Latest news

On the back of strong iPhone and iPad sales, Apple is now worth as much as the 32 largest euro zone banks.

Over the past month, following a market crash in Europe, Asia and the U.S., banks have been notably crushed, even relatively steady banks like Santander, Deutsche Bank and Sociale Generale.

The 32 members of the DJ STOXX euro zone banks index are valued at $335 billion compared to Apple's current market capitalization of $335.25 billion.

Overall, the euro zone banks have lost 75 percent of their value since 2007, and have lost 33 percent since July after making marginal recoveries in 2009 and 2010.

Earlier today, the WSJ reported that Apple was set to release the iPad 3 in early 2012, and the iPhone 5 in September.

In recent months AfterDawn has had some major additions to our Guide lineup we hope you will be interested in.

We now have several guides devoted to Blu-ray. If you need help extracting titles from a Blu-ray disc, we have two new guides you may want to check out. Extract Content From A Blu-ray Disc shows you how to use free programs for selecting titles and MeGUI's HD Streams Extractor for extracting video, audio & subtitles for processing.

If you don't want each title extracted into a single Matroska (MKV) file, Create MKV files from Blu-ray titles with MakeMKV may be of interest.

If you have a collection of TV series DVDs you don't plan to replace any time soon, you might want to think about combining them in Blu--ray format, either on a DVD or a Blu-ray disc. You can get help with that in our guides on Extracting Content From A DVD, Converting SUB/IDX Subtitles to BDN XML & Authoring a Basic Blu-ray Disc With EasyBD Lite.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is prepared to introduce their own music streaming service, say multiple sources.

The company is in late-stage negotiations with UMG, Sony, Warner and EMI and expect to have licensing deals in place by September 5th.

Additionally, the music service could be integrated in BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) which has been getting increasingly more "social" as it updates.

It is unclear whether the music service will help attract new customers, but it may help slow the exodus of its current customers.

Android has quickly become the top smartphone OS in the world, with Apple continuing its slow grind higher despite only having one device.

RIM has recently launched their BlackBerry 7 devices, including full-touch phones, and QNX-based devices are set for launch next year.

Since the day after the iPad 2 launched, there have been rumors as to when Apple would release the iPad 3.

Today, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple is already developing the latest tablet, with a launch date set for "early 2012."

The new device will feature a 2048 x 1536 resolution display, the largest yet seen on a tablet.

One component supplier is said to already have an order for 1.5 million iPad 3s in the coming quarter.

Apple sold 9.3 million iPad 2 in the last quarter, alongside a record 20 million iPhones.

The iPad 3 will come at a time where most Android tablets have moved to the larger-screen-optimized Honeycomb OS.

Follow us on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/#!/afterdawn

Theresa May requests meeting with representatives of social networks.

The meeting will take place next Thursday, and will discuss the role of the social networking sites in the recent riots across England. Facebook, Blackberry and Twitter have been asked to attend, though only Facebook has officially confirmed that it will attend the meeting.

"We look forward to meeting with the home secretary to explain the measures we have been taking to ensure that Facebook is a safe and positive platform for people in the UK at this challenging time," it said in a statement.

BlackBerry has not officially confirmed that it will attend, but previously suggested that it would welcome talks. Twitter has not addressed the issue at all, and didn't respond to a BBC question about its attendance.

Some rioters used services like Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry's BBM instant messaging system to organize their activities during the riots. UK Prime Minister David Cameron hinted that the government would draw up plans for limiting access to such services in the event of further unrest.

"We are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality," the Prime Minister said whilst addressing Parliament.

Paul Ceglia, the man at the center of a Facebook ownership lawsuit, ordered to turn over materials by August 29.

Lawyers for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg hope that the contents will help expose Ceglia as a fraud. U.S. Magistrate Judge Leslie Foschio ordered Ceglia to turn over the materials by August 29 for review by Facebook's experts, including ink sampling.

Paul Ceglia will also have to provide a sworn affidavit about the contents and also about other materials he doesn't claim to possess. Facebook lawyers have been seeking a storage drive that they believe contains a scanned image of the original contract between both men.

Ceglia claims to have hired Zuckerberg in 2003, when he was a Harvard freshman, to work on a street mapping project. He also claims that he gave Zuckerberg $1,000 as an investment in what would become Facebook. He has shown a contract to that effect, but Facebook claims that it has been doctored.

