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Pair facing lengthy jail sentences if convicted on terrorism charges for tweets.

Gilberto Martinez, 48, and Maria de Jesus Bravo, 57, are accused of using their Twitter accounts to insight panic. They had warned that gunmen had stormed a primary school in Veracruz. "They took five children, an armed group," Martinez, who is a math teacher, said on Twitter.

Maria de Jesus Bravo is a local radio host, and is also accused of making similar tweets as parents rushed to save their children from the reported attack.

The rumors spread fast, and were fuelled further when witnesses reported a burning car near the school. The two face up to 30 years in prison if they are convicted on terrorism charges, said Fidel Ordonez, their attorney. He said that Mexico is breaching an international human rights charter by charging the pair with terrorism offences.

"You cannot regard us as terrorists or saboteurs," the pair said in court documents filed by their lawyers on Monday, saying they were only exercising their right to free speech.

Over 42,000 people have been killed over the past five years in an ongoing drug war in Mexico between authorities and traffickers. Several attacks in recent months have prompted citizens to keep an eye on social media for unfiltered news, according to Rupert Knox of Amnesty International.

HTC, in the midst of a legal battle with Apple, has shot back with a new lawsuit today.

The smartphone maker, using patents it obtained from Google just last week, has filed an infringement suit and is the third such suit between the companies in the last two years.

Nine patents, originating from Palm Inc., Motorola Inc. and Openwave Systems Inc. and now in Google's possession, were transferred to HTC on September 1st.

The new suit is over four patents, and HTC's current complaint with the US ITC has been amended to add the other five.

Apple is in legal battles over Android and smartphone patents with Samsung, Motorola Mobility and HTC.

Cloud company Citrix, popular for its GoToMeeting webinar application, has now launched an app for Android.

GoToMeeting will be bundled with the upcoming Droid Bionic starting tomorrow and free in the Android Market for everyone else.

A similar app from Citrix has been available for iOS for some time and has been downloaded over 250,000 times.

Here are the features:

Quick session entry: Click a meeting invitation from your email, enter your meeting ID and you are in.

VoiP integrated audio: Use the phones built-in mic and speakers over WiFi for conversation over an IP connection.

Audio controls: The ability to mute yourself if you are in a noisy area.

Zoom in on content: Pinch to zoom to see content up to 200%.

Portrait or landscape: Taking advantage of the accelerometer.

See who is attending: List of all meeting attendees.

Earlier today, there was considerable outrage when Netflix began enforcing their policy on concurrent video streams, months after changing their ToS, making it impossible for multiple users to stream movies or TV shows at the same time if they are using the same account.

While the move would of course cut down on groups of people pooling together to use one account, there was outrage from families who legitimately have two people who enjoying streaming films, sometimes at the same moment.

Reads the ToS:

Personal Computer Requirements and Device Limitations: To enjoy watching instantly via your personal computer, your equipment must satisfy certain system requirements. Click here to view the various system requirements. To see partners who offer Netflix ready devices you may use to access our service, click here. YOU MAY INSTANTLY WATCH ON UP TO SIX UNIQUE AUTHORIZED NETFLIX READY DEVICES. YOU WILL BE ALLOWED TO INSTANTLY WATCH SIMULTANEOUSLY ON ONLY ONE SUCH DEVICE AT ANY GIVEN TIME. For certain membership plans in the United States, you may instantly watch simultaneously on more than one Netflix ready device within your household. Click here to view the number of devices on which you may simultaneously view movies & TV shows that are associated with your plan. The number of devices and concurrent streams may change without notice to you. For certain limited membership plans in the United States, your available Netflix ready device may be limited to personal computers.

Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt has let the cat out of the bag.

The chairman, speaking at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week, says the upcoming Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) will be released in either October or November.

Quoted (via AandM)

We have a new operating system, internally known as Ice Cream Sandwich for some reason, which is being released in October/November, which everyone's really excited about.

