KTLA anchor Hal Fishman dead at 75 – Los Angeles Times:

Hal Fishman, the multi-award-winning KTLA-TV Channel 5 news anchor who was a Los Angeles broadcasting fixture for nearly 50 years, died today, the station announced this morning. He was 75.

Fishman died at 3 a.m. at his home with his family, the station said. He was hospitalized with a serious infection after collapsing at his home Wednesday. On Friday, the station announced that he had been diagnosed with colon cancer and that the disease had spread to his liver.

A broadcaster who began his television career in Los Angeles in 1960, Fishman had anchored his station’s popular 10 p.m. newscast — ‘KTLA Prime News’ — since 1975.

Back when channel 5 was “LA’s Movie Station” I regularly watched Hal Fishman on the 10:00 news. He was the calm, reassuring voice that let you know things would work out–but you knew there was a fine journalistic mind behind those fish-eye lenses. RIP, Hal.

IBM kills off BlackICE firewall:

IBM is pulling the plug on BlackICE PC Protection/Server Protection, the highly-rated firewall product that came with last year’s acquisition of ISS (Internet Security Systems).

BlackICE PC Protection, formerly known as BlackICE Defender, has reached “end of life” and will be discontinued. Existing customers will get support through next September.

I’m not sure why BlackICE still ranks as “highly-rated” though; Windows XP SP2 rendered it pretty much obsolete in its current state, and after ISS acquired Network ICE they de-emphasized the consumer-level firewall to a point where there was no chance it would be updated and enhanced to be relevant in a post XP-SP2 / Vista world.

Still, it was a good run, and I’m proud to have been part of something so well known and mostly well received–Steve Gibson’s rants to the contrary.

From Ars Technica comes the welcome news that TiVo and DirecTV are getting the band back together.

Come 2008, DirecTV’s TiVo users will get a major update to their DVRs. The message from DirecTV HQ appears to be “don’t bail on us yet, TiVo users.”

In early June we reported on signs of renewed courtship between TiVo and DirecTV’s new ownership, Liberty Media. TiVo CEO Tom Rogers hinted at the possibilities between the two parties when he noted that Liberty isn’t in the business of making DVRs, unlike DirecTV’s previous owners, News Corp. TiVo’s profitable relationship with DirecTV came unraveled years ago when News Corp’s influence led them to roll their own DVR solution and begin phasing out TiVo altogether.

Clearly the road map has changed, as the two companies today announced something that I thought I’d never see: a series of major updates planned for Series 2-based DVRs. This includes all TiVo units DirecTV has rolled out in recent years, including the HD TiVo HR 10-250, which is based on the Series 2 platform.

I’ve been a DirecTV subscriber for ten years and a very happy DirecTiVo devotee for three. Last year, I upgraded and expanded my DirecTiVo unit with the Zipper–going from stock 35GB to 500GB and adding the networking and other features DirecTV didn’t want to roll out to TiVo users–and although HD is beautiful (especially for baseball!) I don’t want to move to DirecTV’s non-TiVo HD-DVR. The possibility (mentioned later in the Ars Technica article) of a new DirecTiVo HD unit has me very excited.