In 2007, Dell was sued over selling faulty computers to not only individual consumers, but also to corporations and big Universities who needed Dell's OptiPlex business units.

New documents, finally unsealed in the long-standing case, show that Dell employees knew that the company was selling faulty units, and decided to instead play off the issues, allowing the corporations and schools use the computers, at risk to their business.

In a twist of irony, the firm defending Dell in the suit had 1000 Dell computers run into trouble, and the PC manufacturer refused to fix them.

Internal documents also show that Dell shipped almost 12 million computers from May 2003 to July 2005, knowing full well they were at risk of failing.

In 2005, the company took a $300 million charge to fix and replace faulty computers, and will pay up to $100 million this year to settle with the SEC for shady accounting practices.

The problems affecting the millions of computers had to do with bad capacitors found on motherboards being built by Taiwanese suppliers. After three years, the capacitors had a 97 percent chance of popping and leaking fluid.

Microsoft has confirmed today that they are pulling the plug on the Kin One and Kin Two smartphones, after sales fell well below expectations.

Additionally, the Kin phones will not make it to Europe as promised, and the entire Kin team has been moved over to the company's Windows Phone 7 division.

Says Microsoft: "We have made the decision to focus exclusively on Windows Phone 7 and we will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned. Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones."

Pulling the plug is a glaring admission of failure from the Microsoft team, which released the phone just two months ago, after almost two years of development.

The Kin series failed for many reasons, but the main factor was price. For low-end smartphones aimed at teenagers, Microsoft and Verizon still forced consumers to buy a $70 mandatory voice+data+texting plan. For the same price, you could have a top-end Android device, or head to AT&T for an iPhone.

Apple may not want to admit it, but the Android OS has already surpassed their iOS in smartphone market share in the United States (by some accounts), and is catching up internationally.

AdMob, the mobile analytics and tracking firm that was recently purchased by Google, has released their latest mobile metrics report, which is a "monthly snapshot of the smartphone industry based on data generated by ad requests within its network of 23,000 mobile websites and mobile applications."

The report shows that Android is rapidly rising internationally, in terms of share, thanks to a plethora of new smartphones using the popular mobile operating system.

As of May 2010, iOS leads the way at 40 percent international market share, with Android closing in at 26 percent. Symbian, by Nokia is in third at 24 percent. Blackberry OS, despite being popular in the United States, is in fourth at 6 percent. Windows Mobile, once dominant, fell to a measly 2 percent. Palm's WebOS and "other" make up the rest of the numbers.

Since the introduction of their new iPhone 4, Apple has been getting complaints of reception problems related to users bridging a gap in the steel band around the phone's edge during normal use. Despite acknowledging that the issue exists, Apple has consistently defended their design and characterized the problem as a user issue.

The problem occurs when the device is cupped in the user's left hand in such a way that a gap in the steel band around the edge is bridged. Among other things, the band serves as a pair of antennas which are separated by this gap.

Holding the iPhone 4 in this way has been found to degrade or completely block phone and data service.

Sprint has said today that they are seeing shortages of the popular HTC EVO 4G smartphone, with CEO Dan Hesse saying some areas have had much higher-than-expected demand.

Hesse went as far as to say that he wishes there was more supply at launch, on June 4th.

"The device is more popular than we or HTC could foresee," said the CEO, via Reuters.

The CEO was then asked if the spot shortages was due to component shortages in Asia, but Hesse referred those questions over to HTC, which said there were no shortages.

"We're certainly doing everything we can to ensure we're supplying devices as quickly as possible. We're seeing greater demand for our products than we ever have in the past," said HTC spokesman Keith Nowak.

Additionally, HTC is also seeing spot shortages of the Droid Incredible, which is sold by Verizon.

Bloomberg is reporting today that Apple and Verizon have made a deal to bring the iPhone 4 to the US' largest wireless carrier.

AT&T has exclusively been home to the iPhone since its original launch in 2007, and rumors of Verizon getting the device have cropped up every few months.

The device will be available in January, with pre-orders likely starting at Christmas.

Apple recently sold 1.7 million iPhone 4 in just three days of availability, the company's strongest launch ever, by far.

This is still not confirmed by Apple or Verizon, so take it as rumor for now. But this rumor may finally have legs.

We will keep you updated.

Hulu has announced today the launch of Hulu Plus, a premium version of the popular streaming site that will cost $10 per month.

Buyers of the subscription get expanded content, and the ability to play the shows on their HDTVs, Blu-ray players, Xbox 360 (with Gold subscription), PS3 and iPad and iPhone.

The PlayStation 3 is the first to get the service, starting in a couple of weeks, with the Xbox 360 getting the service in early 2011. HDTVs from Sony and Vizio will also get the service in "the fall."

Most importantly, Hulu Plus gives users season passes for most current shows, which is a massive improvement from only being able to watch the trailing five episodes of a given show. You will also be able to watch back seasons of the shows.

There are currently 2000 full TV episodes available for Hulu Plus, including older shows from the 80s and 90s.

On the downside, Hulu Plus will still be ad-supported.

Last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.6.4 with "Crash Protection" which isolates third-party plug-ins when they crash, if you are using the Windows or Linux versions of the browser, allowing the main browser to remain stable.

Today, the company has had to rush out another small update, after the company was bombarded by complaints from Farmville players, the popular game available through Facebook.

The complaints mainly came from users with older computers, which were seeing the game crash from within their browser due to Firefox's update.

How "Crash Protection" works, explains Mozilla, is if Flash, QuickTime or Silverlight crash or become unresponsive for over 10 seconds, the browser kills the plug-in.

Barnes & Noble has reported a large fourth quarter loss this week, citing its expensive push into the e-book and e-reader markets.

Additionally, the company forecasted lower future earnings, as it keeps expanding into aforementioned markets.

For the fourth quarter ended May, the company lost $32 million, compared with a $3 million loss in the same period last year.

Revenue, however, rose to $1.32 billion from $1.1 billion, beating analyst expectations.

The book company recently slashed the price of the Nook Android e-reader from $260 to $200, and introduced a 3G-stripped Wi-Fi only version for $150.

B&N's move prompted Amazon to drop the price of their market leading Kindle to $190.

After a quick private beta period, MSpot has opened their cloud streaming service to everyone, allowing for 2GB free and unlimited streaming of your own music libraries from the cloud.

The service works to your PC, Mac and Android-based smartphones or netbooks.

If you have over 2GB music you want to have everywhere (and most do), then you can purchase an MSpot storage plan for $3 a month (12 GB), $5 a month (22 GB), $10 a month for 52 GB or $14 per month for a massive 102 GB.

MSpot's media player works in IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

If you are running an Android device with firmware 2.1 or higher, you can download an app "that can set aside local phone storage and both stream and download songs to whatever amount of space you allow it to take up on your SD card or built-in storage," says CNet.

Last month we reported that Foxconn was raising worker salaries up to 70 percent amidst a flood of worker suicides at their Chinese factory.

The company, probably best known for manufacturing the Apple iPhone among tons of other electronics we use daily, has been massively criticized for its working conditions, and low wages.

Foxconn has considered moving to Vietnam to lower their already low labor costs, and has also considered replacing workers with automated robots at some factories.

Today though, according to Gizmodo, the company has taken a much simpler route, installing safety nets at some of its facilities, effectively as a way to catch workers that may be considering trying to kill themselves.

Foxconn has not released a PR on the nets, so for now they are just speculation.

The Google Nexus One is the first Android smartphone device to officially get the final Android 2.2 Froyo, the much-anticipated OS update.

Users should begin getting the OTA update starting this week.

Says Google: "In order to access the update, you will receive a message on your phone's notification bar. Just download the update, wait for it to install, and you should be all set. This update will be rolled out gradually to phones - and most users will receive the notification by the end of the week . We hope you enjoy these new features."

There are many new features that most users have been expecting and wanting. The main two are the addition of Flash (built-in) and the addition of Wi-Fi tethering. Additionally, Apps2SD, desktop to handset music streaming and a "one-handed camera UI" are part of the update.

On the performance end, a new Dalvik JIT compiler will give 2.2 users a 200-500 percent performance boost over those using 2.1. The HTML-5 supportive browser will give 300 percent performance boosts for JavaScript.

Sony America has announced that they will be launching the PlayStation 3 firmware update v3.40 "soon," and the update will bring Facebook integration and the launch of the PlayStation Plus premium PSN service.

PlayStation Plus was announced at E3 and will give users access to new applications and features that standard free PSN users will not have.

Plus is free for the first 90 days, and then users can purchase a three-month package for $18 USD or a full-year package for $50 USD.

For the fee, a user will be able to gain full access to certain PS3 downloadable content and PSN titles, such as the PSone archives and Minis, and be able to play them for as long as the PlayStation Plus membership is valid. Some games will only be playable for a certain amount of time on a trial basis before needing to be purchased.

An extra feature that PlayStation Plus provides is the ability to schedule the PS3 console to switch on and automatically retrieve demos, patches or updates at certain times.

Additionally, says Gamasutra, PSP firmware v6.30 will add the service to the aging handheld.

AT&T has announced the completion of a year-long project to improve their wireless service in New York City, finally dubbing the populated city "iPhone-ready."

Over the years, the carrier has received a bad reputation for dropped calls, slow Internet and overall shoddy service in NYC, where there are the highest amount of iPhone owners outside of Los Angeles.

The carrier has now given more space on the airwaves for its 3G network in the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens, which should lead to less dropped calls and faster data downloads.

AT&T started the project last year and says that service quality has improved over the last six months in the city.

The project was ongoing in NYC and San Francisco, with the California project still in progress.

Apple recently sold 1.7 million new iPhone 4 units this week, so AT&T will likely have a surge in bandwidth usage.

According to analytics company StatCounter, Google Chrome has surpassed Safari as the third most popular Web browser, although both still remain far behind Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox.

Chrome now has 8.97 percent share in the U.S., passing Safari at 8.88 percent.

IE, all iterations included, leads the way at 52 percent, and Firefox is in second at 28.5 percent.

Internationally, StatCounter says Chrome took third a long time ago, and now holds 9.4 percent, compared to Safari's small 4 percent. The company attributes that to Chrome having language support for 48 languages, while Safari only has support for 16.

StatCounter bases its stats "on an analysis of 3.6 billion page views, 874 million of them in the U.S., captured from its network of counters embedded in the pages of 3 million Websites."

Samsung has announced that five of the six largest U.S. wireless carriers have signed on to sell Galaxy S Android smartphones.

The Galaxy S range are Samsung's "Superphones," each of which have a Super AMOLED screen, which are 20 percent brighter, with 80 percent less sunlight reflection and add 20 percent more battery life.

Says Morgan Keegan analyst Tavis McCourt of the deal: "It's a good sign Samsung has placement at all the major carriers but a lot of phone sales depend on how much marketing support you can get from the carriers. Exclusive products tend to get more marketing support."

"If you want to make a big splash the exclusive phones tend to sell better at least for the first quarter or two in the U.S. market," he continued.

McCourt cites the smashing success of the iPhone 4, which just sold 1.7 million units in its first 72 hours of availability.

Sprint will sell the Galaxy X as the Epic 4G, Verizon will sell the Galaxy S as the Fascinate, and T-Mobile will sell the S as the Vibrant, loaded with Kindle e-books. AT&T's Galaxy S will sell as the Captivate. US Cellular's device has not been branded yet.

The free Amazon Kindle app is now available for Android users, giving users a chance to start reading e-books for the popular e-reader on their smartphones and tablets running the popular open source mobile operating system.

The app is still a bit lacking in features compared to the full software available for PC and Mac users, but it serves its main purpose, which is to allow users to shop and download e-books.

Most books sell for $10-12 USD, and users can read the first chapter free before deciding to take the plunge and buying the full book.

Unfortunately, in version 1.0, you cannot browse for titles, but that necessary feature is upcoming in future updates.

The app allows for portrait and landscape orientations, depending on your preference and screen display.

Kindle for Android is free in the Android Market.

iSuppli has torn down the new iPhone 4, and found that the hardware costs as little as $187.51 to build.

The smartphone's most expensive component is the 3.5-inch LCD display, which was created by LG Display and costs $28.50 per device.

"Over the years, the iPhone has generally tended to hover in the $170-to -$180 cost range because Apple seems to be trying to hit some kind of budget," says Kevin Keller of iSuppli.

Keller notes that the tear down does not include R&D, labor, shipping, advertising and iOS development, which could add a significant amount to the total.

The A4 processor was created by Samsung and costs $10.75 per device. The gyroscope chip costs an estimated $2.60 per device and the accelerometer chip costs 65¢.

It is unclear how much money Apple receives per device from AT&T, which in turn sells the device (with contract) for $199 or $299 depending on the amount of memory, but regardless it seems Apple is making a high profit margin on each device sold.

Apple has announced this morning that they have sold 1.7 million iPhone 4 units in just 72 hours following the device's launch.

The latest update of the popular smartphone has now become the best selling launch in the company's history.

"This is the most successful product launch in Apple’s history," adds Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. "Even so, we apologize to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply."

The iPhone 4 sold 600,000 pre-orders on its first day of availability, June 16th, even taking down AT&T's servers and forcing orders to take minutes instead of seconds to submit.

Apple and a number of retailers sell the smartphone for $199 (16GB model) and $299 for the larger capacity 32GB model.

The phone is available currently in the U.S., UK, France, Germany and Japan and soon in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

The Blu-ray Disc Association has approved the BDXL standard this week, meaning quad-layer 128GB Blu-ray discs are on the way.

BDXL also allows for triple-layer BDs with 100GB capacity.

Current Blu-ray players are not compatible with BDXL, and there are no players yet in the works with support for the new standard. When they do become available, BDXL players will support current single and double-layer BD, as well.

For now, the format is targeted "at professional applications such as archiving and medial imaging," says TG.

BDXL should hit the mainstream, however, when 3D Blu-ray content hits mainstream, as that content will need the extra space.

Says BDA committee chair Victor Matsuda: "The BDA worked diligently to create an extension of the Blu-ray Disc format that leverages the physical structure of the design of the disc to create even more storage capacity."

The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) has announced this week that their long time Chairman and CEO John Kennedy will be stepping down.

Says Kennedy of his departure: "I leave behind a fabulous team at IFPI well qualified to deal with the many and complex issues the recording industry has to deal with."

The IFPI has been known to take down file sharing sites, notably international torrent sites. The IFPI is also behind raids on music pirates and uploaders.

Kennedy continued: "It has been a fascinating, enjoyable and challenging role over the last few years and I believe we have achieved a great deal but I now intend to return to a more commercial role."

Finally, the ex-CEO marked a number of "successes" the group has had during his tenure:

-The concept of graduated response is now being enacted by many governments and considered by more - a far cry from the reception I got when I suggested this idea to the ISPs many years ago in Brussels.

According to a leak reported by BGR, Verizon is already slashing the prices of the Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two devices, part of a wider promotion that starts tomorrow.

Just last week, it was rumored that Verizon had only sold 500 Kin devices since launch in May, an unexpectedly low number, even by most conservative standards.

If the rumor is true, which seems likely, Verizon is slashing the prices in an effort to sell excess stock of the smartphones.

The Kin One will drop to $30 from $50 and the Kin Two from $100 to $50, with both also offering "BOGA," (buy one, get an additional phone of equal or lesser price free).

While decent low-end smartphones, the Kins have been criticized for their mandatory $70 voice+text+data plans, especially since the phones were built for teenagers.

Nokia has selected the Linux-based MeeGo mobile operating system over its Symbian OS for all upcoming high-end smartphones, effectively admitting that Symbian was not in a position to ever truly rival the iPhone or Android devices.

CNET says the N8 will be the last N-series smartphone to use Symbian.

"Going forward, N-series devices will be based on MeeGo," said a spokesman.

Symbian will still be installed on low and mid-end phones from the world's largest phone maker, however.

Nokia has spent many millions on developing the Symbian OS, only to see their smartphone market share deteriorate thanks to Apple and Android.

MeeGo was created earlier this year, a merged effort by Nokia and Intel, mixing their Maemo and Moblin operating systems.

As has been the case with all service packs, whether in alpha or beta mode, a beta of the upcoming Windows 7 SP1 has been leaked on line, and is now circulating on torrent, P2P and warez sites.

Additionally, a beta of the Windows Server 2008 R2 has been leaked as well.

The SP1, as stated by Microsoft, will be mainly a rollup of already-released hotfixes.

Earlier in the month, Microsoft spokesperson Gavriella Schuster, said the Windows 7 Service Pack 1 official beta was set for a July launch.

She also explained the SP: "It will not contain any new features that are specific to Windows 7 itself. For Windows 7, SP1 will simply be the combination of updates already available through Windows Update and additional hotfixes based on feedback by our customers and partners. In other words, customers can feel confident about deploying Windows 7 now!"

Peter Molyneux of Microsoft, the man behind games like Fable, has taken a shot at Sony's PlayStation Move motion control system, saying it is no different than the Wii's four year-old motion controls.

In an interview, Molyneux said: "I find it hard in my mind to differentiate between the Sony Move and the Wii... I know Sony and Nintendo would argue that they are different, but they kind of seem the same."

Those comments mirror critics of the Move, who say the system is very similar to the Wii's controls, even down to the controller's shape.

Sony has downplayed those concerns, arguing that the Move is much more sophisticated because it can track player motion through a camera, while also capturing full depth of motion. The Wii can only recognize 2D movements.

Jason Bateman, the popular actor, was booed unmercifully on iPhone 4 launch day, after he was escorted inside by Apple employees, effectively cutting over 2000 people who were waiting in line.

USWeekly says a line of 2000 would-be iPhone owners were waiting in line at a Los Angeles Apple store when the actor arrived.

After waiting just ten minutes, he was pulled from the line and escorted inside by Apple employees.

"The crowd freaked and booed, and he put his head down," said one spectator. "Everyone literally started booing and hissing!" said a second witness.

The iPhone 4 has a 1GHz A4 processor, a 3.5-inch multi-touch screen, a 5MP camera, a smaller MP front-facing camera for video conferencing, a micro-SIM tray, large 960x640 resolution, and 720p video recording capabilities.

Earlier this month, Microsoft officially launched the Kinect motion control system for the Xbox 360 but the company has still refused to give a concrete price on the system.

Retailers like Amazon, Gamestop and Wal-Mart all have the system up for pre-order at $150, with the warning that the price is not yet official and is subject to change.

The system seemingly got more official pricing when the Microsoft Store put the system up for sale at $150 also.

Stephen Toulouse, Director of Policy Enforcement for Xbox LIVE, made it clear, however, that the pricing was still not live: "Guys I have nothing to do with Kinect Pricing. All prices now *no matter what the retail source* are placeholders. We've not announced."

Xbox Evolved is posting the latest rumor, this week, citing a Microsoft representative who has said the Kinect will actually sell for $120 USD.

Reads the site: "A Microsoft representative told the employees of a Texas Gamestop that Kinect would be $119."

Microsoft has announced that it is selling seven copies of Windows 7 every second, making it the fastest selling operating system in the company's history.

Notes Brandon LeBlanc, Microsoft's in-house Windows blogger: "Windows 7 is the fastest selling operating system in history."

The company has sold over 150 million Windows 7 licenses in the past 8 months, and LeBlanc says that 75 percent of enterprises are either deploying it or actively evaluating the operating system.

IW adds that Microsoft may still have its hands full trying to convince IT managers to move from XP Pro to Windows 7, as the memory (or nightmare some would say) of Vista is still fresh.

Vista left many concerns of application compatibility and stringent hardware requirements, and who could forget about the UAC.

Windows 7 has addressed most of those issues, however, including the implementation of XP Mode for compatibility.

Sony Worldwide Studios VP Scott Rohde has denied recent rumors that the company is creating a 3D-enabled PSP handheld, one that will compete directly with the upcoming Nintendo 3DS.

Rohde was specifically asked during an interview whether Sony was developing a handheld with 3D capabilities, and the answer was pretty straightforward.

"No, no plans for that," says Rohde. "It’s just not something we’re announcing right now. It’s just as simple as that. It’s all I can tell you."

Speculation of a PSP2 has been around for a year, and some analysts believe Sony will introduce the device in September, during the Tokyo Game Show.

Earlier in the week, Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Kazuo Hirai called 3D technology too imprecise.

The Nintendo 3DS uses 3D technology that does not require any type of special glasses.

Speaking to Cnet, Sprint has said the popular HTC EVO 4G will soon be getting the highly anticipated Android 2.2 firmware update.

Froyo features many new features that most users have been expecting and wanting. The main two are the addition of Flash (built-in) and the addition of Wi-Fi tethering. 2.2 is said to bring 450 percent performance increases, as well. Additionally, desktop to handset music streaming, Apps2SD and a "one-handed camera UI" are part of the update.

You can read about the full update here: Video Daily: Introducing Android 2.2 Froyo

Sprint says the carrier is finalizing the software and the update is coming in the "near future."

Unfortunately for Hero or Moment owners, the carrier says there is no 2.2 update expected for their devices.

After being shown off first at CES and given an April release date, Plastic Logic has once again delayed their QUE proReader device, this time without a timetable given, further angering would-be owners who pre-ordered as early as March.

Additionally, the company has cancelled all pre-orders, a significant move that could mean there are a lot more problems under the surface than the company is letting on.

Differentiating the QUE from other e-reader is the fact it is aimed at the businessman demographic. The device will retail for $650 for the 4GB/Wi-Fi model and $800 for the 8GB/Wi-Fi/3G version. The Que features a large 10.7-inch screen, and has built-in support for Microsoft Office documents as well as PDFs.

Yes, you read that correctly, $800 for an e-reader that has only marginally better specs than rival devices that now sell for under $200.

Last week, Twitter announced that users were publishing 3,085 tweets per second at the end of the final game of the Boston Celtics versus Los Angeles Lakers playoff match, a record for the micro-blogging site.

That record has been shattered this week, thanks to the World Cup, with users publishing 3283 tweets per second by the end of Japan's victory over Denmark on Thursday.

The numbers come directly from Twitter who says they expect the number to be broken again when the World Cup concludes in the next month.

Twitter says the average tweets per second (TPS) is around 750.

The World Cup continues to create "consistent surges," says the company, with the average TPS expected to rise in the upcoming weeks.

According to a survey conducted by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, 77 percent of customers who were buying an iPhone 4 on launch day were past iPhone upgraders, moving from a 3G or 3GS model.

