Latest news

German Government is Deutsche Telekom's largest shareholder.

The Financial Times is reporting that Berlin is becoming increasing anxious over the uncertain future of AT&T's proposed $39 billion buyout of T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom AG. The German Government is the largest shareholder of Deutsche Telekom, with a 32 percent stake in the telecommunications giant.

Opposition to the merger is coming from all angles in the United States, with both regulators at the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) and the Department of Justice (DoJ) opposed to it on the ground that it would harm competition in the market, and potentially lead to job losses.

The FT report said that government officials in Berlin are resigned to the deal falling through, or to a radical reconfiguration of the acquisition to gain approval from regulators.

AT&T is reportedly holding discussions with a third party over the possible sale of a multibillion portfolio of assets. The disposal of certain assets could be looked upon favourably by the DoJ, depending on the circumstances.

Quick Guide: How to check if your smartphone is infected with Carrier IQ

For the past few weeks, there has been much ado about Carrier IQ, the rootkit unknowingly pre-loaded in over 100 million smartphones around the world.

The company has been accused of being a rootkit/keylogger pre-installed Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Nokia devices around the world. The software quietly watches and logs all keystrokes entered into the device, including texts. It also monitors location, when you shut your phone off, and who you call.

For more back info on the scandal, check here: Smartphone keylogger/rootkit software company CarrierIQ receives letter from US Senator

That leads us to the quick guide on how to check whether your phone has Carrier IQ running on it.

What carriers, OEMs are known to have Carrier IQ installed?

Surpasses first year sales of original DS.

Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimes has said that the 3DS handheld console has surpassed the year one sales of the Nintendo DS, after being on the market for eight months.

"In sales through this past Saturday - 8 months - [the 3DS] has outsold the full 12 months of the original DS," Fils-Aims said, to Time. "During that 12 months time, the original DS sold 2.37 million and we just surpassed that this past Saturday, so we've got real good momentum going into the holidays."

It hasn't been much of a secret that the Nintendo 3DS has failed to live up to the impact that the previous iterations of the hugely successful handheld device had. To push up sales, Nintendo is pushing on the software side, developing titles that will entice gamers, while also tweaking features of the 3DS.

Drives are designed for use in ultra-slim notebooks.

Samsung has announced volume production of new SSDs that support the Mini-Serial ATA (mSATA) interface. The new SSDs will be part of the popular Samsung PM830 product family that was introduced earlier this year. They use Samsung's 20 nanometer class NAND flash memory components, incorporating a toggle DDR interface.

Available in 64GB 128GB and 256GB capacities (32GB for caching), the SSDs utilize high-performance SATA 6Gb/s controllers based on Samsung's own technology, operating at the industry's highest sequential read and write speeds of 500MB/s and 260MB/s respectively, under optimal conditions.

"Samsung's compact mSATA SSDs will provide performance of the highest quality in helping to deliver the advanced ultra-slim PCs that consumers have been wanting," said Myungho Kim, vice president of memory marketing, Device Solutions, Samsung Electronics.

"Samsung plans to continue providing timely delivery of advanced SSD solutions, while preserving its leadership position in the SSD market for notebook PCs."

The Samsung mSATA SSDs feature an advanced hardware-based security solution including 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) protection, which will prevent unauthorized access to data on a lost or stolen notebook PC.

EU joins forces with Facebook, Google, Apple and more.

In total, 28 companies will develop an age-based rating system and vowed to strengthen privacy settings for users of web services. They also agreed to make it much easier to report inappropriate content on large web services.

"This new coalition should provide both children and parents with transparent and consistent protection tools to make the most of the online world," said Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda.

Other measures agreed to include enhancing cooperation among law enforcement and hotline authorities, and also to improve parental controls. In June, a European Commission report found that fourteen of the leading social networking sites do not do enough to protect children using their services.

