Billy Tompson: The Technology newsbucket: scraped 'patents', how Apple grows, Google's Chrome plans and more

Plus how the Beatles sold 2m via social media, William Gibson on Twitter v Facebook, when bad Google is good and more

Photo by quinn.anya on Flickr. Some rights reserved

A burst of 11 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Google's Chrome OS Is Prepared for a Netbook - NYTimes.com
"'When Google made their decision early on with the Chrome OS project, Android was in its infancy and the tablet market didn't really exist,' said Ray Valdes, a research vice president at Gartner who studies Internet platforms. 'Now things have changed, and I think Google is likely recalibrating its strategy and product mix to take that into account.'"
There's a growing suspicion that unless Chrome can do a better job on desktop and laptop computers than it had been expected to, it will stall just as the netbook market is doing.

Tom the Dancing Bug: A Security Issue at the Office >> Boing Boing
"Isn't there a better approach to stopping these thefts than simply reacting very specifically to the last incident?"

Casting some light on the white-box [smartphone] phenomenon >> Carolina Milanesi, Gartner
"Our 3Q10 [smartphone] market share document has caused a bit of excitement as it appeared that we changed our methodology on how we track white-box sales. Our methodology has NOT changed but the market HAS."

Amid economic doldrums, Apple has a spectacular year >> San Jose Mercury News
"Apple, no matter how many economic dark clouds may hover, never skimps on research and development. In calendar year 2009, at the nadir of the great recession, Apple's R&D spending jumped 20 percent to $1.4 billion. That contrasted with a 4 percent drop in spending on research among the SV150, the Mercury News' annual report on Silicon Valley's 150 largest publicly traded companies. While the SV150 as a whole cut payrolls by 6%, Apple went on a hiring binge, adding 2,300 employees to the fold, a 7% increase in its work force.
"The pace of hiring accelerated during the company's fiscal 2010, which ended Sept. 25. Over the preceding four quarters, it added 12,300 employees, raising its number of full-time workers to 46,600, a 36% jump. In the same period, Apple's R&D spending soared 38% and it opened 44 new retail stores, ending the year with a total of 317 outlets."
It may only be a 7% increase in workforce, but that's still a lot of people.

How Did The Beatles Sell 2 Million Songs On iTunes? Mostly Facebook (Not Search) >> Hitwise
On the first day that Beatles songs were available on iTunes, 26% of traffic to Apple.com cae from social media, about twice as much as came thruogh search. Then again, might it have been social media reflections of mass media reports? That's not explained.

Switch | The multi-user web browser for iPad
Certainly what the iPad needs: multi-user functionality, even without multi-user function.

Interview: A chat with the guys behind ChevronWP7 >> GeekSmack
"An unlock tool for WP7 which allows people to sideload applications to the OS without needing to go through the Marketplace process." It's near enough jailbreaking.

The Vulture Transcript: Sci-Fi Author William Gibson on Why He Loves Twitter, Thinks Facebook Is 'Like a Mall,' and Much More >> NYMag.com
"I was never interested in Facebook or MySpace because the environment seemed too top-down mediated. They feel like malls to me. But Twitter actually feels like the street. You can bump into anybody on Twitter." He only follows 87 people. Interesting to look at who they are.

For DecorMyEyes, Bad Publicity Is a Good Thing >> NYTimes.com
Fascinating tale about how negative comments about a site pushed it *up* Google's rankings, meaning that worse customer service actually made people more likely to buy things from it (if they weren't cautious before purchase). Oddly, given that Google professes not to make changes to the search rankings by hand, the site involved (decormyeyes) doesn't turn up in the first page of searches for various glasses search terms.

Windows password cracker >> Ophcrack
"Ophcrack is a free Windows password cracker based on rainbow tables. It is a very efficient implementation of rainbow tables done by the inventors of the method. It comes with a Graphical User Interface and runs on multiple platforms."
Consider that using this could easily break the Computer Misuse Act unless you have the machine owner's permission to do so. Use at your own risk.

Patent skullduggery: Tandberg rips off x264 algorithm >> Diary Of An x264 Developer
"There's been a lot of very obnoxious misuse of software patents in recent years. This ranges from patent trolls wielding submarine patents to overly-generic patents being used to scare everyone else out of a business. But at least in most of the cases, the patents were an original idea of some sort, even if that idea was far too general to be patented.
"The situation just got worse. We now have a company scraping open source commit logs and patenting them."

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Charles Arthur

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