By comparison, in 2008, only 38 percent were upgraders and in 2009, 56 percent were upgraders.

Says Munster: "Apple is effectively building a recurring revenue stream, where iPhone users pay on average $200 USD a year to stay current with the latest phone."

Continuing, Munster says: "While its true that iPhone 4 is a more significant feature upgrade compared to the 3GS, and we expect this upgrade rate to decline next year, Apple has in three years built brand loyalty in the phone market that compels users to upgrade to the latest version and wait in line for one to six hours to pick up their iPhone.”

The analyst says that 16 percent of iPhone 4 buyers switched to AT&T from other carriers just to get the new device, falling from 28 percent in 2009, implying that Apple needs to add the device to a second carrier in the U.S or face saturation on that front.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved the motion forward for a .xxx top-level domain for porn sites today, passing the decision on to the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee which has final say.

However, adds ICANN spokesman Brad White: "The board approved the movement forward on .xxx, but .xxx itself has not been approved."

The ICANN GAC, which is a group of 100 governments, will not take up the issue, banking on public popularity and the recommendations of the ICANN board.

ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush says he expects .xxx to be a reality "by 2011."

Notes Stuart Lawley, chairman of ICM Registry that has been trying to get the domain approved for years: "It's been a long time coming, but I'm excited about the fact that .xxx will soon become a reality. This is great news."

ICANN actually rejected the .xxx domain in 2007, but following an expert ruling by an independent review board, the rejection was overturned.

According to Bloomberg, Sony is close to a deal with popular streaming site Hulu that will bring the service to the PlayStation 3.

Sources say the deal could be completed as soon as next week.

The new deal would be for a "premium" ad-free subscription version of Hulu, which would cost around $10 a month and give users access to full back catalogs of all shows available. Currently, the free Hulu only allows (for the most part) playback of the trailing five episodes of a current season, and no back seasons.

Hulu is said to be in talks with CBS, Viacom and Time Warner, as well, in an effort to bring a lot more content to the premium service, making the site a one-stop destination for content from all the major broadcasters.

PS3 owners will need to have a free PlayStation Network account to use the service, as well as the latest firmware. Hulu is also in talks to add the premium service to the Xbox 360, say sources.

This week, Google VP of engineering Andy Rubin announced that Android smartphones are being activated at a rate of 2 per second, adding up to 160,000 per day.

Last month, that number was 100,000 per day, and in February, Rubin revealed that the number was just over 60,000 a day, showing incredible growth for the mobile operating system.

The strong growth can be attributed to the recent releases of the myTouch 3G Slide, HTC EVO 4G, and Droid Incredible, and continued strong sales of the Motorola Droid.

Looking to the near future, Samsung is releasing its Galaxy S line of Android devices, and Motorola is releasing the Droid X and Droid 2, each of which are expected to sell well.

Additionally, Rubin says the Android Market now has over 68,000 applications, with 100,000 likely coming within months.

Skype has announced this week that they will be offering free calling for a month in countries that have World Cup soccer teams.

The deals vary, but subscribers for the most part will have free minutes or unlimited minutes to call landlines in their countries for 30 days.

If you are American, the deal is better, with unlimited minutes to call mobile phones and landlines for the month.

The deal will likely only last until the end of the World Cup festivities, and you must have a Skype account.

Deals by country:

60 minutes free calls to landlines in Algeria for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Argentina for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Australia for a month
400 minutes free calls to landlines in Brazil for a month
60 minutes free calls to landlines in Cameroon for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Chile for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Denmark for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in France for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Germany for a month
60 minutes free calls to landlines in Ghana for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Greece for a month
60 minutes free calls to landlines and mobiles in Honduras
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Italy for a month
60 minutes free calls to landlines and mobiles in Japan for a month
120 minutes free calls to landlines in Mexico for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in the Netherlands for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in New Zealand for a month
120 minutes free calls to landlines in Nigeria for a month
60 minutes free calls to landlines in Paraguay for a month
60 minutes free calls to landlines in Serbia for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Portugal for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Slovakia for a month
120 minutes free calls to landlines in Slovenia for a month
120 minutes free calls to landlines in South Africa for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in South Korea for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Spain for a month
120 minutes free calls to landlines in Switzerland for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in the UK for a month
60 minutes free calls to landlines in Uruguay for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines and mobiles in the USA for a month

According to BusinessWeek, popular streaming content destinationHulu is in talks with CBS and Viacom to add their content to the upcoming premium Hulu service.

Currently, CBS is the only major broadcaster to not have an ownership stake in Hulu, but that may change in September, when the premium Hulu begins, giving users a chance to watch full catalogs of content as long as they pay a small monthly subscription fee.

Hulu will keep the free, ad-based service available too, but as most users have already noticed, you can only watch the trailing five episodes of a current season using the free site.

"Charging a subscription is possibly Hulu’s best way to improve its library of TV shows and films,"adds Tony Wible, an analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia.

Hulu would not comment on the speculation.

All of the owners of Hulu revenue share advertising dollars and would do the same for subscription fees.

VLC has been updated to version 1.1, making the popular media player "ready for HD" with hardware video acceleration leading to smoother HD playback.

Additionally, the update brings support for the WebM video standard alongside tons of other tweaks and fixes.

On the downside, VLC has been forced to remove SHOUTcast streaming protocol support, as AOL (the owner) had demanded that the company bundle AOL software into the player or remove the support. VLC has left the email addresses of prominent AOL execs on their page, however, so angry users can do what they will with that.

The hardware acceleration works, so far, only through Nvidia hardware for both Linux and Windows, but all other updates work for Macs, Windows and Linux.

VLC is free and available here: VLC Media Player 1.1

Verizon has officially launched the Motorola Droid X today, and the smartphone packs a punch.

The device had a 4.3-inch, 16:9 multitouch display with 854x480 resolution, a 1GHz OMAP processor, 512MB RAM, HDMI-out, DLNA support, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Hotspot tethering.

Additionally, the phone has an 8MP camera with 720p HD video recording, three mics, 8GB on-board memory and a 16GB microSD card and a 1570mAh battery.

Included with the phone will be video apps from Blockbuster, V CAST video, NFL Mobile, Skype, and Backup Assistant.

Mozilla had updated their popular Firefox browser to version 3.6.4 today, adding "crash protection."

Crash Protection isolates third-party plug-ins when they crash, if you are using the Windows or Linux versions of the browser, allowing the main browser to remain stable.

If you are watching videos online, or playing games that require a third-party plug-in and that plug-in freezes, users can simply refresh their page and continue browsing "uninterrupted."

As of version 3.6.4, Firefox offers "crash protection" for Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight.

Firefox currently controls about 26 percent of overall browser market share.

Download the latest Firefox here: Mozilla Firefox 3.6.4

Speaking at a seminar for the Cinema Expo this week, Paramount Pictures COO Fred Huntsberry said that average Joe unauthorized movie downloaders are no longer Hollywood's biggest threat, with that spot being taken by "Cyberlockers," illegal subscription services.

Huntsberry says cyberlockers are usually run by mobs in foreign nations, which download hot pirated films, then sell them to the public in unlimited streaming for as low as $5 a month for a subscription.

"Cyberlockers now represent the preferred method by which consumers are enjoying pirated content," says the COO, via Reuters.

Cyberlocker businesses normally operate from Russia, Ukraine, Colombia and Germany, and most sties even have ads from such big-time names like Netflix, KFC and Samsung, which have unwittingly been placed there.

"Sometimes these sites look better than the legitimate sites," adds Huntsberry. "That's the irony."

Nintendo has updated the Wii Menu again this week, releasing version 4.3, in an effort to target homebrew and piracy on the popular console.

Posted to Nintendo's support site alongside the update: "Because unauthorized channels or firmware may impair game play or the Wii console, updating to Wii Menu version 4.3 will check for and automatically remove such unauthorized files."

That being said, if you actively use Homebrew channels on your Wii, updating to version 4.3 may not be the best option for you, just yet.

If you do not use any homebrew on the console, the update brings some "behind the scenes enhancements," as well, for improved system performance.

Reads the full update:

Wii Menu 4.3
Unauthorized Modifications
Because unauthorized channels or firmware may impair game play or the Wii console, updating to Wii Menu version 4.3 will check for and automatically remove such unauthorized files. In addition, there are some behind the scenes enhancements that do not affect any prominently-used features or menus but will improve system performance.

In early 2007, media giant Viacom demanded that Google take down copyrighted content from YouTube.

Afterwards, Viacom sued the site and its search giant owners for $1.2 billion USD, claiming Google facilitated the uploading the copyrighted videos through YouTube while doing little to deter it.

This week, Google has won the landmark case over the media companies, with a federal judge throwing out the lawsuit.

"Mere knowledge of prevalence of such activity in general is not enough," writes Judge Louis Stanton. "The provider need not monitor or seek out facts indicating such activity."

Viacom said it plans to appeal, calling the Judge's ruling "fundamentally flawed," as it does not reflect recent Supreme Court decisions.

The media giant is behind such hit channels like MTV and Comedy Central, and also owns the Paramount movie studio. A few of the shows that Viacom alleged were readily available on YouTube, in their entirety, were "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," "South Park," and "SpongeBob SquarePants."

Until March, Theflyonthewall.com posted research reports and press releases on its website, usually minutes before the banks the headlines came from even shared the reports with their clients.

In March however, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote ruled that the site "engaged in systematic misappropriation,", making money and getting a "free ride" from analyst moves which usually move stock prices positively or negatively.

The banks that brought the case were Merrill Lynch, Barclays and Morgan Stanley which also tried to ban the site from using their research reports.

However, TFOTW's appeal has gained some legs today, with both Google and Twitter backing the site, saying blocking immediate news dissemination is "obsolete" and "wrong."

Reads the filing: "News reporting always has been a complex ecosystem, where what is 'news' is often driven by certain influential news organizations, with others republishing or broadcasting those facts -- all to the benefit of the public."

Both companies say if the court's decision is upheld, the banks will go after other sites that offer real-time news updates in the financial markets.

The BPI, Britain's largest recording industry association, has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google demanding the popular search engine take down links that lead to "one-click hosting" sites such as MegaUpload.

The complaint says there are at least 38 links "available via Google’s search engine, and [requests these] links be removed as soon a possible as they directly link to sound recordings owned by [BPI] members."

A few of the songs mentioned as being readily available for unauthorized download via Google are K’Naan’s "Wavin’ Flag," Michael Bublé's "Haven't Met You Yet" and Eminem's "Not Afraid." While Google does not host any of the infringing sites or songs, searches lead users to MegaUpload, SendSpace, Rapidshare and others.

The BPI, in an example, typed "k’naan wavin’ flag download" into Google and the first couple of pages of results showed off free download sites.

Google has often said they are not liable as they only index sites and list them, while not hosting any files.

Google has announced that the most popular video sharing site on the planet, YouTube, will now offer full-length, current episodes of WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) programming.

The new deal will include current episodes of Friday Night Smackdown, WWE NXT, WWE Superstars, and ECW.

Additionally, there will be more footage from Monday Night Raw, classic matches, and interview videos with "WWE Superstars and Divas like John Cena, Chris Jericho and Alicia Fox."

The WWE's official YouTube channel is here: http://www.youtube.com/user/WWEFanNation

YouTube's new deal should help it compete with "catch-up" programming services like Hulu, since the WWE will be making brand new episodes available within 24 hours of its broadcast day.

Google has begun offering free OCR software with their Google Docs online productivity suite, giving users a chance to convert PDFs or images into editable text.

Google demoed the image-to-text conversion last year but it appears it is finally ready for prime time.

When uploading files to Google Docs, you will now be given the option to turn PDFs or JPEG image files into an editable text copy, using the Google OCR algorithm.

GoogleSystem says the results are not great yet, but the system will certainly prove to cut down time on making a text copy of a large image or PDF.

Try it out here: Google Docs OCR conversion

Following a week of speculation as to its price, Microsoft has officially priced the Kinect motion control system for the Xbox 360 at $150 USD.

Last Tuesday, GameStop put the system on sale for $150 USD while also offering up a bundle with an Arcade console and Kinect for $299.99 and an Elite console with Kinect for $399.99.

Later in the week, more retailers followed suit, with Amazon, Best Buy and Wal-Mart offering the system for $150, as well.

At the point, Microsoft had still not officially outed the price for the system.

There is still no word on when the device will ship, but speculation has the launch date as November 4th.

Read more about the Kinect system here: Xbox 360 Kinect news @ AfterDawn

On June 16th, when the Apple iPhone 4 went on sale, the device was so popular that it took down the AT&T web site, and the carrier was forced to halt all pre-orders.

If you were lucky enough to get your order in before the systems went haywire, Apple has begun shipping the device, with some users expected to even get it a day early, on the 23rd.

Today, other users who thought they had successfully pre-ordered the smartphone have instead had those orders canceled.

AT&T says that out of the 600,000 pre-orders accepted, a "fraction" have been sent emails saying their order is canceled, with CNN saying those emails should only be to users that accidentally/purposely submitted multiple orders, or to those that paid full price when they could have used the cheaper upgrade price.

Says AT&T: "We're reaching out to many of these customers to answer questions, and are also happy for customers to call us with individual account questions."

According to Droid-Life, Verizon has quietly phased out the Droid Eris smartphone, removing it from its active smartphone roster.

The site tried filtering Verizon's site by smartphone>Android>HTC and found the Eris completely removed except for some accessories and support documents.

Additionally, Droid-Life posted a "phaseout/closeout" list and besides the Eris, the Droid Incredible is also apparently set to be phased out.

The Incredible is Verizon's top-of-the-line Android device, and was only launched two months ago.

So far, off the list, the Eris and the Tour have already been phased out, giving more fuel to the rumor that the list is accurate.

Adobe has announced the wide launch of Flash Player 10.1 for mobile platform partners, finally giving smartphone users the chance to experience video and applications on the Web that they had been unable to.

Flash 10.1 is already the top free app in the Android Market for developers running Android 2.2 Froyo and the product will be a final production release once 2.2 is rolled out to a wider variety of Android devices.

A few of the smartphones and tablets expected to have Froyo soon are the Dell Streak, Google Nexus One, HTC Evo, HTC Desire, HTC Incredible, DROID by Motorola, Motorola Milestone, Samsung Galaxy S and 3G Slide.

Besides Android, Flash Player 10.1 was also released to mobile platform partners for support on devices with the BlackBerry OS, webOS, Windows Phone 7, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian OS. Notably missing is the iPhone OS, and its many millions of users.

Giant retailer Sears has announced it has partnered up with digital media company Sonic to sell movies and TV shows online, through the company's RoxioNow platform.

Sonic, over the course of the year, has made similar deals with Blockbuster and Best Buy.

Sears will launch the online portal site later in the year, giving HDTV, Blu-ray player and smartphone users the chance to download the movies and shows for playback through their respective devices.

Adds Mark Ely, executive vice president of strategy for Sonic: "This is an opportunity for Sears to get their consumers up and running with digital content, and offset what is happening as consumers move from physical media to digital delivery."

The move can be seen as a way for Sears, the owner of K-Mart, to counter Wal-Mart's recent purchase of HQ video streaming service Vudu.

On May 3rd Apple announced the sale of 1 million iPads and by the end of the month the company had announced 2 million units sold.

At the same time, the tablet launched in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.

Today, Apple has announced the sale of its 3 millionth iPad, just 80 days after its early April launch in the United States.

"People are loving iPad as it becomes a part of their daily lives," adds CEO Steve Jobs. "We're working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more people around the world, including those in nine more countries next month."

Additionally, Jobs says there are now 11,000 native iPad apps now available in the App Store, which has over 225,000 apps in total.

Using a VPN service like ipredator in Sweden to share files with some level of security using BitTorrent or similar methods has become very popular as more tough laws pass to address Internet piracy. However, for those using IPv6 in combination with a PPTP-based VPN, a flaw may have undermined the entire idea of the VPN in the first place.

A security flaw was revealed at the Telecomix Cipher conference that would allow a third party to find the true IP address of a user sharing through a VPN. To make matters worse for some users, there are suggestions that anti-piracy investigators in Sweden at least are aware and may have been exploiting the flaw to identify "anonymous" sharers.

IPv6 is set to replace the IPv4 protocol, but most users using IPv6 arguably have no idea they are, as it is promoted by newer operating systems like Windows 7.

The operators of ipredator are aware of the issue and have said they will contact all users about it. Other privacy-based VPN services may want to do the same thing. Simply turning off IPv6 in Local Area Connection properties on Windows should serve as a workaround for the problem.

OnLive, the cloud streaming games service, has finally been priced in the United States, with downloads and rental offerings now detailed.

There will be 20 games available at launch, with such blockbuster games like "Assassin's Creed II," "Mass Effect 2" and "Batman: Arkham Asylum" available alongside other smaller titles.

GI says, for example, the recent title Borderlands can be purchased outright for $30 USD, rented for 5 days for $9 or rented for three days at $6.

Some brand new releases, such as Splinter Cell: Conviction, can only be purchased and not rented, at full price, $60 USD.

While hardly a problem, game access is only guaranteed until June 17th, 2013, which appears to be a licensing limitation.

Over the past few months, rumors have surfaced that Microsoft has been offering monetary incentives to popular Apple iPhone app developers in an attempt to bring them over to the Windows Phone platform.

This week, that rumor has been confirmed, with developer Chillingo confirming Microsoft's practices, as well as admitting that it has declined offers from Google, as well.

Chillingo director Joe Wee, the developer behind Angry Birds and six other #1 hits in the App Store, says he is "ignoring their requests for now because Apple iOS is the only “commercially viable” mobile platform for him."

Angry Birds has sold over 4 million copies, so it is clear that both Google and Microsoft want to get such a popular developer onto their platforms, which are currently smaller in market size than that of the iPhone.

While Android continues to take market share with strong growth, Microsoft has lagged behind, with Windows Phone 7 not even released yet.

At the E3 event, Nintendo unveiled the 3DS handheld, the first console to support 3D playback without the need for special glasses.

What Nintendo did not reveal, however, was a set timetable for the handheld's release, or a price.

Today, IndustryGamers is reporting that Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime has confirmed the device will be launched no later than March 31st, 2011, although it is unclear which nations will get it first. (My bet is on Japan).

Price is still not revealed.

Perhaps more importantly, Fils-Aime says the final design may still be tweaked, after it receives feedback from E3 users.

Says the boss: "You know typically, at an E3, our engineers are looking for feedback. You know, we have an army of Nintendo representatives out on our show floor talking to attendees, getting reactions to everything in the device: the depth slider, the buttons, the sliding pad that is, essentially, an analog-type stick. These are things that we’re looking to get reaction to, including the overall button placement. When we get all that feedback, then we’ll finalize the design."

Apple has announced today that iBooks are now available on the iPhone, after first only being available to iPad owners.

The books are also now available to iPod Touch owners.

iBooks firmware update 1.1 makes the service a universal app for the aforementioned line of devices, among other new features and updates.

New with 1.1 is bookmarks, highlighting ability, and note-taking capabilities. All new annotations will sync between multiple devices, as well.

Additionally, you can choose between a sepia or white background page, you can choose between left or fully justified text layouts and you can increase the size of the font.

Installing iBooks will require iPhone OS 3.2 or higher.

Reads the changelog:

• In addition to iPad, iBooks is now available on any iPhone or iPod with iOS 4.
• Open and read PDF documents from Mail. PDF documents will be added to your library and appear on the PDF bookshelf. You can even search PDFs for words or phrases and bookmark your favorite pages.
• Take advantage of new ways to bookmark. In addition to highlighting a word or a passage, you can now also add notes or bookmark an entire page with the new page ribbon.
• Keep your bookmarks, notes, and your current page wirelessly in sync between iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch with the new automatic bookmark syncing feature.
• See your book pages in a new font, called Georgia.
• Read your books on white or sepia colored pages.
• Choose left or fully justified text layout from Settings.
• Read pages with greater ease by increasing to even larger font sizes.
• Enjoy greater stability and better performance.

AndroidandMe has gotten their hands on the upcoming Motorola Droid 2 and done a full hands-on the device, which is remarkably similar in looks to the original Droid smartphone.

Verizon is set to announce, officially, the new Droid 2 this Wednesday.

Both phones are exactly the same size, shape and weight, and use the same battery, and the only cosmetic difference is a slightly redesigned keyboard. The keys are raised and the directional pad is gone.

Color-wise, the phone is dark blue with silver trim.

Under the hood is a powerful 1GHz TI OMAP3630 processor, one that uses a 45nm production process, resulted in smaller transistors which suck up less power during daily use.

In addition to the higher clock speed, the new OMAP3630 is one of the first mobile platforms to use a 45nm production process (vs 65nm of the OMAP3430). The shrink in size results in smaller transistors which consume less power.

Additionally, the phone has 512MB RAM, leading to increased benchmark speeds. The phone is expected to ship with Android 2.2 Froyo.

Opera has not given detailed information about four out of five security vulnerabilities it recently patched in the latest stable version of the Opera web browser. Of the five security problems that Opera 10.54 fixes, the only one that has been fully disclosed relates to a problem with font handling on Windows, which Microsoft has already patched.

Only the severity status of the remaining four has been disclosed; extremely severe, highly severe, moderately severe, and less severe. Thomas Ford, a spokesman for Opera, said that the company was honoring responsible disclosure practices.

Other browser publishers may not have been able to patch their browsers against related attacks either. Generally, security researchers and software vendors only fully disclose security vulnerabilities when there is a patch publicly available and easily applied.

The Opera 10.54 update also fixes several problems the browser has had with Macs, such as premature shut downs.

Both Intel Corp. and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed motions on Monday to temporarily suspend trial proceedings while the two take time to discuss settlement of a lawsuit brought against the chip-maker for alleged anti-competitive practices.

The government accused Intel of stifling competition in a lawsuit back in December and said it aimed to halt the illegal practices that contributed to Intel keeping its status as the top chip-maker. The FTC said Intel had been trying to stifle competition with illegal tactics dating back to 1999.

Both NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) made similar allegations against Intel in the past, and in November, Intel agreed to pay $1.25 billion to AMD to settle litigation. The motions filed today will give Intel and the FTC until July 22 to discuss a proposed settlement.

No details of any proposed settlement were disclosed by either party today. Intel spokesman Tom Beermann said it was possible that the commission would proceed with the case, should both sides fail to reach an agreement.

