Stephen Heywood’s wife Erin just gave birth to their daughter Samantha. Nothing special there — sexual reproduction stopped being much of a unique achievement after eukaryotes got into the habit over a billion years ago. But Ustream.tv wasn’t around to bring the birth of a little baby eukaryote to the world live on the Internet.

Stephen is the proprietor of The Tech Buzz, and normally uses his Ustream.tv account to broadcast the unboxing of new gadgets. Think of this as more of a meatware unboxing, or “unvadging” if you will. Certainly raises the stakes on the woman who tweeted her birth. Also, I’d like to take a moment to thank my mom for her foresight in giving birth to me long before this kind of thing was technically feasible.

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A group of Apple watchers have been compiling a spreadsheet listing product numbers of iPhones submitted by recent buyers. Presuming them to be sequential, they’ve come up with an estimate of at least 4,539,700
iPhone 3G handsets purchased. With 2.4 million suckers having shelled out as much as $599 for the firstgeneration model, and factories in China churning out over 800,000 units a week, his hot-tempered holiness Steve Jobs’s prediction of 10 million units sold in 2008 could come true well before Thanksgiving. (Photo by George Panos) [Apple 2.0]

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In a world where movies are made by machines, one man stood tall. The ubiquitous and unmistakable voice of Don LaFontaine will no longer grace movie trailers. LaFontaine, known as The Voice in Hollywood, passed away Monday in Los Angeles due to “complications from pneumothorax, a collapsed lung that causes air to build in the pleural cavity.” In this clip from a while back, the comically self-mocking LaFontaine shows how he did what he did. Watch all four minutes. [CNN]

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Blogger Jason Kottke has been asking for a Google browser for seven years. So, too, have Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In 2001, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told them the company wasn’t ready to take on Microsoft in a full-fledged browser war, Steven Levy reported in his Wired feature on Google’s new browser, “Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web.” But I don’t think Google’s project is really about taking on Microsoft. It’s about Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, in a feud that stretches back almost two years.

John Lilly, the CEO of Mozilla, has said he’s “not worried” about Google Chrome. That’s classic PR-speak. Mozilla and Google are financially intertwined; Firefox makes money for Mozilla by referring users to Google’s search engine; that traffic, in turn, generates advertising revenues for Google.

But Mozilla has shown some signs of independence, signing a deal with Yahoo for search in some parts of Asia. And the larger Firefox gets — its browser-usage share has reached 20 percent, according to some estimates — the more leverage it has over Google.

Sure, in theory, Microsoft can tie its Internet Explorer browser to its Web search and mapping services, generating traffic. But that’s been the theory for years. Can we say it? Microsoft’s online services just aren’t very good, which is why users avoid them and they’re losing money hand over fist. A new browser won’t change that.

So Firefox, not Internet Explorer 8, is the real strategic problem for Google.

Of course, it’s impolite to say so. Firefox, as an open-source project, is beloved by geeks, even though its executives are well paid and the project is gushing cash. (Mozilla Corp., a for-profit corporation, is owned by the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit; the company’s profits can thereby flow up to the foundation without violating its tax-exempt status. Neat how that works, eh?)

Google would also face an all-out rebellion in the ranks if it came out and said it’s taking on Firefox. But there’s reason for the Googlers behind Chrome to start a grudge match.

Several key engineers — Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher among them — devoted considerable volunteer time to Firefox before joining Google’s browser project. An article posted on the Truth about Mozilla blog in February says Mozilla’s CTO, Brendan Eich — a veteran of Netscape — removed Goodger as a Firefox “module owner” in September 2006. Being the “owner” of a module, while a volunteer position, carries considerable cachet. Goodger subsequently removed himself from the Firefox project, as did colleagues like Fisher and Pam Greene.

Wired now reveals the motivation behind Eich’s move: By June 2006, Goodger and others had created a prototype of Chrome. If Lilly wasn’t worried about Google’s browser, why would Eich take Goodger off Firefox? In any event, removing Goodger played into Google’s hands, making him all the more willing to take on Mozilla.

The infighting between the browser maker and the search engine shows the limits of open source’s “sharing is caring” ideology. Open-source projects can be just as political as proprietary code — and as vulnerable to twisting for corporate priorities. The bottom line of Google Chrome’s creation? The bottom line. Google was worried that Firefox was making too much money, and Mozilla was getting too independent. Mozilla had to be stopped — and the true Firefox believers at Google had to be cajoled into doing Larry and Sergey’s dirty work.

