Buzz Report: Hookers and tech, together at last Video

Buzz Report: Hookers and tech, together at last Video Transcript

[ Music ] ^M00:00:06 [ Background Music ]

>> Hi I'm Molly Wood and welcome to The Buzz Report. This week TV on your computer, more dangerous cellphone use and prostitution rings but first it's the Gadget of the Week. The Gadget of the Week is the Axiotron ModBook, now this has been the talk of the town lately. Axiotron took the standard MacBook and they reworked it into a tablet. Even bigger news, Apple is not planning to sue them. They're totally allowing this. The ModBook costs about a thousand dollars more than a regular MacBook and it's a big old heavy tablet Mac that you can pay a lot more for if you're one of the 137 people or so who really need this but you know what? In the land of gadgets, sometimes there does not have to be a reason, there only has to be a will and the engineering skill to make that will a reality and I ought to respect that. [Music] And now for the news, we're actually starting off this week with what's Clogging the Tubes. It's Hulu.com. Hulu came out of beta this week, and office product activity around the world, ground to a halt. Hulu is the online video site launched by NBC Universal and News Corp. and it features new and old shows from NBC and FOX, you've got 30 Rock, you've got Heroes, The Office, Battlestar Galactica. They've also got new deals to deliver movies; here they are from Lion's Gate, MGM, Warner Brothers. Now, a lot of people are worried that Hulu is not gonna make any money because no one's gonna go there or like you can't download stuff to your iPod. Huh! Family Guy! Hey can we shoot just this later? There's good stuff on here.

>> Can you get back to work?

>> Ahh...fine. Stupid work. Anyway, a new study finds that simply listening to a cellphone even with a handsfree headset presents a dangerous destruction to drivers. Researchers say they want to raise awareness of the problems of using cellphones while driving, but they are not asking for a ban or anything like that. The researchers did say that it is not known whether talking to a passenger or listening to the radio while driving, has an equally detrimental effect. I'm sorry, what? It is not known? So we've done dozens of studies on the effects of using cellphones while driving and none on the possible dangers of passengers? Talk radio? Navigation systems? Eyeliner? Paperback novels? Cigarettes? Children? The fail point in this equation is pretty easy to spot and it's actually got nothing to do with cellphones? You know what I'm saying? ^M00:02:34 [ Music ] ^M00:02:56

>> This week, as you know, New York governor, Elliot Spitzer, Champion of the Little People was busted for frequenting a prostitution ring. My colleague go over at ZDNet, Larry Dignan wrote an interesting piece about how sophisticated IT networks helped bring Spitzer down. Basically, it goes like this, the prostitution ring was already under investigation due to some shady financial business. On top of that, federal officials had been monitoring suspicious money transfers made by Spitzer which eventually led them to a company called QAT which was the alias for the prostitution ring. Since they were both under investigation, everything fell into place. See, Spitzer's transactions, looked like they were kept below 10, 000 dollars to avoid federal porting rules but that can actually help tip off the FBI if you have multiple transactions that are just under 10, 000 dollars. Basically, when banks record any of these transactions, they end up in a giant super-powerful federal database that crunches the numbers and looks for irregularities. See and this is what sucks about being a technology reporter, covering a big sex scandal. Wolf Blitzer gets to talk about hookers and services and all I get to talk about is the databases. I'm Molly Wood and this has been The Buzz Report. Thanks for watching. [ Music ]