The Black Eyed Peas' feel-good track "I Gotta Feeling" is the first song to ever be legally downloaded more than one million times in the United Kingdom. The song was released over a year ago, in June 2009, and spent two weeks at the top of the chart, 33 weeks in top 40.

"It's exhilarating to know we are so connected to our Peabodies," Black Eyed Peas singer Fergie said. "Hopefully the good vibes from that song will continue to brighten people's lives." Official Charts Company managing director Martin Talbot said it was a very significant step for the download market.

Downloads were first counted as part of the singles chart in the UK in April 2005, but only if the track was also available in stores. A year later, digital downloads were counted regardless of whether the singles were sold as a physical product, and Gnarls Barkley's Crazy became the first to top the charts without selling any copies on CD.

"It's been with us for five years but this really marks a coming of age," Talbot commented about the Black Eyed Peas million-milestone in the country. Fast forward four years from Gnarles Barkley's Crazy and now 98 percent of all single sales in the UK are from downloads.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google Inc. is to launch a music download service tied to its search engine later this year, citing sources familiar with Google's negotiations with music companies Additionally, Google will roll out a cloud-based music subscription service in 2011.

The news comes as Google is attempting to get more involved with entertainment content distribution. It is currently moving to add professional content on its YouTube video site and is to roll out a digital bookstore this year.

Google's move into music downloads would further muddy ties with Apple Inc., which has witnessed relations with Google sour increasingly since the unveiling of Google's mobile Android software seen as a direct rival to the iPhone by Apple.

Record companies would probably welcome such a service as they have become increasingly worried about Apple's stranglehold on digital music sale. Apple services accounted for 28% of all music purchased by U.S. consumers in the first quarter, leaving Wal-Mart and Amazon far behind at 12% each.

Verizon Communications is to let customers trial its FiOS Internet and television service for a month, and will not charge any fees if a customer chooses to switch the service off after. The offer also includes the option of paying month-by-month, eliminating a long-term contract, with the assurance that the price would not go up for a year.

The offer might be risky to Verizon, which reportedly spends around $1,350 to install FiOS at a new customer's home. if most customers chose to keep the service however, it could put pressure on cable and satellite rivals to adjust their own terms. Termination fees usually still apply for U.S. wireless providers even if try-out periods are offered to customers.

Larry Hettick, an analyst for Current Analysis, predicts that Verizon will keep a substantially large number of customers who sign up under the new rules. "There's so much tit-for-tat in the cable TV business, anything that changes for one provider may bring pressure on the others," Hettick said.

Verizon's FiOS coverage region has a potential 12 million customers for television services, and 12.6 million for Internet services. The company has been offering FiOS Internet services since 2004, and television services since 2005. In areas where it operates, it has roughly 25 percent market share for TV and 29 percent for Internet.

Microsoft's new slim Xbox 360 console will not display a red ring of death (RROD) as we reported already, but the system does take some measures to protect itself against heat-related damage that the older units don't. It was reported recently that the three blinking red lights had been replaced with a single "red dot of death", but the red dot may not indicate that the console is broken.

Pictures posted on the NeoGaf forums by "Giant Robot" show an Xbox 360 250GB model displaying the red dot of death, and also an on-screen message alerting the user: "The Xbox 360 is shutting down to protect the console from insufficient ventilation. You can turn the console back on after the power light stops flashing."

Source: NeoGaf

Amazon has announced that the Kindle e-reader will now sell for $189, following news that Barnes & Noble reduced the price of its Nook e-reader, released last year, to $199. Both companies are attempting to brush off increasing competition, particularly from Borders Group Inc., which sells e-readers for between $119 and $149.

Other new devices, such as Apple's iPad, are also being touted as solutions for e-book reading, and the Cupertino-based company is only too keen to bite a chunk out of the emerging market. "The Kindle Store includes over 600,000 books and the largest selection of the most popular books people want to read, including 109 of 112 New York Times Bestsellers and New Releases from $9.99," a statement from Amazon reads.

"In addition, over 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are available to read on Kindle. Since its release, Kindle has been the #1 bestselling product across the millions of items sold on Amazon."

Sales of e-book reading devices in the United States reached 2.2 million in 2009, and the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) expects that figure to rise to 5 million for 2010. Digital e-book sales also doubled to $27.4 million in April, compared to a year earlier.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal revealed on Monday that more than 30 U.S. states participated in a conference call over the Google Wi-Fi snooping incident. Google had to admit recently that its Street View cars had intercepted and stored payload data from unencrypted wireless networks in countries all over the world. The data grab was unintentional.

Blumenthal is now to lead a multi-state probe into the situation to determine what laws Google may have broken, and to discover whether U.S. states need to alter procedures in order to avoid such data leaks. "My office will lead a multi-state investigation -- expected to involve a significant number of states -- into Google's deeply disturbing invasion of personal privacy," Blumenthal said in a statement.

"Consumers have a right and a need to know what personal information -- which could include emails, Web browsing and passwords -- Google may have collected, how and why." Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan also revealed last week that she had opened an investigation into whether Google collected personal information from Illinois residents' networks, while Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox requested more information from Google.

Dell Inc. has confirmed that it is in talks with search engine-giant Google Inc. over possibly using the upcoming Chrome operating system in some of its products, according to a top company executive. "We have to have a point of view on the industry and technology direction two years, three years down the road, so we continuously work with Google on this," Amit Midha, Dell's president for Greater China and South Asia told Reuters.

"There are going to be unique innovations coming up in the marketplace in two, three years, with a new form of computing, we want to be on that forefront ... So with Chrome or Android or anything like that we want to be one of the leaders," Midha said

Midha said there were no firm announcements to be made for the time being, but that talks will continue between both companies.

The Chrome operating system is expected to be released by Google later this year, and when it comes to products like netbooks, it represents a direct challenge to Microsoft's Windows line of operating systems.

Apple Inc. has delivered the latest OS update for its iPhone range; iOS 4. The software update boasts 100 new features, but it is not fully compatible with all iPhone models. iOS 4 works with iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 3G. Not all features are compatible with all devices. For example, multitasking is available only with iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS.

iOS 4 brings Multitasking to the iPhone, running third-party apps (developed for iOS 4) and switching between them simultaneously without killing the performance of the foreground app or draining the handset's battery. Folders let a user organize their app collection into folders by simple drag-and-drop controls. A Unified Inbox shows all messages from all the user's accounts in one source.

Other notable changes are more playlist creation options, 5x digital zoom, iBooks, tapping on a recording video to change focus, viewing photos based on who is in them or where they were taken, home screen wallpaper options, sending apps as gifts to friends and family, a spell checker that works with apps and support for pairing a bluetooth wireless keyboard.

Toshiba has unveiled the libretto W100 notebook which features two 7-inch multi-touch screens in the familiar clamshell design. The little laptop celebrates the marking of 25 years since Toshiba released the first Intel 286-based clamshell laptop. Unlike netbooks or slate devices, the Toshiba laptop provides a full Windows 7 experience that can be expanded across both screens.

It is powered by an Intel Pentium U5400 processor, 2GB DDR3 memory and a 62GB Solid State Drive. It runs full Windows 7 Home Premium, either on one or two screens. The lower screen can be changed into a 6-mode virtual keyboard with haptic response. Additionally, it features a 1 megapixel HD Webcam, 802.11 b/g/n wireless connectivity, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, a MicroSD slt, one USB 2.0 port and an 8 cell battery.

According to Gartner research firm, the number of people worldwide using mobile phones to make payments will rise by about 50 percent by the end of the year, with Asian users leading the way. In 2009, there were 70.2 million mobile payment users worldwide. Gartner expects this number to grow to 108.6 million people by the end of 2010.

Mobile phone users that make payments using their handsets will represent about 2.1 percent of all users in 2010. The number of users making mobile payments in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to rise form 2009's 41.8 million to 62.8 million this year.

While the number of such users in North America is expected to rise from just 1.9 million to 3.5 million this year, the numbers are much higher for Eastern Europe, the Middle East and African countries, expected to rise from 16.8 million to 27.1 million.

"We continue to see strong growth in developing markets in Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa for mobile payment, while adoption in North America and Western Europe lags behind due to the plentiful choices of payment instruments that consumers have," Gartner research director Sandy Shen said.

A Morgan Stanley analyst has made a startling prediction about Apple's smartphone. Katy Huberty has predicted that about 42 million iPhones will be sold by the end of 2010, and the number could even reach 48 million. Apple recently announced that it sold 600,000 iPhone 4 units (pre-orders) in the first 24 hours of availability.

Huberty believes that more than half of current iPhone owners will upgrade to the new iPhone 4. She points out that the original iPhone isn't eligible for an upgrade to iOS 4 and the iPhone 3G won't be able to use all of its features. Additionally, there are also tiered data plans from AT&T which can drop the overall cost of an iPhone by about $400.

Tripling its user base within 18 months would be a dramatic expansion for the iPhone, but it already has gotten rapid growth before.

Gartner Research reported in early 2009 that the iPhone had more than doubled market share in just one year from 5.4 percent to 10.8 percent. Apple now holds an estimated 28 percent of the smartphone market in the United States.

Google Inc. is integrating a PDF reader with its Chrome browser. The move comes not long after the company revealed it would do the same for the Adobe Flash player, showing growing support from the search giant for Adobe's products.

The company rolled out developer builds of its browser for Windows and Mac that include a PDF reader on Friday. "As we’ve previously mentioned, the traditional browser plug-in model, though powerful, presents challenges in compatibility, performance, and security. To overcome this, we’ve been working with the web community to help define a next generation browser plug-in API," Google engineering director Marc Pawlige said.

"We have begun using this API to improve the experience of viewing and interacting with PDF files in Google Chrome. This mirrors our efforts to optimize the Adobe Flash Player experience in Chrome."

The PDF viewer will not be on by default, and has to be activated by visiting "chrome://plugins", but Google will eventually change the default settings to have the PDF reader active.

Major providers of landline telephone services in the UK will be cutting fees charged to customers who break contracts early following pressure from the telecommunications regulator, Ofcom. The providers will cut "early termination" charges by up to 85 percent.

The one-off fees will reportedly fall from as much as £33 to just £2 in cases. The major providers have made the commitment to the cuts, while Ofcom has warned smaller providers to follow suit, or face the consequences. "We very much welcome the reductions made by BT, TalkTalk and Virgin Media which mean that consumers will face much lower charges if they wish to end their contracts early," Ofcom said in a statement.

The regulator has been investigating the fees for 18 months. Customers that ended deals early had to pay charges supposedly based on the money they would have had to pay under the remaining term of the contact, but Ofcom argued that firms weren't taking into account that they would no longer need to bear the cost of supplying service to a household that leaves early.

BT doesn't see it that way. "If a customer leaves within the minimum contract period that they signed up to, they are charged the amount we expected to receive from them, less the costs we save as a result of them leaving early, as this is what we are legally entitled to," said a BT spokesman.

Google announced a new command line tool for some of its services on its Open Source Blog on Friday. GoogleCL is a command-line utility that provides access to various Google services. It streamlines tasks such as posting to a Blogger blog, adding events to Calendar, or editing documents on Google Docs.

GoogleCL is a pure Python application that uses the Python gdata libraries to make Google Data API calls from the command line. An example use of a Google service this way looks like this...

$ google blogger post --blog "My blog" --tags "python, googlecl, development" my_post.html
$ google calendar add "Lunch with Jason tomorrow at noon"
$ google docs edit --title "Shopping list" --editor vim

A trade group representing movie theater operators - amusingly called NATO (National Association of Theater Owners) - ran a full page trade ad on June 16th attacking changes in the theatrical release window of movies as well as pressing studios not to adopt VOD distribution to compete with theaters.

Some cable companies and movie studios have thrown around some ideas to provide video-on-demand (VOD) access to films not long after their theatrical release and well before they land on DVD or Blu-ray. NATO warned studios that such services would undercut the value of a typical movie ticket, saying that a lot of people could view a VOD feature at the same time, with just one payment.

"Collapsing windows muddies the value proposition for the consumer, blurs distinctions between theatrical and ‘straight-to-video’ and undercuts one of the important selling points for theatrical exhibition — the timeliness of the exclusive event," NATO warned.

NATO also tapped the fears among Hollywood execs about the future of services such as Redbox, whose kiosks offer very-low-priced rentals of movies. Most Hollywood studios have enforced 28-day delays for kiosks (after DVD release) due to fears that they could hurt sales of brand new titles.

Swedish police have made three arrests in an Internet piracy case that targeted "scene" warez servers known as "Darkside". The action follows an investigation from anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyrån. The servers carried huge amounts of data, making them the biggest case so far in Sweden, and possibly even in Europe.

According to Henrik Pontén of Antipiratbyrån, the three arrested maintained servers that housed 130 terabytes of Swedish and international films and other content. Searches were carried out by police in Stockholm and at two locations in Västerås. The servers were found at the locations.

"Dark Side has a huge capacity," Pontén said. "This is the biggest case we know of to date, certainly the biggest in Sweden, but possibly also in Europe." The investigation was handed over to police in February after Antipiratbyrån spent months gathering IP addresses and other usable information.

"Wednesday's police operation was yet another important step to stop organized piracy. This type of action has a direct and dramatic effect on the number of infringements," said Pontén in a statement.

Following their recent announcement of the Galaxy S Captivate, Samsung has leaked some specs of the Galaxy S Pro, the second phone in its "superphone" line.

The phone will have a full QWERTY keypad, along with a 4-inch touchscreen. It will use a 1GHz Samsung/Intrinsity ARM Cortex A8 processor.

As with all Galaxy S line phones, it will have a Super AMOLED screen, which are 20 percent brighter, with 80 percent less sunlight reflection and add 20 percent more battery life. Described by the source as "gorgeous."

The resolution, unconfirmed, is 400x800.

8.2GB of ROM and 512MB of RAM, but the ROM space may be moved to internal storage.

The Pro has a 5MP camera with 720p recording, and a front-facing camera for video conferencing, as is quickly becoming the standard.

While Apple's battles against iPhone hackers and modders have been well publicized, things have been much quieter on the Android side up until now. Even as hackers found ways to gain root access in devices and port otherwise-unavailable new builds of Android, Google and its hardware partners HTC, Motorola and Samsung, have kept quiet.

Now a website run by Android hacker Conflipper is in HTC's sights. The website, Shipped ROMs, provides ROM dumps of released and unreleased Android devices. HTC has fired off cease and desist letters to the site, alleging that its intellectual property was "illegally obtained by fraudulent means."

HTC even released a statement on the issue to clarify its problem with Shipped ROMs. "While HTC tries to take a hands off [approach] about the modder / ROM chef community, this site's sole purpose [is] to make HTC's content available for download from a source other than HTC," HTC's statement reads.

Google Inc.'s YouTube online video service, and Rumblefish are reportedly set to hold a joint press conference on June 29. The pair are likely to announce a new deal over the use of licensed music on YouTube videos uploaded by users.

An e-mail pitch seen by CNET indicates that Rumblefish chief executive Paul Anthony and a YouTube executive will hold the conference.

Rumblefish is a music-licensing firm that arranges deals with music companies and artists for the use of their music in marketing campaigns or products offered by third parties. YouTube enlisted Rumblefish' services back in 2008 to give video uploaders a legal option for using music in their content.

We hope the press conference means something good for the millions-strong YouTube community.

Graham Cluley of the Sophos security firm has written about a hidden change in Mac OS X 10.6.4 that is not mentioned in its release notes. Specifically, Apple included an update to the malware protection built into Mac OS X to protect against a backdoor Trojan the Cupertino-based Mac-maker identifies as "HellRTS".

Sophos has been tracking the same trojan since April as OSX/Pinhead-B. It is distributed by malicious sources as the iPhoto application. The malware can provide a attacker with full access to an infected Mac, allowing for the taking of screenshots, sending spam, reading the clipboard, accessing files and so on.

"Unfortunately, many Mac users seem oblivious to security threats which can run on their computers. And that isn't helped when Apple issues an anti-malware security update like this by stealth, rather than informing the public what it has done," Cluley wrote.

"You have to wonder whether their keeping quiet about an anti-malware security update like this was for marketing reasons. 'Shh! Don't tell folks that we have to protect against malware on Mac OS X!'"

When Apple unveiled the iPhone 4 earlier this month, one of the features most touted was the device's Retina Display screen. The screen, which uses in-plane switching (IPS) technology is also used with Apple's iPad tablet, and is also made by LG Display.

According to Ashok Kumar, managing director and senior technology analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, supply issues might become a problem for the new iPhone over the coming months. "Low yields on the IPS LCD panel from LG Display have dramatically impacted the production volumes for iPhone 4," Kumar wrote in his research note.

"Our supply chain checks indicate that our earlier monthly shipment estimate of 4 million units have been reset by about half." He said that demand is likely to be chasing supply through September. That is not good news when analysts also anticipate strong demand for the iPhone 4, as users of the older first generation iPhone to iPhone 3GS may opt to upgrade to get full feature support from iOS 4.

"The hope is that the LG transition to Gen 5 LCD capacity by late summer could help alleviate the production bottleneck. Meanwhile there is a non trivial risk in the September quarter whereby demand for the legacy 3GS iPhone drops off faster than production can ramp up for the iPhone 4," Kumar's note concluded.

YouTube is reaching out to San Francisco local media to test a new iteration of the YouTube Direct platform. Launched last November, YouTube Direct is intended to be used by publishers to locate and distribute video captured by amateurs and uploaded to the YouTube site, and it has been used well by bigger named in news such as NPR, or ABC's Good Morning America.

However, local news outlets have not embraced the YouTube Direct platform as a tool for enhancing their news coverage. For this reason, YouTube will reportedly use San Francisco as a sort-of showcase. YouTube staff are currently looking for local contributors in San Francisco to test out the YouTube Direct platform.

"We launched YouTube Direct in November, and it's been a great way for news organizations to easily leverage citizen reporting on YouTube," YouTube's comment on the matter reads, according to CNET. "We're currently experimenting with new ways to make the platform more useful, and we'll have more to announce on that front soon."

Logitech has added a product page to its website for its new Google TV box. The Logitech Revue is an external device that connects to a television via HDMI, and takes full advantage of everything that Google TV will have to offer. As well as supporting Google TV, the Revue has Logitech's Harmony technology built in to provide integration with a home-entertainment system.

Intel, Sony, and Logitech, together with Best Buy, DISH Network and Adobe, joined Google on stage at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco in May, to announce their support for Google TV. With Google TV, consumers will be able to search and watch an expanded universe of content available from a variety of sources including TV providers, the web, their personal content libraries, and mobile applications.

The Apple iPhone 4, which was so popular that it took down servers and websites when pre-orders began has begun shipping today, with early consumers guaranteed to get their devices on June 24th launch day.

Macrumors is reporting today that a number of their readers have already received shipment and tracking numbers for their devices, with some even seeing a "Delivers By" date of June 23rd.

The iPhone 4 has a 1GHz A4 processor, a 3.5-inch multi-touch screen, a 5MP camera, a smaller MP front-facing camera for video conferencing, a micro-SIM tray, large 960x640 resolution, and 720p video recording capabilities.

Additionally, the phone has 802.11n wireless networking and quad-band HSPDPA/HSUPA networking.

In April, rumors began that Barnes & Noble was all set to start shipping a Wi-Fi only version of their popular Nook e-reader, with the device dubbed the "Nook Lite."

The Lite would remove 3G support, but give consumers a way to buy the e-reader on the cheap.

Today, Engadget has been sent a screenshot of the internal database showing off a Nook Wi-Fi shipping on Wednesday with a price of just $150, cheaper than most expected.

Rival e-readers, such as the Amazon Kindle, Kobo and iPad sell for significantly higher, with the Kindle at $250 and the cheapest iPad at $500.

While the "Lite" is still unconfirmed by B&N, we should know if the screenshot is accurate on Wednesday.

In addition to its E-ink screen, the Nook has a 3.5-inch color touchscreen and the device runs the Android mobile operating system.

Kotaku, after seeing an internal marketing Q&A with Microsoft can confirm that the new, second slim Xbox 360, priced at $199 USD, will be available this 'fall.'

Additionally, Microsoft confirms Kinect as a standalone product and also as part of a bundle "with the newly designed Xbox 360 console."

Microsoft would not confirm pricing on the bundle, saying: "We have no additional details about pricing or retail strategy to share at this time."

GameStop, the largest video game retailer in the U.S. has posted the Kinect bundles at $299 (for the Arcade model) and $399 (for the Elite bundle) but those prices are still subject to change.

It is still unclear what will be stripped down in the $199 version, as the $299 model announced at E3 will have a 250GB HDD and built in wireless capabilities, including 802.11n support, the "fastest Wi-Fi in any console."

Many Turkish Internet users are very unhappy with the growing level of censorship online, particularly when it comes to the blocking of Google services. Earlier this month, services such as Google Translate, Google Docs and Google Books became inaccessible in Turkey following a request that Turkish ISPs block access to IP addresses associated with YouTube.

On Thursday, an Ankara Public Prosecutor asked Ankara's 1st Criminal Court of Peace to add 44 more IP addresses related to YouTube and Google, and after the court complied, users started complaining that Picasa and Google Maps had become impossible to use with more Google services malfunctioning.

As a response to the actions taken by Tuskish authorities, a group of hackers has been blamed for the inaccessibility of the websites of the Ministry of Transportation, the Information and Communication Technologies Authority and the Telecommunications Communication Presidency.

The group reportedly carried out a 10 hour denial of service attack on the websites of the three departments, all of which are responsible for Internet censorship actions. Such censorship is becoming more common in some countries, with YouTube being a constant target of such action because of user-uploaded content deemed "offensive" or dangerous by governments.

Google is encouraging developers to work on the next incarnation of its now-open sourced VP8 video codec, acquired from On2 technologies last year in a $124.6 million deal and an integral part of Google's WebM project.

"To maintain codec stability while also allowing for quality and performance improvements in VP8, we have added an experimental branch to the VP8 source tree," said Google codec engineering manager Jim Bankoski.

"The WebM community can use this unstable branch to propose changes to VP8 that will produce the best video codec possible, but without the constraints of a frozen bitstream. At some point in the future, when the experimental branch proves significantly better than the stable branch, we will create a new version of the codec."

Mozilla and Opera have officially put their weight behind the WebM royalty-free format, while Microsoft has said Internet Explorer 9 will support WebM once a user installs VP8. Apple's Steve Jobs has hinted that Safari will stick to H.264 video content.

