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Apple has filed for a patent that could give us a hint about the future of iPad covers.

The patent details "accessory device for a tablet device" that can display notifications and other information.

In addition, the cover would have the ability to communicate with the iPad so that different lights would go off in different formations depending on what type of notification is being displayed (email, message, FaceTime, etc).

Other manufacturers have tried similar accessories, including HTC and Samsung, to varying degrees of success.

A couple of photos of the patent:

Norway's new Rights Alliance anti-piracy group has announced plans to get infamous torrent tracker The Pirate Bay blocked in the nation.

The group will be sending a petition to the Oslo District Court later this month, and the group is citing the newly enforced copyright law that came into effect over the summer. The new laws allow copyright owners the right to force ISPs to block sites and services "where material which clearly violates copyright is made widely available".

If the petition is accepted, the Pirate Bay will be the first site in the history of the nation to be blocked by ISPs not due to child pornography.

The Rights Alliance first sent a letter to Norway's largest ISP, Telenor, asking to block the site, but the ISP refused. The ISP says it will not block any site unless required by law.

Earlier this week, popular notetaking app Evernote, and RSS feed service Feed.ly were taken down by multi-hour DDoS attacks.

Evernote managed to stay active with major lag and issues while Feedly was rendered unavailable.

Within four hours, Evernote did manage to claim it was back "up and running," though users could experience "a hiccup or two for the next 24 hours."

Feed.ly CEO Edwin Khodabakchian confirmed the attack was an attempt at extortion. "The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop. We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best we can."

Mozilla has confirmed that the company's $25 Firefox OS-powered phones will be available in at least India and Indonesia later this year.

So far, Mozilla has partnered with four OEMs and five carriers to launch Firefox phones in Latin America and some nations in Europe, but the phones have not been as cheap as $25. Most retail for between $75 and $100, still cheap by smartphone standards, but not cheap enough to attract consumers that will otherwise purchase an Android or Windows Phone device if given the choice or will stick with feature phones.

Especially in emerging markets like India, $75 is too expensive, in general, and hundreds of millions of citizens still have feature phones. Mozilla Chief Operating Officer Gong Li notes: "One U.S. dollar means a lot of things to consumers in emerging countries. It's difficult to sell smartphones that cost more than US$50 in those markets."

The new $25 handsets are built in collaboration with Chinese chip maker Speadtrum Communications. "With a $25 price tag, there is no price gap between a smartphone and a feature phone," Mr. Gong said. "This attractive price point would help motivate feature-phone users to switch to smartphones."

Amazon has shut down the ability to pre-order hit movies from Warner Home Video including "The Lego Movie" as it tries to gain added leverage with the major supplier.

Among the hit films that are unavailable in physical copies are the aforementioned Lego Movie, "300: Rise of an Empire," "Winter's Tale" and "Transcendence." Amazon still offers the digital download.

Amazon is currently in a similar row with Hachette Book Group, delaying shipments of the publisher's books and removing pre-order ability for new titles. Amazon is trying to gain better prices on e-books and as the world's largest book retailer it has some leverage to try this.

Hachette has so far refused to give in, and it is unclear who will cave first.

All we know is that consumers are the only losers in this situation.

Source:
NYT

After weeks of rumors and a leak last night, Amazon has officially unveiled its Amazon Prime Music streaming service.

The e-commerce giant says the new service has over a million tracks, hundreds of curated playlists and allows for unlimited streaming without any ads as long as you are a Prime subscriber. Prime costs $99 per year and offers free 2-day shipping on millions of products, free access to Amazon's streaming movie/TV catalog and hundreds of thousands of books for free via Kindle.

While the deal is certainly great for Prime users, there are some notable songs and artists missing. As of writing, Universal Music Group's entire catalog is not available, unless you want to purchase the tracks via Aamzon MP3. Additionally, there are no brand new tracks like you would find on Spotify, as all the tracks available are older than six months.

