News written by Matti Robinson (January, 2011)

The next generation iPhones and iPads are rumored to have Apple's new System on a Chip, which will feature the much more powerful dual core SGX543MP2 graphics chip. It is also said that the chip would enable four times the pixel count of previous iPad. The new iPad 2 Retina display would have a resolution of 2048 x 1536.

The more advanced SoC will also add support for HDMI as well as 1080p Full HD video playback. However, it is not yet certain in which iOS devices you will see these, if any. According to AppleInsider, there will be multi-core ARM Cortex A9 CPUs in the SoC quite like in Nvidia's Tegra 2 chip.

It certainly does sound like the new iOS devices will have a ton more horsepower than the predecessors.

The Japanese police carried out raids all over the country last week. They managed to arrest 18 people who have allegedly uploaded copyrighted movies, music, games, and software to the Internet.

Anti-Counterfeiting Association (ACA) which consists of many of the influential trade groups had been monitoring the Internet use in Japan for weeks to spot the possible copyright infringements. They handed out the information to police who started the operation last Tuesday.

The police searched a total of 50 locations and found 18 individuals who are waiting to be prosecuted. One of the ACA partners, Recording Industry Association of Japan, has released details of the arrested.

Even though the operation was quite a large one, none of the accused pirates are big time crooks. Even the worst of the bunch shared only a couple games or music tracks.

Last week Google announced the removal of H.264 support in its Chrome web browser. A questionable move got a follow-up yesterday when Google said in the Chromium blog that they will be releasing WebM plug-ins for Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Both of the companies have been strongly supporting H.264 and denied the support for WebM in their web browsers.

Google prefers their own royalty-free WebM technology that is backed up by browsers Firefox, Opera and Chrome. Apple and Microsoft are behind H.264 that has a larger supporter group and move established community because of its longer history.

Forming the future standard for HTML video tag is no closer than before. Google won't be giving up easily, Apple and Microsoft on the other hand really want their money. Well, at least now it seems that each of the browsers will be soon supporting WebM. That should be a good thing, right?

After a flood of piracy allegations, the file locker site MegaUpload has stood up against the music and movie industry. In an interview for TorrentFreak the company says RIAA and MPAA are directing them with some "grotesquely overblown allegations".

Just a couple days ago Anti-fraud firm MarkMonitor claimed that upload sites are "on a par with peer-to-peer sites when it comes to piracy." MarkMonitor's stats say that RapidShare, Megaupload and Megavideo alone account for more than 21 billions visits to illegal files per year.

We provide connectivity between end users and storage capacity in the cloud, but no content – just like e.g. ADSL providers and hard drive vendors.

MegaUpload however reminds that the service is actively fighting against sharing of copyrighted material and that vast majority of its traffic is legitimate. They also provide services for employees at most of the Fortune 500 companies. MegaUpload reminds copyright holders that they work in a similar way to many unquestionably legal companies.

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The recent rumors from Boy Genius Report's Apple sources say that the Cupertino-based company will remove the home button from their future iPad models. It does sound like a strange move, but the iOS developer release for iPad suggests that there will be support for multitouch gestures that allows navigation to the home screen and other views.

According to the sources, Apple will be removing the home button from iPhone as well. They have already been testing the buttonless handsets that are likely to arrive in stores next summer.

In addition to button removal, 9 to 5 Mac talks about a new camera. The iOS 4.3 developer release hints about a new camera with four images seen below. The shutter images are sized at 1024 x 768 pixels, which also suggests that the iPad 2 will have the same resolution display as its predecessor.

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