Latest news

The highly anticipated smartphone is selling on the cheap.

Wal-Mart will sell Sprint's version of the Samsung Galaxy S II for $99 with two year contract, cheaper than its $199 price tag on other carriers.

Samsung's new "superphone" has a 4.27-inch WVGA Super AMOLED Plus touchscreen, Android 2.3.4, a 1.2GHz Samsung dual-core processor, an 8.49mm thin chassis (at lowest), an 8MP camera with autofocus and 1080p recording, NFC support, 4G, a 2MP front-side camera and HSPA+, WiFi a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0+HS.

Furthermore, the device will run on Samsung's updated TouchWiz UI and weighs just 4 ounces with access to Sprint's 4G Wi-Max.

The device will hit T-Mobile, AT&T and Sprint on September 16th.

Bloomberg has reported that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has been talking to Yahoo! advisers to gauge any interest in a merger of the two struggling companies.

Over the past few months, AOL has been speaking to private equity firms in an effort to go private while they complete their turnaround efforts.

Armstrong is said to have pushed a merger last year, but newly fired Yahoo! Carol Bartz had rebuffed the talks at the time.

While both companies are in similar markets, Yahoo is worth $18 billion and AOL is worth just $1.6 billion (market value) with declining revenue and losses. AOL has lost $800 million since 2009.

Although unconfirmed, it appears Google's eventual successor to 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich will be called "Jelly Bean."

Sources speaking to ThisIsMyNext say Jelly Bean will be the next version of the OS after this November's launch of ICS, although other sources have claimed Jelly Bean is in a very short list and has not been selected yet.

ICS is said to be a huge release, with "major architectural, functional, and design changes," and will not be a rehashed Gingerbread or Honeycomb like critics worry.

Still unconfirmed, ICS is also said to integrate Google TV, the struggling platform which lets users stream content from their TVs.

Android 4.0 will also finally unify the fragmented smartphone and tablet offerings.

When Jelly Bean is launched, it is expected to be a minor update, perhaps a 4.1.

It's taken a very long time but Netflix fans got some good news today.

Android phone users with software 2.2 Froyo or above can now use the Netflix app which had been available to just two dozen handsets.

Be reminded, Netflix is still not available for Honeycomb tablet users unless you have a Lenovo IdeaPad.

Downloading the updated Netflix app, version 1.4 will give access to 80 percent of Android users, which have Froyo or higher (up to 2.3.4 currently).

To use the Netflix app, you need a $7.99 streaming account from the company. Also, if you have a phone with Android 2.1 or lower, you are likely not moving to 2.2 anytime soon, (at least not without root).

Get it here: Netflix 1.4 at the Android Market

Group promises that work on "Do Not Track" standards is starting.

Around the world, privacy concerns have been raised as advertising firms track the habits of regular Internet users as they go about their daily online business. The tracking helps the firms to target more adequate advertisements at users with different tastes, but not everyone is OK with all the methods if tracking in practice.

This has prompted privacy groups and regulators in the United States and Europe to call for "Do Not Track" features to be offered to Internet users, giving them the option to opt out of this form of data gathering.

W3C has announced the creation of the Tracking Protection Working Group, which will meet September 21-22 with an ambitious timeline to publish standards by mid 2012.

"The W3C's action here can help protect consumers from unwanted tracking. Microsoft welcomes the opportunity to work with the industry and governments on a web standard based on our earlier work," said Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Internet Explorer.

W3C is seeking broad-based participation, hoping to gather together browser vendors, search engines, advertising networks, regulators, civil society actors, and many other interested parties involved in the task. The group will be led collaboratively by a pair of industry-sponsored co-chairs, one from Europe, one from the US, of which the first is Aleecia M. McDonald, senior privacy researcher at Mozilla.

According to the latest NPD figures.

Microsoft's "Major Nelson" has reported today that the "Xbox 360 sold 308,000 units in August, maintaining the # 1 console spot in the U.S. for 2011."

The company has now led the U.S. in 14 of the last 15 months, as the PS3 remains strong and the Wii tapers off.

Sony's PS3 is rumored to have sold over 200,000 units on the month, thanks to their $50 price cut.

Flash Media Server 4.5 will set the stage to expand online content libraries and give audiences more choice and access to the content they want, Adobe says.

