IBLOG SPACE

Google has updated its privacy policy , replacing the individual agreements for each service like Gmail, Google+ and YouTube with a single policy that already has privacy advocates screaming. Although Google’s new terms of service – which will come into effect on March 1 – won’t involve collecting any more user information than is currently, it will allow the search giant’s various services to share that information between themselves, rather than keep it siloed. From Google’s perspective, that allows them to better tailor information to individual users; viewed from a different angle, it’s an even greater amount of data and inference one company knows about you. Google says it will use the harmonized data to improve its services. Spelling corrections will get better, auto-suggestions will become more accurate – and potentially confused topics, like Jaguar cars or jaguar cats, will be less likely to frustrate – and altogether more intelligent mash-ups of data will be enabled, such as

Nokia has passed a huge milestone with its Series 40 mobile phones. The mobile phone giant has announcedthat it has sold its 1.5 billionth 40 Series device. The magic 1.5 billionth device was a Nokia Asha 303 smartphone, and it was sold to a woman in São Paulo, Brazil. The Asha 303 is a touchscreen handset that also has a QWERTY keypad on it for typing and web surfing. Nokia notes that the first mobile phone in the 40 Series was the Nokia 7110 back in 1999. None of the devices in the Series 40 range are considered true smartphones; Nokia refers to the latest devices in the range as “smartphone lite.” They sit in the area between smartphones and feature phones. The latest of the 40 Series devices have Nokia Maps, Nokia Browser, and Web Apps along with Nokia Money and Life tools. Nokia is looking forward to the next billion in sales of the Series 40 devices. Part of the next billion in device sales will be pushed thanks to the recent purchase of Smarterphone OS that already looks better

Samsung is considering adding S-Pen digital stylus functionality to future tablets, borrowing the pen-input option from the Galaxy Note for larger models as it boosts data-entry methods. Asked whether Samsung saw the Galaxy Tab line-up expanding beyond mere finger control, ”I think a pen interface continues to make a lot of sense across a number of screen sizes, like the larger is more obvious of those” product marketing manager Ryan Biden told Laptop . “That’s about as specific as I can be without announcing a product.” The Galaxy Note comes complete with a digital pen, using Wacom active digitizer technology to support handwriting, sketching and more precise touch control. Unlike capacitive styli, which mimic a point of finger contact and are thus relatively lacking in accuracy, the Samsung S-Pen is far more accurate; we found it was certainly good enough for casual note-taking in our Galaxy Note review . Tablets offering active stylus support are rare, in the consumer market at le

UK carrier O2 finds itself embroiled in data protection controversy today, with allegations that the operator is revealing mobile users cellphone number to each website they visit on their phone. According to Lewis Peckover , buried in among the header data from each O2 visitor is a line revealing their own mobile number; he set up a site to show off just what O2 is including. However, while some O2 users are corroborating the claims, our own tests have failed to do so. Update: Temporary workaround after the cut. We visited the site on a Galaxy Nexus using an O2 SIM and the carrier’s 3G network, and saw no evidence of the number registered to the account. The screenshot above shows exactly what data is being received by Peckover’s site. Where his testing identified a line in the headers called “x-up-calling-line-id:” with the mobile number in international format, though, ours did not. A quick check of Twitter indicates we’re not the only one to see it too. O2 says, via Twitter, tha

A window coated in raw egg wasn’t the only thing Apple got when it launched the iPhone 4S in China earlier this month; it also got a wake-up call about quite how high demand for the new iOS smartphone would be. Appetite for the iPhone 4S was both “staggering” and “off the charts” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a financial results call yesterday, Businessweek reports, admitting that the company “didn’t bet high enough” on supplies of the handset. “We thought we were betting bold” Cook said of the Chinese launch, which saw crowds build outside of official Apple stores. He also declined to comment on whether Apple would add a second carrier partner in the country, describing current operator China Unicom as “a very key partner” but dropping hints that more was afoot in the near future. “I’ve got nothing to announce today on an expansion there,” Cook dismissed, “but as I’ve consistently said, China is an extremely important market for us and we continue to look at how to grow it further.” A