Microsoft Corp. is set to make improvements on the search results its Bing search engine displays for queries relating to music, television shows, movies and games. Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Audience Business, is expected to give specific details at a press conference in West Hollywood California on Tuesday.

Television shows search results for example, will include local programming listings and for some shows, the ability to stream episodes from the search engine interface itself. Music searches will return extensive information about artists, concerts and tracks. A music player will let users play back some music content right from the search results too.

Movie queries will add information about local showtimes and critic reviews, while "specialized tools" to discover new games and other information will be provided for gaming enthusiasts. Some of the new search capabilities involve deals Microsoft has made with other companies.

The improvements are part of an effort by Microsoft to boost competition with Google and other search providers. The company will also be providing similar additional services for other popular areas such as Health, Travel and Shopping in the near future.

President of Indonesia Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono put his support behind proposals to censor the Internet in the country following the release of a sex tape featuring several popular celebrities. Nazril Ariel, a rock singer for the band Peterpan, along with Luna Maya and Cut Tari deny uploading the clips but could still face up to 12 years in prison.

Yudhoyono has steered clear of the scandal, dubbed "Peterporn", until he was asked for an opinion about it on Friday. "We have increasingly realized that our nation should not stay naked and be crushed by the information technology frenzy, because there will be many victims," he said.

"Other countries have already have regulations on this... The incident has made us think about the best thing that should be done. Negative impacts on our society should be avoided." Indonesian communications minister Tifatul Sembiring, chief of the Islamic Prosperous Justice Party, called for an Internet blacklist and got lawmakers support recently.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and The TOR Project have developed an add-on for Mozilla's Firefox web browser designed to simplify the use of HTTPS for web users. HTTPS combines the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) with SSL to provide encryption for web browsing.

The new Firefox extension (HTTPS Everywhere) was inspired by the launch of Google's encrypted search option. The EFF and TOR Project wanted to ensure that every search sent by a browser was encrypted, and that encryption would be enabled for a wide array of other websites including Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, PayPal and more.

"Many sites on the web offer some limited support for encryption over HTTPS, but make it difficult to use," says the EFF. "For instance, they may default to unencrypted HTTP, or fill encrypted pages with links that go back to the unencrypted site. The HTTPS Everywhere extension fixes these problems by rewriting all requests to these sites to HTTPS."

In the first hint of premium pricing for 3D versions of video games, Electronic Arts chief executive John Riccitiello talked about opportunities for additional growth at an executive briefing at E3. "3D may well be one of the next and most important drivers for growth. That's yet to be seen and I don't think it's a 2010 story in any way, shape or form... in a meaningful way," Riccitiello said.

"As we move through 2011, 2012, it's likely to be an opportunity both for additional growth and perhaps premium pricing for titles that better support 3D." Sony showed off 3D content at its E3 press conference this year, handing out 3D glasses to attendees, while Nintendo unveiled the 3DS handheld console.

Microsoft's Neil Thompson recently dismissed 3D, branding it too expensive for mass market adoption for the time being. He was referring to living room 3D gaming (so, PS3) which requires a 3D-capable television and suitable glasses for viewing the content.

An analysis of some of the payload data accidentally sniffed by Google's Street View cars reportedly shows the cars nabbed e-mail account passwords and e-mail contents from unsecured wireless networks. The report comes from the French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL).

"It's still too early to say what will happen as a result of this investigation," CNIL told IDG. "However, we can already state that [...] Google did indeed record e-mail access passwords and extracts of the content of email messages."

On May 14, Google confessed that Street View cars operating in 30 countries had accidentally collected payload data from unsecured wireless networks, after previously asserting that they hadn't. Google had been scanning open Wi-Fi networks from the cars, collecting SSIDs and MAC addresses of network hardware. The information is used by Google for applications that rely on location data.

After admitting to the snooping, Google said that only fragments of information were collected and only from unsecured networks. It said its Street View cars were constantly on the move and that Wi-Fi equipment in the cars automatically changed channels about five times per second.

Three rapidly blinking red lights forming three-quarters of a circle on the Xbox 360's "ring of light" is unintentionally one of the most observed features of the Xbox 360 console, at least for units made before 2008. The "red ring of death", RROD/3ROL, represents a general hardware failure, but unlike the E74 error with a single blinking red light, there is no onscreen message to explain whats going on.

Instead users can only retrieve a secondary error code to give a clue to the problem. The problem is so widespread that Microsoft set aside $1 billion to address it, extending the console's warranty to three years for RROD (and E74). Even at that, stories of sending back consoles to Microsoft multiple times over these errors are commonplace.

While the new slim Xbox 360 console is, of course, capable of failure too, it will no longer present three blinking red lights. "Obviously if you look at the success rate of the original 360s, we're very proud of both the way the company stepped up to support the customers that we had as well as the success rate we have with the box today," said Microsoft Game Studios' corporate VP Phil Spencer.

According to a blurb posting by the BusinessInsider, Microsoft has only sold 500 Kin "smartphones" since the devices went on sale in May, a horrible number even by the lowest expectations.

The story says Verizon has sold only about 1 or less per store the phones are available in.

Each device sells for under $100 with contract, but both require data plans, which can be as expensive as $30 USD.

Kin One:


- Has a compact full QWERTY keypad
- Multitouch screen
- 5MP camera with LED flash
- 4GB memory
- "Media player powered by Zune."

Kin Two:


- Full QWERTY keypad
- Multitouch screen
- 8MP camera with LED flash, HD video recording
- 8GB memory
- "Media player powered by Zune."

PCMag is reporting today that Samsung has sent out a press invite to "join Samsung Mobile as we unveil a new class of brilliant Android smartphones" on June 29th. The invite has a Galaxy S logo on it, which the company introduced in March.

Generically, the Galaxy S line devices all include Super AMOLED screens, which are 20 percent brighter, with 80 percent less sunlight reflection and 20 percent more battery life. Each model will have at least a 1Ghz processor, as well.

Samsung introduced the first Galaxy S phone, the Captivate, earlier in the week, with the phone headed to AT&T.

The Captivate has a 1Ghz Samsung Hummingbird processor, which the company says is comparable to Qualcomm Snapdragon chips at the same speed. Additionally, it has 5MP camera, and accelerometer and gyroscope for 3D motion sensing, 16 GB of built-in storage, HD video recording and surround sound.

Kobo, the company behind the Kobo eReader apps and supporting ebook store has announced the launch of an Android app, making the Kobo store now available for PC, iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry users.

The company also has a standalone eReader device.

Says Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis: "Now the fastest-growing mobile platform, many of the new Android devices are great for eReading and we’re excited to deliver Kobo to the millions of Android users around the world. We’ve adapted the features our customers love and expect from Kobo to ensure that we provide the best reading experience for Android-enabled smartphones."

The app is free through the Android Market, and Kobo supports ePUB file formats that can handle rich text and images.

Kobo's ebook store has over 2 million titles, with some for free and best sellers for as low as $10.

The Japanese Nikkei is reporting this week that the upcoming Nintendo 3DS will allow for game installs on the handheld's onboard storage, an important feature that was not disclosed by the company during the console's E3 launch.

The report says "multiple" games can be installed to the system off their original carts, giving users a way to take a bunch of games on the road without the need to bring the physical game card.

While the game carts are tiny and not to bad of a hassle to carry around, it will be nice to not have to worry about losing multiple games you have paid for, when you can simply carry them on the system with you, leaving the physical copies at home.

There was no word on how to install the games from the cartridges, and Nintendo has not commented on the report yet so it is still considered a rumor.

Gamers will be able to switch from the games they install through a specialized home menu, one that will likely look similar to the "Moonshell" main menu seen on flash carts used for homebrew.

Media reports from Pakistan today are saying that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg could face the death penalty in the nation, for allowing users of his site to run a "Draw the Prophet Muhammad" contest last month.

Pakistani penal code allows for the death penalty in certain cases of blasphemy.

The popular social networking site was banned in Pakistan when the contest started, but access was later restored, with all "offensive contents" removed.

While the police in the nation have already started formal proceedings, there is little chance Zuckerberg will be extradited to Pakistan to face his accusers.

Human rights watchdog Privacy International had this to say on the matter: "The move to prosecute Zuckerberg parallels the government’s attempts to shut down a substantial spectrum of internet activity."

Additionally, PI says the Pakistani government is planning to increase its censorship in the nation, which is already one of the world's most censored in terms of Internet activity.

The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of employers this week, in a case that will allow supervisors to read through employee's texts if they feel work rules are possibly being violated.

In the unanimous 9-0 ruling, the justices said they felt a police chief in California did not violate constitutional rights when he read the transcripts of sexually explicit texts sent from an officer's pager.

The ruling says the reading of the messages was reasonable, because it had "a legitimate work-related purpose." The chief was looking into whether officers were using their text pagers for police work, or for personal matters.

Police Sergeant Jeff Quon has sued the city of Ontario, California after he was told his messages were being read, and Quon had won in the Court of Appeals before losing this week in the highest court.

Quon had been sending sexually explicit texts to his wife and a girlfriend.

Microsoft has filed suit against a group of spammers this week, accusing them of one of the "largest" spam attacks against Windows Hotmail, ever.

Making the case more insulting to Microsoft, was the fact that the spammers used Microsoft's anti-spam filtering technologies to start the spam campaign.

"The lawsuit ... alleges [the] defendants engaged in an elaborate scheme to evade Microsoft's filters by abusing Microsoft's Junk E-Mail Reporting Program (JMRP) and Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) to send vast quantities of spam each day," says John Scarrow, general manager of safety services for Microsoft.

The SNDS and JMRP features are free services for Hotmail users that want to report spam that breaks through filters.

As a way to get around the anti-spam filters, Microsoft says the defendants hired hundreds of people to open millions of Hotmail accounts, who then were sent the spam, and manually misidentified them as valid e-mails, thus destroying the accuracy of the filters.

According to a new report from Digitimes, a CDMA-capable iPhone for the Verizon network is already being manufactured and will be ready to ship in time for the 2010 holiday season.

The report says contract manufacturer Pegatron already has an order from Apple for the CDMA iPhone 4, and the company is "currently using its plants in Shanghai, China, to produce the products."

A Wall Street Journal report earlier in the year said the same thing, that Pegatron had already been contracted.

An iPhone for Verizon has been rumored, on and off, for years now but earlier this month a Verizon spokesperson said: "We have no plans to carry the iPhone in the immediate future." That being said, it is likely an iPhone 4 for Verizon is in the works, but unlikely that it is coming as soon as a few months from now.

There is also still the possibility that Apple and AT&T signed an iPhone exclusivity pact until 2012, which would clearly make it impossible, at least without a breach of contract, for a Verizon iPhone this year.

Verizon, the biggest wireless carrier in the U.S., has said today that it may follow AT&T's recent move into tiered data plan pricing, while at the same time eliminating unlimited plans.

Says Verizon CFO John Killian: "We will probably need to change the design of our pricing where it will not be totally unlimited, flat rate."

The plan will likely not take effect until Verizon rolls out its 4G networks. When 4G goes live, the carrier expects an "explosion in data traffic," due to video downloads, video conferencing, and other bandwidth-intensive applications.

Verizon says smartphone owners currently use about 700MB of data per month, and the company says eventually smartphone users will be 80 percent of all Verizon consumers, up from just 17 percent today.

AT&T's cheapest new plan is $15 per month, but will only include 200MB of data. If customers go over the limit, they will be charged $15 extra for every 200MB of data, a very expensive proposition.

Broadcom has agreed to buy Innovation Research & Technology which specializes in short range communication for a fee of around $47.5 million, the company announced on Thursday. While Innovation makes products for a variety of different wireless products, Broadcom has highlighted Innovation's progress in Near-Field Communications (NFC).

Innovation launched the Topaz-512 this week, which opens the door for content delivery including for example discount coupons that can be be retrieved via smart posters.

Broadcom is staying silent about how it intends to use Innovation's technology. However it is likely that Broadcom intends to integrate NFC with its existing solutions for other wireless technologies, including Bluetooth and 3G.

The lack of NFC-enabled phones has been seen as one of the major factors holding the wireless technology back, but Nokia recently announced that all smartphones it releases from 2011 will include NFC capabilities.

Siliconera has posted a picture this week on how the game cart for the Nintendo 3DS looks, and unsurprisingly it looks very similar to a standard DS cart.

The new 2GB 3DS carts are the exact shape as a standard DS cart, but with a small tab in the corner.

Additionally, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata has hinted that the 3DS may be getting an e-reader app that works with the handheld's built-in Wi-Fi support. Using the wireless, the device may soon be able to "automatically acquire newspaper and magazine articles."

Posted in the Japanese Nikkei, Iwata also said the 3DS' wireless connection could stay active even when the handheld is asleep: "It will seek out and automatically connect with wireless LAN spots, and download information," leaving the latest news or other info for gamers when they turn the system back on.

Please read our full post on the 3DS here: E3 2010: Nintendo shows off 3DS, 'No More Glasses'

PreCentral has revealed this week that HP, which recently acquired the struggling smartphone maker Palm for $1.2 billion, is planning on releasing new Palm smartphone devices next year, as well as an updated WebOS mobile operating system.

Palm had put itself up for sale in March after it became clear that the company's phones were not selling and it only had enough cash to last the next 12 months. In late April, HP swooped in and purchased the company Palm for $1.2 billion, after at least four other companies gave serious bids.

Engadget has posted the official press sheets for a white HTC EVO 4G that will be sold exclusively through Best Buy.

Pre-orders start today for the white model, and it will be officially launched on July 11th.

While unconfirmed, the site says Sprint stores will get the model in August and other retailers will get it as late as September.

The price is the same as the existing black model, $200 with two-year contract.

Under the hood is a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 1GB ROM, 512MB RAM, a 1500 mAh battery and an 8GB microSD card. The device has a 4.3-inch WVGA capacitive multi-touchscreen display (with pinch to zoom), Android 2.1 with Sense UI, Google Search, Google Maps, Google Talk, Gmail, Google Goggles, YouTube, Google Calendar syncing, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g and 3G/4G Mobile Hotspot capability for connecting up to eight Wi-Fi enabled devices.

According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, adults are more likely than teenagers to text while driving, with 47 percent of respondents saying they either send or read messages while at the wheel of a vehicle.

That shockingly high number compares with 34 percent of teens doing the same thing. Pew considers teens as minors aged 16 and 17.

Says Mary Madden, senior research specialist at Pew: "There's been a lot of focus on young drivers, and for good reasons. But this research provides an important reminder that adults are setting a bad example."

The U.S. Senate is currently voting on banning texting as a federal mandate, and 28 states already ban the practice. Seven states have banned all mobile phone use while driving.

Pew also says that focus groups have shown that younger children have seen older siblings and their parents texting while driving, and see it as "okay" to do, as well.

The industry as a whole is moving to discourage use of mobile phones while driving, with the CTIA wireless trade group, the National Safety Council, and large carriers Verizon and AT&T starting ad campaigns.

According to sources cited by Reuters, Facebook had revenue of $800 million USD in 2009, thanks to huge boosts in user-ship and advertising.

Perhaps more importantly, the social networking site turned a profit "in the tens of millions of dollars."

Facebook, which started in 2004, has become the most popular web destination in the United States, even topping Google, and has over 500 million users.

The revelation comes at a time when would-be shareholders are practically begging for an IPO (initial public offering) for the site, making the company public and allowing it to trade in the stock market.

$800 million in revenue, and profits in the tens of millions is well ahead of what various analysts have estimated over the course of the year. Even the most generous estimates placed revenue at $700 million with a thin profit margin.

Revenue in 2008 was $250 million, based on 150 million users.

Apple Inc. has pushed out an updated version of its popular iTunes multimedia software ahead of the iPhone 4 launch next week. Top of the list of changes is compatibility with iOS 4 and syncing with iPhone 4. It also introduces book syncing and reading with an iPhone or iPod Touch running iBooks 1.1.

iTunes 9.2 also supports organizing and syncing PDF documents as books and supports the new "Folders" feature of iOS 4 that lets users organize their applications into groups. The update version also promises some improvements such as much faster backups while syncing with an iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 4, and quicker display of album artwork in the iTunes library.

Changes between iTunes v9.1.1 and iTunes v9.2

• Sync with iPhone 4 to enjoy your favorite music, movies, TV shows, books and more on-the-go
• Sync and read books with iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4 and iBooks 1.1
• Organize and sync PDF documents as books. Read PDFs with iBooks 1.1 on iPad and any iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4
• Organize your apps on your iOS 4 home screens into folders using iTunes
• Faster back-ups while syncing an iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4
• Album artwork improvements make artwork appear more quickly when exploring your library

Think back a few months to a fight that took place between Redbox and the major Hollywood studios. Hollywood execs were all hot and bothered about how Redbox kiosk's cheap $1 movie rentals were cannibalizing new DVD and Blu-ray sales, and decided to order their wholesale distributors not to sell to Redbox for a month or more after the initial release.

Redbox launched some legal action in response and decided to buy directly from retailers to stock kiosks as a workaround. However, that came crashing down for Redbox when Wal-Mart and other retailers imposed limits on the number of units of the same film a single customer can buy from them. Long story short, Redbox ended signing deals with Fox, Universal and Warner Bros. that required a 28-day window before Redbox kiosks could offer new titles for rental.

Paramount however decided to actually test whether or not the availability of new titles from rent from Redbox kiosks affects the sales of new DVD or Blu-ray releases. It signed a deal with Redbox in August 2009 which would allow it to stock new releases on the same day as the title comes out on Blu-ray and DVD. Redbox agreed at the time to share rental data with Paramount so that it could evaluate the potential benefits of a longer-term contract.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is inviting everyone who is opposed to the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA), or to provisions of ACTA (or how it is being negotiated) to support a "firm, simple declaration against ACTA." People can sign the declaration which includes 11 demands about ACTA if it is to be implemented, or provides an alternative of abandoning ACTA entirely.

The FSF does not want to seem opposed to the Wellington Declaration however, but a post from Richard Stallman of FSF does point out some details about it that he "cannot put his name to." New Zealand citizens held a public meeting dubbed PublicACTA to criticize a secret meeting of government representatives. The attendees published the Wellington Declaration (which you can sign), calling on the negotiators to reject several injustices suspected to appear in the controversial treaty.

Stallman however points out that while the Wellington Declaration condemns the plan for ACTA to prohibit devices that can break digital restrictions (DRM, digital handcuffs etc.), it goes ahead to suggest instead that a limited prohibition, along the lines of Article 11 of the WIPO Internet Treaty. This would result in government backing being given to certain kinds of digital handcuffs, according to Stallman, and he is concerned that to accept that much without a fight would tempt ACTA negotiators to try for "more."

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., has introduced a new high-speed 512GB solid state drive, utilizing high-performance toggle-mode DDR NAND. "The highly advanced features and characteristics of our new SSD were obtained as a direct result of an aggressive push for further development of our NAND flash technology, our SSD controller and our supportive SSD firmware," said Dong-Soo Jun, executive vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Electronics.

"Early introduction of this state-of-the-art toggle DDR solution will enable Samsung to play a major role in securing faster market acceptance of the new wave of high-end SSD technology." The 512GB SSD uses 30 nanometer-class 32-gigabit chips that the company began producing just last November. Combining the toggle-mode DDR structure with the SATA 3.0Gbps interface generates a maximum read speed of 250 MB/s and a 220 MB/s write speed.

Samsung claims this provides three-fold the performance of a traditional hard disk drive, with two 4GB DVD movies being stored in just a minute. The SSD is also developed to be energy-efficient, using a low power controller specifically for toggle-mode DDR and a low-power mode that is activated after the controller analyzes the users' activities that can extend the batter life of a notebook significantly.

Sony Ericsson has launched its latest Android device, the Xperia X8, a mid-level entry to the smartphone market.

The device will have a 3-inch HVGA touchscreen, a 600 MHz processor,Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G, GPS, a 3.2MP camera, a microSD slot, a 3.5mm headset jack, and will run the aging Android 1.6.

An update to 2.1 is expected "soon," however, says Sony. On top of the Android OS, the device will use Sony Ericsson's "four corners" UI layer.

Additionally, the X8 will run the Timescape app, which manages calls, texts, emails, and social networking.

As with all SE devices, the phone will come with strong video and audio playback players.

Price and release date were not revealed.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has sued Oracle today, claiming that the software giant overcharged the federal government by tens of millions of dollars after not disclosing discounts given to other corporate customers.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the DOJ says Oracle did not provide a discount that is normally given to "most favored customers." The government should have that discount through a deal with the General Services Administration (GSA).

GSA's "multiple award schedule" lets the government negotiate contracts with companies so that government employees can make purchases at a discounted price.

Due to regulations, the GSA must obtain the best price a contractor provides, and the contractor must disclose that price.

The new suit says Oracle, starting in 2007, did not disclose their lowest prices to the GSA.

For consumers hoping to get their Apple iPhone 4 early, watch out, you may be in for a multiple week wait.

Apple's official store is now showing that iPhone 4 pre-orders will ship by July 14th, a big-time delay from the expected July 2nd ship date.

Yesterday the company said they sold 600,000 of the device on June 15th, the first day of pre-orders, with the demand so high that the AT&T web site had to take down the pre-order form and call in specialists.

Apple apologized for the lack of supply yesterday: "Many customers were turned away or abandoned the process in frustration. We apologize to everyone who encountered difficulties, and hope that they will try again or visit an Apple or carrier store once the iPhone 4 is in stock."

If you want your device closer to launch date on June 24th, Radio Shack, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy should have a limited number of devices in-store.

While it is expected to become a huge market in just a few small years, 3D HDTVs are having a modest early adopter period in Europe, says retail analyst GfK.

Consumers in Europe have purchased 25,000 3D-capable TVs as of May 31st 2010, with sales expect to grow significantly with the release of a number of new devices this month.

Overall, 252 million TVs are expected to be sold, globally, in 2010.

GfK says "every notable manufacturer" either currently offers, or will offer within months, a 3D-capable HDTV, and that interest is growing from the consuming public.

A recent study has shown that the majority of consumers interested in buying a 3D TV are avid gamers, with 27 percent saying they plan to purchase one within the next year.

Sony recently revealed the first 3D games available for the PS3, the console which has had the capability to playback 3D content for a few months.

Nokia has revealed that all smartphones it releases from 2011 on will feature near-field communication (NFC) technology, a welcomed announced as NFC-backers feared Nokia was backing off on its long-term support plans for NFC. Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia's executive VP for markets, made today's announcement at the Mobey Forum's 10th anniversary meeting in Helsinki.