"When Prime launched nine years ago, the program offered Free Two-Day Shipping on one million items. Today, that selection has grown to over 20 million items. Prime Instant Video now offers unlimited streaming of more than 40,000 movies and TV episodes, up from 5,000 at launch three years ago. And the Kindle Owners' Lending Library now features more than half a million books to borrow for free," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. "Today we're introducing Prime Music--more than a million songs from some of music's best artists, plus hundreds of expert-programmed Prime Playlists, all at no additional cost. Prime Music is the latest great addition for Prime members and we think they're going to love it."

Unlimited music streaming service Deezer, one of the largest rivals to market leader Spotify, has announced a new deal with major German broadcaster ProSiebenSat.1 in which the company will own a stake and promote the music service online and on TV.

Besides the marketing help, PSS.1's current streaming service, Ampya, will have its subscribers migrated over to Deezer. It is unclear if Ampya will shut down.

The new alliance is Deezer's largest ever, says the company, and its first ever with a major television provider.

In addition, Deezer will get access to Vodafone and its 32 million wireless subscribers in the nation.

Spotify has 40 million active monthly users and over 10 million paying subscribers, while Deezer has just over 16 million active users. Spotify has had a partnership in Germany with Deutsche Telekom AG since 2012, letting its customers stream unlimited music without ads.

Best Buy has announced that the Pebble Steel smartwatch will go on sale at the major retailer starting this Sunday in stores and immediately online.

The retailer has priced the watch at $229 and it will be available in the stainless steel and black matte options. However, the stainless steel band will not be available, just the leather strap. If you buy directly from Pebble, you get both bands for $250.

"Pebble Steel is an elegant follow-up to its predecessor and the second-generation, high-end smart watch is now as strong as it is sleek. And this Sunday, June 15, you can get your hands on it at all Best Buy and Best Buy Mobile stores, in addition to finding it at BestBuy.com," reads the press release.

Best Buy also sells the original (and nerdier) version of the Pebble, which was a Kickstarter record holder for some time.

Check Afterdawn's review of the Pebble Steel here: Review: The Pebble Steel is a fantastic smartwatch, but will it hold up in the future?

E-commerce behemoth Alibaba has announced the acquisition of mobile browser firm UCWeb in what will be the largest merger in Chinese Internet history.

The company already owned a majority of UCWeb, but increased competition by Tencent and Baidu seems to have forced the move as Alibaba looks to continue expanding into more business for mobile.

Alibaba, which could be valued at nearly $200 billion when it goes public, has spent nearly $10 billion on acquisitions since the beginning of 2013, while rival Baidu has spent $2.4 billion and Tencent has spent nearly $2 billion.

WeChat, the mobile messaging app owned by Tencent and used by a majority of smartphone users in China is the next target of Alibaba, as executives have called it a monopoly. The merged company will create the UCWeb Mobile Business Group "responsible for internet browsers, search services, location-based services, the mobile gaming platform, mobile application distribution and mobile literature services."

Source:
Re/Code

The OnePlus One smartphone, which was initially meant to ship in May, has been delayed again, this time citing security issues.

At $299 unlocked and with specs better than any phone on the market at that price, OnePlus built some hype by only offering the device via invite and through special promotions.

The company is now "perfecting some final issues," but there is no final timetable for its official release.

Via Reddit, Abhisek Devkota (username Ciwrl) explained the delays:

So what "major update" led to the "final issues"?

As you may be aware, a handful of new issues with openSSL were made public on June 5th. We decided to include the correction for those vulnerabilities, in the factory release of the One
A new release means the whole firmware needs to be re-certified (including QA time), but we believe the security benefits outweigh the delay. So yes, there was a new build issued at fairly last minute, but it wasn't due to missing set deadlines or expectations.

Apple may soon be able to bring back over $100 billion in cash they hold overseas as Senate Democrats and Republicans are meeting to consider offering a one-time tax break if corporations repatriate such stashed profits.

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says Republicans have considered the "tax holiday" and "it enjoys a good deal of support in our conference."

