Gadgetory

hi i'm molly wood and welcome to the buzz report this week TV on your computer more dangerous cell phone news and prostitution rings but first to the gadget of the week the gadget of the week is the axial tron mod book now this has been the talk of the town lately axio tron took this 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 ole 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 doesn't have to be a reason they're only has to be a will and the engineering skill to make that will a reality and i gotta respect that 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 weekend office productivity 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 lionsgate 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 Oh family guy hey can we shoot the rest of this later there's good stuff on here fine you couldn't work anyway a new study finds that simply listening to a cell phone even with the hands-free headset presents a dangerous distraction to drivers researchers say they want to raise awareness of the problems of using cell phones while driving but they're 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 cell phones 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 cell phones you know what I'm saying this week as you know New York Governor Eliot Spitzer champion of the little people was busted for frequenting a prostitution ring my colleague 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 ten thousand dollars to avoid federal reporting rules but that can actually help tip off the FBI if you have multiple transactions that are just under ten thousand 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 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 this databases I'm Hollywood and this defend the buzz report thanks for watching