European Union research has also shown that many children become active online around the age of seven, and that 38 percent of 9-12 year olds have social network profiles of their own. It also found that 26 percent of children access web services through games consoles (PSN, Xbox Live etc.) and over 30 percent now access the Internet using their phones.

Recall affects about 31,000 units in U.S., 1,000 in Canada.

Best Buy has announced a voluntary recall the Rocketfish Model RF-KL12 Mobile Battery Cases for iPhone 3G and 3GS after several disturbing complaints were made about the product.

Best Buy and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) received about 14 reports of the battery cases overheating in the United States, including three reports of minor burns to consumers and four reports of minor property damage.

The battery case is made of black lightweight, soft-touch rubberized material designed to hold the phone securely, and comes with a built-in battery. The model number "RF-KL12" appears on the front of the product?s packaging, on the packaging barcode, and in white print on the curved inner surface of the product.

It was sold exclusively at Best Buy stores in the U.S., Future Shop and Best Buy in Canada, and online between April 2010 and September 2011. It cost between $10 and $60.

Apple responds to questions from bloggers and rights group.

The iPhone 4S maker said that its new digital personal assistant, Siri, is not "anti-abortion" after bloggers and women's rights groups asked the company to explain why it cannot find abortion clinics. In some cases, Siri suggests pregnancy advice centers as an alternative when asked about nearby abortion clinics.

"Our customers want to use Siri to find out all types of information, and while it can find a lot, it doesn't always find what you want," spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said in a statement.

"These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone, it simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better and we will in the coming weeks."

Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation, had written a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, saying that Siri is missing the mark when it comes to providing information about personal health issues such as abortion and contraception.

Siri has been bombarded with all kinds of questions from users who are posting the answers online. When asked what was the best mobile phone in the world, Siri replied: "Wait... there are other phones?," and informed users asking Siri to marry them that its "end user agreement does not cover marriage."

Google in talks with U.S. retailers.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google is in talks with U.S. retailers and shippers - including Macy's, Gap Inc and OfficeMax - to provide a service to help customers shop online. The report cited people familiar with the matter, who say Google stops short of selling directly to consumers.

The service would work in tandem with websites from retail partners. It would combine a product search feature that directs shoppers to those sites, with a new shipped service that Google will oversee.

A customer could check if a nearby store has a product they desire in stock. If it does, Google can then offer the customer an option to have the goods delivered to them for a fee.

According to the WSJ report, Google will trial the area in the San Francisco Bay area soon.

EFF wants Copyright Office to protect the act of "jailbreaking."

Whether you are jailbreaking your smartphone, tablet PC or video games console, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) believes you should be protected from any legal hassle brought under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

In a filing today with the U.S. Copyright Office, the EFF defended the "liberation" of electronic devices to run software from any source, not just that approved by the manufacturer.

"The DMCA is supposed to block copyright infringement. But instead it can be misused to threaten creators, innovators, and consumers, discouraging them from making full and fair use of their own property," said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry.

"Hobbyists and tinkerers who want to modify their phones or video game consoles to run software programs of their choice deserve protection under the law. So do artists and critics who use short excerpts of video content to create new works of commentary and criticism. Copyright law shouldn't be stifling such uses ? it should be encouraging them."

EFF's requests are part of the Copyright Office's rulemaking process, convened every three years to consider exemptions to the DMCA's prohibitions on "circumventing" digital rights management (DRM) and "other technical protection measures" used to protect copyrighted works.

It's time to "get more into YouTube."

YouTube has introduced a new homepage and channel design today. Logged in users can now create their own personal, customizable YouTube Channel line-up, browse recommended channels based on their interests, link their YouTube account with Google+ and/or Facebook and customize their homepage feeds.

The online video giant also introduced an improved Channel design, focused on helping users find videos more easily. New Channel templates are aimed at casual uploaders who rarely add to their YouTube account, and also to users who have hundreds or thousands of videos for fans to wade through.

