By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

Time-Warner Cable (TWC) giveth and TWC taketh away. More on that later. HBO, a TWC subsidiary, is about to roll out a (yet another) trial service in Green Bay and Milwaukee, Wisconsin starting Tuesday. The new service, HBO on Broadband, will give users access to approximately 400 hours of programming per month.

(I wonder if someone at HBO is prescient, as this is perfect for Wisconsin, since the Packers lots the NFC Championship game and they Wisconsin residents will have more time on their hands).

To get HBO on Broadband you have to be an HBO subscriber (natch), you have to be a digital cable customer, and you have to have Internet service* through your cable provider. Also, the software to watch the shows is only available on Windows PCs (surprise, surprise).

The software will allow multiple accounts, one for each family member, and there are parental controls as well. You can also watch the East Coast feed of HBO, which would be great if you are traveling.

Naturally if things go well, TWC will roll out HBO on Broadband nationwide.

The bad news, of course, is this leaves out satellite users (DirecTV, Dish), people who use DSL or satellite broadband, people with Macs - who am I leaving out? Oh, and in case you were wondering: no portable devices yet.

Also, when you think about it, 400 hours is not that much. According to HBO, about six episodes will be offered at any one time for a series, but for one series each month, all the episodes ever produced will be available.

So why did I say TWC taketh away? Well, hey, you’re gonna use plenty of bandwidth here, and yet in Texas TWC is trialling hard bandwidth caps. TWC, you can’t have it both ways!

* As if (in my area) the incentive to sign up for Comcast to get lower rates for cable modem service isn’t enough, now they tack this on.

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

AT&T and the iPhone have gone corporate. Despite the opinion of many analysts, AT&T is now labeling the iPhone an Enterprise-class device. My question, as with my earlier AT&T SIM-only story is, why is this all that great again?

The reason I say this is because if you compare the data plans between the consumer and corporate plans, you’ll pay $25 more a month. Oh, wait, if you read the fine print, here’s the answer:

Qualified Corporate Responsibility Users and other corporate-liable users who activate an Enterprise Data Plan for iPhone by March 31, 2008 may be eligible to receive a service credit in the amount of $25 per month through December 31, 2008.

Waitasec, AT&T, that’s only until December, and I’m signing up for a two-year plan, right? Sigh. My guess is the reason for this announcement of “corporateness” may lie in the upcoming announcement of Lotus Notes on the iPhone.

At any rate, they needed something really exciting to talk about since there was no 3G iPhone at Macworld, right? Follow the links to compare the corporate and consumer plans.

By David Johnston
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Nearly a decade after their release, both Counter-Strike and Everquest have been banned from sale in Brazil. The ban, which has recently been implemented, was ordered by the Brazilian courts last October. Some Brazilian gamers have written in to website Kotaku about the bans. One of the readers claims that Counter-Strike has been banned because it teaches “war strategies”. For those unfamiliar with Counter-Strike, it is centered around battles between two teams called the Terrorists and the Counter-Terrorists. Everquest, a very popular MMORPG, has been banned because some experts fear that quests which are both good and evil may lead to antisocial behavior. They also claim that a number of other games, such as Grand Theft Auto and Carmageddon, have been banned in Brazil as well. It will be interesting to see if this ban will effect the professional gaming organizations like as mibr (Made in Brazil) and their sponsors that make money from playing these games.

Sources: Kotaku, AFP

By Martin Regtien
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Let’s not pretend otherwise: Routers are normally pretty boring devices. The best routers tend to quietly do their job in anonymity amongst the Rat king of cables hidden away from view.
If you do happen to intentionally glance at your router, it usually coincides with the words, “Why are you not working?” Expletives optional.

The Belkin N1 Vision takes this truth and attempts to turns it on its head. Here is a router that wants to be looked at.

Read on to find out why in another review from Paul Moons in Australia.

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

It’s a weekend, and a holiday weekend to boot, so the site might stay this way for some time. Someone apparently used SQL injection to wipe, and we do mean wipe, the website of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) clean of content. (In case they’ve fixed the site, click the empty “Who We Are” statement above to see what their homepage looked like at the time of this writing.)