A window coated in raw egg wasn’t the only thing Apple got when it launched the iPhone 4S in China earlier this month; it also got a wake-up call about quite how high demand for the new iOS smartphone would be. Appetite for the iPhone 4S was both “staggering” and “off the charts” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a financial results call yesterday, Businessweek reports, admitting that the company “didn’t bet high enough” on supplies of the handset. “We thought we were betting bold” Cook said of the Chinese launch, which saw crowds build outside of official Apple stores. He also declined to comment on whether Apple would add a second carrier partner in the country, describing current operator China Unicom as “a very key partner” but dropping hints that more was afoot in the near future. “I’ve got nothing to announce today on an expansion there,” Cook dismissed, “but as I’ve consistently said, China is an extremely important market for us and we continue to look at how to grow it further.” A

Something makes you feel justified of a Porsche’s hefty pricetag when window shopping at your local dealership. But does this same mentality persist when viewing their new Porsche Design P’9981 BlackBerry smartphone ? The device is set at $2,350, just enough to make a few jaws drop. We had recently seen it clear the FCC earlier with an estimated amount of $2,000, but it has clearly broken that barrier. It’s hard to believe the P’9981 doesn’t have decent hardware specifications. We’re used to seeing larger displays as in the Galaxy S II or iPhone 4S when it comes to the latest and greatest. But the Porsche Design, like the other BlackBerry QWERTYs out there, offers a 2.8″ touch screen with a 640×480 resolution. If you were to spend $2,400 on a smartphone, wouldn’t it make sense to ensure it has a decent camera? Its 5MP rear shooter most definitely can’t compete with a few others currently in production. People have even started bragging about a possible 12MP camera included in the Gala

The next generation Microsoft Xbox 720 has been tipped to be shipping in late October or early November complete with six times the power in an AMD 6000 series GPU under the hood. There’ve been reports from several sources saying the same set of details, the most recent confirmation coming from IGN’s source close to the project. Specifically it appears that the Xbox 720 will be using the AMD Radeon HD 6670 working with support for DirectX11, 3D and 1080p HD output, and multidisplay output. The Radeon 6670 itself costs upwards of $79.99, so we’re likely not looking at an inexpensive device in the end here. That said, the Xbox 720′s graphics processing power because of this beast of a GPU will be six times the Xbox 360. Compared to the upcoming Wii U (as seen in some lovely hands-on videos back a few months here on SlashGear), the Xbox 720 will be set to have a 20-percent greater performance on the whole. For those of you out there in the world of developing for consoles can expect kits

We’ve been following the terrifying sounding but mostly harmless solar flare as summoned up by the Sun’s most recent solar storm as it hits the Earth in a dazzling display across the Northern half of the hemisphere. What NASA has posted in regards to the situation is not one, but two views of not the Earth, but the Sun as it flares up early this week. Photos of the aurora collection going on constantly for the past couple of days have been popping up across Flickr as well, a few choice slides provided for you here as well. The first video you’re going to see is a lovely black and cyan/teal view of the Sun as viewed by the Solar Dynamics Observatory on the 22nd of this month. SDO’s view of what’s called the M8.7 Solar Flare is shown in the 131 Angstrom wavelength, a wavelength commonly used to view nothing less than solar flares on the regular. The flare itself, they note, began on the 22nd of January at 10:38 PM ET, peaked at 10:59 PM that same day, and ended at 11:34 PM. The next vide

Apple reported record fiscal Q1 2012 earnings today with sales of its iPads and Macs well exceeding rivals’ sales of PCs. Specifically, the 15.4 million units sold of iPads alone already surpass HP’s worldwide PC sales of 14.7 million as well as Lenovo’s 12.9 million and Dell’s 11.6 million units. For the first time, Apple has surpassed HP in both computer unit sales and revenues, making it the largest computer maker. Apple also isn’t fazed by the onslaught of cheaper tablets, such as the Amazon Kindle Fire. Instead, Apple said it would continue to “innovate like crazy” on the iPad, which will continue to threaten PCs. Apple CEO Tim Cook reiterated the company’s belief that tablets will one day overtake PCs, citing IDC’s recent study that showed strong momentum with tablet sales already surpassing PC sales last quarter. Cook also emphasized that although iPad sales were having negative impact on PCs, it has not affected Mac sales.