(Illustration of Ben Goodger by Scott McCloud)

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In the October issue of Wired, Steven Levy has delivered a formulaic feature on the making of Google’s Chrome browser. It’s just like those jargony trade-publication writeups you’ve read ad nauseam — but with the value-add of meeting recaps. One line makes the whole thing worth it, however, is engineer Pam Greene’s retelling of a demo by colleague Darin Fisher to Sergey Brin : “Sergey was bouncing on one of those exercise balls, watching Darin give a demo, and petting the snake,” according to Pam Greene, an engineer on the project. Oh, wait — it was a stuffed snake. No, that doesn’t make it any better. (Illustration of Greene by Scott McCloud)

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Until we found this image from Google London’s bathrooms on Blogoscoped, we didn’t know how Googlers carved out 20 percent of their time to spend on side projects. Here’s how: Learning about “defragging” their computers when they’re already busy doing something not too dissimilar with a biological system. Maybe you know what we’re getting at, and could put it better? Write your own caption for the photo in the comments below, and we’ll retitle the post with the best one. Friday’s winner was ThatKid with “On a Segway, you don’t have dress like as a donkey to look like an ass.” (He didn’t get the bonus points, though.)

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So Google launched a browser, did you hear? Well you should have by now considering that Google slipped up and sent the promotional comic book about the project early. Today’s featured commenter, giddieup, knows how the breakdown in communication occured:

that is what you get for not hiring phd’s in the mailroom.

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The Department of Homeland Security used Wikipedia in its effort to reject an application for asylum by Ethiopian woman Lamilem Badasa. Badasa had presented a “laissez-passer” travel document as a form of identification, and the DHS used the Wikipedia page in its successful petition to deport the woman. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that “Wikipedia is not a sufficiently reliable source” to make such decisions, and handed the case back to the immigration appeals court. Too bad for Jimmy Wales — think of all the vulnerable hotties facing deportation from around the world he could have seduced in exchange for helpful edits. [Wired]

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The cult of Scientology can’t keep the pulp science fiction and quack psychology of founder L. Ron Hubbard in print merely through sheer force of will. Instead, it’s with a state-of-the-art production facility in Commerce, Calif. featuring the latest printers from Hewlett-Packard. The plant is owned by the church through a company called Bridge Publications, whose unique experience in modern print production was enough to land Blake Silber, vice president of production at Bridge, a seat on a discussion panel for print-production professionals sponsored by Hewlett-Packard earlier this week. How does HP help Bridge churn out thousands of copies of Dianetics and related books in multiple languages to use as gateway texts for indoctrination?

Through fast prototyping made possible by HP’s Indigo line of industrial printers. Thanks in part to the Indigo 5000, Bridge can print, bind, and shrink-wrap 22,090 copies of Scientology: A New Slant on Life in as little as a week. And as acolytes move up “the bridge to total freedom,” they are required to buy further materials for study that, because of the increasingly elite membership, necessitate small runs. Thankfully, print-on-demand technology is here! When some sucker ponies up the five-figure sum necessary to pass through the “Wall of Fire” in order to become a level three “operating thetan,” Bridge can whip up a copy of the Xenu myth on demand in no time flat.

And since all of the print production is done in-house, it allows leader David Miscavige and his disciples to keep a tight lock on potential leaks “secrets” written in the embarrassingly bad prose of Hubbard. At the discussion on Tuesday, one of the topics panelists addressed was staffing and employee retention. There aren’t a lot of press operators familiar with such cutting-edge technology. Luckily for Bridge, members of the church’s paramilitary Sea Org — the true believers who often work as peons — have all signed contracts to serve for eternity. They couldn’t jump ship for a rival printer or publisher if they wanted to — that old-time religion matched with the latest in HP’s technology combine for business advantage.

There’s no surprise that Scientology is run like a business. Making a profit was the reason why Hubbard came up with the religion in the first place. But here’s what’s really disturbing: Could HP be helping Scientology proselytize? The church has a history of recruiting members in business settings. If Silber talked about more than just print-on-demand technologies at his seminar, that would raise eyebrows among HP’s many non-Scientology customers.

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The laptops up on the International Space Station have been infected with a virus — the W32.Gammima.AG worm, to be precise — which raises an interesting challenge: How do you wipe a computer clean when you’re 217 miles away from Earth and moving at 17,000+ miles per hour? According to the BBC, the ISS isn’t net-connected. All data is subject to scan before transmission upstairs. So the laptops were probably infected via flash drive before they left. The worm itself doesn’t threaten the station — all it wants is your gaming passwords — and the laptops aren’t connected to mission-critical computers. But the lack of an Internet connection makes fixing things tricky.

The solution to the problem is the same one you would use for your grandma who refuses to get off of her 56K connection. Pack a free version of AVG and their update files onto a flash drive and talk them through the installation and cleaning process. Don’t forget the part where they owe you a beer or dinner for helping them out. You have plenty of time to plan — the next supply run is due to leave on or about November 10 from Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center.

