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Canwest takes Global Ontario, Global BC and E! Ontario to HD
Canwest Broadcasting, a major operator of upwards of 20 channels in the Canadian market, has announced that it will soon be launching a trio of new digital transmitters in Ontario and British Columbia. As of April 18th, the launches will enable Global Ontario, Global BC and E! Ontario to all make the jump to HD, and providers located "within the footprint of each transmitter will carry these services and provide simultaneous substitution of the US HD signals." Based on that, we're assuming most everyone will be hopping on board here, but be sure to share you anger / glee in comments below once the switch is made and you see if your carrier begins offering the high-def feeds.
$10,000 Mac hack bounty not yet claimed
Update: One of the two targets has been compromised.How do you spice up a security conference in lovely Vancouver, BC with a sense of risk, reward and fun? If you're the organizers of CanSecWest, you offer a prize to anyone who can work an exploit on two MacBook Pro machines; said prize, originally just the laptops themselves, is now a cool $10,000 thanks to sponsor & security appliance vendor TippingPoint. Both machines are freshly patched with Thursday's security updates.As of earlier today, ZDnet blogger Ryan Naraine reports that nobody has claimed the bounty, and conference organizers have moved to the scheduled phase II plan; challengers, who originally had to attack the machine remotely over the network, now may send URLs to the judges and have them opened in Safari. Happy hunting!graphic: Sebastiaan de With[via MacDailyNews]
Sona's video player for BlackBerry powers "bbTV"
Last time we checked in with SonaMobile, their video player was in beta and it was looking a bit, well, beta-like -- download times were hurting, video quality left a lot to be desired, and content selection was limited at best. Well, times are a-changin', and it looks like these guys are just about ready to flip the switch for Canadian BlackBerry users on Rogers, Bell, and Telus. So what's changed? For starters, Sona's claiming faster download times and reduced storage requirements thanks to an improved compression scheme, though you're still looking at a 3-5 minute download for a 1-2 minute clip. The commercial launch has also been renamed "bbTV," offering news, sports, and financial content from Canada's Global National, and they've added an archive feature for reminiscing about last week's... uh, news, sports, and finances. No word on launch plans outside Canada, though users are claiming it's easy enough to fool Sona's site into letting anyone download the goods; the only question is whether you want to put up with some pretty painful download times to watch exclusively Canadian content.
Sona BlackBerry Media Player will enable streaming video
RIM's effort to position certain BlackBerries as more consumer-oriented products received a big shot in the arm today, as Sona Mobile Holdings -- which may or may not be the same company that's supposedly developing a Star Trek-themed cellphone -- announced the first-ever dedicated multimedia player for the company's "latest generation of devices." Although very little will be known about the software until it's unveiled at the Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando next month, we do know that the so-called Sona BlackBerry Media Player will be able to handle streaming video, and that the first content provider will be CanWest Media Works. CanWest's offering will come in the form of a daily Sona Mobile BerryCast (their term for a wirelessly-updated podcast), which will deliver downloadable news clips to a user's device. Not even a screenshot is available yet to show you, unfortunately, but rest assured that we'll be all over this come May 16th.[Via BBHUB]
