Latest news

Journalists have been receiving invitations for a Samsung event on May 3rd, in which the company will launch the Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone.

The invitation simply reads "come and meet the next Galaxy" with a 2PM EST start time on May 3rd.

Samsung has still not officially named the device, but calling it the SGIII is a logical progression from its predecessors.

The alleged specs of the new smartphone are that it will be smaller and narrower than its predecessor at 131 x 64 x 8 mm. The device will weigh just 0.27 pounds, as well.

Featured specs are a large 4.7-inch Super AMOLED Plus display with 1280 x 720 resolution, a 1.5Ghz quad-core Samsung processor, 1GB RAM, Android 4.0.x, dual-cameras (12MP/1.3MP), 32GB internal storage and a decently sized 1750 mAh battery.

The studio is now the sixth to sign up.

Wal-Mart's UltraViolet "disc-to-digital" initiative has launched today in 3500 store after being announced last month, giving disc owners a chance to have access to a digital copy of their movie, for a nominal price.

DreamWorks Animation is the studio behind hits like the Shrek, Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar franchises.

Consumers can pay $2 for an SD digital copy of a DVD or $5 to get an HD copy. If you bring in Blu-rays, you can get an HD digital copy for $2. You get to keep the disc, but the retailer will mark it with some kind of ink so that you can not get more than one digital license per disc.

Earlier this month, Variety reported that actor Ashton Kutcher will play former Apple CEO Steve Jobs in an independent biopic directed by Joshua Michael Stern.

There are more details today on the biopic, which is set to begin filming next month, when Kutcher goes on break from "Two and a Half Men." The film will be independent of the Sony Pictures blockbuster that is based on the best-selling Walter Isaacson book that was released just a month after the entrepreneur's death.

For now, the working title of the movie is "Jobs: Get Inspired," which is horrendous but will be changed before final release.

The film will cover the years of 1971 to 2000, right before the company made it huge with the release of the firs-generation iPod.

Sony's movie will not start filming for another year.

(Pic via Verge)

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings ranted to his 120,000 Facebook subscribers today about Comcast and their bandwidth caps and overall approach to net neutrality.

The rant came about because Comcast's streaming Xfinity service does not count against the ISP's bandwidth caps, while other similar services (like Netflix, for example), do.

Reads the post:

Comcast is no longer following net neutrality principles. Comcast should apply caps equally, or not at all.

I spent the weekend enjoying four good internet video apps on my Xbox: Netflix, HBO GO, Xfinity, and Hulu.

When I watch video on my Xbox from three of these four apps, it counts against my Comcast internet cap. When I watch through Comcast's Xfinity app, however, it does not count against my Comcast internet cap.

For example, if I watch last night's SNL episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap, but if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn't use up my cap at all.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has said the entertainment industry is "shooting themselves in the foot, or maybe worse than the foot" by trying to push anti-piracy legislation.

Brin said the recently killed PIPA and SOPA legislation would have led to the U.S. becoming more like Iran and China, who censor their people.

Even more importantly, Brin hit the nail on the head in regards to piracy, saying the industry cannot understand the simple concept that users will continue to download unauthorized content as long as it remains easier to acquire than authorized material.

"I haven't tried it for many years but when you go on a pirate website, you choose what you like, it downloads to the device of your choice and it will just work - and then when you have to jump through all these hoops (to buy legitimate content), the walls created are disincentives for people to buy," says Brin.

Brin is also scared of the future of the Internet, claiming "there are very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world. I am more worried than I have been in the past ... it's scary." Most of the threat is coming from governments who are actively trying to control access of their citizens, all under the guise of things like piracy.

Sony has reminded gamers today that the PlayStation Network will be down for maintenance starting tomorrow.

The Network will go down at 9AM EST, and be down for the next 13 hours.

Says Sony: "This maintenance will last roughly 13 hours. During much of this time, users won't be able to access the PlayStation Store, PlayStation Home, Account Management or play online. PSN enabled websites will not be able to service users, including [the PlayStation Blog]."

The maintenance will be to optimize and clean up processes and Sony confirmed nothing is "broken."

When asked for more information on the downtime, Matthew Harper, the Senior Manager of PlayStation Digital Platforms noted "Part of my job is to make sure that the lines of communication are open between our users and PlayStation. While I don't have more details to share at this time regarding the downtime, I will certainly work to include more info in future posts."

Despite past delays, the first batch of Raspberry Pi mini-computers will ship to customers who pre-ordered it starting next week.

There are only two distributors of the computer, which sells for $35. The two sites, Premier Farnell and RS Components, said they were seeing 700 orders per second, crashing the sites on the first day of pre-orders.

RSC has been inviting customers who registered interest to order, in the order they signed up: "We are delighted to have the first batch of fully compliant products in our warehouse. There has been a great deal of anticipation for Raspberry Pi since its launch at the end of February, and it is important that we provide a delivery guarantee to customers when they place their order."

Those lucky enough to have ordered first will get their device by April 20th.

For $35 you get a 3.3-inch wide board with a 700 MHz ARM11, 256MB RAM, HDMI-out, SD card slot, a USB port, ethernet, audio jack and Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU.

As of April, 16:9 widescreen monitors are now the most used in the world, surpassing old "full screen" 4:3 resolution devices.

Widescreen displays with 1366 x 768 are the most commonly used, just beating out 4:3 1024 x 768 resolution screens.

The full screen monitors controlled well over 40 percent of the market, just two years ago.

Following the year-long trend, the two types of monitors reached 18 percent at about the same time. Laptops and ultrabooks commonly have a 1366 x 768 resolution, which is likely leading to the quick growth in the hits.

