Boxee gets boxed

Boxee fans have been using the free open source software on their Macs, PCs and Linux machines for a long time, now Boxee gets physical with the new D-Link Boxee Box. Enjoy all the same digital content from YouTube, MLB, Netflix, Pandora, Last.fm, Flickr and more. It won’t be available until the first half of 2010 and the manufacturer’s suggested retail price is still undetermined. Full press release after the jump.

D-Link/Boxee Partnership Statement

In front of a packed house at their Boxee Beta Unveiling event in Brooklyn this evening, Boxee revealed that Dlink has been named first choice as the hardware partner to release a Boxee branded device for the living room.

Boxee is the best way to enjoy content from the Internet or a computer on a TV screen. With the Boxee Box™ by D-Link®, the two companies have created the easiest way to bring this experience into the living room, allowing people to watch tens of thousands of movies & TV Shows, organize and play their favorite home movies and photos, and play great music from their home network or from Internet sources like Pandora.

“By pairing Boxee’s innovative social entertainment platform with D-Link’s technology we’re able to create a solution that introduces people to what TV should be. Additionally we’re bringing a new level of social interaction to the living room,” said Daniel Kelley, senior director of marketing, D-Link Systems, Inc. “We can’t wait to bring this product to market and are looking forward to demonstrate the Boxee Box by D-Link at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in January.”

“We are happy to be working with D-Link as a hardware partner because we share the same vision for creating solutions to help anyone get the most out of technology,” said Andrew Kippen, vice president of marketing for Boxee. “D-Link has great reach and together we are able to offer consumers an attractive inexpensive solution to bring the Boxee experience directly onto the TV.”

The Boxee Box by D-Link, which has already won a Best of Innovations award from the Computer Electronics Association, reinterprets what TV should be, delivering all the movies, TV shows, music and photos from a user’s computer, home network and Internet to their HDTV with no PC needed. Additionally, Boxee’s core social features make it easy for friends to discover new content from each other through social networks like Facebook, Twitter and more.

In addition to its many software features, The Boxee Box by D-Link makes it easy for consumers to connect the device via HDMI, SPDIF, RCA Audio. The box has 2 USB for expansion and can quickly connect to a home network using both Wi-Fi (802.11n) and wired ethernet.

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Denial of Service Attack Knocks Twitter Offline

Twitter was shut down for hours Thursday morning by what it described as an ongoing denial of service attack. In a one sentence statement on its status blog, Twitter said, “We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.” The outage appeared to begin mid-morning, EST, and affected users around the world. In the early minutes of the outage, we confirmed it in two boroughs of New York and received word that it was down in Brazil as well. At that point, Twitter apparently didn’t know what had hit it. (The status blog read, at that point, “Site is down - We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.”) The world won’t come to a standstill as a result of the Twitter outage, of course, but its impact will surely be felt. The popular short messaging service has become an integral part of the communications ecosystem — our first question was, how do you confirm Twitter is down without Twitter? — and from its millions of inveterate users, we expect an outpouring of pent-up Tweeting when this gets sorted out. An extended outage could have an impact on the spread of information — videos, music, and articles like this one to say nothing of a growing number of businesses which depend on the service. We experienced a seemingly unrelated problem when accessing the Twitter blog through Google. The page greeted one Wired.com employee with an error message beginning “We’re sorry… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.” Another Wired.com employee was able to access the page as usual, with no virus warning. But with other users encountering the same error message, we wondered whether today’s Twitter outage was somehow related to Google’s virus warning. Judging from Twitter’s admission that it is under a denial-of-service attack, that appears to have been the case. Twitter hasn’t had a significant outage since May 8, and has shown improved reliability since last year, when such outages were a regular occurrence. The last scheduled maintenance we know about was on June 16 — delayed by a day at the urging of the US State Department. This was during the height of the anti-government protests in Iran, much information was being disseminated to the world via Twitter, and the maintenance window, in the middle of the night in California, would have been prime daylight hours in Tehran.