Intro­duc­ing reddit: you can now use reddit to save your favorite arti­cle. At the bottom of each post you’ll find an reddit icon. And remem­ber you reddit here first!

The JavaScript Engine war has started, the WebKit team wants to apol­o­gize for toast­ing V8 (Google Chrome) in public. With SFX (Squir­relFish Extreme) the WebKit team has taken the com­pet­i­tive lead with their highly advanced JavaScript Engine, which is fea­tur­ing a high-​performance byte­code inter­preter. It’s nice for us tech-​heads but also for con­sumers. The web is finally evolv­ing again…
26-09-2008: WebKit is the first browser engine to fully pass Acid3. A while back, it scored 100/100 and matched the ref­er­ence ren­der­ing. Now, thanks to recent speedups in JavaScript, DOM and ren­der­ing, it passed the third con­di­tion, smooth ani­ma­tion on ref­er­ence hardware.

As anyone knows, I am not a huge fan of Adobe Flash, but I had to share this with you guys, in case you’ve missed this! One of my favorite TV per­son­al­i­ties is co-​host Adam Savage from the pop­u­lar Dis­cov­ery sci­ence tele­vi­sion show Myth­busters. Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel pre­vented the explo­ration of RFID secu­rity by Myth­busters, after allegedly coming under pres­sure from credit card com­pa­nies. Adam Savage said a planned seg­ment of the pro­gram was going to look at how hack­able, reli­able and track­able RFID tech­nol­ogy might be. A researcher for the show called up Texas Instru­ments to arrange a con­fer­ence call to talk about the tech­nol­ogy. But when the call took place, Texas Instru­ments brought along big legal guns from the credit card indus­try.
“Texas Instru­ments comes on along with chief legal coun­sel for Amer­i­can Express, Visa, Dis­cover, and every­body else,” Savage told del­e­gates at the recent HOPE (Hack­ers on Planet Earth) con­fer­ence.

“The Myth­Busters pro­duc­tion team were way, way out­gunned and their lawyers made it really clear to Dis­cov­ery that they were not going to air this episode talk­ing about how hack­able this stuff was. Dis­cov­ery backed down being a large cor­po­ra­tion that depends upon the rev­enue of the adver­tis­ers. Now it’s on Discovery’s radar and they won’t let us go near it.”
Texas Instru­ments has responded to these accu­sa­tions by saying that only one lawyer took part in the con­fer­ence call, and that tech­ni­cal ques­tions were explored. It said that it wasn’t involved in putting pres­sure on Myth­busters or Dis­cov­ery to drop the seg­ment, sug­gest­ing it got credit card firms involved because they were more famil­iar with con­tact­less pay­ment tech­nolo­gies.
“Technical ques­tions were asked and answered and we were to wait for Myth­Busters to let us know when they were plan­ning on show­ing the seg­ment. A few weeks later, Texas Instru­ments was told by Myth­Busters that the sto­ry­line had changed and they were pur­su­ing a dif­fer­ent angle which did not require our help. Savage’s com­pletely dif­fer­ent take on this con­ver­sa­tion can be found in a clip posted above. Weird part of the story is that hack­ing guides are freely avail­able all over the inter­net. So as they say at Myth­busters: this myth is busted!

As I promised ear­lier, I would write a review about TOMTOM. I have had the device now a couple of months, although I find the device the eas­i­est to use cur­rently avail­able in the indus­try, I have some real com­plaints, actu­ally I only have two. On the hard­ware side the bat­tery life, which is really shame­ful! I know I can charge the device with my cig­a­rette lighter but thats not really the point of a portable device. With modern Lithium-​Ion bat­ter­ies nowa­days you can expect bat­tery life of 5 hours or more. While it charges quickly, after less than two hours on the road the little bat­tery indi­ca­tor at the lower right would start to flash yellow… bugger. My second com­plaint is about the soft­ware, I would rather see TOMTOM write a native Cocoa appli­ca­tion, JAVA tech­nol­ogy is okay, but one way or an other, JAVA pro­gram­mers seem only to be able to pro­gram buggy and crappy pro­grams, that’s at least my expe­ri­ence. I have tried mul­ti­ple times using the TOMTOM Home soft­ware, it can brick your TOMTOM (the famous blink­ing red cross)! Luck­ily I had backed-​up my device so it wasn’t a prob­lem. I can repro­duce it every time. The soft­ware really sucks balls big time! SO should you buy a TOMTOM? I would say yes, it’s always right in find­ing my loca­tions, traf­fic infor­ma­tion, is really easy to use and when I buy a new car I don’t have to migrate or redo all my data or settings.

Apple teaser ban­ners have begun crop­ping up around San Francisco’s Moscone Center. They only state: 2008 There’s some­thing in the air. The sen­tence says it all!

Intro­duc­ing Send-​To-​A-​Friend: you can now send your favorite arti­cle to your friends. At the bottom of each post you’ll find an enve­lope icon. Send­ing an arti­cle to a friend is lim­ited to a 10 min­utes inter­val (for spam­bot pro­tec­tion). Please be polite and don’t spam anyone (your e-mail will never be pub­lished). This a 1.0 release, so there might be some quirks

Mobile devices are get­ting more and more pow­er­ful by the year. In this demo NVidia shows off their vision on next-​generation mobile phones (at 3GSM). The power behind these graph­i­cal capa­bil­i­ties is their new Mobile GoForce line-​up. Engad­get has a nice arti­cle on the sub­ject. Khronos OpenKODE is used for accel­er­at­ing these vector 2D and 3D graph­ics. I wouldn’t be sur­prised if they would become the de facto stan­dard on a lot of mobile devices.