CNET News Daily Podcast

Inspired by photosynthesis, MIT researchers have devised a catalyst to capture the sun's energy by unyoking hydrogen and oxygen. They're calling it a breakthrough in solar-energy storage. CNET News' Leslie Katz asks reporter Martin LaMonica to explain.

NBC is gearing up for its exclusive broadcast of the Olympic Games in Beijing, and it has teamed up with Microsoft's Silverlight for online video viewing.

Also, Scrabulous' creators have made a new word game for Facebook that bears even less resemblance to Hasbro's Scrabble.

Today's stories:

De Vere's Olympic iPhone has more bling than a medal… Read more

Time was when people reported on wrongdoers in officialdom to their local paper. Increasingly, though, that function has been supplanted by YouTube. CNET News' Greg Sandoval has the tale of how citizen journalists increasingly are taking advantage of communications technology to flex their muscles.

Erica Ogg explains the context for a future move by Dell to challenge Apple's iPod in the digital music player market. And Tabula Rasa players have an opportunity to get their DNA sequenced and added to a time capsule that the game's creator will take with him when he lifts into outer space this … Read more

Microsoft recently pulled an operating system switcharoo--a la the Folgers taste test or the Pepsi Challenge--on a focus group with the hopes of changing public perception of Windows Vista. Now the company has posted some of the videos of people's reactions online. But will the marketing scheme work? And separately, while in Redmond, reporter Ina Fried got an up-close look at an experimental research project, called Sphere. News intern Holly Jackson checks in with Ina on both those stories.

Also in this podcast: after a 17-month antitrust saga, satellite radio companies Sirius and XM are now one; a new … Read more

CNET News' Greg Sandoval analyzes Yahoo's attempts at damage control to mollify customers upset over its digital music policy. Apple has begun issuing regular status reports for its recently introduced e-mail and cloud-computing service. The good news: The situation is improving. But the company still isn't out of the woods. And Webware's Rafe Needleman assesses the odds for a technology start-up with an impressive pedigree to carve out a place in the increasingly hardscrabble market for Internet search.

Today's stories:

MSN to follow Yahoo in issuing music refunds?

New search engine takes aim at Google … Read more

An internal AOL memo reveals the Internet giant is looking to shed some extra weight as it gears up for a potential sale: XDrive, Bluestring, AOL Pictures, and others. Writers for some of its popular blogs have also been asked to post minimally until the end of the month. CNET News reporter Stephen Shankland tells Erica Ogg what AOL has up its sleeve.

Also in Friday's podcast, Amazon and MySpace are looking to team up on music, a convicted spam king is found dead along with his wife and daughter, Microsoft flashes some new search algorithm technology, and NASA … Read more

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer stepped onstage Thursday to tell an assembly of Wall Street analysts and reporters that, Yahoo or no Yahoo, the company plans to continue to invest until it achieves greater scale in online services.

Speaking of Yahoo, CNET News' Leslie Katz interviews Mark Stevens, author of King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist, to find out what has pushed this activist investor to challenge the powers that be. And Webware's Rafe Needleman wraps context around Facebook's bevy of announcements, including the social-networking company's renewed commitment to engage its development community.

An unlikely drama is playing out in, of all places, the security research field. Researcher Dan Kaminsky says that earlier this year, he discovered a serious flaw in the Domain Name System that drives the Internet. He's spent the last few months coordinating a huge project to get the flaw patched by all necessary companies before disclosing details about the flaw. But now a fellow researcher has taken a public guess at what the flaw was. And whether he's right or not, Kaminsky is warning companies to patch their software immediately. Reporter Robert Vamosi joins me in the … Read more

As the Last HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference comes to an end in New York, CNET News' Elinor Mills gives the lowdown on what she learned from 3,000 hackers about lock-picking, private investigation, and the security of consumer electronics.

According to new reports, Carl Icahn will be doing his bidding inside the Yahoo executive board come August, with no specific statements that he'll try to sell the search business to Microsoft.

This weekend's megahit, The Dark Knight, is up on the Web and it may be a sign that smaller Web sites are flying under the … Read more

The E3 trade show finished up this week in Los Angeles. CNET News' Daniel Terdiman covered this annual get-together for game developers and he has a wrap-up of the big news--as well as what will be the overarching technology themes to come out of this year's show.

If you're Microsoft and you've got deeper pockets than nearly any institution outside of Fort Knox, you can spend yourself silly. But the statement by the company's CFO about pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a struggling part of its business has a logic behind it. CNET News' … Read more