Over the past several decades, the change from stock car racing up to the massively powerful motor sports that include such gems as NASCAR has been drastic – but Ford and several other manufacturers are aiming to shrink that gap with their 2013 lineups. In the 2013 Ford Fusion, the main objective of Ford is to bring a NASCAR vehicle that owners of the production model of the same vehicle will not only recognize, but will impressed to see jamming around the track with essentially the same build as their own vehicle at home. In this way both Ford and NASCAR are aiming to tie the NASCAR sport back to the viewer in a way that’s close to the heart. The term “stock car” originally meant that the vehicle was the same model as what any regular fellow or lady could purchase from the lot. Over time there’ve been some changes to the sport of Stock Car Racing that have given a bit of a change to that unspoken rule, allowing the model on the track to be quite a bit different from its showroom equiv

Apple TV has long been considered a hobby by the late Steve Jobs and it still is for the Cupertino company, which reported spectacular earnings today for fiscal Q1 2012 . During the earnings call, CEO Tim Cook revealed that 1.4 million units of the Apple TV were sold in this past quarter, a record for the device. But, it still remains very much a hobby for the company, although one that Cook says he can’t live without. “Our Apple TV product is doing quite well… but in the scheme of things, we still classify Apple TV as a hobby. We continue to add things to it. If you’re using the latest one — I don’t know about you, but I can’t live without it. Other than that, no comment,” said Cook. Cook did suggest that the company would “continue to pull strings and see where we can take it,” but there were no hints at rolling Apple TV into the much rumored Apple HD television sets. Ever since the Steve Jobs biography revealed that the visionary believed he had “cracked” the code for developing a

If you look up the term “objectification of women” in your college dictionary, you’ll probably see a definition illustrated by a photograph of a tall, slender, blond woman wearing skimpy shorts and a tight t-shirt, standing next to a table stacked with plastic cell phone carrying cases. Recently, there’s been a lot of hubbub over these hired guns who stand at booths set up at the trade shows that are dominated by men. The video game shows, the technology shows, the car shows. In an interview with the BBC, Gary Shapiro, the head of the CEA, which is the association that runs the Consumer Electronics Show, made some comments about the unfortunate necessity of booth babes. Surprisingly, Gizmodo published an editorial taking Shapiro to task. Let that sink in for a moment. Gizmodo. Arguing against booth babes. The same Gizmodo that published a story a week earlier in which one of their writers dances awkwardly with a couple of models who clearly would rather be elsewhere. Now, I’m not criti

This month’s complete and utter closure of the Megaupload file uploading and sharing site has created more than one ripple in the online world, the latest being with so-called “legitimate” users of the former file-sharing service launching a legal collective aiming to push the FBI into re-activating the site. What this front is basing its actions on are several laws in the Spanish Penal Code Articles 197 and 198 which protect user data inside the law’s jurisdiction, this law saying that the FBI misappropriated personal data in a way that should not stand. Over 1000 ex-users of Megaupload have signed up on the first day of operation of this front, with more pouring in by the minute. The campaign has a message right up front which states that “millions of legitimate users have been crippled by the U.S. authority’s attempt to enforce their own law across the world.” What’s a bit confusing, on the other hand, is that this case has already gone national before the Pirate Party here tried to

The AT&T exclusive Nokia Lumia 900 was rumored to be heading to the UK sans LTE sometime in June, but now a new claim by mobile insider Eldar Murtazin suggests that it could be replaced by a new model called the Nokia Lumia 910. Murtazin claims that this model has an upgraded camera and is set to hit Europe in May. The Nokia Lumia 910 has never been announced before and given Murtazin’s hit-and-miss track record, more misses than hits as of late, we’ll have to take this rumor with a grain of salt. He doesn’t reveal much in the way of details on this device except that it will sport a 12-megapixel camera instead of the 8-megapixel camera that’s on the Lumia 900. Murtazin also doesn’t dismiss the possibility that the Lumia 900 is still heading to the UK in June, but only suggests that there’s no reason to wait if the 910 gets there first. Other claims he’s made today include details on the rumored Samsung Galaxy S III , for which he spills the specs and pegs to arrive in April fol

