richard

Steve Jobs pitches the city of Cupertino on a gigantic, circular "office complex" with its own power supply and, of course, a totally gorgeous design. Our question: does it come with its own Arc reactor? Also, World IPv6 Day is actually about preventing riots in the streets. Now do you care? And we found out right after the show ended that the Facebook profile pic tattoo story is a hoax. So now we hate the Internet, but we're still a little relieved.

Though Rustock remains down for the count, according to Microsoft, the hunt goes on for the creators of the infamous botnet.

Rustock was taken down this past March by Microsoft and law enforcement officials who used a combination of legal maneuvers and raids to seize control of the servers that ran the notorious spamming network. Since then, Rustock has remained "dead and decaying," said Richard Boscovich, senior attorney for Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, in a blog published yesterday.

But taking down the network itself is only half the battle in keeping botnets like Rustock offline. Tracking down the … Read more

Richard Stallman, who bridles to see the idealistic purity of his free-software philosophy debased into the more pragmatic open-source movement, can be a prickly character. But I find myself agreeing with some of his concerns about e-books.

In a piece titled "The Danger of E-books" (PDF), Stallman bemoans the e-book's loss of freedoms that most of us take for granted with physical books and places the blame on corporate powers.

"Technologies that could have empowered us are used to chain us instead," he said. "We must reject e-books until they respect our freedom...E-books … Read more

Stephane Richard knows a thing or two about the iPhone.

In addition to carrying one of Apple's iconic smartphones, Richard is also the CEO of France Telecom, whose networks carry traffic from more iPhones than any other carrier except AT&T. France Telecom, with its Orange brands, sells the iPhone in 15 countries.

"They just created smartphones with the iPhone," Richard said during an hour-long chat over breakfast at the W Hotel in San Francisco last week. "Everybody should be grateful to them to have put such a product in our market."

But, while … Read more

commentary News that researchers have "discovered" hidden files on the iPhone that store geolocation data of approximate locations the devices pass by has sent privacy conspiracy theorists screaming back to their panic rooms.

Apple now joins the ranks of Facebook (Beacon), Google (Buzz), RFID tags, Flash-based "super cookies," and the Department of Justice's WikiLeaks investigation as the latest crisis du jour in the struggle to hold back a flood of invasions into our most intimate information for the most nefarious uses.

Never mind that cellular carriers already capture the same data for roaming and billing … Read more

Usually, when someone says "this is the coolest thing I've ever seen," you know that no matter what they're looking at, they're resorting to a little hyperbole.

But today, when I saw two videos taken from the window seat of a Virgin America flight that show Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo flying alongside in tandem (give the video about 35 seconds before the spaceship appears), my reaction was, well, "this is the coolest thing I've ever seen."

And that was before hearing the audio of the person shooting the video saying … Read more

Netflix reportedly will pay about $100 million to stream every episode of Mad Men: chump change, if predictions of an $800 million streaming TV market turn out to be true. Also, it seems that everyone wants to get in on the tablet market, but given reported XOOM sales of only about 100,000, it's possible the only tablet market there is is for iPads. Plus, AT&T iPhones and their dropped calls, and Obama goes to Facebook. -- Molly

Picking up where the late uber-adventurer Steve Fossett left off, Virgin impresario Richard Branson said today he wants to go to the deepest spot on Earth.

In a press conference today in Newport Beach, Calif., Branson announced his Virgin Oceanic and Five Dives initiatives, which could send a Virgin-branded deep-sea submersible with a single pilot to the deepest spots in each of the planet's five oceans.

Virgin Oceanic will use the DeepFlight Challenger, a submersible built by Hawkes Ocean Technologies of Point Richmond, Calif., for the dives.

The five dives are intended to be to the Pacific Ocean's … Read more

LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif.--The key to avoiding the worst effects of global warming is to make money while doing so, says iconic entrepreneur Richard Branson.

The chairman of the Virgin Group, which oversees 350 businesses, is involved in dozens of efforts to reduce carbon emissions linked to global warming, both in Virgin's business operations and through spin-off efforts.

Branson was interviewed at the Fortune Brainstorm Green business conference here yesterday, where he argued that entrepreneurs, investors, and corporations need to take the lead on addressing global warming. Government policies should set ground rules, such as taxing dirty fuels, but … Read more