell out of you gym clothes.

New Blackberry Bold has Unlock Codes

UnlockBlackberryBold.com is already offering unlock codes for your Blackberry Bold. They’ve gone a step further than their competitors with an easy-to-follow video.

If your BlackBerry is “locked” to a specific network they will help you “unlock” it.

All you need to do is purchase the service and send your 15 digit IMEI number and they will send you the code & instructions to instantly unlock your phone.

Cool. We like.

Spam King Murder-Suicide

Spammers are sociopaths. I’ve often said so. Friends and colleagues sometimes consider my views a little over the top, but here’s my shibboleth… would you want your daughter to marry a spammer?

I don’t know about you, but I think spammers are below used car salesmen on the food chain. I think the people who hire spammers are below used car salesmen, too. I think that someone should publish lists of the companies that hire spammers and include the names and addresses of their employees, not unlike Megan’s Law websites requiring registered sex offenders.

Companies could brag, “Spammers and people who have ever hired spammers will never work for us.”

Come to think about it, I think it insults the food chain to include spammers among them.

eWeek reports:

Convicted penny stock e-mail hustler Eddie Davidson kills his wife and young daughter before taking his own life just days after escaping from a federal minimum security prison.

Convicted spam king Eddie Davidson has committed suicide after killing his wife and 3-year-old daughter, according to media reports. Just five days ago, Davidson, the infamous online hustler of penny stocks, escaped from federal prison in Florence, Colo.

According to a story by the Denver Post, Davidson, 35, was found dead in the driveway of a home near Bennett, Colo., an apparent gunshot suicide victim. In a 2006 silver Toyota Sequoia located in the driveway, authorities found the bodies of Davison’s wife and toddler, also gunshot victims. An unidentified teenager survived the killing spree, as did an infant in the backseat of the SUV.

Davidson escaped from the minimum security prison at Florence on July 20. Davidson was just two months into a 21-month federal sentence for his role in sending millions of e-mails promoting questionable penny stocks. The Rocky Mountain News reported that Davidson forced his wife to help him escape from the minimum security facility.

The newspaper also reported that the teenager who was wounded was Davidson’s daughter, who escaped the murder scene and was lucid enough to tell authorities what had happened.

“What a nightmare, and such a coward. Davidson imposed the death penalty on family members for his own crime,” U.S. Attorney Troy Eid told the newspaper.

Davidson was sentenced on April 28. In addition to his nearly two-year prison sentence, Davidson was ordered to pay $714,139 in restitution to the IRS. As part of the restitution, Davidson had agreed to forfeit property he purchased, including gold coins, with the ill-gotten proceeds of his offense.

According to government documents, Davidson conducted his spamming operation from July 2002 through April 2007. The primary nature of Davidson’s business consisted of providing promotional services for companies by sending large volumes of unsolicited commercial e-mail.

Davidson’s original spamming activities were provided on behalf of companies to promote watches, perfume and other items. Beginning in the middle of 2005, Davidson sent spam on behalf of an unidentified Texas company to promote the sale of the company’s stock. The company generated its income through selling stock on behalf of small companies on the public market.

Davidson, aided by several subcontractors, sent hundreds of thousands of unsolicited e-mail messages to potential purchasers throughout the United States and the world touting the excellent investment opportunities the stock offered.

The e-mail messages contained false header information, which concealed the actual sender from the recipient of the e-mail. Davidson operated his spamming activities from his personal residence in Bennett, where he had a large network of computers and servers that facilitated his business.

Hackers Obtain Critical Internet Flaw

Internet security researchers on Thursday warned that hackers discovered a “critical” flaw that allows “cache poisoning” attacks that tinker with data stored in computer memory caches that relay Internet traffic to destinations.

Seeking to keep details of the vulnerability hidden at least a month to give people time to protect computers from attacks, computer industry engineers that labored in secret to solve the problem, releasing a software “patch” two weeks ago.

“We are in a lot of trouble,” said IOActive security specialist Dan Kaminsky, who stumbled upon the Domain Name System (DNS) vulnerability about six months ago and reached out to industry giants to collaborate on a solution.

“This attack is very good. This attack is being weaponized out in the field. Everyone needs to patch, please. This is a big deal.”

DNS is used by every computer that links to the Internet and works similar to a telephone system routing calls to proper numbers, in this case the online numerical addresses of websites.

For $54M, Lose My Laptop… PLEASE!

$500 for the hassle is hardly compensation. It takes days just to get old software installed and a laptop configured, let alone trying to restore backups.

BestBuy should be on the hook for damages and penalties related to identity theft linked to the lost laptop. Hard to add that up to $54M, though.

Raelyn Campbell seems to be VERY highly connected and if her contacts — maybe many with unlisted phone numbers — have been compromised, there is more to this story than is covered in the article.

Lost laptop? Sue for millions!

Is your laptop worth $54 million? Raelyn Campbell of Washington, D.C., is suing Richfield-based Best Buy for that amount after it lost her laptop computer while it was in for repairs.

Campbell, who could not be reached Tuesday, filed a negligence lawsuit suit against the company in Washington Superior Court on Nov. 16, seeking fair compensation for replacement of the $1,100 computer and extended warranty, plus expenses related to identity theft protection.

Best Buy spokeswoman Nissa French said in an e-mail that Campbell “was offered and collected $1,110.35″ as well as “a $500 gift card for her inconvenience.”

According to Campbell’s blog at bestbuybadbuyboycott.blogspot.com, Geek Squad employees spent three months telling her different stories about where her laptop might be before finally acknowledging that it had been lost.

Explaining Copyright and Fair Use to Disney… The Hard Way

Via BoingBoing:

Fair(y) Use Tale: AMAZING video cuts up Disney to explain copyright

Bucknell prof Eric Faden has produced the most amazing video mashup I’ve ever seen: “A Fair(y) Use Tale” cuts together thousands of extremely short clips from dozens of Disney cartoons, lifting indivudal words and short phrases to spell out an articulate, funny, and thoroughly educational lesson on how copyright works. This is the most subversive and hilarious use of Disney material I’ve ever seen — and there’s even a really smart chapter about why Faden used Disney material to make his film. This should be required viewing in every K-12 classroom in the country.

Link to:

• Coral Cache link to MP4 download
• Stanford page
• another mirror

For your immediate gratification, while it lasts:

DVD Encryption… Can You Digg It?

Long before he voiced South Park‘s Chef, Isaac Hayes was probably most famous for his theme song to the classic 70′s movie Shaft. Pardon the parody, but the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), the consortium of companies that oversees DVD copy protection, would not like us to sing this tune:

You see this HD DVD encryption shafting is a bad mother–
(Shut your mouth)
But I’m talkin’ about shafting HD DVD encryption
(Then we can digg it)

Go read Social networking gets major challenge at Digg

Oh, and as of today, there are 1.7 million sites that Google sees mentioning 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-+63-56-88-c0