There’s not a whole lot of devices out there at this point that the group known as Crystal Rocked have not bumped up an ultimate over-the-top level of glitz, and both Beats by Dre and Street by 50 have been caught on the radar and pushed through the crystal machine by the masters. What you’ll get with the Beats by Dre set of audio blasters is the “Mixr” model tricked out in 2750 individual Swarovski Crystals. What you’ll get with the Street by 50 headphones is two shades of Swarovski Crystals which they’ve declined to number. What on earth you’d be thinking when you pick these up unless you’re one of the people involved in the company behind the two, one simply cannot guess. Crystal Rocked’s claim to fame on the Street by 50 model is that they’re the first group on the planet to have gotten sets of the headphones in for customization specifically, while the Dre headphones they’ve simply gone nuts on without any special bonus. You will notice, if you step back for a moment and see the c

Microsoft posted new details on its Building Windows 8 blog today, this time revealing the next-gen operating system’s improved sensor support. The company is introducing new hardware sensors, which include ambient light sensor, accelerometer, magnetometer, and gyroscope. It also explains how developers can integrate the hardware sensors with apps developed for the Metro interface. At the system level, Windows 8 will use the sensors for features such as automatic screen rotation and adaptive brightness. Since tablets are meant to be mobile and used in various environments with different ambient lighting, a screen with adaptive brightness can help optimize readability while saving battery life. Developers will be able to use Microsoft’s sensor API to create Metro style apps for Windows 8. Microsoft also offers “sensor fusion” support, which lets developers tap into multiple sensors together when each used on its own may be insufficient.

There’s a lot to be said about the Q1 2012 sales report from Apple today , but one point stands out like a beacon: with 37,044,000 units and 24,417,000,000 (that’s $24 billion) in revenue from iPhone and related products and services. This is compared to the units and revenue from the same category during Q4 of 2011 which ads up to 16,235,000 units and 10,468,000,000 in revenue – this means that Apple has more than DOUBLED their units and revenue in one quarter. Of course this includes the holiday season once Apple’s Q1 started, so it’s not that big a deal, right? Compared to last year, the percentage change in units and revenue in the iPhone category was 128% and 133%, this meaning that the change is only slightly greater there than it was between this quarter and the last quarter of 2011. So the first quarter of 2011 and the last quarter of 2011 are fairly similar in their overall totals. The difference between Q4 2011 and Q1 2012 then, percentage-wise, is 117% in units and 122% in r

Apple’s fiscal Q1 2012 earnings report has been released , revealing an amazing record breaking quarter, which includes both the iPhone 4S launch and the holiday shopping season. Revenue spiked to $46.3 billion from $23.8 billion in the previous quarter with a record profit of $13.06 bilion, which is more than double the $6 billion in profit from the same quarter last year. This marks the first quarter that Apple has surpassed $40 billion in revenue, with a bulk of the sales being for the company’s iPhones, which sold 37.04 million units, a 128 percent increase year-over-year. Apple also moved 15.43 million iPads, a 111 percent increase from a year ago, and 5.2 million Macs, a 26 percent increase. iPods, however, declined about 21 percent to 15.4 million units sold. Apple generated $17.5 billion in cash flow this past quarter and predicts revenues of $32.5 billion in the next quarter. Overall, Apple blew past Wall Street expectations, which predicted that the company would report $39.2

Third party iPhone accessory makers have taken the next step in iPhone personalization with solid wood back panels – not a case, not a skin, but an actual real replacement for the glass back you’ve grown tired of. There are two different groups I’d like to share with you here, one of them a bit more expensive with a wider range of options, the other more affordable and keeping with the simplicity. Both of these groups offer backs for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. Material 6 The first of two groups we’re taking a peek at here is the group known as Material 6, these guys offering up wood backs that range from $89 USD all the way up to $99 USD, with the option of adding your very own custom engraving for $5 USD. In this set of backs, you’ll get options in Walnut, Lacewood, Maple, and a few artist series backs, these pre-cut masterpieces being the ones that cost the extra $10. It’s the customizable back that you make yourself that makes this group all the more worthwhile – download your own