A few days ago, Facebook lawyers submitted a blurry image of what they claim is the real contract, which makes no reference to such an investment.

UK regulator slaps providers for incorrectly billing customers.

TalkTalk and Tiscali UK were fined a total of £3 million after they incorrectly billed tens of thousands of their customers for services they never received. The fine is the result of an investigation opened in July 2010, after the regulator received complaints from over 1,000 customers.

Ofcom found that the pair billed customers for services they didn't receive, and singled out bills that were given to consumers who had closed their accounts previously. Ofcom issued both with a legally-binding notification in November 2010 and set them a deadline of 2 December 2010 to take steps to sort out their billing problems.

According to Ofcom, while they did take steps to improve their billing departments, they still manages to incorrectly bill almost 3,000 people between December 2, 2010 and March 4 this year.

"Ofcom has therefore issued TalkTalk and Tiscali UK with a financial penalty to reflect the seriousness of their breach of the rules and to act as a deterrent to them and other telecoms companies who must comply with the rules," a statement from the regulator reads.

TalkTalk and Tiscali UK have paid over £2.5 million in refunds and good will payments to over 65,000 affected consumers.

Blog post introducing the Windows 8 team modestly confirms App Store rumors.

The blog entry was written by Steven Sinofsky, President of the Windows Division at Microsoft, to introduce the teams that are working on the firm's Windows 8 products, which will be available for PCs, tablets, smartphones and beyond when launched.

The blog was intended to show just how much work goes into the creation process, spelling out the roles that different employees and different teams have.

"We have several engineering roles, or disciplines, that make up our team. The implementation work on Windows happens when developers write code. This code implements features that come from specifications written by program management along with interaction designs from our product designers. Testers are responsible for making sure the spec is complete and the code does what the spec says it should do. This is a simplified view of the relationship between roles, since we routinely walk a bit in each other's shoes."

• App Compatibility and Device Compatibility
• App Store
• Applications and Media Experience
• App Experience
• Core Experience Evolved
• Device Connectivity
• Devices & Networking Experience
• Ecosystem Fundamentals
• Engineer Desktop
• Engineering System
• Enterprise Networking
• Global Experience
• Graphics Platform
• Hardware Developer Experience
• Human Interaction Platform
• Hyper-V
• In Control of Your PC
• Kernel Platform
• Licensing and Deployment
• Media Platform
• Networking Core
• Performance
• Presentation and Composition
• Reliability, Security, and Privacy
• Runtime Experience
• Search, View, and Command
• Security & Identity
• Storage & Files Systems
• Sustained Engineering
• Telemetry
• User-Centered Experience
• Windows Online
• Windows Update
• Wireless and Networking services
• XAML

Unless you've been away from planet Earth since Monday, you should have almost certainly heard about Google's big announcement on Monday that they are buying Motorola Mobility. You probably also know the reason they felt compelled to spend more than $12 billion dollars was a bundle of patents that came with the deal.

What you may be wondering is why a company like Google, with so many innovations under their belt, needs to buy patents. Shouldn't they already be collecting patents daily in the course of normal business?

In fact the answer is no, and that's the not so secret reality of the software patent game. Software patents usually have little or nothing to do with software.

Let's look at one of the most significant software patents in the mobile OS world. US Patent 7,966,578 (full patent documentation below) covers one of the most elementary features of every modern touch interface - moving the display by swiping.

Apple's case against Samsung Electronics in the Netherlands is more severe than previously thought.

The iPhone-maker is reportedly demanding an extensive ban on all of Samsung's Galaxy smartphones and tablets in the European market, and even goes as far as demanding that Samsung issue a recall of stock by European distributors and resellers too.

Apple's ban would cover manufacturing, importing, exporting, stocking or selling of all Galaxy-branded devices by Samsung Korea and all of its Dutch subsidiaries. Samsung's Dutch presence is a crucial part of its operations in the European market.

Apple also demands that Samsung send letters to all of their European clients to recall all infringing products within 14 days, and to offer compensation and cover all costs. The letter would also have to notify the client that if they do not comply, then they too will be violating Apple's intellectual property rights.

In the past year, Samsung has rapidly overtaken Apple in shipments in the smartphone market in Europe, and in the Middle East and Africa, while Apple still dominates the tablet market with an 69 percent share compared to Samsung's 7 percent.