This news comes just a day after Samsung confirmed the existence of the Nexus Prime flagship phone, the first phone to run ICS, set for release later this year.

The Pirate Bay has launched a new section in their torrent tracker, one for 3D.

Since its launch, the site has had standard categories like videos, music, games, software, each broken down into more exact portions.

Says the site, via their blog:

We have read on the Internets that there are some new technology called the third dimension. So we added a category in the video section called . . . 3D!

There are about 40 titles in the section now but it has been growing pretty quickly since this morning.

Of course, if you want to watch a 3D film via your TV, you will require a 3D capable player (PS3, Blu-ray, etc) and a 3D HDTV, both of which can get pricey but are expected to fall in price, perhaps significantly, in 2012.

LG, Philips and Sharp are teaming up to create a single framework for developing Smart TV apps.

Smart TVs offer a variety of internet connected content options, such as web browsers and clients for streaming services like Netflix Watch Instantly.

The idea behind this plan is to attract developers for smart TV apps by making it possible to reuse code across different brands. The three companies will release a SDK combining HTML5, CE-HTML & HbbTV.

A beta version of the SDK is planned for early October.

"This cooperation is nothing less than a watershed in the brief history of Smart TVs," said Havis Kwon, President and CEO of LG Electronics Home Entertainment Company.

They also issued an open invitation for other TV manufacturers to participate in the initiative.

Following the high-profile firing of Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget has posted that he wants to be made new Chief of the struggling company, as long as they buy out BI.

Reads the post from Blodget:

We have been huge Yahoo! fans since the mid-1990s, when we fell in love with the company. We've been devastated by what has happened to Yahoo! in the past decade, and we would love to help put the company back on the right track.

The good news is we know exactly what needs to be done to fix Yahoo! and unlock huge value for Yahoo! shareholders (including ourselves—we have unfortunately owned the stock forever). And we know how to do it.
We will outline this plan in detail when the time comes.

But, for now, here's our offer...

Given all the private-equity firms circling around Yahoo, we expect we would have little difficulty raising the $20 billion or so we would need to buy Yahoo outright. But we're busy, and that would take time and be messy. It would also involve paying several hundred million dollars to investment bankers and other "strategic advisors." And there's no reason for Yahoo to waste that kind of money.

Based on the latest MPAA claims, every person in the US who downloaded a movie illegally last year kept an average of $2,000 out of the economy.

That figure is based on claims from an infographic they released recently, suggesting illegal downloading in the US cost removed $58 billion from the economy.

The most obvious problem with their figures is the claim that money is being removed from the economy. In order for that to be true, money which would otherwise have been spent on movies can not be spent on anything else.

So why $2,000? It all comes down to simple math.

First they start with a figure of 29 million Americans downloading illegally.

Then they give a total figure of $58 billion lost.

$58 billion divided by 29 million people comes out to $2,000 per person. If you assume DVDs cost an average of $10 each, that means each one would have purchased 200 discs last year.

After firing CEO Carol Bartz and replacing her temporarily with CFO Timothy Morse, Yahoo! is looking for a change of strategy moving forward.

Roy Bostock, Chairman of the Yahoo! Board mentioned it in passing in an official statement:

We have great confidence in his abilities and in those of the other executives who have been named to the Executive Leadership Council.

Yahoo!'s newly formed Executive Leadership Council is tasked with establishing a new direction for the company, which has floundered since before Bartz's appointment in 2009.

According to a report from TechCrunch, Bartz informed Yahoo! employees of her firing from her iPad :

I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.

Bartz took over as CEO after co-founder Jerry Yang stepped down following an aborted takeover bid from Microsoft. Yang fell out of favor due to his failure to capitalize on an offer of almost twice the Yahoo!'s market value at the time.

The federal judge hearing the antitrust lawsuit brought by the US Department Of Justice opposing AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile wants both sides to discuss a settlement.

