Company executives who conspire to manipulate prices are breaking the law. Generally, this involves a company agreeing with competitors to keep prices high. But conspiring to keep prices artificially low, if that's what's happened, may land some of the tech sectors’ biggest firms in very hot java.
No sooner had the dust settled on the SOPA debate — a bad law the tech sector did a good job of torpedoing — than the nerdlingers were up in arms once again about copyright theft. But it's not what you think.
Grok has always considered Google to be its own worst enemy, and its biggest threats to be hubris and antitrust. Now they have found a way to combine the two and as a result, the blogosphere and Twitter streams are thick with the stench of cordite, or at least baloney.
Facebook, Twitter, blogs ... hell, the whole damn internet mess does two things very well. It upsets rich old tycoons, and it reinforces the users prejudice. It's the later that's got Grok thinking today.
You know it is evil because Rupert Murdoch supports it. We're talking about the Stop Online Priacy Act (SOPA) and its sister, Protect IP Act (PIPA).
The culprit — operating system fragmentation. There are just too damn many generations of Android out there.
Search is so central to First World Problems these days that any time Google makes a significant change, the news wires start to hum, fish start to fall from the sky and statues start bleeding from the eyeballs.
Remember when we told you last year that Google was about to kill Firefox. Well in case you weren't paying attention - and for the record - Grok got that horribly, horribly wrong.
This is the last Grok of the year, and frankly your mind is most likely elsewhere, probably on a banana lounge somewhere, sipping a daiquiri. So instead, let's end with a selection of easy to digest vignettes.
At last, Samsung gets to sell some Galaxy tablets. Of course, that doesn't mean anyone will buy them. But at least now, with just under a fortnight left until Christmas, it has a fighting chance. More to the point, Apple, for now, has to fight its battles at the cash registers, and not in the Federal Court.
When was the last time you even noticed which browser you used, and frankly why would you care? They all will pretty much get you from 01000001 to 01000010 on the Web as quick as you click.
BlackBerry PlayBook was a terrible idea that was rushed to market too early by a company still shell shocked by the lead it had surrendered to Apple in the smartphone sector.
The herd is running hard with the idea that Facebook will finally IPO in April next year, following a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Who remembers Groupon? Yep, that's right. The shooting star of dotcom 2.0 IPO and the biggest dotcom stock market blazer since Google has already crashed and burned on the markets.
Inch by inch Facebook is turning into a real company. And that's not a compliment. Then again, with an IPO reportedly just around the corner who can blame them.