Judy’s Tech News Digest

Samsung Rolls Out Milk Music

Samsung is now offering a free radio-streaming service in the U.S.   The service, Milk Music, combines content from Slacker Radio with exclusive music deals from artists.

Milk Music joins the somewhat crowded music streaming field along with Pandora, Spotify and iTunes Radio.   In an effort to retain and attract customers, Milk Music is only available on Samsung Android phones.  The app is available from Google Play.

Price Wars for iPhones

Best Buy currently offers a $50 discount on the 16GB iPhone 5s, dropping the price to $149.   Walmart will beat that by offering the model for $119.  In addition, it is offering the 16GB iPhone 5c for just $29.  Of course, a two-year contract is required.

Why are there price wars when its not even the holiday season?  There are two schools of thought.  The first is that there the smartphone market is reaching a saturation point.  The second theory is that the iPhone 6 is coming out in June and the major retailers are trying to clear their inventory.  I’m not a strong believer in either theory.  I guess we’ll have a better idea which one is accurate come June.

Vine Cleans Up Its Act

The six-second video-sharing app, Vine, is cleaning up its act.  It has revised Terms of Service to forbid sexually-explicit videos.  These types of videos represent a very small portion of Vine videos. Vine does not want to be the source of such videos.  To that end, Vine has added guidelines to define exactly what that means and provides the ability for users to report violations of its policy: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20171363#

Any user who violates this new policy faces being suspended and will only be able to have their account restored once they have removed any offending posts. Severe or repeated violation of the policy may result in permanent suspension.

Dell Charging $27.00 to install Firefox?

The Dell company has been taken to task over charging $27.00 (£16.25) to install Firefox on customers’ machines. The free and open source Firefox browser is shown as optional “Additional Software” during Dell’s purchase process.

This seems an excessive charge just to install a free browser, and Mozilla apparently agrees, launching a preliminary consultation with its legal team. A Mozilla spokesperson has been quoted as saying… “Mozilla is looking into this as it does not comply with terms and conditions policy.”

UK Internet Filter Advisor Arrested for Child Porn

A top British Prime Ministerial advisor, who helped design the country’s controversial Internet filtering program, has been arrested for possessing child pornography. Patrick Rock was arrested at his home a day after the Prime Minister’s office learned about the investigation.

“This is an ongoing investigation so it would not be appropriate to comment further, but the Prime Minister believes that child abuse imagery is abhorrent and that anyone involved with it should be properly dealt with under the law,” said a spokesperson.

Talk about putting the fox in charge of the hen house! (*Patrick Rock has since resigned)