Eldar Murtazin, a tech blogger with a notorious track record and inside sources, claims that a yet to be announced Samsung Galaxy S III will be arriving in April, following an announcement at Mobile World Congress in late February. Murtazin may even have possession of the device, so he teases via a series of tweets . The above image was originally deemed a leaked press image of the Samsung Galaxy S III, but later turned out to be a fake concept image. Nonetheless, the actual device could look quite similar and it’s not difficult to guess what the logical progression in specs might be, although some have guessed more outrageously a 2GHz quad-core processor with 2GB of RAM. According to Murtazin, the Samsung Galaxy S III will instead feature a 1.5GHz to 1.6GHz quad-core processor. This would certainly still require a larger battery to keep the device juiced up and per Murtazin’s experience with the device so far, battery life seems to be decent. Murtazin also reveals that the new handset

When the term Data Free comes up on your news readers and in the newspapers in the coming months, you’ll know that it started here, and with Wikipedia and Orange, who together will be offering free – that is, without data charges – use of Wikipedia’s vast knowledge archive. What this means for the future of the mobile industry is this: the door has been opened to free data, or at least that’s what Wikipedia is aiming at through mobile users in Africa and the Middle East soon. Orange and the Wikimedia Foundation have announced in a press release today that they are aiming to make their store of information available for free to those who need it, those who otherwise would have no such simple access to the information you and I take for granted. Africa and the Middle East, otherwise known as AMEA, will have access to Wikipedia at no charge through their internet-enabled phone so long as it has an Orange SIM inside it. This project is part of a larger campaign initiated by the Wikimedia F

Upcoming book “Inside Apple” by Adam Lashinsky reveals that Apple HQ has a secret room dedicated for product packaging design and testing. The revelation isn’t too surprising considering how elegantly packaged Apple products have been, but it confirms what lengths Apple goes to achieve that. The book reveals that the room is located in a walled-off section inside Apple’s main marketing building and requires a special badge in order to enter or exit the room. The packaging designers inside are said to open hundreds of prototype packaging in trying to achieve the perfect unboxing experience. “How a customer opens a box must be one of the last things a typical product designer would consider,” wrote Lashinsky. “Yet for Apple, the inexpensive box merits as much attention as the high-margin electronic device inside.” One after another, the designer created and tested an endless series of arrows, colors, and tapes for a tiny tab designed to show the consumer where to pull back the invisible,

In a court case currently going on here in the United States including a Colorado woman who’s hard drive may well include incriminating evidence against her, it’s been ruled that her encrypted password on said hard drive must be bypassed by her, and is not protected under the Fifth Amendment. Before this case, a distinction had been drawn in cases which included such situations, the difference being clear between forcing a person to reveal their password and forcing a defendant to decrypt encrypted data without revealing their password. Revealing the password has up until now been ruled as forcing the defendant to reveal the contents of their mind, this bringing up some Fifth Amendment issues – that’s no longer the case according to Judge Robert Blackburn. What Blackburn is saying here is that forcing a defendant to decrypt a laptop so its contents can be inspected is essentially the same as producing any other bit of evidence. If a law enforcement agent has a warrant, they can force y

Though Paramount will not be the only group to have UltraViolet digital movies in the near future, they’re currently the first and only group to offer the service through their site. What UltraViolet offers is a copy of your movie “in the cloud” right after purchasing it in physical or digital form. In this way the film industry hopes not only to offer its consumer base a new bit of value, but to fight off piracy as this process may prove to be the easiest way to have your videos anywhere, anytime. The only drawback here in this whole process you’re about to understand implicitly is the fact that you will not be able to download these cloud-based movies for offline viewing. When your movie is in Paramount’s cloud, you can stream it over the internet on your iOS device or through your mobile hotspot, wi-fi, or the equivalent, but no offline viewing in any way at all will be up for grabs. Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone are currently not connected to this service and set-top TV bo