(Virus-protein image by Allen Portner and Gopal Murti)

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Gary McKinnon, the British hacker who broke into an astonishing number of U.S. military systems via a 56k modem, lost his court bid to avoid being extradited to the United States. Here’s what that means for him:

According to a fresh eWeek report:

By rejecting the appeal, the human rights court paved the way for McKinnon to come to the United States, where he faces up to 70 years if convicted. He is accused of hacking his way into computers at the Pentagon, NASA and the U.S. Army and Navy in 2001 and 2002, causing a reported $700,000 worth of damage.

Attorney Karen Todner, who is representing McKinnon, said her client would now appeal to Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to try to persuade her to reconsider an earlier decision and prosecute her client in the United Kingdom.

“Failing that he will be extradited…probably within the next three weeks,” Todner added.

She said her client had recently been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and hoped Smith would take this information into account. McKinnon told Reuters in 2006 he was just a computer nerd who wanted to find out whether aliens really existed and became obsessed with trawling large military networks for proof.

His lawyers have argued that sending him to the United States would breach his human rights because he could be prosecuted on account of his nationality or political opinions.

Not surprisingly, McKinnon has a lot of support among technical people:

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant with Sophos, said a poll of IT professionals conducted in 2006 found that more than half were against extraditing him, mostly because they did not feel he had malicious intent.

“There is a feeling in much of the IT community that McKinnon is being treated as a scapegoat by the U.S. authorities, that because he was arrested shortly after 9/11 that the U.S. agencies felt that they had to send out a strong message that hacking was not going to be tolerated.”

(Photo by AP/Lefteris Pitarakis)

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Infurious Comics created an iPhone app called Comic Reader, which does just what it sounds like it does, and featured a book called Murderdrome as the app’s first title. Murderdrome is a story about a “game where the only way to score a goal,” one character explains as he cuts into another’s skull, “is with the severed head of an opposing player.” Because Apple prohibits “any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content” in iPhone apps, Apple quickly booted Comic Reader and Murderdrome from its iTunes App Store.

Naturally, this upset Murderdrome’s creator Paul Jason Holden, who called — “infuriously,” we suppose — for action on his blog: “PLEASE leave a comment. We’ll forward ALL of these to Apple, so that we can ensure that not only Murderdrome, but that ANY comic submitted to Apple doesn’t fall foul of the same censorship.” (Do hyperviolent comic book authors also always go by three names?) By this morning, tech-news aggregator Techmeme was dutifully full of sympathetic retellings of Infurious’s plight.

Not here though. We’ll only make the obvious point that we’d never heard of the Comic Reader app, Infurious Comics or its just-plain-gross comic Murderdrome until now. Publicity for being banned worked commercial wonders for even James Joyce’s unreadable Ulysses, so we bet it helps Mr. Holden’s gore-porn sales just plenty.

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YouTube now supports closed caption text files that can be displayed inside video clips. The tech spec is here. Of course, the Googletards behind YouTube tout the feature’s value for science, such as this English assist for a heavily Dutch-inflected talk by physics hero Walter Llewin. (Sorry, but the captions don’t work on embedded clips yet. To activate subtitles, play the video on YouTube and click the button in the lower right corner of the screen.) I give it a week at max until video remixers are using captions Joe Isuzu-style.

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Did Barack Obama’s Web czar just admit the campaign screwed up its announcement of Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate? At the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Chris Hughes, the Facebook cofounder who left in 2007 to help Obama campaign online, told a crowd of bloggers, including Steve Rhodes, that the plan to freeze out the media and alert supporters via text message and email didn’t work out. “The last thing we wanted to do was send out the text message at 3 a.m.,” said Hughes.

And yet that’s what Obama’s campaign ended up doing. The plan was to send it out Saturday morning, not in the middle of the night — a time chosen to make things difficult for reporters with advance deadlines. But the campaign’s hand, it seems, was forced by intrepid reporters who smoked out Biden by process of elimination. No worries, Chris. The scheme succeeded in its real aim — getting millions of cell-phone numbers to call and text in the runup to Election Day.

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Need proof that the media’s “biased, in-the-tank support for Obama” isn’t something Lou Dobbs made up? Find me a publication bigger than Silicon Alley Insider that’s owned up to John McCain’s comeback from way, way behind to surpass Obama’s views on YouTube by 38 percent this month. McCain’s official videos have outpulled Obama’s, 6.8 million to 4.9 million.

I’ve no plans to vote for McCain, but I’m all too aware that if the numbers were the other way around, I could collect a couple thousand bucks this afternoon in MSM assignments on Barack’s “YouTube victory” and how it changes politics forever. As is, I’m reduced to pitching The Weekly Standard.

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