YouTube also applied a "fresh coat of digital paint" across the whole website, with a consistent gray background, bigger video thumbnails and a more streamlined watch page.

Nokia teams up with deadmau5 to bring iconic London tower to life.

Millbank was turned to darkness and each of the iconic tower's 800 windows were covered with vinyl. Using 16 powerful projectors located 300 meters away, across the river, 3D images were beamed onto the structure and put on a very neat looking show for spectators.

Remixes were played for the performance from producer deadmau5, which Nokia said "added the 4th dimension."

Surely the display looked stunning for anyone standing at the foot of the tower, but the video looks pretty awesome too.

Amazon has expanded its Kindle Store to Spain and Italy today.

Additionally, the company has now begun officially selling the e-readers in the nations.

The Spanish Kindles will cost 99 euros and Amazon says there are now "22,000 Spanish-language Kindle books, including the most best sellers in Spain with 20 of the Top 30 El Cultural non-fiction best sellers, the largest selection of Catalan, Basque, and Galician books, and over a thousand free classics in Spanish."

In Italy, the Kindles will cost the same price, and Amazon boasts "the largest selection of Italian-language titles in digital with over 16,000 Italian-language Kindle books, a wide array of best sellers and hundreds of free Italian classics."

The stores have a total of 900,000 titles, in multiple languages.

Options abound for users of seized or blocked websites.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) started seizing domains last year, targeting BitTorrent websites and other sites that it linked to copyright infringement. The Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP legislation being debated in the United States also contain measures for taking out such websites.

In the UK, the largest ISP in the region, BT, has been ordered to block access to Newzbin2, a Usenet indexing website. Users of these sites are obviously outraged at the actions taken by authorities, and consumer rights / digital rights groups oppose the methods being used.

DNS blocking (hijacking) in particular has come under immense scrutiny. Public Knowledge has argued that DNS blocking creates conflicts between DNS servers on the Internet, make the system less secure and create potential for identity theft. ICE-seized domains use this method, where DNS servers direct users to the wrong web server, where they get a nice message from ICE.

In most cases, the website in question is still online and operating and anyone who has the right IP address can access it easily. For those that don't, there are some solutions to the problem.

Using BlockAID DNS

BlockAID is a public DNS service setup in response to domain seizures (also known as PeerDNS.) Using BlockAID means you will not be prevented from accessing a domain after it has been "seized," in the same way you would be if you were sticking to the DNS servers used by your Internet Service Provider (ISP), OpenDNS or Google's DNS servers.

Apple has made a statement in the huge CarrierIQ fiasco, saying they have now fully dropped support for the rootkit/keylogger.

The next update for iOS 5 (and other past operating systems) will remove all traces of the software.

Says Apple:

We stopped supporting Carrier IQ with iOS 5 in most of our products and will remove it completely in a future software update. With any diagnostic data sent to Apple, customers must actively opt-in to share this information, and if they do, the data is sent in an anonymous and encrypted form and does not include any personal information. We never recorded keystrokes, messages or any other personal information for diagnostic data and have no plans to ever do so.

For more info, check here: Smartphone keylogger/rootkit software company CarrierIQ receives letter from US Senator

The RIM BlackBerry PlayBook has been jailbroken.

Three hackers lay claim to the feat, saying: "We've done it. We've broken RIM's fancy security. We've got the device fully rooted - this persists even after the device reboots."

In the video, the hackers show off root on version 1.0.8 of the PlayBook's QNX-based operating system, but they say the root works on the newer 2.0 beta, as well.

Furthermore, the tablet can now access Hulu, which is blocked from mobile devices.

The group comically calls the tool DingleBerry.

Adds the group:

So we're planning on releasing this pretty soon, just as soon as we finish cleaning up a couple of things that are still looming and finish up a tool to make it easier for you guys.

I'm hoping that at some point we can maybe even get a full version of Android running on the PlayBook, although that's going to be a lot of work.