When you think about Siri, it’s not something that before the iPhone 4S was released was really a big deal: speaking to your phone, your phone then doing what you told it to do. But now that Siri and iPhone 4S are married, everyone wants a piece of the action. Take for example the brand new and nearly released to the public Tweet with Siri, a hack which allows you to use Siri to add a Twitter status on your iPhone 4S on the go – simple, and perhaps easy enough to accomplish that it should have been included in the basic build long ago, yes? The process a powerful piece of development like Siri has to go through to legally connect with an application such as Twitter is prohibitive enough that the iPhone 4S was released with a version of Siri that did not work with more than a few applications. What the future of Siri holds though, is just that: application integration. Before that happens, the hackers are having at it, and solutions like Tweet with Siri are being released so that those

When you’re the kingpin of Megaupload and your name is Kim Dotcom, it’s not hard to think that it’s a good idea to purchase a lot of fancy electronics so you can look awesome when posting yourself sitting in your basement hacking away – but when you’ve gone beyond hackerdom, there’s something else you’ll end up purchasing: fabulous automobiles. That’s what Dotcom did, and as his Megaupload and other internet-based ventures grew, he amassed what’s been revealed today as a king’s ransom worth of luxury cars. Amongst these were Rolls-Royce, Maserati, and 16 more in autos dating from 2012 all the way back to 1959. This month the Megaupload owner and several of his colleagues were arrested and what his prosecutors call a $175 million USD worldwide internet piracy operation was shut down indefinitely. Yesterday he was brought before a New Zealand court after having been taken from a grand jury in U.S. District Court in Virginia. It’s also in New Zealand that the raids are going on now, his $

It should come as no surprise that this device was all but overlooked at CES 2012 as its predecessor, the Casio G’Zone hasn’t exactly seen its fair share of press or success in the market (on Verizon.) That said, this device has a few one-ups on its predecessor, including perhaps most importantly the “G-Shock” branding, straight off Casio’s ultra-popular wristwatch line by the same name. The G-Shock smartphone will be running Android, has a camera on the back, and will likely be near-impossible to break. For those of you that love hardcore electronics, congratulations, you’ve found the king of the crop. At the moment this prototype is said to be shock resistant up to 10 feet, water resistant up to 1.0 bar (that being 10 meters), and pressure resistant up to 1.0 bar. You can smash this one, folks, drop it from on high into the watery depths where it hits a rock and comes back to tell the tale! That’s what’s going on here, hardcore people. You’ve got a metal back casing, the rest is made

The folks at Microsoft have announced today that they’ll be doing away with the yearly MIX developer conference starting this year in favor of moving it up and into a new developer conference later in the year which they will be announcing soon. What we’re perhaps looking at here is a hope that the Windows Phone community will have grown to an equitable level by then given the popularity of the Nokia devices released early this year, but as Microsoft says, the Web Community being no longer separate from the developer community as it has been in the past makes for a better conference in a single form in the future. This means that there will, barring disasters before then, be a conference at the end of 2012 instead of any earlier. This new conference will be a combination of what was the other developer conference, PDC, and MIX, and will combine all developers surrounding the Microsoft suite of platforms instead of splitting them all up. Developer feedback has been heard by Microsoft fo

There’s nothing like a good burn to start off your Tuesday afternoon, that being exactly what Samsung has aimed at doing today as they release their next in a long line of burns on the iPhone with the Galaxy S II. As this particular video spot shows, the Samsung Galaxy S II running Android has the ability to translate your voice into text and send a text message without a hitch, this much to the dismay of a very chilly customer whose iPhone does not do the same. When he steps in the hipster clothing store it all becomes rather apparent where his heart lies. This ad spot and the rest from Samsung in the past few weeks have all been leading up to the big one set to roll out during the Superbowl. While they never technically say the word Apple or iPhone, it’s quite clear what’s going on here. Apple fans wait in line in the cold midwestern weather to get a chance to purchase the next generation iDevice while Samsung customers prod them with sticks. And when I say prod them with sticks, I m