Since the RIAA is usually chasing after pirates of copyrighted and copy-protected material, call it … well, call it what you will.

It started on Reddit, where a link to a really slow SQL query was posted. The post said “This link runs a slooow SQL query on the RIAA’s server. Don’t click it; that would be wrong.”

Of course, no one listened to that tongue-in-cheek warning. While some users were messing around changing links to point the Pirate Bay (below), for example, someone allegedly wiped the site’s entire database.

We say allegedly since it’s possible, though not likely, that the RIAA wiped it clean themselves because of all the hacking, but it would have been simply to just take the site down and fix the issue. No, it seems more likely that hackers wiped the site’s database.

As pointed out by blorg, they could have used SQL injection:

They haven’t disabled it, someone has used SQL injection to wipe their entire database. There is no content left on that site at all.

SQL injection works when a sloppy programmer passes a URL variable straight into a query without validating it. So if you have something like this:

SELECT article_title FROM table WHERE year = [URL variable]

And you pass “2007″ as the URL variable but don’t check it, it is open to tacking stuff on the end which is simply passed straight to the database for execution.

The “slow query” link tacked on a query that ran millions of pointless MD5 hash computations through MySQL’s BENCHMARK() function. Someone else decided to tack on a DELETE or DROP statement instead, and poof- goodbye site content.

There’s a lot more speculation in the comments at the original link above, though. I guess we’ll find out what happened if and when the RIAA posts some info.

For now, this is a good example of why you need backups.

Update: Looks like the site’s coming back.

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

Not to be outdone by Yahoo!, Google has announced the ability to use your Blogger URLs as an OpenID URL at any site that allows OpenID 1.1 authentication.

Yahoo announced on Thursday the ability (at the end of January) to use Yahoo! user IDs for OpenID logins, so this doesn’t go quite so far, as it doesn’t allow the use of the much larger pool of Gmail user IDs.

So how do you enable this? You edit your profile from the beta version of Blogger, draft.blogger.com (if you edit from www.blogger.com you won’t see the checkbox) and check the box that says “Enable OpenID for blogs” (see below).

Caveats? No support for blogs that aren’t hosted on BlogSpot or are on a custom domain. There’s a workaround that may work for some (help page). Also,“Yes, Always” to trust an OpenID site forever, you cannot now delete that trust. We will add this feature soon.

Hopefully the fact that Google has opted to support OpenID 1.1 won’t be an issue going forward; Yahoo! has opted for OpenID 2.0 support.

Although you can already login to comment at Blogger using OpenID, this still means that at least as far as actual services go, Blogger and Yahoo! are still both providers, not consumers of OpenID. It would really serve to validate OpenID if they would start allow users to login to their services with OpenID.

The one hint that this may happen, at least for Yahoo!, comes from Jeremy Zawodny (”Yahoo!’s MySQL guru”) at his blog, which says:

Oh, and before anyone jumps on me about this not being “full” (meaning bi-directional) OpenID support, I’m quite aware of that. Consuming OpenID is a different beast that can’t happen overnight. Give it some time. I’m optimistic that we’ll get there.

The assumption being if Yahoo! is moving in this direction, so will Google, leads one to hope.

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

According to a report issued by web metrics firm Hitwise, MySpace dominated among social networking sites in 2007. MySpace averaged 76.35% of all U.S. visits in 2007. Facebook was #2, with a mere 12.57%. Market share dropped drastically after that to Bebo’s 1.24%.

However, if you look closer at the statistics MySpace had 72.32% of visits in December 2007, which was actually an 8% decrease from December 2006 (78.89%). At the same time Facebook Rose from 10.59% to 16.03%, a gain of 51%.

On the other hand, Facebook users spend a lot less time on their site than MySpace users. MySpace users spent 29 minutes, 36 seconds per visit, while Facebook users spent 19 minutes, 51 seconds per visit, a nearly 10 minute difference. However, year over year, Facebook visit time doubled, from 9 minutes, 56 seconds last year.

In the report, Heather Dougherty, director of research at Hitwise said:

“MySpace and Facebook remain the market leaders among social networking websites, retaining a loyal base of users. The continued popularity of social networking activities online will drive the interest of marketers seeking to target influential users to approve and advocate their products and services.”