RTMP delivery through Flash Media Server has supported the largest live events in the world such as Obama's Presidential Inauguration, the World Cup and the Royal Wedding, and with Flash Media Server 4.5, HTTP streaming will help broadcasters and content providers scale to meet the demands of more video online.

HTTP streaming is the focus of the new release. While iOS does not support Adobe Flash, it does support HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). When Adobe's Media Server encounters an iOS device (or any that do not support Flash), it will provide the streaming video in a supported container through HLS.

This will allow for publishers using Adobes server software to offer their content to iPad and iPhone users. It does not, however, provide a solution for flash games, just for video.

Key New Features inside Flash Media Server 4.5

• Same Source Video delivery to Apple Devices and Adobe Flash (single workflows to reach both platforms)
• On Demand video packaging / segmenting for HTTP video delivery (no need to pre-package your content)
• Set-level F4M Manifests and Variant M3u8 playlist support
• Simple and robust content protection workflows for HTTP streaming (as easy as saying on or off)
• Live PVR/DVR support for Apple Devices and Adobe Flash with Disk Management (don’t miss that special moment in live)
• Support for Studio-approved DRM with Adobe Flash Access 3 (robust DRM that exceeds your requirements on Desktop and Android)
• Multicast SSM and ASM, with Multicast re-broadcast
• SIP Device support for communication
• P2P support in Flash Media Interactive Server

Not the best week for cloud services.

Users of Google Inc.'s popular Google Docs suite of web-based applications were unable to use the service for some time on Wednesday. Alan Warren, Engineering Director at Google posted an explanation on the official Google Docs blog.

The outage is the result of an update that should have made the service better. The change was designed to improve real-time collaboration within document lists, but a lurking memory management bug showed its ugly head when the servers came under heavy usage.

"Every time a Google Doc is modified, a machine looks up the servers that need to be updated. Due to the memory management bug, the lookup machines didn't recycle their memory properly after each lookup, causing them to eventually run out of memory and restart," Warrern writes.

"While they restarted, their load was picked up by the remaining lookup machines - making them run out of memory even faster. This meant that eventually the servers couldn’t properly process a large fraction of the requests to access document lists, documents, drawings, and scripts which led to the outage you saw on Wednesday."

Google's automated monitoring alerted the team to a spike in failure rate of attempts to access Google Docs. The engineering team atarted rolling it back 23 minutes after the first automated alert. They then doubled the capacity of the lookup service to mitigate the impact of the memory management bug, and the rollback completed 24 minutes later. Within five minutes the service was restored and everything got back to normal.

Judge sides with Electronics Arts in case over use of football player's image.

Former Rutgers University Quarterback Ryan Hart sued the giant video game publisher for the use of his image in its NCAA Football game without getting his permission first. EA argued that it had a constitutional right to free expression, and that the case should be dismissed.

U.S. District Judge Freda Wolfson in Trenton, New Jersey, agreed, citing the First Amendement to the United States Constitution that guarantees the right to free expression, saying it outweights Hart's right to control the use of his image.

Electronic Arts' lawyer, Elizabeth McNemara, said the company is pleased with the Judge's decision, adding it "validates Electronic Arts' rights to create and publish its expressive works."

Hackers tweet phony terrorism reports on NBC's Twitter.

With the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist atrocities in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania approaching, and with U.S. authorities urging vigilance amidst a "credible threat", Americans are keeping an eye on the media and hoping it all passes without incident again this year.

Unfortunately for followers of NBC's Twitter account, some hackers decided to exploit the current atmosphere and post messages about a phony terrorist attack happening in New York.

"Breaking News! Ground Zero has just been attacked. Flight 5736 has crashed into the site, suspected hijacking. more as the story develops," one of the tweets read.

NBC released a statement explaining the tweets. "The NBC News twitter account was hacked late this afternoon and as a result, false reports of a plane attack on ground zero were sent to @NBCNews followers," the statement read.

"We are working with Twitter to correct the situation and sincerely apologize for the scare that could have been caused by such a reckless and irresponsible act."

According to sources, Sprint will be the only carrier to offer unlimited data for iPhone 5 users.

Sprint currently offers unlimited data plans for Android and RIM products, including Wi-Max 4G, for a flat fee per month.