Vanjoki was unable to give specific details about the new smartphone models, but delegates were informed that information would be made available "in due course." Vanjoki said that the handsets will support "all open business models," suggesting that they will support both the Single Wire Protocol (SWP) and other secure element formats such as MicroSD cards, or possibly an embedded security element.

Using NFC technology, users can avail of a proximity payment system to carry out transactions, such as paying for public transport. Besides having the NFC to facilitate wireless communications, the handset would also need a lot of various elements to be stored safely that control the system securely. Operators have lobbied for the SWP standard which would store all of this important data in the SIM and facilitate such features.

On Monday, Microsoft officially launched Kinect, the motion control system that had been formerly dubbed "Project Natal."

The software giant, however, would not set an official price for the product at E3 this year.

On Tuesday, GameStop put the system on sale for $150 USD while also offering up a bundle with an Arcade console and Kinect for $299.99 and an Elite console with Kinect for $399.99.

Today, more retailers have followed suit, with Amazon, Best Buy and Wal-Mart all offering the system for $150, as well.

With four major retailers now offering the device for the same price, it seems the pre-order price is Microsoft's MSRP on the system.

The Kinect is compatible with all current Xbox 360 models as well as the unreleased Slim console.

At E3, Sony also unveiled its Move motion control system, pricing the two-part controller at $80 USD.

Lenovo announced its first 3D laptop on Thursday. The Lenovo IdeaPad Y560d features the TriDef 3D technology solution which includes a 3D screen, 3D glasses and of course software. "Fun is a notebook that brings multimedia to life—and the IdeaPad Y560d does this in a dramatic fashion with a truly unique 3D viewing experience," said Dion Weisler, vice president, business operations, Lenovo.

"While 3D technology has been around for ages, it has not been readily accessible to consumers within the home. Lenovo is helping bridge this gap by delivering consumers a 3D experience on a familiar PC platform that can be viewed and enjoyed when and where they want."

The Y560d features a 15.6-inch 16:9 high-definition screen. The TriDef 3D technology (TriDef Media Player) software can transform a standard movie into a 3D experience (the software does not support transforming Blu-ray or HD DVD content though), while TriDef Photo Transformer can turn standard photos into 3D as well.

The Y560d also features Lenovo's new innovative Enhanced Experience RapidDrive technology which combined traditional HDD and SSD storage solutions to deliver a fast boot of the installed Windows 7 operating system (this functionality is optional). The RapidDrive technology can boost Windows 7 boot by 66 percent and open applications twice as fast.

Toshiba Corp. announced on Thursday that it will launch a 128-gigabyte embedded NAND flash memory module designed for application in a wide range of digital consumer products, including smartphones, tablet PCs and digital video cameras.

The new 128GB embedded device integrates sixteen 64Gbit (8GB) NAND chips manufactured with Toshiba's 32-nanometer process technology. Along with the dedicated controller, the product measures just 17 x 22 x 1.4mm. The module is fully compatible with the latest eMMC standard.

It makes Toshiba the first company to successfully combine 16 64Gbit chips, using applied advanced chip thinning and layering technologies to produce individual chips just 30 micrometers thick.

Toshiba offers a line-up of NAND flash memory packages in densities now ranging from 2GB to 128GB. They integrate a controller to manage basic control functions for NAND applications, and are compatible with JEDEC eMMC Version 4.4 and its features.

Indonesian communications minister Tifatul Sembiring, chief of the Islamic Prosperous Justice Party, is calling for an Internet blacklist to be enforced in the country to "save the young." Sembiring highlights the recent shockwaves through Indonesia caused by the distribution of homemade sex videos involving three popular celebrities in the country.

Sembiring has vowed to draft a new decree with lawmakers after an earlier proposal of a blacklist was shelved due to opposition. "The porn video 'allegedly' consisting of three artists ... has insulted the nation's constitution and Pancasila," he said, referring to the founding national philosophy that enshrines belief in the "one and only God."

"Our teachings have been tainted by the release of these videos," he added. The minister cited a survey conducted in 2007 which claimed 97 percent of Indonesian high school students had watched pornographic content online.

Now Sembiring wants a special task force to maintain a blacklist for the electronic filtering of the web of offensive material. "There will be a team to observe whether a website contains points from the blacklist. The team will assess whether such websites truly contain pornographic material," Sembiring said. "If it does, we'll ask the website to delete the points included in the list, but we won't ban the whole website."

Swype, the speed record breaking texting alternative for Android phones has gone open beta (with limited functionality) to anyone who signs up for a limited time.

The app was formerly only available to a very limited amount of users who got lucky to sign up for the beta in the past, or natively on smartphones like the MyTouch 3G Slide.

Swype allows for extremely fast typing, as users do not type letter by letter with their fingers, but instead slide their fingers from letter to letter, with Swype "magically" knowing what word you are trying to write.

For the next few days, Swype beta is available at beta.swype.com, with users submitting an email and getting sent a download link for their respective phone.

Swype does note, however, that the beta will be open to the public for a very limited time, will be available in only Spanish, English and Italian, and will have "limited functionality," although it is unclear what will be missing.

Industry research group NPD revealed earlier this year that U.S. consumers had spent $19.66 billion on games products in 2009, including hardware, software and accessories. This was a significant drop from $21.4 billion take in 2008 for the industry. Of the $19.66 billion, NPD had estimated from its research that $10.5 billion was spent on software.

The NPD stats however only account for the sale of new software titles at retail, and leave out the sale of used games, subscription fees, downloadable content and more. NPD has carried out research that allows it to factor in these sources of revenue and also game rentals and mobile game applications (but not social network games).

With the extra sources of revenue for the wide industry added in, NPD reports that the software take jumps between $4.5 - $4.75 billion for 2009, bringing the total to between $15 - $15.25 billion. "Our expanded estimate of consumer spending reflects the growing number of options to purchase, acquire and interact with video games ranging from GameFly rentals to iPod Touch game apps," said NPD analyst Anita Frazier.

Twitter has apologized, again, for the month's worth of outages, bugs and system instabilities that have hobbled the site.

Citing a huge usage spike due to the World Cup, and the uncovering of a number of bugs, Twitter says the problems have led to the "worst month since last October" for the micro-blogging site.

Says the site via its official blog: "As we go through this process, we have uncovered unexpected deeper issues and have even caused inadvertent downtime as a result of our attempts to make changes. Ultimately, the changes that we are making now will make Twitter much more reliable in the future. However, we certainly are not happy about the disruptions that we have faced and even caused this week and understand how they negatively impact our users."

Twitter's updates will fine tune load balancing and double the network's capacity.

According to the web monitoring company Pingdom, Twitter's home page has been down for 5 hours and 22 minutes so far in June, its worst month in almost a year.

Following a huge victory for record companies over LimeWire, eight music publishers have filed their own lawsuit against the software company, seeking relief and damages for the facilitation of rampant copyright infringement. Many of the publishers are owned by the parent companies of the record labels that won the the case against LimeWire.

David Israelite, chief executive of the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA), said that songwriters and publishers were also hurt as well as performers, by the music sharing facilitated by LimeWire software. Publishers are paid royalties for songwriters, while record companies work with the performers.

"The pervasive online infringement facilitated by LimeWire and others like them has consequences for everyone in the music chain," Israelite said in a statement. A U.S. District Court judge in New York ruled that LimeWire is liable for inducing copyright infringement.

Record companies sought a preliminary injunction last week that would freeze the assets of Mike Gorton, chairman of LimeWire, accusing him of attempting to shield LimeWire assets and proceeds from the court. LimeWire is attempting to relaunch itself as a legal music service.

IsoHunt attorney Ira Rothken said the search engine has asked a federal appeals court to block a lower court's injunction that could force the site down. The takedown order was given by a U.S. District Court in May. Judge Stephen Wilson said that IsoHunt is an unlawful avenue to free, copyrighted movies and television shows. Wilson said he would not stay enforcement of the injunction unless ordered to do so by a federal appeals court.

IsoHunt, which gets 30 million unique monthly visitors, asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to block the takedown order. It accuses the District Court's injunction of being too broad. One issue of concern is a mandated removal of "searches" from the site. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) sent a list of keywords for the block, which include the number 10, and the word Dracula, for example.

"One person's copyrighted Wizard of Oz is another person's public domain work," Rothken said to Wired. "The motion picture studios do not have a monopoly on names on things. That is where the injunction is violating the First Amendment." Rothken said the MPAA should instead provide URLS or hashes which can positively identify an infringing link.

Microsoft's UK boss Neil Thompson has responded to Sony's E3 press conference by saying that 3D gaming is too expensive for consumers for now. Sony have attendees 3D glasses to view 3D content at the conference while revealing titles that will support 3D for the PS3.

PS3 users will need a 3D television for the effect to work. Thompson feels that the price involved with 3D gaming puts it a while off being mass market.

"If you look at the costs of entry into the living room and when that's going to become mass-market, we think the offering with Kinect and the natural user-interface we're bringing, that's a more compelling proposition for consumers over the coming years than maybe looking at 3D at this point."

Of course, Nintendo also promoted the 3D effect of its new 3DS handheld console, and that doesn't require an investment in 3D glasses, but for living room gaming, maybe Thompson has a point on price for now. As for Microsoft's Kinect, Thompson resisted providing any pricing information to Eurogamer.net.

All mobile handsets in stores in San Francisco may be labeled with information about their radiative output. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance which would make it a reality by a 10-1 majority. Following a 10-day consultation on the issue, the Mayor can sign it into legislation.

The ordinance would require outlets selling phones in the city to provide information on the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) for each handset stocked.

The information can already be retrieved from the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) website. Critics of the board's decision say that the move may indicate to consumers that using mobile phones is a health risk.

The potential of mobile phones to cause harm to users has been the subject of plenty of scientific studies for the past couple of decades. The chief sponsor claims that the ordinance is there to "help people make informed decisions."

Opera has released a beta of the next release of its popular web browser, v10.6. The beta features support for the royalty-free WebM video format being pushed by Google. It also features new HTML 5 offline applications. The company claims that the Javascript engine in the newer version is 75 percent faster than the previous version.

The v10.6 release is the next major version for Linux and BSD users also after Opera decided to skip 10.5 releases on either of those platforms. Opera pushed out v10.5 of the browser in time for Microsoft's distribution of the web browser selection screen that allows users to download and install a browser of their choice as part of a settlement agreement with the European Union.

The new WebM video format is being pushed by Google as a royalty-free alternative to H.264, which is only royalty free to use until the end of 2015, according to MPEG LA. A WebM video file consists of VP8 video (Google acquired the VP8 technology in its $106.5 million deal with On2 Technologies last year) and OGG Vorbis audio packed in a Matroska (MKV) container.

Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) has announced that it will release an "all-in-one" surround sound system for the PlayStation 3 (SP3) console. The surround sound system consists of just one central speaker, with the subwoofer built in.

The system will be released in fall 2010 in North America, Europe (and other PAL territories) and Japan for US$199, €199 and 19,800 yen, respectively.

The system uses Sony's S-Force PRO Front Surround Sound, generates rich realistic surround sound over just one front speaker. Bringing in SCE's expertise in both entertainment and technology acquired from developing games, four sound fields of the speaker system have been designed with the help of SCE's expert game sound designers, to optimize the cinematic experience of all forms of entertainment.

The system features two audio inputs; an optic audio input for connecting the PlayStation 3 and an analogue input for other sources, including Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP).

Google has unveiled a new video editor this week, one that will allow users to create new videos from clips of videos they have already uploaded.

Additionally, you can add a music track from the AudioSwap licensed song library, but some will have advertisements.

The feature has been rolled out today, in batches, with all users getting it by the end of the day.

So far, the editor is very basic, but should cover most of the needs of average users who want to create montages or other simple editing jobs.

Adds Rushabh Doshi of YouTube: "We wanted something really, really easy for our users to use."

Check it here: http://www.youtube.com/editor?popart=681928

T-Mobile has announced the launch of the HSPA+ network in 15 new cities this week, giving users speeds faster than that of Sprint's 4G.

The network has already been available in New York, Philadelphia, Memphis and a few other cities for some time, but now T-Mobile subscribers in Atlanta, Houston, Seattle, Tampa, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, New Orleans, and Charleston can use the very fast data network on their smartphones and netbooks.

Important to note, however, is that not all phones can use the HSPA+ network, and the phones that work are pictured below. Most are Android devices like the myTouch series and the HTC HD2.

Additionally, the fourth largest carrier in the U.S. is now also offering a HSPA+-friendly USB dongle, dubbed the webConnect Rocket, for netbook users wanting the fast connection.

T-Mobile's "3.5G" HSPA+ network promises speeds of up to 21 Mbps.

A lead hacker for Goatse Security, the group now notorious for posting 114,000 email addresses of iPad owners after exploiting the AT&T website, has been arrested today, charged with felony drug possession.

Andrew "Escher" Auernheimer, 24, of Arkansas, was arrested after the FBI searched his home, although it is unclear whether the warrant is in connection with the recent hacking episode.

Escher now faces four felony charges of "possession of a controlled substance" as he was found with LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and other over-the-counter drugs.

The hacker was arrested once before in March for giving a false name to police after he was pulled over.

Earlier in the week, the same group exposed another security hole in the iPad, using the same ICC-IDs given out by using a script on the AT&T Website and determining the locations of iPad owners.

Apple has announced today that despite glitches on the AT&T website, the iPhone 4 has seen 600,000 units pre-ordered, a one-day record for the company.

The number was much higher than expected, and the company apologized to anyone who tried to pre-order but could not because of technical difficulties.

In all five countries the device is available there were reports of delays, system malfunctions and server breakdowns and AT&T in the U.S. even had to suspend all pre-orders while a "special team" was brought in to manually look through the orders.

For comparison's sake, the iPhone 3GS sold almost 70,000 via pre-order in its first day of availability.

Says Apple: "Yesterday Apple and its carrier partners took pre-orders for more than 600,000 of Apple's new iPhone 4. It was the largest number of pre-orders Apple has ever taken in a single day and was far higher than we anticipated, resulting in many order and approval system malfunctions. Many customers were turned away or abandoned the process in frustration. We apologize to everyone who encountered difficulties, and hope that they will try again or visit an Apple or carrier store once the iPhone 4 is in stock."

AOL, infamous for terrible investments, announced in April that they were planning to either sell or shut down the social networking site Bebo, which they bought for $850 million in 2008.

Today, reports are circulating that AOL has found a buyer for the service, Criterion Capital Partners, who will buy Bebo for $10 million USD, leaving AOL with a 98.8 percent loss on their original investment.

Despite that outstanding loss, the sale will give AOL the ability to write off the original purchase for tax purposes, saving over $300 million in corporate taxes in the process.

At the time of the acquisition, AOL was still part of Time Warner, part of a merger that many have called the worst deal of all-time. (AOL had to take a $99 billion dollar loss in 2002.)

Bebo saw less than 5 million unique visitors last month, compared to 120 million for Facebook, and Bebo continues to see declining traffic every month.

Google Inc. uploaded a video to YouTube yesterday explaining what Google TV hopes to bring to the living room. The video is only 2:21 long and is very easy to understand. It contains little on the technical side and just focuses on the features that Google TV aims to bring to the living room.

The video shows how Google TV can be used to search and view television channels and programming, browse the web on your television, play games, browse photos and more.

T-Mobile, the fourth largest carrier in the United States has announced today that it will run a huge Father's Day promotion, this Saturday, June 19th.

As long as you have a family plan, or decide to purchase one, every phone in any T-Mobile store across the nation is free.

If you already have a family plan, to get the deal you need to add another line to your plan, which can cost as low as $5 extra per month.

The deal can be incredible, as it includes literally all phones, even brand new ones like the myTouch 3G Slide, the HTC HD2, and the Garminfone, all of which are over $350 to purchase without contract.

T-Mobile is starting the promotion at 8 a.m. on Saturday.

Business groups in the United States on Tuesday criticized the Chinese government over policy proposals that they say will discriminate against U.S. and other international companies in the market. The companies represented work with software, clean energy and computer technology, but one proposal in China would encourage government agencies to deal with companies that have produced technology in the country.

The proposal is part of a bunch of policies dubbed "indigenous innovation" that are meant to encourage more technological development in the country. Jeremie Waterman, a senior director at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, testified before the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC).

He argued that the policies are being proposed to provide advantages to domestic companies and products, to "force technology transfer if foreign players choose to participate." In April, China allowed foreign companies to compete for government business following pressure from Washington.

Not everyone agrees that the Chinese proposals will be bad for U.S. or other foreign companies however. Lee Branstetter, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, points out that none of the policies are even in place yet and may not turn out to be as harmful to U.S. companies as they think.

While Sony is showing off 3D features of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console today at E3, NVIDIA with support of many big names in the PC industry is trying to push the "3D PC" to consumers. Using the popularity of movies like Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, and the selection of PC games that be displayed in 3D with right hardware, NVIDIA argues that a 3D PC offers the broadest solution for enjoying 3D entertainment at home.

What is a 3D PC? A 3D PC is technically a PC or a notebook on the market that meet the following minimum requirements...

• Includes a pair of 3D active-shutter glasses.
• A 120Hz 3D-capable display in the form of a desktop LCD monitor, a 3D projector, a 3D TV, or a notebook PC with an integrated 3D-capable LCD.
• A discrete graphics processor that is capable of delivering high definition imagery to the 3D display

A few days ago, we reported about a controversial disclosure of an exploitable vulnerability that affects Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Google engineer Tavis Ormandy had alerted Microsoft of the problem and then just five days later published an advisory detailing the bug, even though no patch had been distributed by Microsoft for the problem.

Ormandy was heavily criticized for not waiting until the Redmond software giant had pushed out an update for the bug, which affects the Windows Help and Support Center. His affiliation with Google also fueled some speculation of his motivation for publishing the advisory early. However, Ormandy has consistently defended himself, indicating this is probably the only way to ensure that Microsoft will release a patch.

The flaw was disclosed only last Thursday, but anti-virus provider Sophos has already found that the vulnerability is being targeted by criminal hackers. The bug could potentially allow an attacker to execute code on a victims computer using specially crafted webpages or crafted links in e-mail messages.

Sony revealed details on Tuesday about a premium subscription service package for the PlayStation Network, called PlayStation Plus. The company also revealed that there are now 50 million PSN accounts in 58 different countries, making the PS3 the most connected games console in the world.

Users of PSN will be able to pay a fee for access to exclusive content and functionality. Sony stressed however that the existing elements of PSN would remain free, including multi-player gaming.

Three months subscription will cost £17.99 while a full year subscription costs $49.99. For the fee, a user will be able to include full access to certain PS3 downloadable content and PSN titles, such as the PSone archives and Minis, and be able to play them for as long as the PlayStation Plus membership is valid. Some games will only be playable for a certain amount of time on a trial basis before needing to be purchased.

An extra feature that PlayStation Plus provides is the ability to schedule the PS3 console to switch on and automatically retrieve demos, patches or updates at certain times.

At the Sony E3 Press Conference, the launch date and price information for the awaited Move motion control system were revealed. PlayStation Move will launch in Europe on September 15, in North America on September 19 and in Japan on September 21.

The controller itself will cost $49.99, whereas the navigation controller is sold separately for $29.99. A bundle including the PlayStation Move controller, the Sports Champions game and the PlayStation Eye will cost $99. Those three items will also be sold in a bundle with a PS3 for $399.99 (the bundle does not include the navigation controller).

About 20 Move compatible games are promised by the end of March 2011. At the conference, the first games that were shown controlled by Move were Sorcery and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11.

Before those games were even demoed though, we did learn that Killzone 3 (due out in February 2011 for PS3) and a SOCOM 4 title will be controllable with Move too.

Last week, AT&T confirmed that 114,067 iPad 3G owners had their email information leaked to the Web, with the data being stolen and exposed by a group called Goatse Security.

AT&T went as far as to call Goatse "malicious hackers" who attacked AT&T's servers, and the group is now under investigation by the FBI.

Today, the same group has exposed another security hole in the iPad, using the same ICC-IDs given out by using a script on the AT&T Website and determining the locations of iPad owners.

Additionally, the group says an unpatched Safari browser exploit will allow for targeted attacks on iPads. The exploit, reads DailyTech, "uses an integer overflow exploit, which gives access to proxy connections over banned ports, allowing all sorts of ill purposes including spewing spam and malware deliveries to locally networked machines."

Apple has confirmed that it will sell unlocked iPhone 4 devices in Europe and Canada, with buyers being able to use the smartphone on their choice of provider, including GSM providers in other countries.

The confirmation comes from a new Apple FAQ, which has many more interesting tidbits about the device.

Says the FAQ:
Does iPhone work with any SIM card or carrier worldwide?

iPhone 3GS works with SIM cards and iPhone 4 works with micro-SIM cards from compatible carriers, including prepaid cards. Non-GSM carrier networks do not support iPhone. Availability of 3G data depends on carrier support for the radio frequencies used by iPhone.

Do I need to commit to a long-term contract for my iPhone?
Buying a commitment-free iPhone from the Apple Online Store allows you choose your own carrier and change carriers at any time. iPhone may also be available at a reduced initial price with a contract directly from your wireless carrier.

Additionally, the iPhone 4 will support tethering, reads the FAQ.

According to Cnet, Google is actively creating a digital music store that will compete against Apple's iTunes and Amazon's MP3 Store.

Sources cited by the report say Google could launch the service as early as "the fall," and the service will also be bundled into Android, the popular mobile operating system.

The service will likely be called Google Music.

Cnet adds that Google first pitched the idea to record label execs at the CES in January, in which features such as "tying digital downloads and streaming music to Google's search results," will be standard.

Google is not new to the music business, as they actively helped Google Search users stream music through Lala and iLike. Both sites have since been purchased, however, Lala by Apple and iLike by MySpace and integrated into iTunes and Myspace Music.

Toshiba has announced the launch of the 3D-capable Satellite A665 this week, powered by Nvidia's Vision tech.

The laptop is not "cheap," but will pack some very impressive specs. The Satellite A665 has a 15.6-inch diagonal TruBrite LED backlit LCD display, a 120Hz refresh rate, a rewriteable Blu-ray Disc drive and integrated stereo Harman/Kardon speakers.