Verizon’s next LTE device is here in the Spectrum by LG, a device with the first True HD IPS display for the carrier at 4.5-inches and 392 PPI – that’s massive. This smartphone also has a dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor covered with a pane of Corning Gorilla Glass, the whole monster running Android 2.3 Gingerbread with an Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade in the pipe for the first half of 2012. This device is not the least massive smartphone on the market, that’s for certain. This smartphone is both light and powerful, it rolling out with the most high-clocked dual-core processor on the market and a collection of applications right out of the box that will have your head spinning. There’s ESPN ScoreCenter for your sports needs, it connected to the NFL, the MLB, and NASCAR to name a few. You’ll notice that this and other apps are collected cleanly in the apps drawer which has a unique face, it being part of LG’s own custom user interface over Android. Popout While yo

For those of you that have no idea what the Lytro standalone camera is, know this: it allows you to take a single photo with the ability to focus on any point in its field of view. Capturing the entire light field, all the light traveling in every direction in every dimension – seemed at least a little enticing to Steve Jobs, as it turns out, the CEO of Lytro, Ren Ng, meeting with him soon after the ideas behind the Lytro technology were made public. Can you imagine an iPhone 5 with no need to focus? The information comes from the upcoming book “Inside Apple” as written by Adam Lashinsky, coming out soon of course. In it he reveals that Stanford graduate Ng actually visited Jobs’ Palo Alto home, speaking on the technology and discussing the future with Apple. As far as we know the collaboration did not end up panning out, but you never know! Have a peek at this bit from the upcoming book: “The company’s CEO, Ren Ng, a brilliant computer scientist with a PhD from Stanford, immediately c

Several months ago there was a massive spam operation by the name of Kelihos botnet that both Microsoft and partners took offline, this menace having already sent 3.8 billion spam emails a day for some time. What you should know, and perhaps much more importantly, is the following fact: the controller and creator of that spam factory was no less than a former employee of several Antivirus firms. What does this mean for you? It means you should think twice before firing Johnny No-Virus from your Antivirus group, folks, because he’ll probably be spamming you soon. What we’re looking at here is a fellow by the name of Andrey N. Sabelnikov from the Russian Federation who worked most notably with antivirus vendor Agnitum. Once he began his work on this Kelihos operation, he embedded debug codes into the source of the virus which then allowed the software to download and install the Kelihos machine. It’s undoubtably clear that the fellow in question here got his knowhow from working with the

RIM’s first QWERTY BlackBerry 10 handset won’t arrive until December, according to the latest leaks from the ailing company, with a further keyboard-toting slider tipped for early 2013. After last week’s twin PlayBook tidbits as well as news on new Curves, BGR‘s sources reckon the BlackBerry London will hit in September, but will be followed in December by a combo touch and QWERTY device running the BlackBerry 10 OS and slotting into the Bold series. That will be followed in Q1 2013 by a QWERTY slider, the insiders continue. No information on what, exactly, that device might offer, though it’s worth remembering that RIM was tipped to be readying the Milan, itself a portrait orientation slider, until subsequent leaks claimed the handset had been axed. As for the new PlayBook, the first model is tipped to drop in May or June this year, with a 1.5GHz processor and HSPA+ connectivity good for up to 42Mbps. That’s presumably the 7-inch version from last week’s leak – also believed to have N

As predicted earlier this week by Space officials and reported right here on SlashGear yesterday , the Sun’s newest solar storm has unleashed a lovely coronal mass ejection (CME) outward and towards the Earth, making impact throughout the day today. As was also expected, there appears to be no danger in the radiation storm, believe it or not, despite its terrifying name. What we are looking out for, instead, is a collection of auroras in the night sky – if it’s dark out where you live, look up! NASA also confirmed that there was and is no danger for the astronauts currently aboard the International Space Station as we speak. The CME arrived on Earth at 1500 UT (10 am EST) according to Space Weather, and they’re letting us all know that this could be “a happy day” for aurora watchers everywhere. The chart you’re looking at below is registered at Lofoton, Norway, and shows the CME’s arrival in ground currents outside the laboratory of scientist Rob Stammes. With this and other Sun-relate