AT&T and Verizon recently dumped their unlimited plans and now charge for tiered plans, at around $30 for 2GB.

According to Nielsen, the average Android user on Sprint uses just 582 MB of data per month, while AT&T/Verizon iPhone users use just 492 MB.

In the past, AT&T has said that only 5% of their subscribers ever use over 2GB per month, and that unlimited data is unnecessary.

Techland says it is "disturbed" by wording in line of code revealed by Steam forum goers.

The launch of Dead Island did not go as smoothly as hoped. When the game made its way to Steam, it turned out to be an incorrect developer version of the game. It has since been replaced to the proper final version of the game, but one little nasty detail got out.

Inside a file, Data0.pakDatadefault_player_setup.scr, is a reference to a skill in the game that gives a female character an extra 15 percent damage against men. In the final version of the game, this skill is "Gender Wars". In the not-for-public version, it appears to be called "Feminist Whore" ("FeministWhorePurna" found in default_player_setup.scr).

"It obviously violates professional and ethical standards at Techland and should never have happened," Blazej Krakowiak, international brand manager, told Eurogamer. "We're investigating this right now and we'll issue a statement later. For now, I can only express my sincerest apologies for this incident and assure you that whoever acted so irresponsibly did not represent the views and opinions of Techland."

Internet giant agrees to start collecting sales taxes next year.

Amazon agreed to start collecting California sales taxes on September 15, 2011, unless the United States Congress passes legislation setting a national standard in a debate that has spread to numerous states.

While brick and mortar stores are subject to sales tax, Amazon does not collect the taxes, referring to a supreme court ruling in 1992 that declare the collection of taxes from companies that don't have stores or warehouses within a state unconstitutional.

Amazon had refused to collect sales taxes and gathered over 500,000 signatures of registered voters to put a motion to repeal a law that took effect on July 1 on the June ballot. "Nobody wanted this referendum," said Lenny Goldberg, a supporter who is executive director of the labor-oriented California Tax Reform Assn. "There's a big down-side risk for everyone with the referendum. Amazon gets hammered with bad publicity, and we could lose [the election]."

Increasing numbers of states have been probing the sales tax issue, as it could be a source of hundreds of million of dollars of tax revenue per year.

Our friends at VSO Software released a new useful tool into the wild last week, and it's completely free.

VSO Downloader sits in the background while you are browsing the Internet and consuming multimedia. To the best of its ability it will download any streaming video or audio that it can detect.

It supports the typical sources that you would expect, such as YouTube and Metacafe, but it also has been tested against an extensive list of sources. To see the list, click here.

VSO Downloader will allow you to rename files as they download from remote servers, and using a download accelerator engine, will achieve the best speed it can, supporting resuming if something goes wrong. It also supports VPNs and proxy servers.

It does not matter what web browser you are using to view / listen to multimedia. The software is easy on system resources too, and is only a small installation completely free of adware, toolbars, spyware etc.

You can get VSO Downloader from: https://www.afterdawn.com/software/...

Google urges Gmail users to take precautions after attempted man-in-the-middle attacks.

Last week, the compromise of a Dutch certificate authority, DigiNotar, put the private online communications of some Internet users (mostly in Iran) at risk. It was found that a fraudulent SSL certificate was issued by DigiNotar for Google (which its not supposed to issue certificates for) allowed the attackers to get between Gmail users and the encrypted Google services.

The Google Chrome browser immediately detected the fraudulent certificates, protecting the user. Both Microsoft and Mozilla responded promptly to the threat too.

Not the Gmail team is urging Iranian users to take steps to protect their communications. It is contacting users directly that it deems to have been affected by the attack, even though Google's internal systems were not compromised in any way.

On its official blog, the Gmail team urged all Iranian users to:

• Change your password. You may have already been asked to change your password when you signed in to your Google Account. If not, you can change it here.
• Verify your account recovery options. Secondary email addresses, phone numbers, and other information can help you regain access to your account if you lose your password. Check to be sure your recovery options are correct and up to date here.
• Check the websites and applications that are allowed to access your account, and revoke any that are unfamiliar here.
• Check your Gmail settings for suspicious forwarding addresses or delegated accounts.
• Pay careful attention to warnings that appear in your web browser and don't click past them.