Under the hood is a Intel Core i7 processor with TurboBoost, a Nvidia GeForce GTS 350M, 1GB of GDDR3 video memory and an LED backlit keyboard. Additionally, the device has 4GB DDR3 RAM, a 640GB HDD, runs of Windows 7, has 802.11b/g/n wireless, 10/100/1000 Ethernet, Bluetooth V2.1 + EDR10, an HD impact sensor, a 12-cell battery, one eSATA/USB combo port with USB sleep-and-charge, three USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI port and integrated webcam with face recognition.

Nintendo showed off its anticipated 3DS handheld console at its E3 Press Conference today. Identified by Reggie Fils-Aime - President and chief operating officer of Nintendo of America - as probably one of the best features of 3DS: no glasses required, as he doubted gaming on big screen TVs while glasses are still required to get the effect.

"It's the glasses," he said, with a certain disgust in his tone, also talking about the cost of 3D now. Nintendo then gave the audience a history lesson of "3D" before a prolonged unveiling of the Nintendo 3DS itself by Nintendo President and CEO, Satoru Iwata.

He first drew attention to the 3.5-inch widescreen on top, which will show the 3D content and then the slider on the side of the handheld to control the depth of the 3D effect. The bottom screen is only for touch, as Nintendo found that smudges on the screen from touching ruined the 3D effect easily.

OnLive, the cloud streaming games service, has finally announced its launch day lineup, with some impressive games being made available.

20 games will be available for launch on June 17th, with blockbuster games like "Assassin's Creed II," "Mass Effect 2" and "Batman: Arkham Asylum" available right from the get-go.

OnLive offers instant, lag-free access to games, allowing for users with old computers to play new games without any need for expensive video cards and processors.

Better yet, the service is free for the first year, thanks to a promotion by AT&T, which is a large investor in OnLive.

After the first year, the monthly subscription price is expected to be under $9.99. Games cost up to $60 USD to purchase, just like their physical counterparts, but the company offers 3-to-5 day rentals for under $10.

Eventually, the service will be available through your HDTV as well.

A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) official has said both the case of Google's accidental WiFi snooping and the hack which exposed information of over 100,000 iPad users on an AT&T website are "worrisome in their own way." Google recently admitted to accidentally sniffing Internet traffic on unencrypted wireless networks while its Street View cars were snapping pictures in more than 30 countries.

"Whether intentional or not, collecting information sent over WiFi networks clearly infringes on consumer privacy," Joe Gurin, the FCC's chief of consumer and governmental affairs, wrong in a blog post. He went on to remind readers of the risks of using open networks.

Recently AT&T also has admitted that a group called Goatse Security was able to (rather easily) extract the e-mail addresses and cellular ID numbers of more than 114,000 iPad owners by exploiting a web application on the AT&T site. Among the affected users were celebrities and government officials, such as White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

"The iPad incident appears to be a classic security breach – the kind that could happen, and has happened, to many companies – and is exactly the kind of incident that has led the FCC to focus on cyber security," Gurin wrote.

Google Inc. is working with the U.S. State Department, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Commerce Department and European officials to help build a case arguing that censorship acts as a trade barrier, according to Robert Boorstin, Google's director of corporate and policy communications. The company shut its Chinese-language search engine this year because of a cyber attack and concerns about censorship.

The U.S. has been mulling such a WTO case as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has promoted Internet freedom as a basic human right in modern times. In the European Union, Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, has described the Chinese firewall as a trade barrier as long as it served to block communication for Internet users.

"Google believes very strongly, as do other companies, that censorship is a trade barrier," Boorstin said during a discussion hosted by the Media Access Project. He said the company wants to demonstrate that censorship means fewer search pages, and that limits the capacity for a company like Google to go to the Chinese and be on a level playing field with services like Baidu.

Google Inc.'s YouTube video sharing service is to test offering a news feed this summer. On YouTube's official blog, a post highlights some of the latest videos on YouTube that relate to news, or make the news, such as videos showing violent attacks in Kyrgyzstan and oil washing up on a beach in the Gulf Coast.

"Videos uploaded to YouTube by both amateur reporters and professional journalists move through the media ecosystem with a sophistication and speed greater than ever before," the blog reads. "But with 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, how can people more easily find the latest breaking news videos on our site? And how can media organizations better leverage this content to expand the scope of their reporting and keep us all better informed?"

Working with the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, a YouTube News Feed will track news as it breaks on YouTube. The news feed will provide a stream of breaking news with a focus on strong visuals and non-traditional sources.

The news feed back be found on the CitizenTube website, which is YouTube's news and politics blog. It has only briefly been used by the company to track news, such as the Iranian election protests in 2009 and for Los Angeles wildfires.

Game retailer GameStop is listing Microsoft's Kinect for Xbox 360 peripheral for $149.99. The Kinect was dated for a November 4, 2010 release date today at the Microsoft E3 Press Conference, but Microsoft said it will not set an official price for the product at E3 this year. The GameStop website allows users to pre-order the item now, limited to one per household.

"Official pricing has not been announced by the publisher. This is an estimate only and subject to change," the product page reads. "If the price decreases between the time you place your preorder and the release date, you'll receive the lowest price."

The site also lists Xbox 360 bundles that include the Kinect. A bundle with an Arcade console and Kinect is $299.99 and an Elite console with Kinect is $399.99, but there is no sign of the slim Xbox 360 on the site yet.

Also news of a second slim Xbox 360 model emerged later in the day. The second console which is currently in the works will cost $199.99 and will replace the Arcade unit, while along with the Elite console, is to be discontinued.

ModMyI has reported today that AT&T sources have leaked some news on the availability of different colorways for the Apple iPhone 4, and it appears the white model will not be available at launch.

The attached picture, which was emailed to AT&T supervisors, says the iPhone 4 will only be available in the black colorway at launch, for both the 16GB and 32GB models.

Apparently, the white versions will be available "later in the summer."

Pre-orders for the device begin tomorrow, with launch set for June 24th.

The iPhone 4 has a 3.5-inch multi-touchscreen with a 640x960 resolution, runs the iOS 4.0 and has a 1GHz Apple A4 processor. The new OS allows for multitasking.

Additionally, the iPhone 4 has a 5MP standard camera and a 1.5MP front-facing camera for video conferencing.

LaptopMag has started its first ever Android Cup this week, pitting 16 Android smartphones against each other in a bracket voted on by any user visiting the site.

The first match, if it can even be called a competition, is between the new HTC Incredible and the Samsung Behold II.

HTC's Incredible has a 3.7-inch multi-touch AMOLED screen, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, Android 2.1 (for now) and an 8MP camera. The phone also has the popular HTC Sense UI layer, and an optical trackpad.

The Behold II was Samsung's second ever Android phone. It has a 3.2-inch AMOLED touchscreen with a small 480x320 resolution, a slower 528-MHz processor and a 5MP camera. The smartphone only runs Android 1.5, and has TouchWiz and Cube UI layers.

As of posting, the Incredible is winning 97 percent to 3 percent, with over 2300 votes cast.

On June 4th, Sprint launched the HTC EVO 4G to rave reviews. A few days later, the carrier announced that the HTC device had broken the carrier's launch day sales record, even selling "three times" as many units as the Palm Pre and Samsung Instinct did combined on their respective first days.

Additionally, calls to over 20 retailers showed that the phone was sold out, practically everywhere.

Within days, however, the U.S. third biggest carrier apologized for overstating the figures.

MobileCrunch is reporting today that there was an under-the-radar part of the story, in which a Sprint employee was fired for posting unofficial sales numbers online, using the company's inventory system.

News Corp announced that it has made a deal with e-reader company Skiff, which facilitates the distribution of newspaper and magazine content to e-reader devices. Skiff also has its own unreleased e-reader hardware, but the News Corp deal does not include it.

Instead, News Corp is only interested in the software distribution platform. The aquisition empowers News Corp to disttibute its own content to e-reader devices, and also to smartphones, tablets and similar gadgets, as it continues its quest into paid online content.

Chairman Rupert Murdoch has been vocal about charging for online content, hoping that the subscription model adopted by the Wall Street Journal works with more of the company's outlets. To aid with this goal, News Corp announced an investment in Journalism Online on Monday.

Journalism Online helps companies to charge for content in a variety of ways, including subscription models and processing micropayments for article views.

Last week, AT&T confirmed that 114,067 iPad 3G owners had their email information leaked to the Web, with the data being stolen by a group calling themselves Goatse Security.

The group published the emails, which included prominent politicians, celebrities and even military officials.

AT&T said at the time that only email addresses were leaked, however, with any sensitive data like credit card numbers not being compromised.

Today, AT&T has sent out emails to customers, apologizing for the data breach, and giving more information on what happened.

The carrier made sure to note that all other sensitive data was unaffected, and that they should be on note that their emails could get hit for extra spam or possible phishing attempts.

The full letter here, via MacRumors:

Beginning on July 1st, Starbucks will begin offering unlimited free Wi-Fi in all of its 6700 U.S. locations, in an effort to bring more potential customers into the coffee shops.

The company adds that the Wi-Fi will "eventually include a new network of news and entertainment content exclusively for customers."

Starbucks has been losing customers to McDonald's, which offers free Wi-Fi, and cheaper priced coffee, as well.

The chain had offered Wi-Fi, but only two hours a day for free, and you had to register. On average, laptop/netbook users at Starbucks spend one hour using the wireless, currently, says CEO Howard Schultz.

McDonald's has offered free, unlimited Wi-Fi at all 11,500 U.S. locations since January.

Google Inc.'s video sharing website, YouTube, and the prestigious Guggenheim Museums have partnered to search for creative online videos. The pair have launched a competition, announced on Monday, which will allow anybody to submit a video through a channel set up for it.

The competition is called "YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video", and it will select 20 videos from the community to presented at the Guggenheim in New York on October 21. "Creative online video is one of the most compelling and innovative opportunities for personal expression today," said Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation director Richard Armstrong.

"'YouTube Play' demonstrates this is within the reach of anyone who uses a computer and has access to the Internet." The 20 chosen videos will also be projected at museums n Berlin, Bilbao and Venice. Entrants must submit a video up to 10 minutes and a written statement to YouTube.com/play.

A jury of top artists, filmmakers, designers and musicians will select the 20 winning videos from 200 finalists. Entrants can submit creative videos with art, animation, graphics, narrative or non-narrative videos and entirely new art forms, on any subject of their choosing.

Today was a very big day for Microsoft at the E3 event, with the company announcing a Slim Xbox 360 console, the official launch of the Kinect motion control system and ESPN live and on-demand content through XBL.

Flying under the radar however, with all the headline grabbing news, was the addition of a "search" function to the Netflix application through the Xbox 360 console.

The addition of search makes the console the first of the current-generation systems to have such a function, adds Marc Whitten.

Says Whitten: "We're proud of our continued innovation with Netflix. We were the first gaming console to bring instantly streaming movies from Netflix right to the living room. The first to let you update your Netflix instant Queue without a computer. And Xbox LIVE remains the only place you can share the fun with up to seven friends in a Movie Party. Starting this November, Xbox 360 will offer Netflix search. Just type what you’re looking for, immediately search from thousands of titles you can watch instantly, and update your Queue, all right over Xbox LIVE. We’re making your entertainment easier to discover."

An internal memo from U.S. retailer Target has revealed that the price of non-slim Xbox 360 models is to be cut by $50 on Tuesday. Microsoft unveiled a new slimmer Xbox 360 console with a 250GB HDD and internal 802.11n WiFi for $299, the same price point as the Xbox 360 Elite console that comes with a 120GB HDD.

The Target memo about the price cuts reads...

Due to an announcement made Monday 6/14, the following Xbox Game Consoles will be Price Cut by $50 effective Tuesday 6/15:
207/21/2 (Xbox 360 ARCADE CORE HARDWARE): $199.99 to $149.99
207/21/4 (Xbox 360 ELITE CONSOLE): $299.99 to $249.99
207/21/7 (NFC Xbox 360 COD MODRN WRFE2 LTD ED): $399.99 to $349.99
207/21/8 (Xbox 360 FINAL FANTASY XIII BND): $399.99 to $349.99
207/21/9 (TC SPLINTER CELL BUNDLE): $399.99 to $349.99
Source: Kotaku

At Microsoft's E3 Press Conference today, it was revealed that a deal with ESPN will bring live sports and on-demand content to Xbox Live. The exclusive deal with Microsoft will bring 3,500 live and on-demand sports events including college football, college basketball, Major League Baseball, NBA basketball, soccer and more. Giving a demonstration of the Xbox Live ESPN features was Josh Elliot and Trey Wingo of SportsCenter,

They showed how ESPN on Xbox Live can take advantage of the new Kinect motion sensing system when it is launched in November. While watching a game, it was demoed how telling the Xbox 360 which side you want to join (in the demonstration, "Xbox: Join USC") displays how many people are cheering for each side.

Saying "Xbox: Replay" replayed a touchdown from the game, while real-time polls and trivia will also be displayed to enhance the experience. ESPN.com content can be accessed to bring up highlights, game scores, statistics and other information that is available.

Most of the 3,500 sports events that will be delivered through Xbox Live from ESPN will be available in High-definition. One of the most welcome parts about the ESPN deal is it will bring content to Xbox Live Gold members at no extra charge.

Microsoft revealed at its E3 Press Conference today that the Kinect motion-control system will be launched on November 4, 2010 in North America. The company demoed using the controller-free user interface for Xbox Live content, including using sound as well as motion as controls. No price details were given yet.

The Xbox console can recognize and sign in a user that simply waves at it. An additional wave launches the Kinect Menu. The Kinect Menu is populated by Kinect Adventures, Netflix, Zune, Facebook, Friends, Avatar Editor and Last.FM.

Using hand controls, a user can select a movie to watch on the Xbox 360, and also use his/her hands to drag a bar to seek through the video content. Simply saying "Xbox: Pause", will pause the video, while "Xbox: Play" will resume it. "Xbox: Stop", will exit the video and go back to the menu.

Microsoft Corp. unveiled a new slim Xbox 360 console at the E3 press conference which also saw the launch date for Kinect and other goodies revealed. The new Xbox 360 console comes with a 250GB hard disk drive and built in wireless capabilities, including 802.11n support, the "fastest WiFi in any console."

The new Xbox 360 console does not come with a new price tag (remains at $299), and for the lucky audience who watched the event, Microsoft generously gave away one free to each. The console ships today and will be available later this week in stores.

You do not need the new Xbox 360 console to use "Kinect for Xbox 360" as has been speculated, and the add-on will launch in every country that the Xbox 360 console is currently sold in.

Among other announcements made alongside the launch of the new slimmer Xbox 360, it was also revealed that all add-ons and map packs for Call Of Duty will become available first on Xbox 360 up until 2012. An exclusive deal between Microsoft and ESPN to bring 3,500 live sports events (mostly in HD) to Xbox Live was also announced, including NBA, MLB and soccer content.

Everyone from home viewers, to people who have traveled to watch their team in South Africa and even many of the footballers themselves have voiced their absolute hatred for the beehive-like buzzing that is being broadcast throughout the world due to rampant use of Vuvuzelas during the World Cup matches. The noise is so loud that professional players have complained they cannot even communicate with each other on the pitch.

While there has been some talk of banning the evil instruments from the stadiums altogether, some of us just cannot wait that long. If you are watching the World Cup through your computer, or if it is possible for you to route the audio through a computer/laptop/htpc, then you might be able to get rid of that annoyance nice and quickly with the help of some information online.

Basically, if you can filter out sound at 233, 466, 932 and 1864 Hz you will have killed 95 percent (estimated from my own experience) of the noise and can save your liver from the copious amounts of pain killers you need to get rid of the headache after the game.

Filter in Windows

Microsoft has reportedly confirmed that the Project Natal motion sensing system for the Xbox 360 console, first announced at last year's E3 event, will retail as "Kinect". The new name surfaced online on Sunday night with most sites pointing back to a USA Today article that was taken offline but it has since been confirmed.

In addition to the new name for the motion sensing system that Microsoft has asserted will be as fundamental to the Xbox brand as Xbox Live, a short list of Kinect games was also revealed. Kinectimals is a title that will allow the player to train and play with 20 different feline members of the animal kingdom, including lines and tigers.

Kinect Sports is basically an answer for the popular Wii Sports titles with boxing, bowling, beach volleyball, track and field and soccer activities included. Joyride is a kart-style racer title where the player grips an imaginary steering wheel while using his/her feet for accelerating and braking.

A new Microsoft Italy advertisement has surfaced today on Console Tribe showing off a Slim Xbox 360 console, next to a Project Natal system, which has been apparently renamed Kinect.

The Slim device will have built-in Wi-Fi, a 250GB HDD and compatibility with Kinect.

Interestingly, the ad was created by Atlas Solutions, an ad company owned by Microsoft, so it seems legitimate.

Microsoft has not commented on the speculation.

We will likely know more about the console, and "Kinect" tomorrow during the E3 event.

Video by Joystiq:

When Apple finally officially launched the iPhone 4 last week, the older iPhone 3GS had its price cut as a way to clear inventory.

If you purchased the Apple device in recent weeks, the company is now price matching, giving refunds back for the difference between the old price or the new price.

Additionally, users can get an upgrade to the new, improved iPhone 4 instead of the refund.

The policy is in effect for anyone who has bought a 3GS after May 7th.

Owners with a 16GB model will get a $50 credit and 32GB owners will get a $100 credit.

Anyone who purchased the smartphone between May 7 and May 14 are running out of time, however, and will need to put in a request at the store they bought the device by tomorrow, Monday the 14th.

To get an iPhone 4, the device is a straight trade, unless you are moving up in storage capacity (such as 16GB to 32GB models).

Cablevision, the fifth biggest cable operator in the U.S., has announced today the acquisition of Bresnan Communications for $1.36 billion USD.

The ISP had to beat out bids from TPG Capital, BC Partners Ltd., Suddenlink Communications and Ascent Media Corp., say sources close to the negotiations.

The acquisition gives Cablevision a bigger piece of the broadband market, which is expected to continue to grow exponentially over the next few years.

Bresnan is a large force in the Midwest, with roots in Minnesota and now the Rocky Mountain states.

The ISP has little competition in its territories, and should be an inexpensive way for Cablevision to expand out from their bread-and-butter states of New York and New Jersey.

PlayOn, the popular streaming service used on the Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360 consoles has announced the addition of ESPN3 World Cup live-streaming to the service.

It is important to note that only certain ISPs have access to ESPN3, but those include most of the largest providers, such as Comcast, AT&T, Cox and Verizon. You can check if your provider offers the network here: http://espn.go.com/espn3/channelFinder.

To get the service to work, you must buy and download the PlayOn software on your PC, and then you can stream the content to any DLNA-compatible device, including the aforementioned gaming consoles.

Current content available includes Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, Comedy Central, Adult Swim, NHL, PBS.org, MTV.com and VH1.com and others.

It was reported on Friday that the start of the World Cup has led to record Internet traffic levels, with users flocking to news sites for results, or live streaming the games and highlights.

Native applications for the Apple iPad have reached their first milestone today, 10,000 apps available, with almost 1000 being added each week.

In the iPad library, there are 2100 games available, with the rest being a plethora of other categories.

A majority 78 percent of the native iPad apps are paid applications, slightly smaller than the 80 percent reported when the iPad store opened on April 3rd with 3000 choices.

The overall iPhone app store, which has 225,000 titles, has 75 percent paid applications.

In 2008, when the iPhone app store launched, it took five months to reach the 10,000 app milestone.

Until this week, the answer to whether the upcoming Chrome OS could run Windows apps was "no."

The Chrome OS is completely in "the cloud," so all apps had to be accessed through the Chrome Web browser, and installed and "saved" to the Chrome OS.

This week, however, Google software engineer Gary Kačmarčík has announced "Chromoting", a feature that will give users a chance to access "legacy PC applications" through a remote desktop connection process.

Says the engineer: "We're adding new capabilities all the time. With this functionality (unofficially named "chromoting"), Chrome OS will not only be great platform for running modern web apps, but will also enable you to access legacy PC applications right within the browser. We'll have more details to share on chromoting in the coming month."

While that leaves details on Chromoting scant, most believe that the process will be a sharing function that will require a home/office computer to be kept on, while the Chrome OS computer uses remote access.

Boxee has announced that the D-Link Boxee Box will hit North America in November, finally putting a set timetable down on the much-anticipated set-top box.

Initially, the company had hoped to release the box by June, but production delays set shipments back.

The goal of the Boxee Box is to give users a way to play 1080p HD videos from the Web or their local network while using hardware acceleration.

Additionally, the box will "provide a TV browser experience that can handle almost everything you throw at it, including Flash 10.1."

Boxee also wants the box to be affordable and "not feel obsolete 12 months after you buy it."

Earlier in the year, a Google Street View car caught two teenagers in Staffordshire, England in a provocative pose on their front lawn and the picture became the default for street view for Common Rd. in the town.

Today, Google has taken down the image, leaving the simple words: "This image is no longer available."

On Wednesday, The Daily Mail reported on the teens, Hayley Moss and Eddie Bateman, who admitted the picture shows their first kiss.

Says Moss of the event: "I couldn't believe it, I wouldn't admit to it being me at first, as I was worried it looked quite bad, as it looks more than it is, but it really was just a kiss. I think it's amazing that our first kiss has been in the paper."

Google has captured kidnappers, and other bizarre sightings through its Street View cars but the latest begs the question of how users feel about their personal privacy being invaded.

The Food Network and YouTube have teamed up for a new challenge this week, asking YouTube users to submit video applications to be considered for a spot on the upcoming The Next Food Network Star.

You can enter the challenge now, and entries are accepted until July 16th.

The winner of the challenge will then be given a one-on-one audition with Food Network executives in New York City, with the chance to become a contestant on the show.

"The Next Food Network Star" is a reality series that pits contestants against each other in food-based challenges with the winner getting their own series on the channel.

In the past, other networks have tried similar challenges, with Fox starting a "Glee" casting call via MySpace and "America's Got Talent" doing auditions via YouTube.

According to new measurements by Akamai and reported by ZDNet, World Cup fervor has translated to record Internet traffic levels.

The Akamai Web traffic meters have classified the action as "heavy" since yesterday, with traffic to news sites around the world reaching a peak of 12.1 million visitors per minute (vpm) yesterday at noon.

After dipping in the afternoon, traffic held at after 6 million vpn, 130 percent higher than average, with above average traffic coming from every continent but most notably from Europe and Africa.

The traffic numbers seem to imply that traffic to news sites was most active during the South Africa vs. Mexico game, but remained strong for the France vs. Uruguay game.

