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Hackers appear to have figured out a way to run full-screen iOS apps on a jailbroken Apple TV set-top.

The Irish dev Steven Troughton-Smith, known mainly for his work on getting Siri to work on older iOS devices, notes he has jailbroken the 2nd gen Apple TV to run iOS applications at 720p, and in full screen. The hack is not yet available to the public, but Smith did post a video on YouTube.

Smith also says the hack in current form was done with a custom springboard.

The dev added (via Cnet)

Nick had written this amazing window manager for the iPad that replaced the entire homescreen, allowing you to run multiple apps side by side, and I realized this could enable iOS apps on the AppleTV for the first time. We've spent the past 2 days modifying everything to work really well on the AppleTV screen size, etc, and getting apps to run.

Orangutans at the Milwaukee County Zoo have apparently been using iPads since May and could eventually use the tablets to video-call other apes at other zoos.

Conservationist Richard Zimmerman of the charity Orangutan Outreach says the next step is to give the tablets Wi-Fi access, allowing the apes to watch their primate buddies in other zoos.

The orangutans have been using simple apps like "Doodle Buddy" to draw. Says Zimmerman: "What we really want to do is to allow the orangutans to really play - to do paintings, to watch videos, to do almost as a human child would do with basic curiosity."

Zoo keepers are looking to create reinforced tablets so the apes can have free reign with the tablets without the need for human intervention. The animals love watching bright videos and images, says Zimmerman (BBC) and are especially happy when they recognize the people in the images or see other orangutans.

Continues Zimmerman: "They love moving images. They love bright things. They like to be entertained! They love new things, so one of the first things we're going to do to incorporate that is make sure the facilities have wi-fi capabilities so that the orangutans can actually have access to unlimited information - of course with the keepers guiding them."

After years of negotiations, MSG has been removed from Time Warner Cable's lineup leaving sports fans in New York without Knicks, Rangers, Sabres, Devils or Islanders games.

The two companies have been fighting over how much MSG should be paid and each have had an ad campaign blasting the other side. MSG was asking for a 53 percent price increase for their sports programming. Both companies continue to negotiate, but for the New Year, cable subscribers are left with nothing but a blacked out channel.

Michael Blair, president of MSG Media, had this to say of the situation: "All we have asked is for Time Warner Cable to value our programming in the same way as other TV providers -nothing more, nothing less. Unfortunately, they rejected every offer we made to them for almost two years. In the end, they were simply not interested in conducting serious negotiations on behalf of their customers and instead spent their time grossly mischaracterizing our positions to the public."

MSG is urging consumers to switch cable providers, but unfortunately many in New York City do not have any other options. If you are not in an area with Cablevision or Verizon FioS, Time Warner has a complete monopoly.

Sony has slashed the price on their new S tablet, just months after release.

As of today, the 16GB model will cost $400 and the 32GB will cost you $500, a $100 across the board cut. The price cut follows a holiday-inspired $50 discount that just expired.

Additionally, Sony says: "On top of these savings, Sony is also currently offering (for a limited time) a store credit and five free Video Unlimited movie rentals, five free PlayStation Store game downloads and 180 days of free Music Unlimited service with the purchase of a Tablet."

The Tablet S has a 9.4-inch screen, a "magazine" form factor, a Tegra 2 dual core processor, dual cameras and Honeycomb 3.x. If you purchase the Wi-Fi-only version you get Honeycomb 3.1 (with Sony UI overlay) and if you buy the more expensive Wi-Fi/3G version you get 3.2 (with similar UI overlay). The tablet comes with either 16GB or 32GB of internal storage, DLNA compatibility, an IR port (to use as universal remote), an SD card slot, Sony's Crackle and eReader apps and Sony's "QuickView" tech for faster browsing.

LG Display has revealed new pics of its upcoming 55-inch OLED TV. The TV is expected to launch next month at the CES event.

The TV will be the largest ever OLED screen, and LG has hinted that it will be much more affordable (per inch) than past commercial OLED screens. For example, in 2008 Sony released an 11-inch OLED for $2200.

