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Hottest stories, craziest moments from summer 2011

Officially, we still have three weeks of summer, but we all know that after the three-day Labor Day weekend it's all but over. And it's probably a good thing. After the blistering pace of big news and wild moments over the past three months, we could all use an autumn vacation. Here's a look back at the stories that made summer 2011 so memorable:

iOS 5 and "one more thing" from WWDC: No blockbuster new device announcement came out of Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Instead we got updates to Mac OS X and iOS to anticipate, as well as one more very intriguing thing. Steve Jobs announced iCloud, which rehashes a lot of cloud concepts that are already old hat for Android users, but adds that special Apple polish and iTunes Match, which syncs up users' music and media collections across iOS devices. The service still hasn't debuted, but Spotify landed in the U.S. (see below) in the meantime, creating some serious competition.

Everything's coming up tablets: The great race to catch up to the iPad continued, but no one seemed to gain ground. RIM's PlayBook flopped and HP's TouchPad... well, more on that later. But the tech world is far from giving up. Microsoft started the summer by introducing Windows 8, which is basically built to be tablet-ready with a touch interface. Of course, who knows if we'll see it before 2014--by that time tablets will probably have been replaced by nanotech thought-controlled devices. Amazon also looks to be throwing its hat in the tablet ring, with a rumored iPad-killer coming soon, maybe?

Everyone hacks everything: What's summer without a fresh Mountain Dew and Low-Orbit Ion Cannon by the glow of a flat-screen monitor, DDoSing the lazy days away? You're not anyone in this world anymore until someone hacks you. By that measure, a whole lot of people, companies, and governments finally "arrived" this year. Tongue-in-cheek congratulations to the CIA, Sony (several times over), Citigroup, Electronic Arts, Turkey, and so many more for making the long list of targets.

Essential tech to pack in your Hurricane Irene Go Bag

I need to reprioritize the items in my Hurricane Irene Go Bag. How do I know this? Because this a.m. I found myself struggling to decide which toy my cat would prefer should we be forced to evacuate our home early tomorrow morning.

Before you go planning a disaster movie marathon this weekend, be sure to check out the NYC Hurricane Evacuation Zone map or enter your address in the Zone Finder to see if you live in an evacuation area.

And if you do live in one of the affected areas, you can download apps for both iOS and Android devices that show Doppler radar info, detailed maps, and ongoing weather warnings and satellite images for up-to-date news on the storm. But what should you pack in your emergency "Go Bag"?

Friday Poll: Scariest tech happening of 2010?

So here we are on the verge of another Halloween weekend, and I've yet to be sufficiently scared. That said, as I look back at the year to date, I'm a little freaked out--2010 has had its share of frightening tech moments.

Sure, Facebook faced some serious privacy charges, but Firefox now has a plug-in that lets you spy on everyone on your network. Zoinks!

You likely heard about the Stuxnet virus that went around not long ago. It appears to have been built to disrupt power grids around the world. That's frightening.

At the Black Hat more

Attention, readers: Send us your DIY goodness!

Here at Crave, we're giant fans of do-it-yourself projects, and we feature them a lot on these pages because we love the smell of solder and the look of grease stains (even if some of our significant others don't). We've seen some pretty awesome stuff made by regular people to fill needs other products don't--or just because making one's own wacky contraptions is plain fun (robot flower girl, we're talking about you).

We've covered DIY creations including a homemade Lamborghini, automated knock-detecting door lock, snow chopper made from junk, mind-controlled spybot, biometric bridal

Wrapping up Speeds and Feeds, part 4: Security

Nothing disappoints me more about the evolution of the personal computer than the PC's lack of ubiquitous security.

There's no technical reason why PCs can't provide strong security. Improving security costs money, which provides a business reason not to do it, but the way I see it, the costs associated with insecure computing have long since eclipsed the costs of making systems more secure.

It's also true that there's always a way around any layer of protection, which is sometimes taken as another argument against improving security. As the argument goes, you have to be more

Wrapping up Speeds and Feeds, part 2: Reliability

Personal computers have become much more reliable over the last 10 years or so, mostly due to the introduction of advanced operating systems with memory protection and hardware abstraction. The hardware itself has gotten better too; uncorrectable random errors are rare in PCs and extraordinarily rare in server-class systems.

These and other improvements have largely eliminated machine crashes. Blue-screen errors on Windows and kernel panics in Linux and Mac OS X still occur, but much more rarely.

Error-reporting services have become common, helping software developers figure out what went wrong. Most large developers now issue regular patches to fix newly more

Insatiable demand for mobile data challenges industry

Mobile data traffic is doubling every nine months, according to Cisco Systems. By 2013, mobile traffic will hit 2 exabytes--2 million terabytes--per month.

For some vendors, the growth rate is even higher. AT&T says its network load has been growing by 4.5x per year for the last two years, in large part (I assume) because of iPhone sales. You may have read about AT&T's pledge to spend over $12 billion this year to expand its wireless and broadband networks, including new 3G spectrum with better coverage and trials of 4G service.

At the Linley Group's Tech Processor Conference this week in San Jose, Calif., we learned what effect this growth is having on equipment makers, especially the companies making the microprocessors that go into network gear.

According to that same Cisco study, the problem goes well beyond iPhones. A 3G-equipped laptop "can generate as much traffic as 450 basic-feature phones" and 15 times the traffic of an iPhone or BlackBerry.

Networks have also gotten smarter, so network processors have much more work to do. Instead of just hundreds or thousands of clock cycles of work per packet on the network, new functions like firewalls, intrusion detection, and antivirus scanning to keep smartphones and laptops safe can require 100,000 cycles of processing on each packet.

Factoring in the growth in the network itself, Michael Coward of Continuous Computing, a company that sells equipment, software, and services to the telecom market, said that network operators need to achieve a 1,200x boost in processing performance between the systems deployed in 2008 and those that will be needed in 2013.

High-end server chips breaking records

How would you like a single-chip microprocessor with more than four times the performance (on some applications) of Intel's best Core i7?

Then consider that up to 32 of these chips can be directly connected to form a single server, achieving four times the built-in scalability of Intel's next-generation Nehalem-EX processor.

That's IBM's widely anticipated Power7, which it described at last week's Hot Chips conference. But if you're interested, you'd better be prepared to spend a lot more than four times as much per chip. IBM isn't talking about pricing, but large more

Discovery v. Amazon: A lawsuit with legs

As described in an article by CNET's Greg Sandoval yesterday ("Discovery hits Amazon with Kindle patent suit"), the parent company of the Discovery Channel (Discovery Communications) has filed a lawsuit against Amazon.com, claiming that the Internet retailer's Kindle e-book reader infringes Discovery's U.S. patent 7,298,851, titled "Electronic book security and copyright protection system".

I read through this patent in some detail, and honestly, it looks formidable. It was filed in 1999 as a "continuation in part" from patent applications dating back to 1992. Among the prior-art disclosures

Ex-default for Kindle 2 text-to-speech: Legal?

Amazon yielded to the inevitable on Friday when it announced (in this statement) that it would no longer enable the text-to-speech feature on its Kindle 2 e-book reader by default; publishers can make the call.

Instead, publishers may enable the text-to-speech feature on a title-by-title basis, if they believe that choice is in their best interest.

I have been sorely tempted to write a response to some of the factually incorrect and even grossly deceitful pieces I've seen written about this issue since the Kindle 2 was launched, but fortunately, Amazon has made more