Previously, the record for vpm was 8.5 million, which was set on the day of President Obama's election.

The international newspaper The New York Times has announced today that the word "Tweet," used to describe the action of writing a message on Twitter, has been banned from the paper, in print and online.

'Tweet' can of course, still be used to describe the sound a bird makes, notes Phil Corbett, the Times' standards editor, who announced the change. "Someday, 'tweet' may be as common as 'e-mail,'" says Corbett, but for now it is banned "outside of ornithological contexts."

The ban was made because the word tweet, outside of bird noises, isn't "standard English and standard English is what we should use in news articles," adds Corbett.

Additionally, Corbett says that not everyone uses or has even heard of Twitter and therefore may not be familiar with the new use of the word "tweet."

How will The NY Times describe tweets now? "Let's look for deft, English alternatives: use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update. Or, once you've established that Twitter is the medium, simply use 'say' or 'write.' "

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States has launched a probe into an incident that led to the exposure of personal information of AT&T Inc. customers. Among the affected customers were White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and the mayor or New York City Michael Bloomberg.

A group calling itself Goatse Security was able to get information on over 100,000 AT&T iPad subscribers by exploiting a major bug on a script at an AT&T website. The group simply needed to insert an ICC-ID as part of a HTTP request to the vulnerable script which then returned the e-mail address associated with the specific iPad device.

AT&T has stressed that only e-mail address data was actually retrieved by the group and nothing more sensitive was at risk. Still, a collection of 114,000 active e-mail addresses has value by itself without even including the personal e-mail addresses of celebrities or government officials that were revealed.

"The FBI is aware of these possible computer intrusions and has opened an investigation to address the potential cyber threat," FBI spokesman Jason Pack said. Apple's iPad, which launched in April this year, has already sold over 2 million units.

The U.S. International Trade Commission has revealed that it will investigate a patent infringement complaint made against Apple Inc. by Taiwan-based HTC Corp. The ITC is an independent, bi-partisan U.S. federal agency that has powers to protect U.S. industries from unfair trade practices. Its powers include the ability to block imports from foreign sources.

HTC Corp. is seeking an injunction on imports of Asian-manufactured iPhones, iPods and iPads into the United States, alleging that the Apple products infringe five patents held by HTC. The ITC announced on Friday that it has decided to investigate certain portable electronics devices and software related to the complaint.

Apple Inc. sued HTC Corp. for alleged patent infringement in March. The Cupertino-based iPod-maker filed a lawsuit in a US District Court in the state of Delaware against HTC, alleging infringement of 20 Apple patents related to user interface, hardware and architecture associated with its popular iPhone products. It also filed a complaint with the ITC at the time.

ComScore has reported this week that both Yahoo and Microsoft "gained" share in the U.S. search market for May, although both companies appear to be using gimmicks to distort the numbers in their favor.

By the numbers, Google remained the clear leader but share fell from 64.4 percent in April to 63.7 percent in May. Yahoo gained share, from 17.7 percent to 18.3 percent. Microsoft's Bing jumped to 12.1 percent, from 11.8. AOL fell marginally from 2.4 percent to 2.3.

BusinessInsider reports, however, that both companies are "gaming" the stats, by placing thousands of links on their respective homepages that are search queries pretending to be content.

Additionally, the companies have been creating image slideshows as search engines, as well, in an effort to get additional clicks.

Analyst Ben Schachter of Broadpoint Amtech says without the tricks, real search traffic numbers would have shown Yahoo falling to 16.6 percent, Microsoft holding flat at 10.8 percent and Google gaining to 66.4 percent.

President of Turkey Abdullah Gul has used his Twitter account to voice his disapproval for some web blocking practices carried out in the country. Google services such as YouTube are subject to blocks because of content posted by users and deemed offensive by Turkish authorities.

Turkey blocked YouTube in 2008 after videos surfaced describing Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, as a homosexual and an alcoholic. The country has been scrutinized by human rights watchdogs who urge it to reform restrictive Internet laws unexpected of a country seeking membership of the European Union.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) revealed earlier this year that Turkey is blocking some 3,700 Internet sites for arbitrary and political reasons. Turkey, however, maintains that websites are blocked for offenses that include child pornography, encouraging suicide or insults against Kemal Ataturk.

"I know there are lots of complaints about bans on YouTube and Google," President Gul said in a tweet. "I am definitely against them being closed down. I have ordered responsible institutions for a solution. I asked for a change in regulations on merit."

Microsoft has said they expect to sell "at least" 5 million Project Natal systems by the end of year, a large number for the device which has not even gotten its official name yet.

The expectations come from two "insider sources" cited by the WSJ.

The insiders would not provide the exact launch date (which has been rumored for late October) but did note that the pricing model was "aggressive."

Asian manufacturers Foxconn and Flextronics are also rumored to start shipping the device in August, giving more fuel to the rumor that the system will launch in October.

Earlier today, a new study by OTX GamePlan found that videogame consumers have little interest in Microsft and Sony's upcoming motion control systems, with under 10 percent willing to purchase Project Natal or Sony's rival PlayStation Move.

A Google engineer has been targeted with harsh criticism from security researchers everywhere for releasing code to exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft operating systems.

Tavis Ormandy has been criticized for releasing code to exploit an unpatched hole in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

Critics take issue with Ormandy releasing the code needed to exploit the vulnerability five days after he alerted Microsoft of the problem. Generally, software vendors are alerted to the problem and once a patch is prepared and is available for end users to download and install - and only then - is the vulnerability in all its details made public.

Microsoft Corp. is not known for fixing such issues quickly, and doesn't often release such updates outside of its normal "Patch Tuesday" schedule. Ormandy, according to his own writing afterward, didn't seem convinced that Microsoft would actually fix the problem unless there was exploit code freely available in the wild as motivation to do so.

Adobe announced the release of Flash Player 10.1 on Thursday for Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems (as well as promising a release for Android later this month). The anticipated Flash update is geared toward improving performance, power management and video abilities, as well as adding some new features. It's also important to note that Flash Player 10.1 fixes a whole host of security issues affecting the previous version.

Video improvements in Flash Player 10.1

Sticking with AfterDawn roots, we should mention what Flash Player 10.1 means for video before anything else. For Windows users (for now), Flash Player 10.1 introduces hardware-based (GPU) acceleration of H.264 video content, offloading the task from the CPU which could greatly improve playback.

The addition of HTTP Dynamic Streaming expands the delivery options for high quality live and on-demand media with full adaptive bitrate functionality. This new option enables media publishers to leverage standard HTTP networking infrastructure to help increase capacity, reach, and quality of service for video delivery using standards-based MP4 fragments.

Firefox 4, the upcoming major new release of the Firefox web browser, will feature WebM support following the resolution of a licensing issue. The VP8-based video format was introduced at Google's I/O developer conference, and only last week the Internet search giant added WebM support to its own Chrome web browsing software.

Google acquired the VP8 technology in its $106.5 million deal with On2 Technologies last year, and revealed at the time it would use its new codec technology to make the Web experience better for all users. It serves as an alternative to H.264, which for the moment can be used royalty-free. However, the MPEG LA consortium has said that it will only remain royalty-free until December 31, 2015.

With support added to the Chrome browser and Microsoft adding WebM to its upcoming Internet Explorer 9 release (when a user installed the VP8 codec), Mozilla's dedication to it serves as another milestone and WebM is now available in the Firefox nightly builds.

While there are daily rumors about the upcoming Droid Xtreme and Droid 2 devices, Verizon has not forgot about the original Motorola Droid device, which the carrier says still has excellent sales.

The carrier has dropped the price of the device to $149.99 with two-year contract, while concurrently running the BOGO (buy one get one free) promotion on the device.

Analysts are viewing the move as a way to slowly but surely clear out inventory of the device, to make way for the anticipated launch of the Droid X in July, and the Droid 2 sometime later in the summer.

The device had been selling for $199.99 with contract, and with retail stores selling at that price after mail-in-rebate, which can be a hassle. Ordering from the site removes the rebate part.

What is known (unconfirmed) of the Droid X is a large 4.3-inch screen, 16GB of internal storage, a 1Ghz Snapdragon processor, an HDMI-out port, an 8MP camera and 720p video recording.

According to a new study by OTX GamePlan, videogame consumers have little interest in Microsft and Sony's upcoming motion control systems, with under 10 percent willing to purchase Project Natal or PlayStation Move.

2000 console owners were polled over the last month and 8 percent said they intended to buy Natal while only 6 percent said they were willing to buy the PlayStation Move.

Move and Natal are likely to take center stage at the upcoming E3 event next week, with Microsoft finally giving more official details on their system. Natal is still just a codename given to the system.

The horrible consumer response is likely due to this lack of information on the systems, but that should change after the upcoming week. So far, only prototype games have been shown off that use the motion control systems, with no significant third-party titles attached.

GamePlan's study seems to agree with that notion, as only 15 percent of the entire console market is even aware that the systems are in existence.

Wal-Mart has announced that it will be one of four retailers with the iPhone 4 for sale on launch day, June 24th, confirming previous reports.

The other places with the much-hyped device are Best Buy, Radio Shack and Apple stores. Obviously, the smartphone will also be available through AT&T.

Pre-orders for the device begin on June 15th and Apple is expecting to sell over 1 million units during launch weekend.

While Wal-Mart is known for having cheaper prices than competitors, Apple does not allow retailers to charge lower than the MSRP. That being said, the 16GB model will cost $200 and the 32GB model will sell for $300.

The iPhone 4 has a 3.5-inch multi-touchscreen with a 640x960 resolution, runs the iOS 4.0 and has a 1GHz Apple A4 processor. The new OS allows for multitasking.

Additionally, the iPhone 4 has a 5MP standard camera and a 1.5MP front-facing camera for video conferencing.

Motorola Co-CEO Sanjay Jha was recently asked about his thoughts on the Apple iPhone 4 and while most of the comments were generic, Jha did manage to promise a Motorola device running Android that will include a 2 GHz processor.

For comparison's sake, today's most powerful smartphones use a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, including the HTC EVO 4G and the aforementioned iPhone.

Jha made the comments during a speech at the Executives Club of Chicago.

The phone will also have a Nvidia Tegra-based GPU with Flash 10.1 hardware acceleration. Additionally, the device will have 720p video output through HDMI, "HD screen resolution" and an 8MP camera.

Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead has warned young artists to stay away from the big record labels, as the recording industry (as we know it) is dying.

Yorke says talented artists should try to make it on their own without going to record labels for help as the industry is within years of completely dying.

Radiohead's frontman went as far as to say that when the industry dies it will be "no great loss to the world." Young artists should do their best to not "tie themselves to the sinking ship."

It may be "only a matter of time — months rather than years — before the music business establishment completely folds," adds Yorke.

Radiohead released 6 albums through major label EMI but decided to release their seventh album, "In Rainbows," as an Internet download with no specific price set. Allegedly, over 60 percent of downloaders did not pay anything for the album but the "experiment" still netted the band over $1 million, which did not have to be shared with the labels, who are known to take most of profit from CD sales.

Sega has announced its plans today to bring popular Dreamcast titles to the PlayStation Network (PSN) and the Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) this year.

The publisher says the first two games are the wildly popular Crazy Taxi and Sonic Adventure, with fall launch dates.

Says Haruki Satomi, vice president of digital business at Sega: "The Dreamcast is fondly remembered by a large community of dedicated fans as a console that was ahead of its time in terms of graphics, quality and online gaming. There are few things that are more requested from us than making Dreamcast classics available for download in today's digital market place. We’re very excited to begin offering gamers our beloved Dreamcast titles again on the current console systems."

The Dreamcast launched on 9/9/99 and was the first console to ever offer online gameplay. Of course, trying to do anything online using a 56k modem is brutal, so the timing was off.

While they have since changed it, earlier in the day Sony posted in their new Sony Style 3D site that the PlayStation 3 is available "starting at $199.99."

When clicking through, there was no links to PS3s available at that price point, but Maxconsole agrees that the error is pretty large for such an important website.

Speculatively, Max says Sony could be preparing a new PS3 model, similar to the Xbox 360 Arcade, that will strip some features (like the larger HDD) and sell for $199.

The move could make sense for Sony, which is seeing strong momentum in console sales against rivals Microsoft and Nintendo but still sells their console for $100 more than the Arcade model and the Wii. That being said, it is hard to see how Sony could strip anything from the console except for lowering the HDD size, which would not save very much money for the company at all.

Motorola co-Chief Executive Sanjay Jha has said today that demand for the Droid smartphone are still "extremely" strong, despite strong sales of rival HTC Droid Incredible, which also sells through carrier Verizon.

Jha also notes that Motorola is suffering from supply constraints, just as HTC has said they are for the Incredible and the EVO 4G, which sells via Sprint.

The main supply issues are due to a shortage of screens from Samsung.

Says Jha: "(Droid) sales are going extremely well. If I could build more I'd sell more."

Looking to the future, Jha said four Motorola phones with 2010 release dates would have front-facing cameras used for video conferencing.

The EVO 4G and the iPhone 4 were the first phones with the ability for conferencing.

Just like AT&T is doing in the United States, O2 has announced it will be ending its unlimited data plans before the launch of the Apple iPhone 4, as well.

O2 says that 97 percent of users will not "notice the difference" and will actually save money. The carrier also says that there are really only 2000 or so subscribers on their network that use "extraordinarily" high amounts of bandwidth every month.

Going even further, O2 says 1 percent of its smartphone users use a whopping 36 percent of all mobile data traffic, and that those users are mainly iPhone owners.

Instead of unlimited, users can now buy 500MB, 750MB or 1GB data packages, each of which includes unlimited Wi-Fi time via The Cloud and BT's OpenZone services.

Just like with AT&T, anybody currently with an iPhone contract can still use unlimited bandwidth until the end of their contract but new users will not be as lucky.

In late April, HP announced it was purchasing the struggling smartphone maker Palm for $1.2 billion, after at least four other companies gave serious bids.

Palm had put itself up for sale in March after it became clear that the company's phones were not selling and it only had enough cash to last the next 12 months.

At the time, the smartphone maker reached out to 16 different companies and five gave serious offers. Only HP and Lenovo were named as potential buyers, while two other companies wanted to license Palm's patents, including the mobile operating system WebOS.

After Palm accepted HP's bid, which gave shareholders $5.70 a share, angry stock owners brought a class action lawsuit against the smartphone builder, arguing that they did not get the best deal. That suit has been settled today.

According to a note from Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu, who closely follows Apple, the iPhone 4 should be headed to another network this coming fall, with T-Mobile the likely candidate.

Wu cites weekly check-ins with Apple suppliers, and concludes that AT&T will be the exclusive carrier for only nine more months, at the very most.

T-Mobile is the front runner simply because its GSM technology is similar to AT&Ts whereas Sprint and Verizon use CDMA variants.

Wu also notes that T-Mobile sees the iPhone as a way to win back customers it has lost to AT&T so they are more likely to settle for Apple's terms, which usually includes a share of revenue.

Peter Dobrow of T-Mobile USA responded to the rumor: "T-Mobile does not comment on rumor or speculation...Would we like to offer the iPhone to T-Mobile customers in the U.S.? You bet. Ultimately though it is Apple's decision on who carries its product."

AT&T has confirmed today that 114,067 iPad 3G owners have had their email information leaked to the Web, with the data being stolen by a group calling themselves Goatse Security.

The group published the emails, which included prominent politicians, celebrities and even military officials.

AT&T says that only email addresses were leaked, however, with any sensitive data like credit card numbers not being compromised.

Reads the AT&T press release: "AT&T was informed by a business customer on Monday of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC IDS. The only information that can be derived from the ICC IDS is the e-mail address attached to that device. This issue was escalated to the highest levels of the company and was corrected by Tuesday; and we have essentially turned off the feature that provided the e-mail addresses. The person or group who discovered this gap did not contact AT&T. We are continuing to investigate and will inform all customers whose e-mail addresses and ICC IDS may have been obtained. We take customer privacy very seriously and while we have fixed this problem, we apologize to our customers who were impacted."

Here writing my annual AfterDawn birthday post - and I'm feeling old. Can't believe it was eleven years ago we launched this site/obsession/hobby of ours, AfterDawn.com.. Wow. Anyway, today is our site's 11th birthday -- in an online world, that equals to something like 75,000 years in "real world" time. You know, 11 years ago, the dominant search engine was still Alta Vista and "social media" meant something like "going to a movie theater with your friends" :-) Times change..

Anyway, another year has passed and lots of things have changed. First and foremost, we finally launched a new version of our site back in March. The new design is accompanied with a completely new, language-independent backend. That has helped us with our localization projects and during the past 6 months, we have launched Spanish, Norwegian and Dutch beta versions of our site.

Despite the fact that AfterDawn has been around since the last millennium, our intention is to continue to improve our site's content and technology. We expect to launch several new language versions of our site during the next year or so, and also plan to go our site's sections through, one by one, trying to find ways on how to improve each section's usability.

Sony has announced today that 3D games will be available for the PlayStation 3 starting tomorrow. Anybody with the latest firmware will have the ability to play them, but you will need a 3D-capable HDTV, as well, and stereoscopic glasses.

At the same time, the company announced its first line of 3D-capable BRAVIA HDTVs, each of which will come bundled with a pack of 3D games.

The first four games available are Wipeout HD 3D, Super Stardust HD 3D, PAIN 3D and MotorStorm Pacific Rift 3D.

MotorStorm is just a demo, and for PAIN "the stereoscopic 3D content will include the Downtown area and tutorial along with three modes, including two new modes created specifically with stereoscopic 3D in mind, Alien Toss and Ice Breaker."

The other two are full games.

Finally, Sony introduced "The Fight: Lights Out" in stereoscopic 3D, which will use the upcoming PlayStation Move motion control system.

Reuters has gotten the rumor mill in full swing today by posting that a premium, pay-for Hulu is headed to the Xbox 360 and iPad soon.

The news agency is citing two sources close to Hulu that say the site will offer a "premium" service, which will charge a monthly subscription on the popular devices in the very near future.

On the PC, Hulu is currently free, with ad-support. However, users can only watch the trailing five episodes of most TV shows, whereas with a premium subscription, they can watch full seasons, with no ads.

Hulu has quickly become the second most popular online video site, behind YouTube, in the United States, and made over $100 million in advertising revenue in 2009.

Apple, Hulu, and Microsoft declined to comment.

Some believe Hulu's plans is a recipe for disaster: "Many consumers already pay $100 or more monthly for TV, telephony and high-speed Internet access and are unlikely to welcome an incremental fee merely to watch from the Internet some of the programs they already get," said Phil Leigh, an analyst with Inside Digital Media.

While rooted users of the device have had Android 2.2 for some time, T-Mobile has "announced" today that the MyTouch 3G will receive the official firmware update in the near future.

Earlier in the day, HTC Taiwan noted that a few HTC devices have been updated to Android 2.1, with the firmware update expected to go live in the UK later in the month, as well. HTC Hero, Legend and Desire owners should begin receiving the update this week.

HTC also noted last month that the brand new myTouch 3G Slide would get updated to Android 2.2 Froyo, but it was unclear whether original myTouch users would see the update.

According to a leaked internal memo, it does appear the myTouch will get the update, which will add the Genius button, full Microsoft Exchange support and an updated Faves gallery.

Thirteen major record labels have announced they want to freeze all of LimeWire's assets, at the same time accusing the founder of the service of trying to evade millions, and possibly billions in damages over copyright infringement.

Last month, U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood found LimeWire guilty of assisting pirates in downloading unauthorized music and movies, and said that founder Mark Gorton personally "directed and benefited from many of the activities" involved.

Lawyers for the labels filed papers this week accusing Gorton of moving 90 percent of LimeWire's ownership stake to a new entity that he hopes will be shielded from any damages in the lawsuit.

Reads the filing: Gorton and LimeWire "have engaged in a series of fraudulent actions to frustrate a legal judgment in this case...An asset freeze is required in order to ensure that plaintiffs recover at least some of the monetary compensation they are entitled to."

Despite Wood's ruling last month, the labels said a quick search of LimeWire showed every recording in Billboard's Top 40, Top 40 Country, Top 40 Rock and Top 40 Latin Pop charts were still readily available.

Google has launched the popular free Maps Navigation turn-by-turn GPS in 11 new nations, says the search giant, while adding new language packs, as well, to the Search by voice feature.

Android 1.6+ users in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland can now use the turn-by-turn voice guidance, as long as they update to version 4.2.

Until this week, the turn-by-turn was only available in the U.S. and the U.K.

Google first announced the Maps Navigation app last year, and other mobile companies have adopted similar approaches, like Nokia's Ovi Maps, in an effort to catch up.

The search giant says voice search was first developed for English, and then for Mandarin Chinese and Japanese.

Search by voice can run on the iPhone and BlackBerry phones, as well.

On Monday night, DirecTV began sending out a firmware update for their HD DVRs. Within hours, complaints were trickling in that the software update was making the set-tops unresponsive.

Today, the provider posted a note on their website in an effort to help users get back access to their boxes.

"If your set top box is not responding to either your remote control or front panel button input please be advised that you will need to do the following to resolve the issue," reads the opening statement.

Continued: "Just flip the door down on the front of your set top box and press the red button. Be patient as the box may take up to one minute to respond to this reset. Let the system reboot until either a picture or grey screen appears on your TV. Then press the red button again, which will reboot your system a second time. This should resolve the issue."

The provider did not offer a timetable for a real fix, or why the glitch occurred.

Last October, Western Digital launched the WD TV Live HD media player, and saw strong sales.

Today, WD has introduced that latest version of the box, the WD TV Live Plus, which adds built-in support for Netflix and MediaFly. If you are a Netflix subscriber with a $8.99 or higher monthly package, they can stream over 12,000 "Watch Instantly" movie and TV titles.

MediaFly offers podcasts from CNN, NBC, MTV and ESPN.

Just like with past versions of the box, the Live Plus will allow for playback of mostly all formats of video and music and pictures. Also built-in is support for Internet radio such as Live365 and Pandora. You can connect the player to the Internet via Wi-Fi or ethernet, and even stream content from your computer via DLNA.

HD playback is available up to 1080p.

Twice lists the compatible file formats, and you would be hard pressed to find a file you cannot play via the Live Plus:

Compatible file formats include: AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG1/2/4), MPG/MPEG, VOB, MKV (h.264, x.264, AVC, MPEG1/2/4, VC-1), TS/TP/M2T (MPEG1/2/4, AVC, VC-1), MP4/MOV (MPEG4, h.264), M2TS and WMV9 video format; and JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP and PNG image formats.