OLED displays are mainly seen now in phones and watches, where they are extremely cost efficient. Adds Beom Han, CEO and Executive Vice President of LG Display: "Our objective has always been to actively define and lead emerging display technology markets. Although OLED technology is seen as the future of TV display, the technology has been limited to smaller display sizes and by high costs, until now. LG Display's 55-inch OLED TV panel has overcome these barriers."

LG says the new TV has wider color gamut than LCD screens, and a contrast ratio of 100,000:1. Furthermore, "the new technology allows light emitting diodes to self-generate light and features a reaction velocity to electric signals over 1000 times faster than liquid crystal."

Just like their annual video game list, TorrentFreak has released the list of the most pirated films of 2011.

Topping the list was Fast Five, the latest in the Vin Diesel car racing franchise series. At 9.26 million, the film was well ahead of the Hangover 2 which came in second at 8.8 million downloads.

A few of the more surprising films on the list were Rango and Sucker Punch which were not very popular movies but found interested pirates. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which both made over $1 billion at the box office, did not crack the top 10, most likely because quality pirated versions did not appear until near the movie's DVD release dates.

For the list, TF uses public trackers and other sources and includes all release formats, from camera versions to Blu-ray copies and everything in between.

As is their annual tradition, TorrentFreak has revealed the top 10 most pirated video games for the year.

The list is accurate as of December 30th and the site has listed for most the major platforms including PC, Xbox 360 and Wii. PS3 downloads are so low they were not worth noting.

For the PC, Crysis 2 topped the list, mainly because it was released early in the year and had a pre-release leak. For the Xbox 360, Gears of War 3 unsurprisingly took the top spot. In the same vein, Super Mario Galaxy 2 took the title for the Nintendo Wii.

One month before its launch, an unfinished copy of Crysis 2 hit the web, leading to an early boost in piracy. TF says the real numbers began when the full version hit in March.

The year 2011 is behind us and as a short summary of the past year's tech trends, it could be said that the year belonged to mobile and tablets. Console and PC technology seem to have approached certain level of maturity and major product launches that would've changed the industry just didn't happen. And meanwhile, mobile technology seems to be in middle of a breathtaking evolution process, where market shares, technologies and even company names seem to change completely, from one financial quarter to another.

For us, year 2011 was a year during which we focused on improving our site's backend and usability. For regular users, this meant that major, visible changes didn't occur, but hopefully the site is faster and easier to use than it was a year ago. For 2012, we plan to further improve our site's usability, make some changes to variety of site sections to make them easier to use and navigate. But major layout changes are unlikely to happen during the next year.

Now, I want to thank all of our users, employees, moderators and partners for the past year and wish everybody a happy new year 2012.

-Petteri Pyyny
AfterDawn.com

If you are a Boxee user trying to decide what to do now that they have decided to cease development of their PC software, now might be the time to consider XBMC.

Boxee, which is a fork of XBMC, announced their decision to abandon their software platform and concentrate exclusively on their set-top box earlier this week. They will cease offering it at the end of January.

On the other hand, XBMC remains in active development. In fact a beta of the upcoming 11.0 release was announced just days before Boxee's announcement.

Two days ago XBMC developer Nathan Betzen took some time to address the issue of switching from Boxee to XBMC:

The number of domains transferred away from GoDaddy yesterday as part of Move Your Domain Day may not have a long term effect on the company's bottom line, but it raise more than $64,000 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Move Your Domain Day was a promotion by rival domain registrar NameCheap which resulted from GoDaddy's support for the dangerous anti-piracy bill SOPA. While its sponsors claim the bill is intended only to punish foreign owned or operated websites "dedicated to the theft of US property," it is actually a thinly veiled attempt to allow private companies and the US government to censor the Internet.

Not only did GoDaddy initially support SOPA, they went so far as to send a letter to the House of Representatives committee debating the bill a letter describing it as "thoughtful and comprehensive." When faced with a mass transfer of domain names to other registrars initially organized on Reddit, GoDaddy slowly backed away from that stance.

Although GoDaddy claimed to have dropped support for SOPA on December 23, it wasn't until four days later they made it official by withdrawing their letter from the House Judiciary Committee and had their name removed from its list of supporters.

