1. Google gave us CADIE, upside down YouTube videos, and GMail autopilot.
2. TorrentFreak told us that Warner Brothers plans to acquire The Pirate Bay.
3. Arrington announced that he is looking for a date from readers and that General Mills has acquired CrunchGear.
4. CenterNetworks announced the CN51 Startup Conference.
5. SocialBlade claims they cracked the Digg algorithm.
6. The Guardian claims they are killing print version of their site and is going Twitter only.
7. Woot.com is selling a bag of crap for $3.00 and $1 million shipping.
8. Opera announced face-gestured web browsing.
9. Car and Driver is reporting that President Obama wants “a complete withdrawal from America’s premier racing series is expected to save more than $250 million between GM and Chrysler, a substantial amount considering the drastic measures being implemented elsewhere.”
10. Qualcomm stated that their convergence program has implemented tiny base stations into thousands of pigeons. They also stated that these are no ordinary pigeons but a hybrid wolfpigeon.
11. SlideShare told their users that they are Rockstars.
12. Funny or Die wrote that they have been acquired by Reba McEntire and is now called RebaOrDie.com.
13. AOL Radio was considering playing Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up all over AOLRadio.com.
14. Amazon.com launches brand new cloud computing service called Floating Amazon Cloud Environment (FACE).
More to be added as they are discovered…
These were all good, but I think out of all them, Reddit had the best April Fools prank. They replaced their entire user interface to look just like Digg as you will notice in the above screen shot.
Mozilla will be supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation to push for the legalization of iPhone jailbreaking with the U.S. Copyright Office. Mozilla CEO John Lilly stated that “choice is good for users, and choice shouldn’t be criminalized.” Jailbreaking an iPhone means that the device can accept software that is external from what is offered on iTunes. Apple believes that accepting any external software is a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).
“This is not us criticizing Apple,” stated Mozilla CEO John Lilly. “But it’s the principle of the thing. Choice is good for users, and choice shouldn’t be criminalized. The Internet is too important for all of us for that.”
Some of the popular applications available on jailbroken iPhone applications include tethering applications.
Mozilla may have a bias against Apple because developing a browser for the iPhone would require them to use the Webkit rendering engine used for Safari. “Given the choice, would we work on a platform where the sole company controlling it makes us unwelcome, or would we work on a platform, like Linux, where we are welcome? The answer is going to be easy for us,” Lilly stated in an interview with Computerworld.
Even if the U.S. copyright office grants jailbroken iPhones from being legal, Mozilla is still unlikely going to develop a browser for the iPhone. This is the same case with Opera Software ASA. It was reported earlier that Apple blocked Opera’s web browsing application from being added to the iTunes App Store. Other companies supporting the EFF include Skype and Cydia.
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has blocked Opera Software ASA (OSL:OPERA) from releasing their own browser software into the App Store. The Opera browser is already supported by Windows Mobile and many people use it as their default rather than Internet Explorer. It seems that Microsoft is giving users more choice when it comes to mobile devices.
Since the co-founder and CEO of Opera, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner was interviewed by The New York Times a few days ago, there has been speculation for why Apple blocked them. The biggest reason is that Opera directly competes with the Safari web browser. Another reason why it is possible that Opera was blocked is that it has a Javascript interpreter built-in which has a tendency to use up a lot of memory and crash often.
Apple’s Safari browser has a lot of positives to it, but it does not support Flash for the iPhone. Apple tried to compensate it’s lack of Flash-support by providing a separate YouTube program that automatically full-screens any videos that are watched. But is that really enough?
