Well I do have to admit, we here in Silicon Valley have a very nasty tendency to just sort of say what's on our mind and the rest of the country can just figure it out.

After an onslaught of “Shit [blank] Says” videos in my Facebook Newsfeed, I appealed to Twitter yesterday, surprised that the industry that invented YouTube hadn’t weighed in on the phenomenon.

Little did I know that husband and wife team Tom Conrad and Kate Imbach were already on it, coming up with the idea on Monday morning and shooting yesterday, with no script (Imbach just said random techy things and Conrad spliced them together into this in edit).

While I really like “I saw it on Techmeme” and “Who throws a party in Palo Alto?”  (Seriously though, who does that?) avid TechCrunch reader Hillel Fuld volunteered his top 13.

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Wow... well, I just got lucky as hell. Today (and I do mean, actually today) is my 2 year "get a phone without having to take out a loan" day so I jumped online and hit the Verizon store thinking I was just going to get a measly discount but I seem to have lucked out as Verizon has some some special going where you get an additional $50 off a phone if you meet certain requirements and, thankfully, I did.!

As I was looking around the online store, I found that Verizon had just released the Droid razr MAXX which is the one that some magazine just did a review on and released either yesterday or the day before stating that after continuous 4G LTE use they got up to 10 hours of performance where the galaxy nexus to couldn't even reach four hours.

According to all of the recently released articles concerning this particular phone it has the longest battery life of any of the phones some people stating after 20 hours of pretty heavy daily use they still had 30% of the battery left! That did It for me. I still have one of the original Droid Incredible's and even though I can change the battery out and have put a longer lasting battery in the unit I still get maybe eight hours and that's after a day are pretty light usage. As soon as I get to the early evening hours I do have to plug it in.

Anyway, I should have it in the next few days so I'll write a little review on it so that those of you out there who are looking or are up for a phone upgrade will have an idea of what true world usage on this particular phone will look like.

Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX

The Motorola Droid RAZR Maxx has been introduced to address the single most important issue that prospect 4G LTE users are facing: battery life. Of course, this is not a new challenge, and the original RAZR 4G LTE Android smartphone already had software features that made it battery-efficient. The most important of them is Smart Actions, a set of automated rules that can automatically turn the cellular broadband OFF whenever possible, whether it is at home, at work, or at any other known WiFi location. It is also capable or shutting many power-hungry systems at night. But despite all the software improvements, the most drastic way to solve the battery life issue is still adding a bigger battery. This may sound like a “duh”, but there are costs and design considerations that Motorola has solved here. So, how does it feel to use the Motorola RAZR Maxx in the real world?

Read the rest of the review....

Object-based storage vendor Cleversafe today announced the availability of a storage system that can house up to 10 exabytes (that's 1 billion gigabytes) of data in a single pool of capacity.

To put a storage system of that size in perspective, 1,000 gigabytes is a terabyte, and a terabyte of storage can hold about 300 hours of video. Cleversafe's new storage system could hold 1 million times as much data as that.

It would require 4.5 million 3.5TB hard drives to build the 10-exabyte storage system, Cleversafe said. Today's 3TB hard drives can cost as little as $150, but a storage system the size of Cleversafe's would still cost $705 million for the spinning disks alone.

Russ Kennedy, vice president of Cleversafe's product strategy, said the entire system -- with racks, networking equipment and Cleversafe software -- would run in the "single-digits" billions of dollars.

Computerworld has the story HERE!

This Saturday, Jan. 28, is Data Privacy Day. DPD, as it's known, is a day to "increase awareness of privacy and data protection issues among consumers, organizations and government officials and help industry, academia, and advocates to highlight consumer privacy efforts."

Hear, hear. Data privacy, we can all agree, is important. Nobody, from the teenager posting party photos on Facebook to the Fortune 500 CIO in charge of terabytes of data, wants their information compromised.

To honor DPD, Microsoft commissioned a survey (conducted by Blueocean Market Intelligence) of 5,000 people (children between ages of 8 -17 and adults between 18-74) throughout Canada, Germany, Ireland, Spain, and the United States. The results indicated that most of us are not vigilant about protecting our online profiles and reputations.

Your "online profile", according to the Microsoft survey, is the sum of online content about you (credit card purchases, medical records), content that you've created (emails, videos, posts on social networks) and content about you created by others (someone posting a picture or comments about you on a social network or website).

Read the "How-To" HERE!

