Got a yellow iMac? Talk to Mark Wilson of Gizmodo.

With all the buzz about the new 27″ iMacs shipping with yellowed or cracked screens, it’s inevitable that someone in the press would receive one of the bad screens and write a public post about it. Well, it’s happened—Mark Wilson of Gizmodo got one of the yellow screens, and when he returned it, he got another yellow screen. (Let’s just hope his second iMac’s box didn’t have a “Return to Sender” stamp on it.) This is what he says about the incident:

Call me paranoid, but I believe it to be true: Yesterday, after posting my threat, Apple tracked down my non-Gizmodo email I used to purchase the iMac and flagged my account to block exchanges. Either way, my hands are completely tied. Luckily, yours are not.

If my conspiracy thesis is correct, we’ve hit a nerve with Apple. So I’m only going to increase my efforts with your help until they publicize and/or fix the yellow LCD issue. Here’s what I could use from you:

Anyone out there who’s in the process of exchanging an iMac for one without a jaundiced screen and receives a replacement January 1st or after, email submissionsATgizmodo.com to let us know if the issue has been resolved. New purchases that turn out to be yellow are great as well. Please be sure to:

1. Use the subject “Yellow iMac”
2. Take photos of this screen test (just make sure to lock that white balance!)
3. Include details like the ship date and how many iMacs you’ve exchanged so far

He also says that if, after one year, the yellow/cracked iMac issue is still not fixed, then he will be pointing it out again. This is a fail on Apple’s part already, and them not admitting and then trying to cover up the problem just makes it a bigger fail. Apple, take a page from Microsoft’s Xbox 360 red ring of death book. Read the full article below.

[Gizmodo]

Happy holidays from Twek.

RogueSheep releases app to turn your iPhone into a snowglobe

Just in time for the holidays, the awesome people at RogueSheep (creators of the Postage App) have yet another app up their sleeves: SnoGlobe [iTunes Link]. SnoGlobe lets you pick a photo to use as the background for your virtual snow globe, and then you can shake it up and watch the snowflakes settle again. You can also take a picture of your snow globe and e-mail it, or post it to Facebook or Twitter. SnoGlobe costs $1 in the App Store, and is sure to keep children and adults amused for a few seconds at a time—just like the real thing.

Navarrow Wright believes I’m ‘mis-educating people…by posing hypothetical fear scenarios’

Navarrow Wright posted an article roughly a week ago linking to a quote I found earlier. This is what he says:

Here is another article that tries to “mis-educate” people on Net Neutrality by posing hypothetical fear scenarios based on things that have never happened. The more I read these stories, the more I realize that people are really being misled on this issue.

OK. I gave a what-if scenario, or as Wright puts it, a “hypothetical fear [scenario] based on things that never happened.” But then again, what are a majority of crime laws in the world based on? What-if scenarios! Why did the world agree to not use nuclear weapons? Because of what-if scenarios! Some treaties are signed after something bad, like a war, has happened, and others are signed precisely because people felt that they wanted to prevent something bad from happening. And net neutrality, while not even close to being as serious as nuclear war or killing people, has the same ideas behind it.

I looked at the next link on his post. The heading proclaims: “Net Neutrality may actually hinder free speech not help it.” And there is a link to an article covering the president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association basically saying that net neutrality violates the First Amendment.

Two things:

1. The guy saying this quote is the president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. This person represents the cable companies and other ISPs, who have a major content delivery conflict-of-interest: they can block competitors’ services and give preferential treatment to their own services and the services of people who pay them. And Comcast already has.
2. Net neutrality is a concept that would prevent ISPs from blocking websites and slowing traffic of video sites like YouTube. How is that hindering free speech? Yeah, I don’t know either.

Update: Take a look at his tag cloud:

He doesn’t talk about anything but net neutrality and things relating to that. Is that all his website is dedicated to?

See, this is why we need net neutrality (Sony Pictures Entertainment VP quote)

I stumbled on this quote from Sony Pictures Entertainment VP Steve Heckler while reading a Wikipedia article on the Sony copy protection scandal. This is what he told attendees of the Americas Conference on Information Systems:

“The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams…It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what…Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source—we will block it at your cable company. We will block it at your phone company. We will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC…These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake.”

I’m not saying that if net neutrality does not become a law cable companies and ISPs will go around freely blocking things. It could happen, that’s all I’m saying. This quote gives insight to what is going on in executives’ minds.

10balloons.com apparently does not review crowdsourced DARPA Red Balloon data

Today is the day when ten giant red weather balloons are launched at ten different locations on the continental US. This is an experiment by DARPA, the US Military’s experimental branch, to see how social networking can be used to accomplish something a single person cannot do alone. The prize for the first person or group to submit all ten correct locations is $40,000. Needless to say, the stakes are pretty darn high.

This is where sites like 10balloons.com come into play. They try to bring people together to submitting locations of balloon sightings. But the folks at 10balloons.com aren’t even reviewing the results before they are posted for everyone to see, and that makes it so that people can easily mess around with the maps.

The lesson to be learned: review information the general public gives you before posting it online. Although, honestly? That was pretty obvious.

Google launches their own DNS service

Google recently launched their own DNS service. According to them, it’s faster and more secure than other DNS services. Here’s how to switch to it. After I switched, I found it was a lot faster than the crappy AT&T default DNS service. Other than that, there were no noticable differences between the two. But keep in mind that Google keeps the DNS information in their system for 2 days in case they get a subpoena from a court. So don’t do anything naughty while your on Google’s DNS, and remember, Santa’s watching.

The Tiger Woods Reputation Meter

This basically sums up all the news.