The "holiday" would give American companies a significant cut in the amount of taxes they pay on profits earned abroad, giving them an incentive to bring the money home. The government anticipates a massive surge in revenue that will then be used on transportation-based construction and repair projects through the federal Highway Trust Fund. The Fund will be out of money by August if nothing is done.

Currently, U.S. law states that American companies do not have to pay the standard 35 percent corporate income tax on overseas profits until they are brought back. Most of these earnings never come back due to lower tax rates overseas in places like Ireland.

A similar repatriation holiday was enacted in 2004, at a 5.25 percent tax rate, which brought back home tens of billions of dollars.

Google has kept its acquisition trend going, purchasing the satellite imagery company Skybox Imaging for half a billion.

The search giant says Skybox's "satellites will help keep Google Maps accurate with up-to-date imagery. Over time, we also hope that Skybox's team and technology will be able to help improve Internet access and disaster relief -- areas Google has long been interested in."

Skybox added a bit more to their press release:

Five years ago, we began the Skybox journey to revolutionize access to information about the changes happening across the surface of the Earth.

We've made great strides in the pursuit of that vision.

We've built and launched the world's smallest high­-resolution imaging satellite, which collects beautiful and useful images and video every day. We have built an incredible team and empowered them to push the state­-of­-the-­art in imaging to new heights. The time is right to join a company who can challenge us to think even bigger and bolder, and who can support us in accelerating our ambitious vision.

Skybox and Google share more than just a zip code. We both believe in making information (especially accurate geospatial information) accessible and useful. And to do this, we're both willing to tackle problems head on -- whether it's building cars that drive themselves or designing our own satellites from scratch.

The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has denied a report from VICE that its website suffered from a denial of service attack last week.

After comedian John Oliver had a rant about the FCC and net neutrality, he urged people to go to the FCC website and provide the regulator with feedback while opinion from the public was being sought. Not long after this, the commenting section on the FCC website became unusable.

VICE ran a report quoting an FCC source saying that it was actually hacked who brought down the commenting system with a denial of service attack.

Later though, an FCC spokesperson reached out to Engadget to deny the initial report. He said that the commission had no evidence of a malicious attack, and that a high volume of traffic caused the collapse. Engadget also noted that the FCC's commenting system is 17 years old.

VICE is sticking by its original report however, saying that a high-level FCC source had described it as a "database denial of service attack."

When you think about it though, given the age of the FCC's commenting system and combining that with thousands people trying to add comments, would that appear to be a denial of service attack if you were unaware of John Oliver's call to arms?

Google is part of a new coalition aimed at cutting advertising revenue to websites that offer copyright infringing content.

The practice of targeting ads on piracy websites is not new. The goal is straight-forward, to make the operation of these websites a non-profitable risk so that many will end up shutting down, or plans to launch new sites will be abandoned. Police in the UK are already targeting ads on piracy websites.

Search giant Google will join another effort in Italy. It will reportedly sign a Memorandum of Understanding in the country, along with music and movie groups, and others in the advertising business.

A committee comprised of signatories will handle complaints from rights holders that highlight advertisements shown on websites offering pirated content.

Source: TorrentFreak

As of today, we have finally retired our old warhorse -- a forum engine built and maintained by our own development team. We used our old, custom-built forum engine for 13 years and it has served us very well. But as the forum technologies have evolved, it simply became impossible for us to keep up with the modern 3rd party forum engines. After months of evaluation and testing, we have finally switched our forums to run on xenForo, a forum engine built by a group of former vBulletin employees.

Here's the quick summary of what is new:

• responsive layout (=page adapts nicely to mobile, tablet and desktop use)
• support for Facebook, Twitter and G+ logins
• improved private messages
• better editor
• etc..

Ketola has described the main changes in detail in his thread, so read more about changes from there.

As the switch was a pretty massive project, it is inevitable that some bugs are hiding somewhere. If you find anything weird, like 404s, etc, please, let us know!