To say it's been an interesting year for Research in Motion and BlackBerry would certainly be an understatement. It was about 10 months ago that we first learned that RIM's tablet would be capable of running full-fledged Android applications, and suddenly we had to start caring about what was coming out of Waterloo.

This week RIM has undergone probably its most important change since realizing SurePress wasn't a sure thing -- co-founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie stepped down as co-CEOs, and chief operating officer Thorsten Heins has taken their place in the head office. There have been calls for RIM to adopt Android. There have been calls fro RIM to adopt Windows Phone. Really, everybody seems to know what's best for RIM.

Our pals at CrackBerry got some one-on-one time with Heins this week, and we're learning a little more about his position on Android -- mainly that he's unimpressed with the hardware on which it's running. "They are all the same," he says.

Here's what Heins told CrackBerry's Kevin Michaluk:

Kevin: I keep reading these articles that BlackBerry should build on Android, but I just don't understand them.
Thorsten: Just take a look where the Android OEMs are. I leave this to you. Take a look at their recent announcements and what you will immediately see is there is just no room for differentiation because they are all the same.

Read the Crackberry interview HERE!

People like to share everything on social media, and that apparently includes the crimes they commit. The Guardian reports that because of our love of sharing, the FBI is working on building a tool that will allow them to monitor sites like Twitter and Facebook more effectively in order to help fight crime.

By decoding the publically posted social media messages -- “clapped him off the surfboard” is code for shooting the opposition, for example -- law enforcement is able to identify criminals. According to the report, the FBI recently arrested over “40 members of two feuding New York gangs,” and social media was a big part of the process.

Overall, the tool that the FBI is hoping to build doesn’t sound very ominous. It includes requests for automated searches of not only social media but also legitimate news sources like Fox News and CNN, automated alerting when certain conditions are met, and mapping capability that includes not only terrorist information but also weather, embassy, traffic, and the like.

If you’re interested in knowing more, the FBI has posted a 12 page Request for Information (RFI) detailing all of the requirements of the requested system.

If you haven’t gotten around to patching that Windows Media Player vulnerability fixed in the last Microsoft Patch Tuesday batch, you might want to immediately fire up Windows Update.

Just a few weeks after Microsoft shipped MS12-004, a “critical” bulletin with fixes for two serious flaws in the way Windows Media handles certain media files, hackers have pounced and are exploiting this issue to plant malware on unpatched computers.

According to a warning from Trend Micro, the in-the-wild attacks are being launched via web sites rigged with booby-trapped Windows media files.

Trend Micro said the infection vector is a malicious HTML which exploits the vulnerability by using two components that are also hosted on the same domain. The two files are: a MIDI file and a JavaScript, the company said.

ZDnet has the story HERE!

The magnetic chargers used on Apple's laptops may be coming to the iPhone and iPad, according to reports.

A new patent application made public this week reveals that Cupertino could expand the use of magnets to iOS devices, according to Patently Apple. Future models of the iPhone and iPad may use the so-called "MagSafe" magnetically attached power connectors that Apple introduced in 2006 and now uses on all its MacBook laptops. These connectors easily pull out of the socket, preventing devices from being pulled off a table, for instance, if someone trips over the power cord.

If Apple makes the change, the MagSafe connectors would replace the 30-pin dock connector currently used in iPhone and iPad devices for charging and data transfer. Rumors first swirled that Apple was considering using the MagSafe technology for its iOS devices last August.

The application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, originally filed in July but made public on Thursday, indicates that Apple is exploring MagSafe adapters with so-called "coded magnets," which could allow for charging and the transfer of data between the devices and a computer, according to Apple Insider. Further, Apple is also considering using magnetic technology for its headphone connectors.

Read the full report HERE!

The largest-ever Android malware campaign may have duped as many as 5 million users into downloading infected apps from Google's Android Market, Symantec said today.

Dubbed "Android.Counterclank" by Symantec, the malware was packaged in 13 different apps from three different publishers, with titles ranging from "Sexy Girls Puzzle" to "Counter Strike Ground Force." Many of the infected apps were still available on the Android Market as of 3 p.m. ET Friday.

"They don't appear to be real publishers," Kevin Haley, a director with Symantec's security response team, said in an interview today. "These aren't rebundled apps, as we've seen so many times before."

Haley was referring to a common tactic by Android malware makers to repackage a legitimate app with attack code, then re-release it to the marketplace in the hope that users will confuse the fake with the real deal.

Symantec estimated the impact by combining the download totals -- which the Android Market shows as ranges -- of the 13 apps, arriving at a figure between 1 million on the low end and 5 million on the high.

PC World has the details HERE!