Dish Network and Echostar have won a victory this week over TiVo, with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office claiming TiVo's patent claims for "time warp" DVR tech are invalid.

The updated ruling comes after the PTO reexamined the patents for a second time.

TiVo said it would follow the ruling with additional arguments.

The decision could still lead to the satellite companies paying damages to TiVo, but the new PTO ruling could still have long-term ramifications in TiVo's other cases against AT&T and Verizon, says the WSJ.

All the companies have been fighting for years over the patents to the technology that allows for pausing, rewind and fast-forwarding of live TV.

In 2006, Dish and EchoStar were found liable of patent infringement when they began creating their own set-top boxes. The companies are currently in "en banc review," which will spell out the legal ramifications of the case.

Most expect TiVo to win.

HTC Taiwan has noted today that a few HTC devices have been updated to Android 2.1, with the firmware update expected to go live in the UK later in the month, as well.

HTC Hero, Legend and Desire owners should begin receiving the update this week.

Desire owners already run 2.1, but the update will fix security bugs and problems with microSD card accessibility.

While HTC smartphone owners should clearly be happy with the update, many will be disappointed with HTC's lack of a timetable for an update to Android 2.2 Froyo, which brings built-in Adobe Flash support, 400 percent performance boosts, an updated browser and native Apps2SD among many other notable updates.

Google has said in the past that after Android 3.0 Gingerbread is released by the end of the year, the rate of new updates should be standardized for all existing Android devices, a move that should be a welcome relief to older handset owners that usually have to wait longer for firmware updates.

On Monday, Sprint announced that the HTC EVO 4G had broken the carrier's launch day sales record, even selling "three times" as many units as the Palm Pre and Samsung Instinct did combined on their respective first days.

Yesterday, calls to over 20 retailers showed that the phone is sold out, practically everywhere.

This morning, however, Sprint has noted that they overstated June 4th launch day sales, by accident.

Correcting the original statement, the U.S. third biggest carrier said HTC EVO 4G sales at launch were "in line" with that of the Pre and Instinct, combined.

Says Sprint: "We originally reported that the total number of HTC EVO 4G devices sold on launch day was three times the number of Samsung Instinct and Palm Pre devices sold over their first three days on the market combined. We inadvertently erred in the comparison."

Speaking to MCV, Sony Europe president Andre House says the release of the Sony PSPGo handheld was a test of how consumers would accept digital gaming and the end of physical media.

While the handheld was a complete failure, Sony says it was a good test of the company's future plans in the sector.

Says House: "It was introduced in a mature lifecycle to learn more about what the consumer wanted and we’ve definitely learnt a lot. Is that measured by success in sales? I don’t think it is."

He continues: "One of the reasons we launched PSPgo was to understand where that consumer behaviour was going. We were getting signals from consumers that this was the kind of device that they wanted. But we need to recognise that consumers like their packaged media library."

As far as a "test" goes, Sony certainly overstated consumer willingness to pay an $80 premium for a device that is limited to only digital gaming and adds little else of value.

Baidu, China's top Internet search engine, has said today that it wants to extend its market share in China to 79 percent, the far and away leader.

The goal comes from Baidu General Manager for Corporate Development Tang Hesong, who noted that Google's exit from the market has helped Baidu take a large amount of market share in a little bit of time.

Google announced in January that it would quit China if it had to maintain self-censorship of its search results. The ruling communist party forces search engines to filter out results for certain terms, or certain results that it deems inappropriate for Chinese citizens to see.

The search giant's threat to leave the country came after it, along with at least 20 other companies, was the target of a cyberattack aimed at stealing Google's Intellectual Property and at the e-mail accounts of Chinese activists.

Baidu currently owns 64 percent of the search market in China, up from 58 percent in the Q4 last year.

If you are an active Twitter user, you have undoubtedly used a URL shortener such as bit.ly.

Today, Twitter has announced their own official URL shortener, t.co, which will automatically shorten all links posted, whether you are posting from the website or from any number of clients and apps.

The service is currently being tested internally and will be made available to the public by the end of the summer.

If you want to continue to use bit.ly or other third-party shorteners, they will be "wrapped" as well by t.co.

Shortened links will displayed differently depending on what client you are using, however. Using the website, or a desktop client means you will see the full link, or at least an excerpt. Those getting SMS notifications will only see the shortened link. Best of all, only the amount of characters in the shortened link go against your 140, despite the full link being shown to others.

Twitter says this move "removes the obscurity from shortened links," letting users know what they are clicking on.

Sprint's record breaking HTC EVO 4G is apparently sold out across the United States, with more shipments expected later in the week.

The EVO 4G broke Sprint's one-day sales record for a phone, with an estimated 320,000 units sold on June 4th, the day the device launched.

More importantly for Sprint, the numbers crush launch day sales of the Palm Pre, which launched to fanfare last year but quickly faded. EVO demand continues to remain strong.

Sprint, Best Buy, Radio Shack, Wal-Mart, Amazon and many others have all reported being sold out of the smartphone.

The next batch of phones are set aside for those that pre-ordered, notes Sprint.

The HTC EVO 4G boasts a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 1GB ROM, 512MB RAM, a 1500 mAh battery and an 8GB microSD card. The device has a 4.3-inch WVGA capacitive multi-touchscreen display (with pinch to zoom), Android 2.1 with Sense UI, Google Search, Google Maps, Google Talk, Gmail, Google Goggles, YouTube, Google Calendar syncing, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g and 3G/4G Mobile Hotspot capability for connecting up to eight Wi-Fi enabled devices.

Microsoft has issued an update for Internet Explorer that will fix multiple vulnerabilities including one critical flaw that would have allowed hackers to remotely take control of host computers.

Additionally, Microsoft is releasing nine other patches that will address 34 vulnerabilities, three of which are considered critical. The vulnerabilities are for Windows, Microsoft Office, IE, Internet Information Services and the .NET Framework.

The company did note that there are currently no active attacks exploiting any of the critical vulnerabilities covered in the patches, but Microsoft is still trying to release the patches as soon as possible.

Jerry Bryant, Microsoft group manager for response communications, says the critical IE exploit was given an exploitability index rating of "1," indicating that the company expects an active exploit within the month.

The critical exploit can occur even if you are using Internet Explorer 8, the most updated of Microsoft's browser offerings.

Patently Apple has posted an in-depth report this week on an Apple patent they recently unveiled, one for "media players with integrated touch sensor solar panel surfaces."

The patents clearly imply that Apple may be working on incorporating solar panels into their iPhones and iPods in the future, or even perhaps into the popular iPad tablet.

Each panel would be hidden under the touch screen of the devices, allowing them to keep their same design (or future design.)

The patent was filed in 2008, and Apple has yet to release any other solar devices.

Giving more credibility to the assumption that solar-powered iPhones are coming is the fact that Apple recently just released the iPhone 4 with a glass back instead of metal, allowing for double-sided solar panels.

Google has confirmed today that their impressive image recognition app Goggles will soon be made available on the Apple iPhone.

Goggles has been available to Android 1.6+ users for a few months now.

iPhone users have been stuck with a similar app dubbed oMoby, but reviewers agree the software is slow and inaccurate.

Google recently updated Goggles to support text recognition and text translation, but that part of the software is still very buggy.

Regardless, as Goggles continues to update, it is best to see it on as many devices as possible, so feedback can come from a wider market.

You can read more about Goggles here: http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/#text

Last week we reported that Foxconn was raising worker salaries 30 percent amidst a flood of worker suicides at their Chinese factory.

The company, probably best known for manufacturing the Apple iPhone among tons of other electronics we use daily, has been massively criticized for its working conditions, and low wages.

Today, Foxconn has announced that they will be raising worker wages, a second time.

On top of the basic salary hike of 30 percent, workers can conditionally make 70 percent beginning in October.

"While overtime work was always voluntary, this wage increase will reduce overtime work as a personal necessity," says Foxconn.

Until last week, workers had been making Ұ900 ($132) per month. Now, workers can make up to Ұ2000 ($293) per month if they pass a 3-month performance test.

According to Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association (CESA), piracy on the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP has cost the industry $41.6 billion USD since June 2004.

The group began conducting research in June 2004 and ended in late 2009.

Research was done by tracking the downloading done of the top 20 software titles in Japan from 114 piracy sites.

CESA says that amounted to $10.4 billion in piracy losses, and the region accounts for 25 percent of the entire global software market so the total posted above was Japan's "losses," multiplied by four.

The report says P2P networks like Gnutella were not included, and says the $41.6 billion number may actually be conservative.

In the world, the U.S. was the "busiest region" for piracy, followed by Japan and then China.

The HTC EVO 4G has broken Sprint's one-day sales record for a phone, says the carrier, which is the third largest wireless carrier in the U.S.

Running the Android operating system and boasting impressive specs, the smartphone is expected to have sold 320,000 units on June 4th, the day the device launched.

The estimate comes from research firm FBR Capital Markets who says Sprint likely saw 100,000 new customers and 220,000 upgrades. Sprint did not confirm the numbers.

Sprint was quick to boast about the 4G capabilities of the phone, saying users could stream World Cup matches live, with no lag.

Under the hood is a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 1GB ROM, 512MB RAM, a 1500 mAh battery and an 8GB microSD card. The device has a 4.3-inch WVGA capacitive multi-touchscreen display (with pinch to zoom), Android 2.1 with Sense UI, Google Search, Google Maps, Google Talk, Gmail, Google Goggles, YouTube, Google Calendar syncing, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g and 3G/4G Mobile Hotspot capability for connecting up to eight Wi-Fi enabled devices.

According to Microsoft spokesperson Gavriella Schuster, the Windows 7 Service Pack 1 should be released next month, as a public beta.

The release of the service pack should move the OS forward onto the systems of more corporate users, as many IT admins will not upgrade a system to a new OS until at least the first SP.

Microsoft explains that SP1 will not be a big deal, however, as it "will not contain any new features that are specific to Windows 7 itself. For Windows 7, SP1 will simply be the combination of updates already available through Windows Update and additional hotfixes based on feedback by our customers and partners. In other words, customers can feel confident about deploying Windows 7 now!"

Making good on that claim, Schuster notes: "Several organizations of all sizes are already in the process of deploying Windows 7 and not waiting for SP1. In fact, we've already sold more than 100 million licenses of Windows 7."

Steve Jobs moved on from discussing the Apple App Store to the company's iPhone products. According to Jobs, iPhone now has 28 percent of US smartphone market, behind RIM at 35 percent. In terms of mobile web browsing, the iPhone commands a 58 percent market share.

Joking that some attendees have "already seen this," Jobs moved on to introduce iPhone 4, saying it has 100 new features. The iPhone 4 is 9.3mm thick, about 24 percent thinner than the iPhone 3GS was. It includes a micro-SIM tray, a new camera on the back with an LED flash and new front-facing camera. It also adds a second mic on the top for noise cancellation purposes.

The new 5 megapixel camera features 5x digital zoom and adds 720p HD video capture at 30 frames per second. Apple also will be releasing an iPhone version of its iMovie video editing software that will make it possible for users to record and edit video. It will be available for $5.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs arrived at WWDC 2010 in San Francisco today to a standing ovation from a typically large crowd. The first thing Jobs touted was the success of the company's iPad tablet. So far, over 8,500 native iPad applications are available and iPad owners have downloaded over 35 million so far. Each iPad has an average of 17 apps.

The iPad has proven successful in the ebooks area too, with 5 million books downloaded in the first 65 days from iBookstore. Jobs said that Apple now has a 22 percent market share of the eBooks business. A new iBooks app also will allow the viewing of PDF documents with notes and bookmark abilities.

Onto the App Store, we learned that 15,000 apps are submitted every week, with 95 percent being approved within 7 days. The figure includes updates to existing applications. Apps that make false promises, use private APIs or have stability problems account for the majority of all App rejections.

For Netflix users, a Netflix app for the iPhone was demo'd and will be available this summer. The app, naturally, supports streaming movies to the iPhone (any video available through Netflix Watch Instantly). Zynga CEO Mark Pincus revealed that the popular FarmVille game will be coming to the iPhone later this month. Touting over 70 million active monthly users, Zynga said players will even be able to purchase iPhone-exclusive items, such as a Snow Leopard.

TF has put out a bio on file-sharing giant MegaUpload's owner Kim Schmitz, and it is apparently very lucrative to own the site.

Schmitz, who has been convicted in the past of insider trading, computer fraud and embezzlement, has just purchased New Zealand's most expensive home, for $20 million USD.

"Kimble," as he is sometimes referred to, was born in 1974, and by 1998 had been given two year's probation for hacking into corporate networks. In 2001, Schmitz scammed stock traders by announcing he would invest 50 million euro in the verge-of-bankruptcy company Letsbuyit.com, although he did not have the money to do so. He did, however, hold hundreds of thousands of shares at a low price. The scam netted Kimble $1.5 million in profits, and an insider-trading conviction a year later.

Schmitz has also pulled multiple PR stunts such as faking his own death and offering $10 million for the capture of Osama Bin Laden. He has also admitted to bribing police officers, driving at 240 km/h on public roads in Belgium, and even smashing a friends car off the road during a race.

Kimble owns a Rolls-Royce Phantom with the license plate GOD.

Nielsen has released their latest smartphone OS market share numbers, and despite previous reports, it appears that the iPhone OS still has a clear lead over Android.

Year-over-year, smartphone ownership went up from 16 percent to 23 percent of overall mobile consumers.

RIM BlackBerrys were still the clear leader, at 35 percent, but quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) the OS lost 2 percent share.

The Apple iPhone was in second at 28 percent, seeing strong 2 percent growth QoQ. Microsoft's struggling Windows Mobile platform lost 2 percent to 19 percent, but still good for third place.

The up and coming Android platform grew 2 percent, as well, to 9 percent and continues to see strong growth since its launch in late 2008.

iPhone users were the most loyal, with 80 percent saying their next phone would again be an iPhone. 70 percent on Android owners said their next phone would be an Android device again. The numbers get lower from there.

AndroidGuys has reported today on the first sighting of MetroPCS' first-ever Android smartphone offering.

The device is unnamed, so far, but looks similar to the Motorola Cliq, and the source has four images.

Motorola's upcoming device will run on Android 2.1, have a MOTOBLUR UI layer and have a 600MHz CPU.

It will also have a full slide-out QWERTY keypad and a 3.2MP camera.

Oddly out of place is a giant "Home" button surrounded by a purple circle. It is unclear what the circle's use is.

MetroPCS offers a $50 unlimited voice, text and data plan, the cheapest in the industry.

Last week, AT&T announced that they were dropping their $30 unlimited data plans for smartphones and netbook new users, while creating cheaper plans at the same time.

Existing subscribers can keep the unlimited plan but anyone signing up with the carrier after tonight cannot sign up for the $30 all-you-can-eat package.

The cheapest new plan is $15 per month, but will only include 200MB of data. If customers go over the limit, they will be charged $15 extra for every 200MB of data, a very expensive proposition.

A more reasonable plan is $25 per month and will give smartphone, tablet, netbook users 2GB of data for the month. For every 1GB over the cap they go, they will be charged $10, another expensive proposition.

The carrier says, however, that 65 percent of smartphone owners use less than 200MB of data per month, and 98 percent use less than 2GB. For the most part, the only people who need unlimited are iPhone users, a significant number of which will surpass 2GB monthly.

It should be interesting to see the horror stories coming from iPad and iPhone users when they have to pay over $50 per month for bandwidth.

CNET is reporting this weekend that they have uncovered documents revealing that the music trade group RIAA wants LimeWire shut down for good.

The RIAA has requested that a Manhattan District Court give them a permanent injunction against the P2P client, effectively shutting it down in the United States.

Write the RIAA lawyers: "Every day that Lime Wire's conduct continues unabated guarantees harm to plaintiffs that money damages cannot and will not compensate. The scope of the infringements that Lime Wire induced...boggles the mind."

Last month, Judge Kimba Wood found the once-extremely popular file sharing service liable of copyright infringement in a 4-year-old lawsuit brought against them by the RIAA. The decision was seen as the final nail in the company's coffin.

Kimba will now meet with LimeWire and the RIAA's representatives, where the judge can grant the injunction and seal the service's fate.

Developer ZodTTD, best known for his work on emulators for the iPhone, has said today that a PlayStation 1 (PSX) emulator is very close to being launched for Android devices running firmware 2.0 or later.

Without giving any timetable, ZodTTD also noted that an N64 emulator was coming in the future.

ZodTTD partnered with Nesoid and Gameboid authors to use the interface that is likely familiar to Android users that have been using the NES and GB emulators for months.

The PSX emulator will have the ability for fullscreen, and controls works via the touchscreen, physical buttons and the trackball, depending on what your device has and your personal preference.

Currently, the emulator cannot yet hit the "sweetspot" of 60fps, but performance increases are expected for upcoming builds.

In what can only be described as incredible, a woman in California has found her two missing children, reported missing in 1995, using the social networking giant Facebook.

According to Deputy District Attorney Kurt Rowley, the children's father, Faustino Utrera ran off with the kids, but the mother found her eldest daughter's Facebook profile after searching for it a few months ago.

The two kids, now aged 16 and 17, have been placed in the custody of the state of Florida.

Rowley described the mother's feelings: "You can imagine the feelings she's having, not seeing her children for so many years and knowing they've bonded with another family. But at the same time they're almost within her grasp."

Florida has put out an arrest warrant on Utrera.

Rowley did note that the eldest daughter initially told her mother she did not want to be in contact with her, or re-establish any relationship.

More details have leaked today about the Motorola Xtreme, the highly-anticipated sequel to the Droid smartphone.

The Android phone had been dubbed the "Shadow" for months.

Motorola's upcoming Xtreme will run a customized Android 2.1, possibly include the MotoBLUR UI, and will likely be released in late July.

The new details, from Droidlife say the device will sport an 8MP camera and 720p video recording.

Additionally, the device will have a large 4.3-inch screen, 16GB of internal storage, a 1Ghz Snapdragon processor, and an HDMI-out port. Perhaps most notably is the 1500-mAh battery which should give significant battery life, even with moderate-to-heavy daily use.

The phone will be released through Verizon.

According to AppleInsider, Apple will launch Safari 5 with "Reader" and built-in Bing next week at the much-hyped WWDC.

The company is expected to launch the new iPhone 4G during the event, as well.

Additionally, the updated browser will have expanded HTML5 support.

The documents, allegedly leaked from Apple, show 25 percent faster JavaScript performance than Safari 4. Safari 5 will also include DNS prefetching to allow faster browsing.

The new "Reader" feature gives Internet users a chance to read articles "in a single, clutter-free page."

In the footsteps of Firefox and Chrome, the newly updated browser will include "Private Browsing" as well.

Safari 4 was released about a year ago.

Full new, rumored specs:

Citing sources familiar with "AOL's strategy," it appears that Microsoft is ready to purchase the popular web portal, which would then be used to outsource web search to the Bing search engine.

Shares of AOL rose 1.3 percent despite a massive sell-off in the broader indexes.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong recently noted that the company was exploring new web search deals with "more than two potential partners." AOL currently outsources its web search to Google, the clear market leader.

While those discussions are still ongoing, the conclusion could be an outright sale of the company to Microsoft, which has over $37 billion in cash on hand.

AOL is valued at about $2.3 billion.

Both companies declined comment on the matter.

According to Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Online Audience Business Group, the company is ending the Bing Cashback program that has been offering users of the Bing search engine a way to make back some money on their purchases from certain retailers.

Mehdi says Bing Cashback was a "test-and-learn" program and after over a year, they will be retiring the feature.

The last day for Cashback purchases is July 30th, 2010.

Why is Microsoft ending the program? "When we originally began to offer the cashback feature, it was designed to help advertisers reach you with compelling offers, and to provide a new type of shopping experience that would change user behavior and attract a bunch of new users to Bing. In lots of ways, this was a great feature – we had over a thousand merchant partners delivering great offers to customers and seeing great ROI on their campaigns, and we were taking some of the advertising revenue and giving it back to customers. But after a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for."

Warner Bros. has announced that its hit MMO Lord of the Rings Online will move to free-to-play starting in September.

The publisher tried a similar strategy last year with Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited, and says revenue exploded 500 percent after they made the game free-to-play.

"Dungeons and Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited was the world’s first truly premium free-to-play online game that ushered in a new era of choice for online gamers seeking quality entertainment," says Jim Crowley, president and CEO of Turbine (via GI). "The popularity of DDO validated the extraordinary demand by gamers for quality entertainment they can experience at their own pace and within their budget. Extending free-to-play to Lord of the Rings Online will offer another premium game to a broad spectrum of fans."

Warner will make money off the game by charging for expansions, quest packs, items, weapons and account services. The company is also starting a VIP program that will give gamers unlimited access to all content for a certain price.

Research firm NPD has noted today that they have been forced to delay the video game industry sales report for May as the company is upgrading its IT architecture.

The report was expected, as it is every month, to be released in the second week of the month. The delay could be as long as three weeks, which would call for the report to hit at the very end of June or even first week of July.

What the benefits are of the IT upgrade are still unclear but appear significant.

May is generally a slow month for the industry, but a few blockbuster games, including Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption and THQ's UFC Undisputed 2010 are expected to boost the results.

April saw sales fall off a cliff, with hardware falling 37 percent year-on-year and software falling 22 percent. The overall 26 percent decline was the fourth largest such collapse since the turn of the century.

Boost Mobile, the American prepaid cell carrier has announced today the launch of the Motorola i1, the world's first Android touchscreen device with "push-to-talk" walkie-talkie features.

The smartphone will be available through Boost, Best Buy, and Best Buy Mobile stores.

Says Neil Lindsay, CMO of Boost Mobile: "Last year Boost disrupted the wireless marketplace with the $50 Monthly Unlimited offer, and we are doing it again with the launch of the Motorola i1. Together with Motorola, we are able to offer the Android experience to those customers who enjoy the walkie-talkie feature. And with 1,100 Best Buy locations, 80 Best Buy Mobile stores and exclusive Boost Mobile stores nationwide, customers will not have to search far to find this hot handset."

The i1 runs some variant of Android 2.1, has a 3.1-inch HVGA display, an optimized Opera Mini 5 browser, Wi-Fi and 3G support, pre-installed SWYPE for quicker messaging and a 5MP camera with autofocus, flash and video.