The numbers come via StatCounter, which says both types of resolution account for 2.7 billion of StatCounter's 18 billion monthly hits.

J.K. Rowling has opened the doors of the highly-anticipated 'Pottermore' website for fans of the Harry Potter website.

Two weeks ago, the whole set of official e-books went on sale, bringing in £1.5 million in sales in just three days.

Says the release: "JK Rowling's unique online experience Pottermore.com, based on her hugely popular Harry Potter books and partnered by Sony, is opening from today, following its closed Beta testing phase."

"Many more Potter fans old and new will now be able to explore, discover and share the stories in a completely new way. At Pottermore.com, they will be able to join Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, get sorted into one of the four houses, and have a wand choose them, before starting a journey through the storylines of these extraordinary books and discovering exclusive new writing from J.K. Rowling."

The site is a haven for Harry Potter fans, and includes Rowling's notes, extra text cut from the novels and hours of additional content and thousands of words worth of text content.

For starters, Pottermore.com will begin with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, "but will rapidly grow and develop, as new content, features and functionality are added. Users will be able to share their experiences and creativity as the storylines move on to subsequent books in the series in the months following opening."

Last week, attorneys for the former top cyberlocker Megaupload came out swinging, calling the criminal prosecution of the site's top executives "unduly adventurous," while accusing the government of trying to destroy evidence in the case.

"In essence, the government has taken what it wants from the scene of the alleged crime and is content that the remaining evidence, even if it is exculpatory or otherwise relevant to the defense, be destroyed," said defense attorney Paul Brinkman at the time.

On Friday, a federal judge declined to pull the plug on the seized data, which amounts to 25 petabytes, the same as 25 million gigabytes.

The government has openly admitted to copying "selected data" from the servers and has now cleared hosting service Carpathia to delete the rest. The data currently costs Carpathia $9000 per day to host with no one footing the bill now that Megaupload's assets are frozen. The US District Judge Liam O'Grady did not agree with the government's plans to make the information disappear, and instead is ordering the various parties connected to the case to broker a deal.

Alleged 'Anonymous' hacker Higinio O. Ochoa has been arrested thanks to a "racy" photo posted by his girlfriend.

Ochoa, aka "w0rmer" of the affiliate Anon group "CabinCr3w," posted a picture on his Twitter page with a girl in a low-cut shirt holding a paper that reads "PwNd by w0rmer & CabinCr3w." The "pwned" part was in reference to Ochoa's involvement in a site that makes access to personal information on law enforcement officials.

The FBI took the image and checked the exchangeable image file format (EXIF data) that all digital cameras imprint onto an image. The EXIF data revealed information coming from an iPhone near Melbourne, Australia, which eventually led the FBI to Ochoa's Facebook page.

On March 20th, the FBI raided Ochoa's apartment and arrested him.

Says the FBI: "[He] created fake events on their online, posted images representing Anonymous and CabinCr3w, deleted the entire administrator accounts except the one created by the attacker."

Sprint has announced plans to recycle its old iDEN (push-to-talk) spectrum.

The spectrum will be used to help the company build its new 4G LTE network. iDEN currently uses 800MHz wireless spectrum, which will soon be used for Sprint's 4G.

iDEN users is down to an all-time low of 6 million as consumers run away in droves from the Nextel "push-to-talk" service. When the companies first merged in 2005, there were 20 million iDEN users.

Sprint's acquisition of Nextel is one of the bigger disasters in merger history, with Sprint having to take a loss of $29.7 billion on the deal in 2008. Nextel was purchased for $36 billion, so there was an 83 percent loss in just 3 years.

For the rest of the year, Sprint will retire 9,600 iDEN cell sites and then kill the rest next year. Anyone needing walkie talkie features will be migrated over to the CDMA-based Nextel Direct Connect service.

Google's CEO Larry Page has noted today that the company is focusing on cheap Android tablets into the future, lending credence to the unrelenting rumor that the company is releasing a $150 "Nexus" tablet later this year to compete with Apple and Amazon.

Said Page during a conference call: "[W]e definitely believe that there's going to be a lot of success at the lower end of the market as well with lower-priced products that will be very significant. And it's definitely an area we think is important and we're quite focused on."

Page praised other low-priced Android tablet makers, without naming names. Barnes & Noble and Amazon control the market for 7-inch entertainment tablets but Apple is rumored to be testing an "iPad Mini."

If the rumors are accurate, Google's Nexus tablet will be Asus MeMo 370T which includes a quad-core processor and Ice Cream Sandwich.

Security firm Sophos has announced today the discovery of another widespread malware attacking Mac computers.

Dubbed "Sabpab," the threat uses the same Java vulnerability that the Flashback botnet exploited last month in creating 650,000 Mac zombies.

Sophos says you can check to see if you have been infected by searching for the following files:

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.PubSabAgent.pfile

/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.PubSabAGent.plist

Sabpab has been described as a "basic backdoor Trojan horse" which allows control servers to execute commands remotely on infected Macs.

Apple has already patched the vulnerability and the new trojan is not as widespread as Flashback was, but still remains a threat if you have not updated.

In under two weeks since its launch on Android, the photo-sharing app Instagram has reached 40 million users.

In its first 4 days of launch on Android, the service saw 5 million new users, and that number seems to be growing exponentially to over 11 million now, although undoubtedly some are new iOS users, as well.

Rakshith Krishnappa, creator of Instagram-viewer Gramfeed, says the Instagram API listed 40,026,379 users as of this morning.

Last week, social networking giant Facebook purchased the service for $1 billion in a deal that took under 48 hours to complete.

The company says Instagram will remain a standalone photo app, but it will also likely be more thoroughly integrated into Facebook into the future.