Anonymous to hack Malaysia government website

Anonymous to aim at Malaysia Government Website for executing act of censorship on filesharing sites. Video after the break.

Game Over for Incentivized App Downloads

The business model of incentivized app downloads was recently dealt a death sentence by Apple.  Apple said incentivized app downloads were driving inaccurate rankings in the App Store, almost certainly because essentially paying consumers to download apps was a way of gaming a ranking system that used downloads as a key metric.  To be fair, there were many quality apps taking advantage of the loophole in the ranking system, but that era has ended. And so have the days of companies making money hand over fist in the incentivized downloads business, better known in the industry as Cost Per Install or CPI.

So how exactly did it work? Say you’re playing a game that offers you virtual currency; the game might ask you to download an advertised application in exchange for virtual credits within that game. You install the app and get your in-game currency. The app gets a new install and pays for that.  This quickly generates bursts of installs, immediately boosting an app’s ranking in the app store.

Looks like developers need to look for another loophole to gain ranks now.


SOURCE  Tech Crunch

Royal wedding livestream breaks hearts, records

No frogs transformed into princes and no wicked stepmothers were vanquished -- not on camera, at least -- but today's royal wedding managed to capture the world's imagination. Thanks to partnerships with CBS, the Associated Press, UK Press Association, and Entertainment Tonight, the marriage between Prince William and Kate Middleton broke viewing records on Livestream.com, maxing out at 300,000 simultaneous viewers and a total of "at least 2 million" unique users, according to Max Haot, the site's CEO. We reached out to YouTube and Facebook to see how they did on the streaming front, but neither site has a final tally -- though a Facebook spokesperson did tell us that 6,819,072 people have commented on the wedding in the past 24 hours. We don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but we hear News Corp. has secured the rights to the Royal Divorce -- just in case.


VIA  Engadget
SOURCE  Mashable

Formula 1 cars set to go all electric in the pit lane from 2013 onwards, racing purists outraged already

Formula 1, the pinnacle of gas-powered racing, is more often at odds with the eco-conscious electric car movement than in tune with it, but here's an exception to that rule. The FIA, the sport's governing body, announced back in December of last year a move to a hybrid four-cylinder turbocharged engine, which is still on track to be introduced in the 2013 season, and Williams boss Adam Parr has now enlightened us on some of the benefits of the new power setup. Noting that future cars' kinetic energy recovery system will be four times as powerful as on current models, Parr says enough electric juice will be available to power each one-seater through its journey into and out of the pit lane. That would mean that at least for the tame, speed-restricted portions of a race, the F1 gas guzzlers you know and love will be humming along in almost perfect silence while using good old electricity. Unfortunately, it's exactly that lack of vroom vroom that old timers like Bernie Ecclestone and Ferrari chief Luca di Montezemolo are afraid of, describing the new hybrid stuff as sounding "terrible" and insisting on the sport sticking to its V8 roots. Then again, as Parr says, if you don't move with the times, the times leave you behind.


VIA  Engadget, CNET
SOURCE  Reuters

Apple spent nearly $5.7b on Samsung parts in 2010, faces 'strong' response to its patent suit

Want some numerical context to last night's revelation that Apple is suing Samsung Electronics for copying the iPhone and iPad? How does $5.7 billion sound? That's how much Apple spent on buying up parts from Samsung last year, according to the AFP, which cites the Cupertino company as Samsung's second-biggest client after Sony. Given the breadth of Samsung's component manufacturing, these expenditures can and probably do span everything from flash storage and RAM to processing chips to displays. What's fascinating here -- and illustrative of the psychopathic nature of corporations -- is that in spite of this massive interdependency, Apple's lodged a broadly worded patent assault on a major prong of Samsung's business (smartphones and tablets) and now Samsung's been quoted as saying it has "no choice but [to] respond strongly." A company official has apparently expressed the belief that Apple may be infringing on some of Samsung's wireless patents, which means we can probably look forward to another fat batch of papers being submitted to the Northern District of California court. Lovely.


