Barack Obama may have to relinquish his ever-present blackberry for security reasons when he becomes U.S. President in January, but no way will he give up exploiting the digital technology he built his election campaign on. Obama has launched brief weekly talks and will be posting them on YouTube. Among his promises in the first chat: putting $150 billion toward creating 5 million jobs by creating a new green energy economy.

Your response may depend on your politics. You can look at this reaching out as transparency in government - or as plain old politicking, notes Lidija Davis on ReadWriteWeb. Find the video and a link to the transcript of the 3 1/2-minute talk there too.

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It turns out that Apple's new MacBooks and MacBook Pros have a hidden "feature" -- HDCP, or High Definition Content Protection, is baked in to the new Mini DisplayPort connector.

Why? To annoy and inconvenience you, of course. The purpose of HDCP is to plug the "analog hole", the point at which a digital signal is turned back to human-friendly sounds and pictures. HDCP keeps the DRM going right up to the monitor, so in theory you can't hook up a recording device to pirate a movie.

Of course, this – as ever – punishes the legitimate user, in this case "John", the friend of Ars Technica's David Chartier. John tried to hook his new MacBook up to the school's projector (he's a teacher) to watch Hellboy 2 which he had downloaded from the iTunes Store. He was greeted with the message in the picture.

John says that not all movies are thus encumbered, so there is no way of finding out if they will play without just trying them out. It's great that honest John, who seems to buy a lot of movies from the iTunes Store, gets shafted by DRM whereas somebody who grabs the same movie from a BitTorrent tracker can play it anywhere they like. Way to destroy your own business, movie companies!

Apple brings HDCP to a new aluminum MacBook near you [Ars Technica]

Now here's a paradigm shift when it comes to your vehicle's set of wheels courtesy of Resilient Technologies’ non-pneumatic tire (NPT) system which relies on a honeycomb of unspecified polymers that keeps on going even though 30% of the material is missing, helping you get to your destination safely. No longer do you have to worry about punctures, and it boasts greater flexibility, better load support and less heat produced when driving. The gaps also work great in helping shrapnel pass through instead of being lodged inside. Guess the Army's going places now, eh?

Now here's a paradigm shift when it comes to your vehicle's set of wheels courtesy of Resilient Technologies’ non-pneumatic tire (NPT) system which relies on a honeycomb of unspecified polymers that keeps on going even though 30% of the material is missing, helping you get to your destination safely. No longer do you have to worry about punctures, and it boasts greater flexibility, better load support and less heat produced when driving. The gaps also work great in helping shrapnel pass through instead of being lodged inside. Guess the Army's going places now, eh?

I’ve been using TripIt for a bit now and must say it works as promised.  It takes email forwarded from sites like Travelocity and Expedia as well as from the airlines directly and travel agents.  Entering in new trips was effortless and the data entered was spot on.  Even when JetBlue changed a flight time on me, I forwarded the email wondering if it would throw their system for a loop; nope, it changed my data just as I hoped.

My contacts could easily find my trip info and when i was on the road, accessing the data was a snap.  I enjoy the service but had some questions.  Luckily, Gregg Brockway, CEO and founder of TripIt was willing to answer my questions.  Gregg comes out of the travel industry and seems to know his stuff.

Gadgetell: Are there plans for a native iphone/android app? 

The mobile app is nice, but having the data locally or at least the commands to get the data might be interesting. Yes, this is a feature request we occasionally see.  We’re exploring options to provide this.  Native apps are one solution.  We believe that browser based apps are the future of mobile and as browsers become more powerful, new solutions to this problem are also emerging which we are exploring.  Suffice to say, TripIt will provide offline access to your travel information in the near future.

Gadgetell:. How is the site going to make money?  Will we see ads at some point?

TripIt is a free service for travelers and plans to add online advertising in the future. However, our approach is likely to be more targeted by working with relevant brands and closely-related travel services, rather than standard banner advertising. We’re also looking into developing premium services for business travelers and corporate travel programs.

Gadgetell:. What is next for the company?

TripIt is growing quickly with great support from our users and the online community. We focused our first year on building out most of the core services that our users requested. Now we’re focusing on being an open platform and working more with partners. We currently support email confirmations from more than 250 booking sites, and have partnerships with Sabre VirtuallyThere (Sabre is one of the largest travel companies in the world)  and most recently LinkedIn. With LinkedIn, TripIt was one of a few selected applications to launch to their professional network last week, and in lets their users see where their connections are traveling. These are representative of the other partnerships we’re working on to help our travelers make it easy to organize and share their travel plans online. We’re happy to share more on that in the coming months.

Gadgetell: How secure is the info in TripIt’s hands, how secure is the email forwarding?  What precautions should users take?

TripIt takes security of information very seriously and we’re constantly reviewing industry best practices.  Email as a way of distributing information has been around for decades.  Once the information reaches TripIt, we make sure that our travelers have full control over who is able to access their travel information and how much of that information others are allowed to see.  For example, I think it’s very important that my wife see all my travel plans, including flight numbers, hotel addresses, etc.  However, for my broader network, I typically only want people to know my destination city and possibly the dates I’ll be there.  In some cases, I don’t want anyone to know my plans and I will mark these trips private.  TripIt gives travelers the ability to set general rules and update these on a trip by trip basis if needed.

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FROM GAMERTELL - World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King has been out for less than a week and it seems the expansion has already claimed its first official casualty… MORE »

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