leak

If you think you have a technology that can help clean up the Gulf oil disaster, then BP says it wants to hear from you.

Shortly after the oil started spewing in April, BP set up an Alternative Response Technology Web site to solicit ideas for stemming the flow and cleaning up the environment. With the Gulf accident being so severe and high-profile, it has captured the attention of thousands of entrepreneurs.

Critics contend that the Web site is mainly geared at improving BP's image, but some technologies have made it though the BP filter for testing.

Last week, … Read more

MOSCOW/WASHINGTON--His face wracked by age and his voice rasping after decades of chain-smoking coarse tobacco, the former longtime Russian minister of nuclear energy and veteran Soviet physicist Viktor Mikhailov knows just how to fix BP's oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

"A nuclear explosion over the leak," he says, nonchalantly puffing a cigarette as he sits in a conference room at the Institute of Strategic Stability, where he is a director. "I don't know what BP is waiting for, they are wasting their time. Only about 10 kilotons of nuclear explosion capacity and … Read more

Today in tech news, Hulu launches its subscription service and we're thinking about going over the top (maybe next year). Also, FarmVille is apparently so prevalent that it forced a Firefox update ... or, put another way, Firefox gets a little bit broken so that FarmVille people can be happy. Sheesh. Steve Jobs sends more email, Kindle for Android arrives, and we fight for a while about Froyo.

The demand for news related to the next-generation iPhone is such that even errant parts of the device are making headlines.

On Tuesday, a Portuguese iPhone blog became the latest site to post what are fairly believable images of what may be the iPhone Steve Jobs will reveal on June 7 at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference.

Two videos posted to the site show the metal skeleton of the device--no buttons, no screen, no camera. How did the site get these? The blog's overseers claim the parts "were purchased in China by one of our readers (weren't … Read more

BP told congressional investigators on Tuesday that pressure tests on a drill pipe showed a fundamental mistake hours before the deadly explosion that caused the Gulf of Mexico oil leak, a memo released by two members of Congress shows.

The memo by Representatives Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak, who were briefed by the oil giant about the progress of its internal investigation, also said problems were found in equipment meant to provide fail-safe protection against a blowout.

A BP investigator indicated to the lawmakers that the fundamental mistake may have been made because heavy pressure on the drill line of … Read more

My, how our life would improve if all leaked photos were of this quality. And plentiful! Motorola's 3D "Ming" clamshell is looking very near completion, but the girth looks...challenging.

We already know it's 3D-capable thanks to the patent that appeared only a couple of weeks ago, showing a clamshell that displays 2D content on each screen, but when closed the two screens together join forces and turn 3D. Yeah, I know it sounds sketchy, but the patent mentions the use of autostereoscopic technology--basically, the same parallax barrier stuff seen in Sharp and Toshiba's glasses-less … Read more

It's an article of faith in the music industry that pre-release album leaks hurt sales. I don't have the statistics to argue the case in either direction, but it makes sense on a gut level: there's less reason for fans to run out and buy a new record, when they already have the uncompressed files on their hard drives.

As if the record industry hasn't tasted enough bitter irony lately, a bunch of album leaks over the weekend apparently came from a service used by music labels to share files with radio stations, media, and other … Read more

People who use Blippy want to share information with friends about their online purchases, but some users found that the site was sharing a lot more than their purchases with a lot more than just their friends.

Credit card numbers for four Blippy users were found in Google search on Friday, Blippy co-founder Philip Kaplan acknowledged after VentureBeat reported on the data leak.

The problem stemmed from an oversight during the company's beta test months ago when Blippy didn't initially realize that raw credit card data was viewable in the HTML source of its pages, Kaplan said in … Read more

It may not be as dramatic a discovery as the likely iPhone 4.0 prototype in the San Francisco Bay Area that inundated tech headlines this week, but RIM is getting a taste of the premature spotlight as details of the latest operating system for BlackBerry smartphones circulate around the blogosphere.

Boy Genius Report said it got its hands on a BlackBerry smartphone running the OS 6.0 from a secret source at AT&T and wasted little time detailing some of the features within. When asked, RIM's representatives declined to comment on the disclosed information.

The OS … Read more