VIA  Engadget
SOURCE  AFP (Yahoo! News)

Apple sues Samsung for 'copying' the iPhone and iPad

Whoa! In the world of big-time lawsuits, this must be just about the biggest. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple has sued Samsung Electronics for copying "the look and feel" of its iPad tablet and iPhone smartphone. This relates to the Samsung Galaxy S 4G, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the iPhone 3G / 3GS models, and the slightly less obvious Epic 4G, Nexus S, and Galaxy Tab (presumably the older 7-inch model, since the newer ones aren't out yet) devices. The claim for intellectual property infringement is phrased as follows:

"Rather than innovate and develop its own technology and a unique Samsung style for its smart phone products and computer tablets, Samsung chose to copy Apple's technology, user interface and innovative style in these infringing products."

The lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of California on Friday and seeks injunctions against Samsung, damages (both actual and punitive), and a finding that the infringement was willful. Lest we forget, the rarest outcome in such legal tussles is for an actual judgment to actually be handed down, so the greatest likelihood is that this will just lead to another round of grudging handshakes and licensing going one way with money going the other way, but still, it's fun to see the big dogs barking at each other.

Another aspect to these proceedings that shouldn't be overlooked is that, on the software front, they boil down to iOS versus Android (again). When Apple calls Samsung uninventive in its user interface, it's talking more about Android's perceived imitation of the iPhone's interface than whatever TouchWiz tweaks Samsung has slapped on top. And hey, if you're going to sue Google indirectly, you can't leave a major player like Samsung outside the courtroom, it just wouldn't be fair.


VIA  Engadget
SOURCE  Wall Street Journal

Intel Z68 chipset to launch May 8

Intel’s new Z68 chipset is set to debut on May 8, just in time to commemorate VE Day.

The new chipset is designed with high-end Sandy Bridge processors in mind and it will deliver a few features lacking on P67 and H67 products. The Z68 should deliver improved overclocking performance, as well as support for RST SSD caching and a host of other features geared towards the premium markets. 

Basically, Z68 will be the chipset of choice for Sandy Bridge processors and best of all, it shouldn’t end up much pricier than existing 67-series boards.

Apple reportedly hires top UK gaming PR execs from Nintendo and Activision

As you may have noticed, Apple has been more serious about gaming lately that it was even during its Pippin-fueled haze in the mid-1990s, and it's now offering yet more evidence of just how invested it is with a pair of new hires. While the company isn't confirming the move just yet, MCV is reporting that Apple has snatched up Nintendo UK's former head of communications, Rob Saunders, who just left the big N last week and will apparently be focusing on PR for iOS apps at Apple. What's more, he'll reportedly be joined at Apple by former Activision PR director Nick Grange, who's said to be focusing specifically on the iPad -- which, as we've seen, can be a pretty versatile gaming device in its own right.


 VIA  Apple Insider, Engadget
 SOURCE  MCV UK

Nanoparticles successfully take down MRSA bacteria

Traditional antibiotics like doxycyclin and vancomycin—the kind that many bacteria can now resist because of their overuse—work by getting inside the bacterial cell and interfering with essential cellular processes. Charged peptides have been proposed as alternatives, since they work by electrostatically interacting with the negatively charged bacterial cell wall, poking holes in the bacterial cell membrane and thereby killing the bacteria.

Nederberg et al. made charged polymers out of cyclic carbonates, which are nontoxic and biodegradable. Their degradation produces alcohol and carbon dioxide, and they degrade slowly, so they have prolonged antimicrobial functions inside the body and long shelf-lives outside of it. Because of their amphiphilic nature—they have a positively charged region, which is hydrophilic, but also a hydrophobic region—these nanoparticles spontaneously form small spheres in water, so they can hide their hydrophobic parts inside.

The nanostructures were effective against Gram-positive bacteria, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and the fungus Cryptococcus neoformans, and had an efficiency comparable to that of conventional antimicrobials at their best, all while leaving red blood cells alone.

