Bloops! Those hackers who took over comcast.com yesterday were outted by Wired today. It’s a pair of industrious fiends who go by Defiant and EBK. They took over the comcast.com DNS records, redirecting the cable giant’s traffic to their own site.

As it turns out, they were able to take over Comcast’s account at Network Solutions. They then contacted Comcast’s technical department to tell them what they’d done. Comcast hung up on them.

Angry at being treated the same as any other Comcast customer, they edited the registration to point to their own servers. They expect to be arrested for their efforts.

These guys are my kind of stoners, but let’s not mess with other people’s domain names, k?

Filed under: Gaming

The folks at Konami have been trolling the forums again, kids, and this time they're fighting back. Reps from the game-maker have issued a statement on the company forum addressing the furor over the inflated cost of the forthcoming, limited edition Metal Gear Solid 4 bundle. According to Konami, the bumped up price ($600 for a 40GB version of the PS3, plus Dual Shock controller and MGS4 game) is due to the special material used to create the gunmetal gray system and controller casing. The company seems to take issue with the fact that some are calling it simply a "paint job," and points out that the run of units is only 10,000, and the package also includes a version of the game with an extra disc of additional content. To put it another way: this is the deal of a lifetime!

[Via Wired]

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For years, Prince was the poster child for "getting" the internet and new media distribution opportunities. He experimented with a variety of different creative business models that suggested he got how the economics of music worked these days. It was working too -- with his efforts to give away his music helping him sell out concert after concert around the world. But then something changed, and Prince went ballistic, suing YouTube, The Pirate Bay and eBay and even threatening fan sites while demanding that even videos with tiny snippets of Prince music in the background get taken offline. The whole thing is quite surprising, and if he keeps this up, he's risking taking all that goodwill he built up for years, and turning himself into another Metallica. Becoming anti-fan is never a good idea.

The latest story, though, has a twist. Prince apparently did a cover of a Radiohead song at a recent concert. Someone filmed it and put the video on YouTube. Given his newfound hatred for YouTube, Prince demanded that the song be taken down. And here's where it gets interesting: Radiohead's Thom Yorke is demanding that it be put back online, noting that he owns the copyright on the song: "Really? He's blocked it?... Well, tell him to unblock it. It's our ... song." Of course, as that LA Times report notes, in true Streisand Effect fashion, the effort to take down the song has only driven much more interest in people trying to find the song. If Prince weren't suing so many people, you might even think he was canny enough to have done this on purpose as a marketing campaign.

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Filed under: Laptops

It struck us the other day as we were going over some back posts that since the launch of the ASUS Eee PC (and the numerous products that have followed, from the MSI Wind to the HP Mini-Note), to the best of our knowledge we've all yet to have any normalized, agreed-upon name for these kinds of devices. Yes, they're technically "ultraportables" (which we usually define as being any relatively small laptop and under four pounds), but to say an Eee PC is in the same class as, say, the Lenovo X300, the VAIO TZ, or the MacBook Air would be kind of misleading.

We've heard "low-cost ultraportable" and "laptop-lite" used to describe these kinds of machines, but it seems best to let you decide: leave your best suggestion for what we all should all call this emerging product category, and we'll put it up to vote next week. We'll officially be throwing "netbook" into the ring. (Intel may have initially coined the term, but that we don't think it should necessarily have to refer only to Intel-based products.)

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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

In a move of unsurprising proportions, StyleTap announced today that it will be bringing its Palm OS emulator to the iPhone and iPod touch... officially. This basically means that every one of those precious Palm apps you couldn't live without will now be easily accessible via Apple's devices, thus seriously threatening the argument for keeping your Treo 600. Gregory Sokoloff, CEO of the company, said that the response to a video posted in February of a demo version of the software convinced them to take the plunge. Palm, now might be a good time to stun us with your new OS.

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Back in the day, a laptop’s resolution was a big deal. The transition from SVGA to XVGA screens was a big one, but now of course they come in all kinds of shapes and resolutions. And now that HD-DVD is dead and there’s a clear next-gen disk format standard you’ll be seeing a lot more Blu-ray enabled laptops this year. But what good is having an HD optical drive if your display can’t show movies at their highest resolution? Acer’s your bet.

Enter the Acer Aspire 6920-6422 notebook. Not only is it thin and light, it features a native 1080p 16-inch display so you can watch features at full HD resolutions. It’s also got 4GB RAM standard, a Core 2 Duo proc, and a generous 250GB HD.

It’s a thin monster, like an Olsen twin with HD, and we like it. It’s also not half bad looking.

Filed under: Cellphones

With all this hubbub floating around about the elusive 3G iPhone, let us not forget about the latest touchscreen smartphone to land at AT&T: LG's Vu. After getting official earlier this month, we were able to sit down with the Mobile TV-supporting handset and form a few opinions of our own. Here, however, we're interested in your take -- do you feel the $549.99 (or $299.99 on contract) price tag is reasonable for what you get? Are you pleased with the hardware / software? Are you feeling buyer's remorse like never before? Go on and spill it, we're all friends here.

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There's been an ongoing battle in Congress over whether or not telcos that helped the gov't with warrantless wiretaps should get retroactive immunity for their actions. No one has given any good reason why companies should be granted immunity for any sort of illegal actions, and there are plenty of reasons why they should not. The fact that the administration "asked" them to administer the wiretaps is no excuse. The president is not above the law. Basically, the only reason to demand immunity is because it's clear that someone (or, more likely, multiple people and companies) broke the law.

The latest move in this process is a so-called "compromise" bill that would move these disputes into a secret court, who could then dismiss the lawsuits without giving any explanation whatsoever. And, yet, no one has explained why these trials should happen in secret either. Either the companies followed the procedures that are clearly stated in the law, or they did not. You can determine if they followed the procedure without giving up state secrets. This whole thing seems to be involving an awful lot of smoke and mirrors coming out of DC, with people making all sorts of ridiculous statements about "security" and "terrorism." Those statements are all meaningless distractions. There is a clear legal procedure for wiretapping that even allows for going back after the fact to get approval. There is no excuse that the process was too cumbersome or slow, because of that ability to go back. The question here has nothing to do with security and safety. It has to do with whether or not the legal process was followed -- and it's hard to see why that should remain secret.

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Heard of Ingenic Semiconductor? Us either, but they’ve apparently started shipping a new processor for UMPCs called the Jz4740. They’re appearing in 3K’s new RazorBook 400 series UMPCs and are apparently ultra low-cost and low-power. The $299 RazorBook 400 was discussed yesterday, but we didn’t have the detail we do now. The proc is new and could — in theory — run Windows. Until we get more information, though, it’s just another mystery chip doing cool stuff for cheap.