On Monday Judge Ellen S. Huvelle ordered that "the parties shall be prepared to discuss the prospects for settlement," at a status conference scheduled for September 21.

It's hard to imagine how any deal could be worked out which would address Justice Department concerns that reducing the number of major US mobile carriers by one quarter would be bad for consumers in almost every way possible.

AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile & Sprint are the only national carriers in the US. Of that group, Verizon and AT&T lead Sprint and T-Mobile in revenue by a wide margin.

Many people, including Sprint executives, are worried that the loss of T-Mobile as a competitive force would ultimately result in reducing that number to just two.

Progress on Android for the HP TouchPad appears to be moving along quickly. Team-Touchdroid member fnj001 has created a video demonstrating multitouch support.

Work on Android for the TouchPad began almost immediately after HP announcement they would be discontinuing the tablet and sell the remaining stock at a bargain basement price of $99 for the 16GB model and $149 for the 32GB version.

The two models previously sold for $399 and $499 respectively. That was already a$100 price cut from the original price when the tablets debuted in July.

Almost two weeks ago, a CyanogenMod developer showed off a rudimentary Android installation running on a TouchPad.

Even at $99 there is a distinct lack of value for a TouchPad running its native WebOS. Although it showed a lot of promise, the lack of apps and general unfinished feel of the OS were among the primary reason for the poor sales which plagued the TouchPad from the beginning.

On the other hand, once a fully realized Android ROM is available, those same tablets become arguably the best bargain in the tablet world.

On Monday Netflix began offering their Watch Instantly streaming service in Brazil.

It is part of a bigger plan to roll out the service in Latin America and the Caribbean.

By September 12 Netflix streaming will have been introduced in more than 40 additional countries, including Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela & Mexico. The new markets also mean adding interfaces in Spanish and Portuguese.

Interestingly, Netflix's announcement suggests the price in some countries will be set in US, rather than local, currency. In Uraguay and Paraguay, for example, the price will be the same price ($7.99) charged in the US.

Netflix CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings said:

We are excited to be bringing Netflix to Latin America and the Caribbean. People throughout the region are online in ever-greater numbers and they love movies and TV shows. We are proud to bring them the Netflix experience of instantly enjoying as many movies and TV shows as they want, when they want for one low price.

Sony has announced that their much-hyped F65 digital cinematography camera will be released in January, for $65,000.

The 4K camera was expected to sell for $75,000.

Sony showed off the camera's abilities at the DGA theater, presenting three shorts showing off "camera attributes as its wide dynamic range, color reproduction and resolution."

The camera is notable due to its 8K sensor and 16-bit 4K and higher-resolution imagery.

Says Sony senior VP sales and marketing Alec Shapiro:

It was (Sony co-founder) Aiko Morita’s vision to design a digital motion picture camera that retains all the quality of a 35 mm film camera but adding the creative capability and functionality of digital technology.

There is currently one rival 4K camera, the Red Epic M, which sells for $58,000 and it already being used on new movies like The Hobbit.

BSA members reach settlement with organization using illegitimate licenses.

The settlement is to be paid out by a Japanese computer software planning and production company based in Kanto, Japan. The infringing licenses were for software products developed and sold by BSA members Adobe, Autodesk and Microsoft.

The case originated with a report lodged with the BSA Japan software piracy hotline. A software audit was undertaken at the premises of the company, which found nearly 1,300 copies of unlicensed software, including Adobe Photoshop, Autodesk MAYA, and Microsoft Office.

A settlement of JPY437.34 million (approximately US$5.7 million) was reached between the three affected companies and the Japanese firm.

"The world's largest settlement originated from a report made to the BSA hotline. We continue to be surprised by the sheer number of reports being made of large organizations involved in software license infringements, despite a high level of awareness for copyright issues and intellectual property rights. We hope that this landmark case will serve as a timely reminder of the serious legal risks associated to the use of unlicensed software," said Chair of the BSA Japan committee, Sanae Matsuo.