Widespread encryption system could be broken faster than brute-force.

The Advanced Encryption Scheme (AES) is used to protect everything from e-commerce to government data. AES is the encryption standard of choice for the United States government since 2001, when the it took over from the Digital Encryption Standard (DES).

A paper presented at the Crypto 2011 conference on Wednesday detailed a new technique for attacking the encryption standard. It would allow an attacker to recover AES secret keys up to five times faster than was previously possible, using a technique called biclique cryptanalysis.

"This research is groundbreaking because it is the first method of breaking single-key AES that is (slightly) faster than brute force," said Nate Lawson, a cryptographer and the principal of security consultancy Root Labs. "However, it doesn't compromise AES in any practical way."

By practical way, he means that the method will only do a slightly better job than brute force, and so would still take an unfathomable amount of time - in the trillions of years - to break it.

"This technique is a divide-and-conquer attack. To find an unknown key, they partition all the possible keys into a set of groups. This is possible because AES subkeys only have small differences between rounds," Lawson said. "They can then perform a smaller search for the full key because they can reuse partial bits of the key in later phases of the computation. It's impressive work but there's no better cipher to use than AES for now."

AMD Quad Buffer SDK for AMD HD3D technology announced by the chipmaker.

The tool is intended for developers engaged in building immersive stereo 3D capabilities into upcoming game titles. New Passive and Active monitors from Acer, LG, Samsung and Viewsonic were also released, expanding the support for AMD HD3D technology.

"AMD HD3D technology has reached critical mass, with more games, more movies, and supporting hardware and software from many of the industry's leading vendors," stated Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Graphics Division.

"The addition of the Quad Buffer SDK can help our many developer partners make stereo 3D a standard part of future game titles."

The SDK (available on AMD Developer Central) provides clear guidelines on how to implement stereo 3D to help ensure that it can be enjoyed across the expanding ecosystem of monitors and stereo 3D glasses supporting AMD HD3D technology. Additionally, the quad buffer can be used to add native support for stereo 3D in video games and supports DirectX 9, 10 and 11.

Music stars ramp up security to avoid leaks of pre-released tracks.

Jay-Z and Kanye West recently released an album called "Watch the Throne", one of the most anticipated hip-hop albums of the year. These days, such a major release would be expected to find its way onto the Internet long before its official retail or digital release, with some tracks often leaking out months in advanced, maybe in an unfinished state.

To avoid their albums suffering the same fate, the artists reportedly stored music and other content on fingerprint-protected hard drives. In studios where they recorded (often pop-up studios in hotel rooms), they made sure there was no Wi-Fi connection turned on on any of the equipment.

Draft versions of songs were not e-mailed to other artists, which is a common practice with Hip-Hop because the albums often feature many collaborators on tracks. For Jay Z and Kanye's album, all collaborators had to come to the temporary studios to hear the music and record their contribution.

Virgil Abloh, art director for the album, joked on Twitter that producer Noah Goldstein had slept with hard drives for over ten months straight. Only people directly involved with the album production had access to the content, and it was only passed on to CD manufacturers after its iTunes debut.

Last April, HP saved Palm from death by purchasing the phone maker, webOS and its patents for $1.2 billion.

Today, the company has admitted failure, and will kill off its tablet and smartphone division.

Additionally, the company is set to spinoff its PC division in order to move deeper into the higher margin services and software market.

Best Buy and other resellers of the HP TouchPad are now possibly returning hundreds of thousands of unsold units, leading HP to take a $100 million write-off.

We reported yesterday that Best Buy sold just 25,000 TouchPads in the last 6 weeks, leaving 240,000 in inventory.

It is unclear whether retailers are all returning the units, or taking a subsidy so they can discount the tablet and sell at "firesale" prices.

R.I.P Palm, again.

LG Electronics has cut its annual TV sales forecast by 20 percent, citing an uncertain global economy.

Rival Sony issued a similar warning just last week.

Market leader Samsung has long held a weak sales outlook for TVs in Europe and the U.S. for the coming quarters.

Says LG:

TV sales are seen sharply below our original target and may come in at around 32 million units this year, as the euro zone fiscal crisis is likely to continue and a U.S. consumption recovery also remains uncertain.