When injected into mice, the antimicrobial nanoparticles did not exhibit any significant toxicity over the test period, which lasted for fourteen days. It's not yet exactly the nanotechnological immunomodulation described by Neal Stephenson in The Diamond Age… but it's getting close.


VIA  Arstechnica
SOURCE  Nature

Symbian Is No Longer Open Source

Nokia recently clarified via a blog post the status of Symbian's code. Though Symbian was an open source platform in the past, it no longer is. That doesn't change the fact that it continues to be available under license to hardware makers and software developers so that new products can be brought to market. Nokia said it will continue to work with its OEM and developer partners, but those parties will no longer be able to contribute back to the Symbian source code. Nokia said, "The Nokia Symbian License is an alternative license which provides an access to Nokia’s additional Symbian development for parties which collaborate with Nokia on the Symbian platform."


VIA Phonescoop
SOURCE Nokia

Sony's Jack Tretton says Nintendo makes 'babysitting tools'

Sony does what Nintendon't? That's the general sentiment from a brief interview that PlayStation chief Jack Tretton gave to Fortune this week, in which he talked up Sony's strengths and played down (some may even say belittled) its competitors, and Nintendo in particular. That began with the relatively tame assertion that Sony's decision to go high-end with PlayStation 3 is just now beginning to pay off while the other consoles are "starting to run out of steam," before he took aim at Nintendo's handheld business. According to Tretton, Nintendo's handhelds all offer what he calls a "Game Boy experience," something that's great as a "babysitting tool," but that "no self-respecting twenty-something is going to be sitting on an airplane with one of those."


VIA  Engadget
SOURCE  Fortune

NASA's Aquarius Taste Seawater For You

NASA's Aquarius instrument will soon embark on its space mission to "taste" Earth's salty ocean. The Aquarius instrument, set to measure the ocean's surface salinity, recently made the trip from São José dos Campos, Brazil, to California's Vandenberg Air Force Base for final integration and testing before its scheduled launch on June 9. Aquarius will map the concentration of dissolved salt at the ocean's surface, information that scientists will use to study the ocean's role in the global water cycle and how this is linked to ocean currents and climate.


SOURCE  NASA

IBM shows smallest, fastest 155GHz graphene processor

IBM demonstrated its fastest graphene transistor, which can execute 155 billion cycles per second, which is about 50% faster than previous experimental transistors shown by the company's researchers.

The transistor has a cut-off frequency of 155GHz, making it faster and more capable than the 100GHz graphene transistor shown by IBM in February last year, said Yu-Ming Lin, an IBM researcher.

What's more, the thing is also IBM's smallest to date, with a gate length of 40 nanometers; that's 200 nanometers less than the 100GHz iteration. This smaller, faster transistor was produced as part of a DARPA research project that aims to develop high-performance RF (radio frequency) transistors.

We won't be seeing these in our personal computer anytime soon but might be operating war machines of the future.


VIA  Computerworld
SOURCE  Engadget

HTC breaks its own sales and profit records, keeps riding the smartphone wave to success

Another quarter, another spectacular set of financial results for HTC. The once-small Taiwanese phone maker reports its net income for the first quarter of 2011 nearly tripled earnings in the same period of 2010, now totaling an impressive $513 million. Overall quarterly revenue was in the vicinity of $3.6 billion and the causes cited were, rather predictably, demand for Android smartphones and higher-speed internet connectivity (as provided by the likes of the EVO 4G and Thunderbolt). Guess now we know why the stock markets are loving HTC so much -- the company just can't stop growing!


SOURCE  Engadget

Full specs leak for BlackBerry Bold Touch

We understand that it's hard to take two steps rather than one, but a solid list of specifications isn't going to make the BlackBerry Bold Touch (Dakota) look any less last-decade. For whatever reason, RIM's design department seems to be stuck in an era where last-generation is the new next-generation, while it's internals team has seemingly managed to escape.