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Tivo and Yahoo launched a service today that will allow Tivo Series2 owners to program their TiVo from yahoo.com. The service will take advantage of Yahoo’s already developed Yahoo! TV. Users can search for shows, look at images, read cast bios, check out reviews, and so much more on this site. A very cool partnership.

In the future you can look forward to even more collaboration between the two companies. Expect to be able to check out photos, traffic, and even weather from your TiVo.

My only complaint? Us poor saps with DirecTV TiVo’s won’t be able to take advantage. Though my ability to record in high definition more than makes up for it.

© Gadget Flash 2005

As you know, Google has launched a referral program for Mozilla Firefox. Being a member of Google Adsense myself, I’m interested in this, however, I asked many people and they said, “I never download from a banner. If I want to download the program, I’ll go to their website or Download.com.” For every person that visits the Mozilla website and downloads Firefox on a Windows computer without Firefox will get one dollar.

I like that you get paid for your efforts, unlike the SpreadFirefox referral program (but inturn gets you hits to your website). However, I thought to myself that since so many people told me that they won’t even bother to click on banner ads, I think that it isn’t really worth it. Don’t get me wrong, I love Firefox to pieces (even though I listed some problems with it) and I’m always telling my friends and family to use Firefox (and I’ve gotten a lot of people to download i too!), however, this can either bring Firefox to total mainstream, or kill it. I personally do not like the Google Toolbar for Firefox (I like the Yahoo! toolbar). However, being there is millions of Google Adsense publishers, Firefox will get millions of free advertising. I’m interested to see how the partnership came about and if Mozilla pays the one dollar or if Google does. Anyone have any info?

Along with the launch of a referral program for Firefox, Google has started a program for Google Adsense. Rumors were going around even before the launch, however. For every person that signs up for Adsense via the banner of your website, (when they reach their $100) you will also get #100. I think I prefer the Google Adsense program over the Firefox one…

On November 1, 2005, Yahoo! is set to reveal “Yahoo! Music Videos”. It will feature a new video everyday, and it will last for 24 (a video). We don’t know if Yahoo! will incoperate this into Yahoo! Music Engine and Music Unlimited. Most will be world premieres, though some will have simultaneous TV releases. Music videos for online-use only are cheaper to produce. Last year three million music videos were viewed on Yahoo, while AOL says it got 3-5 million. Yahoo! just revealed their new Podcasting site (which I love by the way). This is the new MTV folks…

As I was doing my normal Sunday morning activities, browsing the Internet causally reading news and what not, I came across this. I don’t know who would want to, but you can install a theme to have Firefox look almost like Internet Explorer. Doing this involves installing themes (a very easy thing to do). To your left is an actuall screenshot of my computer running Firefox with the IE Theme installed. As you can see, the buttons resemble Internet Explorer and it even has the XP logo at the top, but it still displays with the Firefox (Gecko) rendering engine (which is great, who wants the IE rendering engine anyways?). This theme is great for people who aren’t really tech-savvy and have used Internet Explorer for all their browsing needs and it’s a great way to get those people to use a more secure browser. After this post, I’m going to uninstall this theme. It’s not that I don’t like it (it must of taken along time to code this all), I just hate the IE look (that’s why I switched over to Firefox). If you want to download this theme, head over here to install it. Take it, or leave it.

Google is supposed to be in the works of a service like Paypal, and maybe an online store, a la Ebay, maybe using the already popular Froogle listings. Ok, so there has been alot of buzz around this topic in the last few days, so let me get all the fact together:

1. Google has added the /purchases directory to it’s robotx.txt, meaning they don’t want robots to crawl it’s contents. Out of pure curiosity I went to google.com/purchase and i saw a login box, even though I am already logged in to Gmail. I wrote my user/pass combination and guess what… nothing happened. The login screen was still there, no error, nothing. This makes me think Google has everything ready to launch, but doesn’t quite want to yet..
2. Google added the base subdomain (base.google.com) and right now it displays a forbidden 403 error, which none of the other ‘could-be’ Google urls like calendar.google.com do. It could mean that they are already testing the service, and have simply protected it using some .htaccess rules or something like that.
3. The blogs don’t lie: Remember all that buzz about the iPod Video, Nano and others? Well, it all was true after all..

So right now we still don’t really know if Google is going to release gWallet (or Google Wallet) now, I guess we’ll find out later this week. Here are some screenshots of what the Google Purchase looks like: Google Rumors. Google has released a blog post in response to the rumors.

Friendster (sorta’ like MySpace) is a social networking website (again, sorta’ like Yahoo! 360). This comes after a partnership with Grouper Network, a P2P program allowing you to share photos and vidoe. Once the Friendster user downloads Grouper’s free file-sharing software, Friendster members can invite people to view an unlimited number of photos and videos as well as stream music. Users won’t have to upload photos inorder to share them, a Friendster representative said. Instead, media files are stored locally on members’ PCs, where others can access them. Users can notify friends of new photos and videos by e-mail and instant messaging, the companies said. Of course illegal file-sharing isn’t allowed and is monitored by Grouper. That spells trouble to me. Having to download a program to enjoy the latest updates (and it’s P2P!).

Ironic, yes. The bird flu has sparked a hacker to write a virus called Naiva.A. It is a trojan that comes in the form of a Microsoft Word document with subject lines such as “Outbreak in North America” and “What is avian influenza (bird flu)?” “Using the bird flu is a very clever way of drawing attention and enticing those PC users less knowledgeable or concerned about security to open the attachment,” said Jeanine Rother, a virus researcher at the German subsidiary of Panda Software, which is based in Spain. “Although users are constantly being told not to open attachments from unknown sources, some are likely to ignore these warnings because of their interest in the epidemic and potential threat to their own lives.” Yes it is…

The Anti-Malware Engineering Team has reported that Microsoft AntiSpyware will be rebranded to “Microsoft Windows Defender”. The change comes after speculation of MS AntiSpyware integrated into Windows Vista. Windows Defender will be part of Vista when it releases. Some people (including myself) are thinking that Microsoft will be underfire for bundling their software with their operating systems. However, Microsoft blogger, Steve Dodson, reassured us:

The biggest announcement we are making is that Windows Defender will be a part of Vista when it releases. You will be able to run another spyware product instead of Windows Defender if you would like. Although I may shed a small tear, you will be able to disable or turn off Windows Defender and install whichever 3rd party anti-spyware application you would like. The really cool thing is that the Windows Security Center in Vista will be redesigned to detect if an Anti-Spyware application such as Windows Defender is running and operating normally.

The name “Windows Defender” might run into some legal trouble considering their is already a security program called “Windows Defender“. I’m interested to see what will happen to OneCare after this (maybe they’ll be seperate…) and if we can get our hands on it, we’ll post some screenshots!