DVD-Logic Software, a company which offers a variety of Blu-ray authoring products, has decided to make a selection of their tools available for free.

DVD-Logic's primary business has been selling helper applications for use with the extremely high end Rovio Scenarist or more reasonably priced NetBlender DoStudio. In fact DoStudio Authoring EX Edition includes DVD-Logic's IGEditor for creating menus.

You probably aren't planning to spend $3,0000 or more for DoStudio, and certainly not tens of thousands of dollars for Scenarist. However, you may be interested in DVD-Logic's own authoring software suites which are aimed more at the prosumer and hobbyist market.

Today their DVD Demuxer and HD DVD Demuxer tools became free. These programs do exactly what their names suggest. They extract every stream from every VOB file on a disc.

Each titleset (VTS_XX) is placed in a separate folder, and the saved streams use a naming convention which includes a lot of advanced information about how the original disc authored. Subpictures, including both regular subtitles and menu buttons, are saved in Scenarist's SST format, which can also be used with DVD-Logic's authoring software.

Now that their campaign against GoDaddy has convinced the world's largest domain registrar to back away from supporting SOPA, some Reddit members are turning their attention to unseating legislators whose support is keeping the bill alive.

To be sure, this effort is on an entirely different level than boycotting an Internet registrar, but Reddit's previous effort surely garnered them plenty of extra attention.

In part that can be attributed to their GoDaddy protest getting significant coverage outside the tech world, in mainstream publications like USA Today, Forbes, and Time. That isn't the only reason GoDaddy is in the news either.

The Hollywood Reporter has an article about a lawsuit in which GoDaddy is accused of facilitating trademark infringement by AMPAS (the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences) because of infringing domain names owned by customers of their domain parking service.

The Galaxy Note may be the most unusual smartphone Samsung has produced, but according to the company that hasn't stopped carriers from ordering 1 million of them already.

The Galaxy Note is hard to classify. With a 5.3 inch display, it seems almost too big to be a phone, but certainly too small to be a real tablet. It is clearly intended to be tablet-like, however, as you can tell from the inclusion of a Wacom stylus.

Although a company statement reprinted in various Korean publications claims 1 million of the Android phones have been sold, a closer reading shows that to be the count of units shipped, rather than sold.

Regardless of how many are actually in consumers' hands, the Galaxy Note has the potential to be something truly unusual - a device that defines a new category. It has a lot of power, with a 1.4GHz dual core Cortex-A9 processor and 1GB RAM. It also offers a minimum of 16GB of internal storage, plus of course up to 32GB more using the microSD slot. Even the display resolution is impressive at 1280x800.

With all the attention Apple's lawsuits against Android device makers has gotten, Oracle's patent and copyright infringement lawsuit over the OS against Google themselves has been overshadowed.

The latest development in the suit is that the USPTO (US Patent and Trademark Office) has invalidated the majority of one Oracle patent related to the suit. Although the document says it is a "final response," that does not make it a final ruling. In fact Oracle can (and no doubt will) still appeal the decision.

Oracle's suit stems from Java patents and copyrights included in their buyout of Sun Microsystems which was finalized in 2010. The complaint revolves around Android's app framework, which is based on Java.

Although Android apps are written in Java, Android does not run them using a Java VM (Virtual Machine). Instead it uses a VM called Dalvik which is designed specifically for Android (although it has been ported elsewhere) and optimized for mobile devices with slow processors, little RAM, and relatively short battery life.

Boxee has announced that the latest upgrade to their primarily web-based media player will be the last to feature Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu Linux versions so they can concentrate their efforts on the Boxee Box and mobile clients.

They broke the news in the Boxee 1.5 announcement on their blog. Boxee 1.5, which adds a Live TV feature to the Boxee Box (with the purchase of a USB TV tuner) is currently being tested by a select group of Boxee Box owners, will be released into public beta in January.

The PC versions, albeit with fewer features, are already available from Boxee's website. They will be discontinued at the end of January, at which time they will disappear from the Boxee website.

Company spokesman Andrew Kippen wrote: