Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts

Kuwait says backs free speech but must protect ruling emir






KUWAIT (Reuters) – Kuwait supports free speech but must act against illegal comments made about the Gulf state’s ruler, the government said on Monday, after a Twitter user was jailed for five years.


A Kuwaiti court sentenced a man to prison on Sunday for insulting the emir on the social networking site, a rights lawyer and news websites said, in the latest prosecution for criticism of authorities via social media.






“Kuwait has a longstanding proud tradition of open debate and free speech,” the Ministry of Information, which regulates the media, said in a statement to Reuters addressing the case.


“We are a country led by the rule of law and our constitution holds our Emir to be inviolable. If our citizens wish to amend the constitution there is a straightforward legal way to do this, but we will not selectively enforce our laws.”


In recent months Kuwait has penalized several Twitter users for criticizing the emir, who is described as “immune and inviolable” in the constitution.


Kuwait allows the most dissent in the Gulf Arab region and boasts a lively press and critical political debate. But the U.S. ally and OPEC member has been clamping down on politically sensitive comments aired on the internet in recent months.


Twitter is extremely popular in the country of 3.7 million inhabitants and well-known figures can have hundreds of thousands of followers.


In January, a court sentenced two men in separate cases to jail time for insulting the emir on Twitter.


In June last year, a man was sentenced to 10 years in prison after he was convicted of endangering state security by insulting the Prophet Mohammad and the Sunni Muslim rulers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain on social media.


Two months later, authorities detained a member of the ruling family over remarks on Twitter in which he accused authorities of corruption and called for political reform.


Kuwait has avoided the kind of mass unrest that has spread across the Arab region in the past two years but in 2012 tension escalated between authorities and opposition groups ahead of a parliamentary election.


(Reporting by Sylvia Westall; Editing by Mark Heinrich)


Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Kuwaiti gets five years for insulting ruler






KUWAIT (Reuters) – A Kuwaiti court sentenced a man to five years in prison on Sunday for insulting the emir on Twitter, a rights lawyer and news websites said, in the latest prosecution for criticism of authorities via social media in the Gulf Arab state.


The court gave Kuwaiti Mohammad Eid al-Ajmi the maximum sentence for the comments, news websites al-Rai and alaan.cc reported.






In recent months Kuwait has penalized several Twitter users for criticizing the emir, who is described as “immune and inviolable” in the constitution.


“We call on the government to expand freedoms and adhere to the international (human rights) conventions it has signed,” said lawyer Mohammad al-Humaidi, director of the Kuwait Society for Human Rights, commenting on the case.


Courts in Kuwait generally do not comment to the media.


Amnesty International said in November Kuwait had increased restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly.


It urged Kuwait to ensure protection for users of social media, whether they supported or opposed the government, as long as they did not incite racial hatred or violence.


Kuwait, a U.S. ally and major oil producer, has been taking a firmer line on politically sensitive comments aired on the internet. Twitter is extremely popular in the country of 3.7 million.


In January, a court sentenced two men in separate cases to jail time for insulting the emir on Twitter.


In June 2012, a man was sentenced to 10 years in prison after he was convicted of endangering state security by insulting the Prophet Mohammad and the Sunni Muslim rulers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain on social media.


Two months later, authorities detained Sheikh Meshaal al-Malik Al-Sabah, a member of the ruling family, over remarks on Twitter in which he accused authorities of corruption and called for political reform.


The recent Twitter cases have been carried out under the state security law and penal code. Last year Kuwait passed new legislation aimed at regulating social media.


Public demonstrations and debates about local issues are common in a state that allows the most dissent in the Gulf, but Kuwait has avoided the kind of mass unrest that unseated four heads of Arab states in 2011.


But tensions intensified between authorities and opposition groups last year ahead of a parliamentary election deemed unfair by opposition politicians and activists.


The opposition movement said new voting rules introduced by Sheikh Sabah by emergency decree in October would skew the December 1 election in favor of pro-government candidates. The emir said the old voting system was flawed and that his changes were constitutional and necessary for Kuwait’s “security and stability”.


(Reporting by Ahmed Hagagy, Writing by Sylvia Westall; editing by Sami Aboudi and Andrew Roche)


Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Twitter, Washington Post targeted by hackers






SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Social media giant Twitter is among the latest U.S. companies to acknowledge that it is among a growing list of victims of Internet security attacks, saying that hackers may have gained access to information on 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users. And now, The Washington Post is joining the chorus, saying that it discovered that it was the target of a sophisticated cyberattack in 2011.


Twitter said a blog post on Friday it detected attempts to gain access to its user data earlier in the week. It shut down one attack moments after it was detected.






But Twitter discovered that the attackers may have stolen user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords belonging to 250,000 users they describe as ‘a very small percentage of our users.”


Nonetheless, the company reset the pilfered passwords and sent emails advising the affected users.


The online attack comes on the heels of recent hacks into the computer systems of U.S. media and technology companies, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Both American newspapers reported this week that their computer systems had been infiltrated by China-based hackers, likely to monitor media coverage the Chinese government deems important.


On Friday, The Washington Post disclosed in an article published on its website that it was the target of a sophisticated cyberattack, which was discovered in 2011. The company’s spokeswoman, Kris Coratti, didn’t offer any details including the duration of the attack or the origins. But according to sources that the paper quoted, who it said spoke on condition of anonymity, the intruders gained access as early as 2008 or 2009.


The cyberattack was first reported by an independent cybersecurity blog on Friday.


“Like other companies in the news recently, we face cybersecurity threats,” Coratti was quoted as saying. “We have a number of security measures in place to guard against cyberattacks on an ongoing basis.”


According to Coratti’s comments made to the newspaper, the company worked with security company Mandiant to “detect, investigate and remediate the situation promptly at the end of 2011.”


Coratti couldn’t be reached immediately for comment by The Associated Press.


China has been accused of mounting a widespread, aggressive cyber-spying campaign for several years, trying to steal classified information and corporate secrets and to intimidate critics. The Chinese foreign ministry could not be reached for comment Saturday, but the Chinese government has said those accusations are baseless and that China itself is a victim of cyber-attacks.


“Chinese law forbids hacking and any other actions that damage Internet security,” the Chinese Defense Ministry recently said. “The Chinese military has never supported any hacking activities.”


Twitter’s director of information security, Bob Lord, said in the blog that the attack “was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident.”


“The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked,” Lord said. “For that reason we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users.”


One expert said that the Twitter hack probably happened after an employee’s home or work computer was compromised through vulnerabilities in Java, a commonly used computing language whose weaknesses have been well publicized.


Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher, said such a move would give attackers “a toehold” in Twitter’s internal network, potentially allowing them either to sniff out user information as it traveled across the company’s system or break into specific areas, such as the authentication servers that process users’ passwords.


The relatively small number of users affected suggested either that attackers weren’t on the network long or that they were only able to compromise a subset of the company’s servers, Soltani said.


Twitter is generally used to broadcast messages to the public, so the hacking might not immediately have yielded any important secrets. But the stolen credentials could be used to eavesdrop on private messages or track which Internet address a user is posting from.


That might be useful, for example, for an authoritarian regime trying to keep tabs on a journalist’s movements.


“More realistically, someone could use that as an entry point into another service,” Soltani said, noting that since few people bother using different passwords for different services, a password stolen from Twitter might be just as handy for reading a journalist’s emails.


___


AP reporters Anne D’Innocenzio in New York, Raphael Satter in London and Didi Tang in Beijing contributed to this report.


Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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This Week’s Social Media Power Rankings: The Return of Swatch






The social media sphere is an increasingly noisy place, especially for brands. But hiding somewhere in the static are strong signals from companies reaching their customers in innovative ways. The Social Business Index from the Dachis Group provides a (free) real-time ranking of more than 30,000 global brands based on their social performance. Every week we’re taking a tally of who’s getting heard, what they’re saying, and why it matters.


RELATED: This Week’s Social Media Power Rankings: Cisco Has a Warrior






As you can see, there wasn’t much movement in the top 10. But if you look at number 17, you’ll see Diageo had the biggest jump this week. If that name doesn’t sound familiar, it’s the company that owns more familiar brands like Guiness, Johnnie Walker and Ketel One. So props to them and our livers—now let’s look at what happened outside the top 20:


RELATED: This Week’s Social Media Power Rankings: Cheers to Heineken


Cisco’s rise in the Social Business Index this week was supported by the social efforts behind ‘the world’s largest classroom.’” Lizzie Steen of the Dachis Group told us. What she’s referring to is the  The Cisco Networking Academy— a public/private program that provides technology and career education to more than four million students across 10,000 academies in 165 countries.  And that sounds serious, but as Steen points out, part of its success is there’s an emphasis on fun. Steen writes: 



Two engineers, Ian and Dan, set up two servers and decorated them with flower lights while studying for their certification from Cisco. The photo received more than 1,200 likes and 186 shares from the the site’s 460 thousand fans.  Overall, the CNA page has balanced a dense subject matter with a collaborative and fun posts, making the learning process more global and human.



Swatch proved that it’s never too early to start prepping for Valentine’s Day.  As the Dachis Group’s Joe Pinaire points out, their very popular True Love (has nothing to hide) campaign and its new A la Folie watch contributed to Swatch’s boost this week. “From Taiwan to Chile, the brand has leveraged countless regional Facebook presences to let their fans know the clock is ticking on the seasonal special,” Pinaire told us. “And fans have taken to this messaging, as the brand’s bevy of original and creative photo content has garnered love from around the globe,” he added. That photo content was specified and regionalized for their fans,  featuring pictures of a Spanish store floor redesign promoting the watch and the watch thriving in the hustle of Vienna city-life and the new O’Hare airport store. “Swatch also launched a Twitter contest using their global handle (@swatch), encouraging Belgian, Dutch, English, Spanish, and Swiss fans to declare their #TrueLove (because it has nothing to hide–right?) in exchange for a chance to win the seasonal watch and a travel voucher.” And if there’s something people love more than Valentine’s Day, it’s a free contest.


cfd3c  20130125 SBIpanels Intel This Weeks Social Media Power Rankings: The Return of Swatch


So, no cheating, but do you know how many Facebook fans Intel and its Ultrabooks have? Over 16.5 million. That also means a lot of social media juice. “Last week, the Ultrabook took in the sights in New York City and Paris. In New York, an Ultrabook posed within view of the inimitable Empire State Building with the caption, ‘Empire State of Mind’, showing off its amazing form factor and the Intel i7 chip that powers it,” the Dachis Group’s Charles Lim told us.  The photo generated more than 130 thousand likes, 1,600 comments and six thousand shares—it’s a photo of a computer people.  Lim explains:



Like car lovers, electronics enthusiasts react positively to photos of gear that they already own or would like to own. This is because electronics, like cars, are aspirational and functional and inspire lust and passion.  It also helped that the photo was a shout-out to the cultural hub of America.  …


These posts are well tuned to a global brand campaign that appeals the traveler, gets local voices involved, inspires contests and instills the notion that the Ultrabook can go anywhere you go.



Methodology: A project of the Dachis Group, a social business professional services group, the Social Business Index analyzes the conversations on social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and others. The index, which currently covers approximately 25,0000 companies and 27,000 brands, detects behaviors and activities exhibited by these companies and analyzes their execution and effectiveness at driving outcomes such as brand awareness, brand love, mind share, and advocacy. The Atlantic Wire takes a snapshot of the rankings at the end of the day on Sundays.


Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Apple loses a U.S. appeals bid in Samsung patent fight






SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Thursday rejected Apple Inc‘s request to revive its bid for a sales ban on Samsung‘s Galaxy Nexus smartphone, dashing the iPhone maker’s attempt to recover crucial leverage in the global patent wars.


Apple had asked the full Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., to revisit a decision in October by a three-judge panel of the same court. The panel rejected Apple’s request to impose a sales ban on Samsung’s Nexus smartphone ahead of a trial set for March 2014.






An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment. A Samsung representative could not immediately be reached.


The fight in appeals court comes after Apple won a $ 1.05 billion verdict last year against Samsung in a U.S. District Court in California. The same trial judge will preside over the legal battle surrounding the Nexus phone, which involves a patent not included in the earlier trial.


The fight has been widely viewed as a proxy war between Apple and Google Inc. Samsung’s hot-selling Galaxy smartphones and tablets run on Google’s Android operating system, which Apple’s late co-founder, Steve Jobs, once denounced as a “stolen product.”


In its October ruling against Apple, the appeals court raised the bar for potentially market-crippling injunctions on product sales based on narrow patents for phone features. The legal precedent puts Samsung in a much stronger position by allowing its products to remain on store shelves while it fights a global patent battle against Apple over smartphone technology.


U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh, in San Jose, California, who has presided over much of the Apple/Samsung litigation in the United States, cited the appeals’ court decision in a December order rejecting Apple’s request for permanent sales bans on several Samsung phones. Apple has appealed Koh’s ruling.


Apple wanted the full Federal Circuit of Appeals, made up of nine active judges, to reverse the earlier ruling. But in a brief order on Thursday, the court rejected Apple’s request without detailed explanation or any published dissents.


Several experts had believed that Apple faced long odds, as the legal issues in play were not considered controversial enough to spur full court review.


Apple could still appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. However, the high court has made it more difficult for patent plaintiffs to secure sales injunctions in recent years.


The case in the Federal Circuit is Apple Inc. vs Samsung Electronics Co Ltd et al, 12-1507.


(Reporting By Dan Levine; Editing by John Wallace, Grant McCool and Leslie Adler)


Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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The Z10 is a good first step, but BlackBerry still has to fix its app problem






BlackBerry, a.k.a., the Company Formerly Known as RIM, made good with its first two BlackBerry 10 smartphones on Wednesday. While the new devices are far from perfect, they will at the very least make long-suffering BlackBerry fans very happy and should provide a needed boost to a company in desperate need of growth. That said, BlackBerry still has a major problem that it will have to fix if it ever hopes to lure Android and iOS users away from their devices — it needs to improve the quality of apps that are available on its platform.


[More from BGR: BlackBerry Z10 review]






BlackBerry has done its best to spin its app situation as a positive, touting the roughly 70,000 apps that will be available for BlackBerry 10 at its launch. This number sounds impressive until you realize that the vast majority of these apps are ported from Android or from the BlackBerry Playbook. Even worse for the company, earlier reviews have indicated that many of these apps don’t at all function well, especially since a good portion of them were ported over from Android 2.3 Gingerbread or earlier.


[More from BGR: BlackBerry Q10 preview]


This is obviously not a sustainable situation for BlackBerry in the long term, and to the company’s credit it did announce some very important apps that are being developed directly for the BlackBerry 10 platform, including Skype, WhatsApp and the Angry Birds franchise. But there is a glaring absence that should give pause to anyone feeling optimistic about the platform’s ability to attract top developers in the future: Instagram.


Yes, Instagram is just one app, but it’s also one of the most popular in the world and it’s owned by Facebook (FB), the social networking giant that BlackBerry supposedly has a close partnership with. If BlackBerry can’t convince one of its close partners to develop an app that’s ready in time for its big platform launch, then it really calls into question how much clout the company will have with smaller developers that may not have the resources to build for more than two platforms.


And BlackBerry’s ability to attract the smaller developers is crucial to its future success because we’ve all seen mobile apps that come out of nowhere on iOS and Android and suddenly take the world by storm. If BlackBerry is constantly rushing around trying to get upstart app developers to make native BlackBerry 10 apps months after those developers have hit it big on other platforms, it will put the company at a perpetual disadvantage. This is a problem that BlackBerry desperately needs to fix by the time its next smartphones roll out.


This article was originally published on BGR.com


Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News




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Apple announces iPad with double storage capacity






(Reuters) – Apple Inc said on Tuesday that it will sell a version of its iPad tablet computer with 128 gigabytes of storage, which is twice the capacity of its existing models.


Apple, which has sold more than 120 million iPads so far, said that the new iPad will go on sale February 5, in black or white, for a suggested retail price of $ 799 for the iPad with just Wi-Fi model, and $ 929 for the version that also has a cellular wireless connection.






(Reporting By Sinead Carew; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)


Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Crucial, long-overdue BlackBerry makeover arrives






TORONTO (AP) — The maker of the BlackBerry smartphone is promising a speedy browser, a superb typing experience and the ability to keep work and personal identities separate on the same phone, the fruit of a crucial, long-overdue makeover for the Canadian company.


Thorsten Heins, chief executive of Research In Motion Ltd., will reveal the first phone with the new BlackBerry 10 system in New York on Wednesday. Repeated delays have left the once-pioneering BlackBerry an afterthought in the shadow of Apple’s trend-setting iPhone and Google’s Android-driven devices.






Now, there’s some optimism. Previews of the software have gotten favorable reviews on blogs. Financial analysts are starting to see some slight room for a comeback. RIM‘s stock has nearly tripled to about $ 16.30 from a nine-year low in September, though it’s still nearly 90 percent below its 2008 peak of $ 147.


Most analysts consider a BlackBerry 10 success to be crucial for the company’s long-term viability.


“The old models are becoming obsolete quickly,” BGC Financial analyst Colin Gillis said. “There is still a big user base but it’s going to rotate off. The question is: Where do they rotate to?”


The BlackBerry, pioneered in 1999, has been the dominant smartphone for on-the-go business people. Corporate information-technology managers like the phones because they’re relatively secure and easy to manage.


The BlackBerry has also crossed over to consumers. President Barack Obama couldn’t bear to part with it when he took office. Oprah Winfrey declared it one of her “favorite things.” People got so addicted that the device was nicknamed “the CrackBerry.”


But when the iPhone came out in 2007, it showed that phones can do much more than email and phone calls. They can play games, music and movies. Android came along to offer even more choices. Though IT managers still love BlackBerrys, employees were bringing their own devices to the workplace — a trend Heins acknowledged RIM was slow to adapt to.


Suddenly, the BlackBerry looked ancient.


Even as BlackBerry sales continued to grow in many parts of the world, many BlackBerry users in North America switched to iPhones and Android devices. BlackBerry’s worldwide subscriber based peaked at 80 million in the quarter that ended Sept. 1, before dropping to 79 million in the most-recent quarter. In the U.S., according to research firm IDC, shipments of BlackBerry phones plummeted from 46 percent of the market in 2008 to 2 percent in 2012.


RIM promised a new system to catch up, using technology it got through its 2010 purchase of QNX Software Systems. RIM initially said BlackBerry 10 would come by early 2012, but then the company changed that to late 2012. A few months later, that date was pushed further, to early 2013, missing the lucrative holiday season. The holdup helped wipe out more than $ 70 billion in shareholder wealth and 5,000 jobs.


Although executives have been providing a glimpse at some of BlackBerry 10′s new features for months, Heins will finally showcase a complete system at Wednesday’s event. Devices will go on sale soon after that.


RIM redesigned the system to embrace the multimedia, apps and touch-screen experience prevalent today.


“Historically there have been areas that have not been our strongest points,” Rick Costanzo, RIM’s executive vice president of global sales, said in an interview. “Not only have we caught up, but we may even be better than some of the competition now.”


Costanzo said “no one else can touch” what RIM’s new system offers.


The new operating system promises better multitasking than either the iPhone or Android. Simply swipe a finger across the phone’s display screen to switch to another program.


All emails and notifications from such applications as Twitter and Facebook go to the BlackBerry Hub, a nerve center accessible with a finger swipe even if you have another application open. One can peek into it and open an email, or return to the previous application without opening the email.


“You are not going in and out of applications; you’re flowing through applications with one simple gesture of your finger,” Costanzo said. “You can leave applications running. You can effortlessly flow between them. So that’s completely unique to us.”


That said, multitasking will be limited and won’t allow for extensive use of apps side by side, as is typically permitted on traditional computers. If you’re watching a video, it will still run while you check for email. But it will pause if you decide to open an email and resume when you are done.


The BlackBerry’s touch-screen keyboard promises to learn a user’s writing style and suggest words and phrases to complete, going beyond typo corrections offered by rivals. See the one you want, and flick it up to the message area. Costanzo said that “BlackBerry offers the best keyboard, period.”


Gus Papageorgiou, a Scotiabank financial analyst who has tried it out, agreed with that assessment and said the keyboard even learns and adjusts to your thumb placements.


The first BlackBerry 10 phone will have only a touch screen. RIM has said it will release a version with a physical keyboard soon after that. That’s an area RIM has excelled at, and it’s one reason many BlackBerry users have remained loyal despite temptations to switch.


Another distinguishing feature will be the BlackBerry Balance, which allows two personas on the same device. Businesses can keep their data secure without forcing employees to get a second device for personal use. For instance, IT managers can prevent personal apps from running inside corporate firewalls, but those managers won’t have access to personal data on the device.


With Balance, “you can just switch from work to personal mode,” Papageorgiou said. “I think that is something that will attract a lot of people.”


RIM is also claiming that the BlackBerry 10′s browser will be speedy, even faster than browsers for laptop and desktop computers. According to Papageorgiou, early, independent tests between the BlackBerry 10 and the iPhone support that claim.


Regardless of BlackBerry 10′s advances, though, the new system will face a key shortcoming: It won’t have as many apps written by outside companies and individuals as the iPhone and Android. RIM has said it plans to launch BlackBerry 10 with more than 70,000 apps, including those developed for RIM’s PlayBook tablet, first released in 2011. Even so, that’s just a tenth of what the iPhone and Android offer. Papageorgiou said the initial group will include the most popular ones such as Twitter and Facebook. But RIM will have to persuade others to make a BlackBerry version, when they are already struggling to keep up with both the iPhone and Android.


Like many analysts, Papageorgiou recently upgraded RIM’s stock, but cautions that longtime BlackBerry users will have to get used to a whole new operating system.


He said RIM can be successful if about a third of current subscribers upgrade and if the company can get 4 million new users overseas, especially in countries where the BlackBerry has remained popular. IDC said smartphone shipments grew 44 percent in 2012. If those trends continue, it will be possible for the BlackBerry to grow even if iPhone and Android users don’t switch.


“This doesn’t have to be the best smartphone on the planet to be a success for RIM,” he said. “I think the big question though is, if it fails, is it just too late? Are the other two ecosystems just so advanced that no one can catch up? That’s a big risk.”


Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Smartphone pioneer RIM looks to put recent hardships behind it with BB10






TORONTO, Cananda – Once a leader but now derided as a laggard, BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion hopes to regain the confidence of cynical smartphone users this week as the curtain is lifted on its much-anticipated new smartphones.


The stakes are high for the unveiling, which many observers say will determine whether RIM survives to see the launch of another BlackBerry smartphone.






It has been a steep decline for RIM, which less than five years ago was the most valuable company in Canada, above Royal Bank (TSX:RY). Affectionately called the “CrackBerry” maker, the mobile communications pioneer was Canada’s crowning achievement of the technology sector.


Back in 1984, the year RIM was founded, it was practically unimaginable that a tiny startup based in Waterloo, Ont. would help change the way we communicate, but for fresh engineering graduates Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin that was always the plan.


“Like so many of these guys Lazaridis was a Star Trek lunatic,” said Alastair Sweeny, author of “BlackBerry Planet.”


“He says it’s almost like telepathy — humans have a yearning to communicate.”


The beginnings were humble for the two founders, with the majority of their time dedicated to Budgie, an LED sign business that was contracted by General Motors to communicate messages to workers on its assembly lines. Despite early interest, the project was a sales flop and RIM‘s owners decided to sell the business and look at other ventures.


One of those projects put RIM squarely in the eyes of Hollywood. The DigiSync film reader caught on with movie editors because its synching technology shaved hours off the time it took to turn miles of film into useable content in post-production. While the technology went on to win RIM both an Emmy and a technical achievement from the Academy Awards, it was never a top priority for RIM‘s founders.


Lazaridis was always into security,” said Sweeny. “He realized that corporations needed secure communications because of industrial espionage, because of hacking.”


Throughout the late 1980s, RIM was working alongside other industry players to develop technology that would eventually be used in pagers and wireless payment processing systems. By the start of the 1990s, the wheels were turning on the communication systems that would become the foundation of the BlackBerry.


An agreement with Ericcson’s Mobitex wireless network allowed RIM to create pagers that operated as a two-way communicators, a revolutionary concept for data transfer.


Turning the idea into a marketable product was a bigger challenge. The world had yet to become accustomed to the Internet age and most people hadn’t heard of email, nevermind used it. While the project was a bust with its first partner Cantel, RIM forged ahead.


The technology captured the attention and imaginations of an industry, and perhaps most importantly Jim Balsillie, an energetic Harvard graduate who, at the age of 33, invested $ 250,000 of his own money into the company by re-mortgaging his house.


In 1996, RIM launched its first sales success, a clamshell wireless handheld device called the RIM 900 Interactive Pager. It was a two-way communicator that also had the ability to send faxes, as well as link to the Internet and email.


But Lazaridis discovered that the email feature, which he believed was one of the strongest qualities of the device, wasn’t being used by most customers. So he hired Lexicon Branding, based in California, to find a way to draw more attention to its keyboard, the main feature that differentiated it from other pagers.


Branding executives pondered the device, focusing mainly on its appearance, and when one of them pointed out the little keypad looked like similar to the seeds of a strawberry, the conversation zeroed in on the names of fruits and vegetables. Eventually, the group settled on “BlackBerry” because it was both punchy and remained true to the device’s original black casing.


The company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 1997, raising more than $ 115 million, and debuted the first BlackBerry the following year.


From there it seemed the sky was the limit.


Suddenly the BlackBerry was everywhere in the technology community, thrust into the spotlight by the enthusiastic co-CEO Balsillie who touted the device on Wall Street and handed it out for free at select technology conferences. Balsillie knew how to build buzz and proudly tapped away on the BlackBerry whenever he appeared before the media.


A demand had been created, and subscribers to the BlackBerry services continued to grow in leaps and bounds. In 1999, RIM listed on the Nasdaq, raising another US$ 250 million.


The success grabbed the attention of Virginia-based NTP Inc. which filed a lawsuit claiming that RIM‘s network infringed on its patents. While NTP won the case, and the courts ordered RIM to pay US$ 23.1 million, the battle continued in appeals courts for years before a settlement was reached for a much heftier $ 612.5 million.


Outside the courtrooms the BlackBerry was a massive success, garnering headlines when its enterprise network remained intact after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 when other wireless phone systems broke down.


The BlackBerry’s reputation was growing at a steady clip, helped by the introduction of cellphone service in 2002 on what had been a text-only device. Within two years, BlackBerry reached more than 1 million subscribers.


The smartphone was in demand at corporate offices around the world, and soon the more casual consumer began to take notice, helping to boost its subscribers to nine million by 2007. RIM also secured a distribution deal in China, driving its stock to a level that made it the most valuable Canadian company.


But amid all of the success a storm of competition was brewing in the tech industry.


In June 2007, Apple unleashed the first iPhone touchscreen device onto the U.S. market, garnering widespread praise from critics and consumers, but hardly rattling its competitors.


Microsoft’s chief executive Steve Ballmer famously dismissed the touchscreen device that year, saying “there’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.”


Whether it was a strategic decision or simply coincidence, Apple kept its iPhone far away from the Canadian marketplace for nearly a year, choosing to launch in six other countries first.


The lower profile with Canadian consumers also seemed to minimize the concern from RIM’s executives, who publicly downplayed the influence of the iPhone in an already crowded mobile phone market.


“They just missed it,” said Carl Howe, vice-president of consumer research at Yankee Group.


“They missed the idea that you could create a really good experience without having a keyboard. They gave Apple a two-year head start.”


By the time the iPhone hit Canadian shelves, RIM was facing scrutiny from analysts who worried that the growing number competitors, which now also included Google’s Android system, would devour marketshare.


RIM went on the defensive in 2008, releasing a combination keypad and touchscreen device it called the Storm, but the phone was swept up in a flurry of other BlackBerry releases that year. Much of the marketing clout was put behind the debut of a high-end BlackBerry Bold, which wasn’t a touchscreen.


“A lot of tech companies have their heads in the sand,” said Howe of the co-CEOs.


“It’s not that they’re stupid, and I think that’s an important point. People who get hit by ‘innovator’s dilemma’ are not stupid … I think when you create something from scratch and turn it into a multi-billion dollar business you’re very reluctant to say ‘I’m now going to throw away everything I’ve learned and do something different.’ “


At the height of its hype, the BlackBerry device was splashed across television shows and movies, while then-presidential candidate Barack Obama proclaimed he was a BlackBerry faithful during his campaign.


As competition heated up with Apple, investors became concerned that RIM’s co-CEOs, in particular Balsillie, were distracted by the possibilities that success brought them, rather than focused on revamping the BlackBerry for a new era.


In 2009, Balsillie launched his third, and most aggressive, attempt to buy an National Hockey League team, with hopes that he could convince the NHL to move the Phoenix Coyotes to Hamilton. The battle dragged on for months before Balsillie abandoned his dream once again.


Back in Waterloo a storm was brewing as technical problems began to wreak havoc on the company’s network infrastructure.


There were two network outages in less than a year that left BlackBerry users temporarily without their services. Some industry observers suggested the company could buckle under its own success. BlackBerry sales were soaring, even with the technical problems, with subscriber growth up 70 per cent to 36 million by the end of 2009. RIM’s leaders reassured users that the outages were a fluke and wouldn’t be a reoccurring problem.


Despite the setbacks, the BlackBerry image appeared to emerge unscathed. In April 2010 it cracked the Top Five mobile phone carriers worldwide and soon afterwards Queen Elizabeth made a visit to RIM’s headquarters in Waterloo.


Behind the scenes there was unrest among the company’s board of directors as the leaders clashed over where the BlackBerry brand should go next. Rumours swirled around the industry that trouble was afoot.


Fanfare eventually gave way to the realities of competition, with the first major blow coming from the failed launch of the PlayBook, RIM’s answer to Apple’s iPad. In September 2010, the co-CEOs showcased the new product for the public but waited another six months before unleashing it to stores.


By then it was too late, the tablet market had already been cornered by Apple and reviews of the PlayBook harshly criticized its lack of connectivity to popular BlackBerry functions like email and instant messenger.


Within months the foundation of RIM started to crumble as it repeatedly missed its own revenue and earnings targets. In June 2011, the company slashed 11 per cent of its workforce, or 2,000 jobs, to keep its cost in line.


A stark reminder of its fragility came in October 2011 when a worldwide four-day outage left BlackBerry users again without the use of the device they had come to rely on. The smartphones wouldn’t connect to the Internet, email or its messaging services.


The anger from its loyal users was heard loud and clear, and Lazaridis emerged from days of silence to apologize and tell users the company had let them down.


In an earnings call several weeks later, Lazaridis urged investor “patience and confidence” as the executives tried to improve performance. Both he and Balsillie, two of the company’s biggest shareholders, reduced their salaries to $ 1.


Again, it was a decision made too late — the outage had cost RIM more than $ 50 million in revenue and tarnished its reputation. In December 2011, the company reported that profits tumbled more than 70 per cent, affected by a big charge from sales discounts it was forced make on PlayBook tablets.


Perhaps an even bigger blow to RIM’s reputation was the delay of its next-generation BlackBerrys, pushing the planned release into 2012. The phones — which were delayed again throughout last year and will be unveiled this Wednesday — were seen as the company’s best hope to maintain market share against Apple and Android devices.


The company stock had tumbled from its lofty height of $ 137.41 on the Toronto Stock Exchange in mid-2008 to $ 14.80 at the end of 2011.


RIM, once a symbol of Canadian success and innovation, had become awash in its own troubles. Apple’s iPhone had cornered the rapidly developing apps market while RIM sat on the sidelines with developers.


Sweeny recalls visiting a group of developers, who he considered BlackBerry fanatics, while doing research for his book in 2008.


“They were writing great games and programs for the BlackBerry and they couldn’t get the latest hardware from RIM to test them on,” he said.


“I called them a couple years later and they weren’t writing for BlackBerry at all. They were writing programs for Apple and starting to write for Android.”


From an outsider’s perspective, it’s often suggested that the co-CEOs lost control of their empire, but some industry watchers say that RIM saw the troubles several years earlier.


“In this market you can’t admit that you’re behind,” said Tim Long, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets.


“You have to put on the face because once you start to lose momentum that can shift the buying patterns.”


Numerous acquisitions were made by RIM throughout 2010 and 2011 to beef up its stable of technology, Long said. That included Ottawa-based QNX Software Systems, whose technology became the basis of the new operating system, and Astonishing Tribe, the Swedish company that helped develop an early user interface of the Android operating system.


But the acquisitions came too late, and by late 2011 some investors were calling for its leaders to resign.


Bowing to pressure, Balsillie and Lazaridis stepped down from their co-CEO positions in January 2012, pocketing a combined $ 12 million in the process. The duo were replaced by Thorsten Heins, RIM’s former chief operating officer, and hardly two months later Balsillie had left the company entirely.


Almost immediately, Heins launched a major revamp of RIM’s operations, hiring several new executives with experience at other major tech companies. The approach was a last-ditch effort to revive the company, but it has also thrown the BlackBerry maker into the most uncertain period in its history.


With nearly $ 2 billion in its coffers Heins had options, but the clock was ticking to get a new smartphone on the market.


“Nobody is delusional here,” Rick Costanzo, the company’s new executive vice-president of global sales, said last summer.


“We get it. That’s why we’re building BlackBerry 10 and man are we committed.”


A new chapter in RIM’s history begins this week as the BlackBerry 10 smartphones and operating system are showcased to the world.


Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Hackers claim attack on Justice Department website






WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Hackers sympathetic to the late computer prodigy Aaron Swartz claimed on Saturday to have infiltrated the website of the U.S. Justice Department’s Sentencing Commission, and said they planned to release government data.


The Sentencing Commission site, www.ussc.gov , was shut down early Saturday.






Identifying themselves as Anonymous, a loosely organized group of unknown provenance associated with a range of recent online actions, the hackers voiced outrage over Swartz’ suicide on January 11.


In a video posted online, the hackers criticized the government’s prosecution of Swartz, who had been facing trial on charges that he used the Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s computer networks to steal more than 4 million articles from JSTOR, an online archive and journal distribution service.


Swartz had faced a maximum sentence of 31 years in prison and fines of up to $ 1 million.


The FBI is investigating the attack, according to Richard McFeely, of the bureau’s Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch.


“We were aware as soon as it happened and are handling it as a criminal investigation,” McFeely said in an emailed statement. “We are always concerned when someone illegally accesses another person’s or government agency’s network.”


(Reporting by Deborah Zabarenko; Editing by Vicki Allen)


Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Everything You Need to Know About Kim Dotcom’s Mega






Click here to view the gallery: Hands On With Mega


Mega — the long-anticipated file sharing and cloud storage site from Kim Dotcom — is now open to the public.






[More from Mashable: Google Glasses Spotted and Two Other Stories You Need to Know]


Thanks to its association with the now-defunct Megaupload — and the legal issues facing its founder Kim Dotcom — the amount of press, user interest and hype surrounding Mega is greater than any file hosting/cloud storage launch in recent memory.


According to Dotcom, more than 1 million users signed up for Mega in the first 24 hours. On Twitter, the larger-than-life entrepreneur has continued to share usage stats and traffic graphs that compare Mega with perennial cloud favorite, Dropbox.


[More from Mashable: 9 Fresh YouTube Shows You’ll Love]


If you’re curious about the inner workings of Mega, how it works and how it handles security, we’ve got you covered.


The Phoenix of Megaupload


Mega is the spiritual successor to Kim Dotcom’s last business, the insanely popular file-hosting service Megaupload. Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice shut down Megaupload and pursued criminal charges against Dotcom. Dotcom, a New Zealand citizen, is actively fighting U.S. extradition orders.


Megaupload was targeted by the DoJ because of its role in illegally distributing copyright material — including digital copies of movies, TV shows, books, music and software.


Rather than try to start a new service eschewing the potential for copyright material to be uploaded and shared, Dotcom is positioning Mega as a service that cares about and protects its user’s privacy. In fact, Mega’s tagline is “the privacy company.”


How It Works


On the surface, Mega is a bare-bones cloud storage host. After signing up for accounts, users can upload files and folders of all types to the service. Those files can then be shared with others.


The free plan gives users 50GB of file storage. There are no hard limits on file size, meaning users can use Mega as a way to back up photos, documents and other data. Obviously, this means users can use Mega as a way to store media content — video files, music, DVD images — as well.


For now, Mega is optimized to work on desktop web browsers. Mega strongly encourages users to use Google Chrome. And while Mega has big plans for developers and client-side apps, for now, the only way to access files is via the web browser.


Files can be uploaded to the service using drag and drop or a file-upload menu. Users can create folders in the file manager.


Uploads and downloads take place in parallel. If you upload a large number of files at once, each file uploads one at a time. In the future, Mega says users will be able to change the upload order. If you need to upload or download multiple files at once, simply open a new Mega tab in your browser and select that file.


You can upgrade to a higher-tiered storage plan from within your account. Mega doesn’t sell these plans itself; instead it has resellers who sell vouchers for a service. A 500GB storage plan with 1TB of enhanced bandwidth is 9.99 euros a month or 99 euros a year (a little over $ 110 U.S. dollars). That’s cheaper than most of its competitors.


The Importance of Passwords


It’s very important to remember the password you select when setting up your Mega account. The password is a big part of how Mega encrypts data on both ends.


During the sign-up process, Mega uses your password to create a 2,048-bit RSA key. This is the key that tells the system you are who you say you are. If you forget your password, you’re not going to be able to get into your account.


Right now, Mega doesn’t even have a password reset or recovery feature. In the future, Mega says it will have a reset mechanism but it will only allow users access to files or folders they have file keys for (more on file keys below). Users won’t be able to access other files until or unless they remember their password.


Because your Mega password is also your master encryption key, it’s important that users choose a secure password. We recommend using a password manager and printing a copy of the password to store in a safe place.


Understanding File Security


Mega is focused on end-to-end encryption. This means that files are encrypted both on upload and on download. With most traditional file hosts or cloud storage lockers, a public link to a file also includes a file path. With Dropbox, for example, the public or shared link includes the file name.


With Mega, things are a bit different. While users can share specific files to other Mega users or via email, the URL to a file doesn’t contain a file name; instead, a cryptographic key is appended to the URL. Without this key, you can’t access the file. Once decrypted by the server, a user has the option to download the linked file.


Mega’s promise, in other words, is that users control who has access to their files and accounts and no one else.


For important files or folders, users might want to make a note of the file key and keep it in a safe place — if they are worried about getting locked out of their account.


How Safe Are Your Files


Since Mega is touting itself as “the privacy company,” it’s important to look at how the company stores files and content.


The end-to-end encryption scheme is only part of how Mega secures data. Still, some are already criticizing the service, noting that it’s not as secure as it says it is. An article for Forbes cites two professionals who have problems with Mega’s security.


Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at John Hopkins University, is particularly critical of the way Mega uses JavaScript to verify its encryption method telling Forbes that “it makes no sense.”


Mega has responded to Green’s claims on its own blog, noting that its scheme “basically enables us to host the extremely integrity-sensitive static content on a large number of geographically diverse servers without worrying about security.”


Meanwhile, at Ars Technia Lee Hutchinson raises concerns about how Mega comes up with its crypto key at sign-up, as well as how the company handles deduplication, or how it eliminates duplicate copies of data.


Again, Mega has taken to its blog to attempt to clarify its policies and the way it handles data.


While Mega’s crypto system certainly doesn’t seem any less secure than any other file locker, we do agree with critics who note that the system might be more about giving Mega culpability against claims that it knows infringing content is on its servers, rather than about protecting that data itself.


The service is still in beta and much of its code is available via open source, so security purists might want to watch how Mega’s system evolves before trusting it with important, sensitive data.


Will Mega Stick Around?


While security experts can quibble and argue over the way Mega uses cryptography and how it stores data on its array of servers, the bigger issue, for us, is long-term survival.


While I would argue that most users who actively used Megaupload were not using it as a traditional cloud service, the fact remains that when the service was shut down, user files went with it.


Already anti-piracy groups are campaigning to shut down payment processors to Mega’s resellers. One of the reasons Mega isn’t taking payments itself and is instead using resellers is to prevent those groups from shutting down payment processors or trying to seize funds.


This is worrisome because in addition to outside capital, Mega needs professional accounts to keep its site working.


It’s too early to say if Mega will be around for the long haul or not, but our advice is not to use Mega as your only file storage solution. Keep backups of crucial files on disk or other cloud-based services.


What do you think of Mega? Let us know in the comments.


This story originally published on Mashable here.


Linux/Open Source News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Women in Combat Stoke Twitter Debate






The Pentagon’s decision to allow women in combat has elicited some strong and controversial words from opponents of the move.


First, Tucker Carlson. Last night, the Daily Caller publisher tweeted: “Feminism’s latest victory: the right to get your limbs blown off in war. Congratulations.”






This drew some swift criticism on Twitter, and a counterpoint from The Week’s Marc Ambinder, who noted that one woman who lost limbs in combat, Tammy Duckworth, is now serving as a Democrat in the House of Representatives.


Then, Politico reported that Allen West, the former GOP congressman and Army lieutenant colonel, tweeted this morning: “Women in combat billets? Another misconceived lib vision of fairness and equality.”


West is already getting trashed on Twitter by users who took offense. After the controversial remarks made by Newt Gingrich in the mid-1990s and Rick Santorum last year, it’s no surprise that the Pentagon’s decision is stirring debate.


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Why the Future of TV Still Isn’t Here Yet






As content providers continue to intimidate tech companies with a seemingly endless couch-potato conundrum, the latest innovation in the war to win your living room isn’t some new gadget from Apple or Netflix, or even that exciting à la carte content delivery system from Intel — it’s a protocol that helps our screens better communicate with one another. YouTube and Netflix have teamed up to create something called DIAL, a competitor of sorts to Apple’s AirPlay, which, as GigaOm’s Janko Roettgers describes it, ”helps developers of second-screen apps to discover and launch applications on smart TVs and connected devices.” Basically, it turns your phone into a kind of wireless super-remote for your TV, as Roettgers explains: 



With DIAL, the Netflix app on your phone will automatically discover that there is a device with a Netflix app connected to your TV. It will fire up that app, and then the two apps are free to do whatever they want — which presumably involves some healthy binge-viewing.







This solves a “big problem” because it makes using those apps on your smart television a lot easier.  As of right now, controlling the Netflix app on a PlayStation still requires the console remote to open up the app on your television before controlling it from a phone or tablet. This eliminates a step — and that, ladies and gents, is the biggest thing actually happening in TV tech right now. Instead of letting us pay just for the content we want, the cable industry’s aging model is still forcing tech companies to help us sift through all the extras were forced to buy. Because with the big media companies refusing to budge on innovative content deals so far this year, “content discovery” tools like GIAL and AirPlay remain one of the only ways everyone can get along. 


RELATED: Netflix Is Winning the Internet


It wasn’t supposed to be this way, of course. Many expected hardware like a supped-up Apple TV or the Roku streaming stick to “fix” television — instead of some protocol that makes finding stuff on our TVs easier. But, as Netflix discovered when it tried to get in the hardware business, the total package can alienate the other key players. Back in 2007, the streaming company had a set-top box in the works that would transform Netflix into a cable competitor, reports Fast Company’s Austin Carr. But CEO Reid Hastings scrapped the idea because it was too competitive. “We could not be competing against Sony, LG, and Samsung,” says Steve Swasey, then the company’s VP of communications. On top of the potential loss of support from hardware makers, this separate Netflix box scared away the content owners, with which Netflix has worked so hard to get streaming TV deals. 


RELATED: The Future of Streaming Video Looks Like TV Reruns


The old-school media industry’s fear of tech-world competition has driven the future of television in a spiraling direction. When one of the too-many entities gets offended, the future falls apart, as we saw with Google TV in an experiment that ultimately scared off content providers as well. A protocol like DIAL is the politically correct solution: It doesn’t change how we pay for content — but it sure does work within the comfortable way we’re used to sitting down and watching TV!


Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Apple slips, BlackBerry slides and Windows Phone stalls in December






Kantar Worldpanel’s December smartphone market share numbers are out. And they are as fascinating as ever. Kantar pegs the BlackBerry market share in America as 1.1% last month, down from 1.4% in November. Surprisingly, Windows Phone’s market share also ticked down to 2.6% in December from 2.7% in November. That might be a statistical artifact, but it is surprising not to see a substantial boost in Windows share considering the marketing support and new devices from AT&T (T).


[More from BGR: BlackBerry 10 OS walkthrough, BlackBerry Z10 pricing]






In Europe, Windows Phone is rapidly picking up steam. Its market share soared to 13.9% in Italy from 11.8% in November. In the UK, Windows Phone’s share moved to 5.9% from 5.1% in a month.The EU average share of Windows Phone bloomed to 5.4% from 4.7% between November and December.


[More from BGR: Verizon Q4 loss doubles to nearly $ 2 billion despite record subscriber adds]


At the same time, BlackBerry dipped to 4.0% from 4.4%. The stage is set for the spring battle between Windows Phone and BlackBerry camps.


Interestingly, Apple’s (AAPL) share in the UK slipped to 32.4% in December from 36.1% in November. The massive popularity of Samsung (005930) models in the British market was undoubtedly the main reason; Android’s share hit 54.4% in the UK.


This is the latest sign that Apple’s market share problems outside the U.S. market are not limited to emerging markets and Southern Europe. The UK has traditionally been the second most loyal market to the Apple brand, right after the United States. According to Kantar, Apple slipped 2.1 percentage points in America between November and December, ending up with 51.2% share of the smartphone market.


This article was originally published on BGR.com


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Rumored Xbox 720 specs: 8-core processor, 8GB of RAM, 800MHz GPU







Console gamers frustrated that their Xbox isn’t holding up well compared to high-end gaming PCs can relax a bit, because it looks like the next-generation Xbox is going to be a monster. It seems that website VGleaks has gotten ahold of leaked specifications for the Xbox 720, which it says will include an 8-core 1.6GHz processor, 8GB of RAM, an 800MHz graphics processor, a 50GB 6x Blu-ray Disc drive, and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. The leaked specifications are in line with previous rumors that also gave the next-generation Xbox an 8-core processor and 8GB of RAM, so there’s nothing overly surprising about VGleaks‘ report. The Xbox 720 will likely be announced at the E3 gaming convention this June and will be released in the fall.


[More from BGR: BlackBerry 10 OS walkthrough, BlackBerry Z10 pricing]






This article was originally published on BGR.com


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Notre Dame football star says he was not in on hoax – ESPN






(Reuters) – Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o has denied ever being in on an elaborate hoax, telling ESPN he had believed his relationship with a woman who turned out to be an online fabrication was real.


The tragic story of his girlfriend and her injuries from a car accident and death from leukemia was one of the most widely recounted U.S. sports stories last year as Notre Dame made a drive toward the national championship game.






“I wasn’t faking it,” Te’o told ESPN in an off-camera interview on Friday, excerpts of which were posted on ESPN.com. “I wasn’t part of this.”


When asked whether he had made up the tale to support his chances of winning the Heisman Trophy, the highest individual honor for a college football player, Te’o replied: “Well, when they hear the facts they’ll know. They’ll know that there is no way that I could be part of this.”


The interview was Te’o's first since the sports blog Deadspin.com on Wednesday exposed the heart-wrenching tale of his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, and her death as a hoax and that a friend of Te’o's named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo was behind it.


Te’o told ESPN that Tuiasosopo called him on Wednesday and admitted he was behind the hoax and it was then Te’o was sure the woman had never existed.


“I don’t wish an ill thing to somebody,” Te’o said of Tuiasosopo, according to ESPN. “I just hope he learns. I think embarrassment is big enough.”


Outside Tuiasosopo’s home in Palmdale, California, on Thursday, a member of his family who did not identify himself told reporters they had no comment.


Te’o acknowledged in a statement on Wednesday that he had never met the woman in person, though he considered her his girlfriend and said he had been duped.


In the ESPN interview, Te’o said he tried to video chat with her several times, but she could never be seen on the other end. He also said he intentionally told people stories about her in a way that would make people believe they had met in person.


“I even knew that it was crazy that I was with somebody that I didn’t meet,” Te’o said.


NATIONAL PROMINENCE


ESPN said the interview was held at a training facility in Florida where Te’o has been preparing for the National Football League draft. The star linebacker was expected to be a high draft pick before the hoax was revealed.


Te’o sprang to national prominence last fall when he led Notre Dame to a victory over Michigan State within days of learning his grandmother and girlfriend had both died. The grandmother’s death was real.


The story grew to become a big feature in coverage of the team, which went undefeated in the regular season and reached the national championship game. Alabama defeated Notre Dame in the title game on January 7.


Notre Dame, one of the most powerful institutions in U.S. collegiate athletics, held a news conference within hours of the Deadspin.com article to say that Te’o had been duped.


Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick said on Friday the Indiana university was comfortable, based on a private investigation it launched and on four years experience with Te’o, that he was the victim and encouraged Te’o to speak publicly.


(Reporting by David Bailey in Minneapolis; Editing by Eric Beech)


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Nintendo’s Wii U problems turn into a crisis






In just a week, the problems Nintendo’s (NTDOY) new home console is facing have cascaded into something sinister. The traditional post-New Year slump hit Nintendo’s home market in the week ending January 12 and exposed cruelly how weak the consumer interest in Wii U truly is. According to Famitsu, Wii U sales slumped from a pace of 70,000 per week to just 21,000. The ancient PlayStation 3 sold the exact same number of units, which is nothing short of a debacle for Nintendo. The hot portable console 3DS saw its sales slow down from 305,000 units to 106,000 units.  This means that Nintendo’s portable machine is now outselling the brand new home console by a 5-to-1 margin in Japan.


[More from BGR: BlackBerry 10 browser smokes iOS 6 and Windows Phone 8 in comparison test [video]]






No matter how weak the Wii U sales are now, they are likely to get worse. The launch dates of key games seem to be slipping from March quarter to June quarter, including the important Pikmin, Wario and Wii Fit franchises. The Wii U now must depend on Rayman and Lego City in coming months.


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This is a scary prospect, because it now seems that Sony (SNE) is planning to unveil the PlayStation 4 in May and Microsoft (MSFT) is expected to announce the Xbox 720 in June. Nintendo rushed its console out in late 2012 to get a running start before the big guns of the home console industry grab the consumer interest with their new machines. That gambit may now be about to backfire in a spectacular manner. As demand for Wii U is already fizzling in Japan and key games slip from the first quarter of 2013, Wii U faces a very hard January-March period. Sony and Microsoft are then inevitably going to start leaking information about their new consoles in April-May time frame in the run-up to their big unveilings in the second half of the spring quarter.


The clock is ticking for Wii U. If consumers start smelling the scent of the grave emanating from the console just when Sony and Microsoft roll out their new gear, Wii U could face a sudden rejection in the market place by early summer. Nintendo needs some big new titles to revive its home machine very soon.


This article was originally published on BGR.com


Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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With an air kiss or empty hug, Te’oing is Twitter craze






NEW YORK (Reuters) – Manti Te’o, the Notre Dame linebacker entangled in a girlfriend hoax that gives a whole new meaning to the term “air kiss,” is inspiring a new fad racing through social media: Te’oing.


An avalanche of pictures of people hugging empty chairs or puckering up to an otherwise empty room were posted to Twitter with the hashtag #Te’oing days after the college football star’s story about his girlfriend’s cancer death was exposed as a fraud. Not only did she never have leukemia, she never existed.






Notre Dame officials said Te’o told them he had been duped into believing he had an online relationship with the fictitious woman.


“Te’oing – Mile High Club edition” read one tweet with a photo of a man hugging the air in an airplane bathroom, an apparent reference to the whispered practice of having sex in mid-flight.


Clint Eastwood was hailed in several tweets as a “Te’oing” pioneer for the actor’s interlude with an empty chair at the 2012 Republican Convention. Other tweets showed Ronald McDonald Te’oing on his cozy bench and President Barack Obama spending quality time Te’oing with a vacant seat.


“Just some afternoon bubbly with my baby” said one Te’oing tweet with a photo of a man clinking his champagne flute against another that appeared to be suspended in mid-air.


The snarky social media frenzy recalled another similar trend called the “Tebowing,” named for New York Jets quarterback Tim Tebow, who frequently kneeled for on-field prayers and inspired copy-cat poses by people whose pictures flooded social media last year.


In its own riff on emptiness and romance, a Kentucky minor league baseball team, the Florence Freedom, has announced it will give away Manti Te’o Girlfriend Bobblehead dolls – actually empty boxes – to the first 1,000 fans at the May 23 game.


One section of the Florence, Kentucky, stadium has been reserved “for fans to sit with their imaginary friends, girlfriends/boyfriends or spouses” who may be caught on the “pretend kiss cam” and are invited to compete in an air guitar contest or an imaginary food fight.


(Writing by Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Vicki Allen)


Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Amazon holiday results to show sales tax impact






SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Acting as a tax collector may have hurt Amazon.com, Inc’s holiday sales analysts and industry executives said, but they expect to know more when the internet retailer reports its fourth-quarter results on January 29.


Best Buy Co., an archrival of Amazon in consumer electronics, saw holiday online sales increase in three states where Amazon started collecting sales tax ahead of the period.






“There was a little softness in states where Amazon is now collecting sales tax,” said R.J. Hottovy, an equity analyst at Morningstar. “That isn’t surprising to me. It levels the playing field for brick-and-mortar retailers.”


Critics of Amazon argued it had an unfair advantage because most retailers have had to collect state sales tax on online sales for years because they have stores and other physical operations in these locations.


But many states, hungry for extra tax revenue in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, introduced new laws requiring that Internet-only retailers also collect sales tax. Brick-and-mortar retailers hope the requirement will reduce Amazon’s price advantage and help them recoup lost sales.


CHANNELADVISOR DATA


Amazon, the world’s biggest Internet retailer, began collecting sales tax of 7.25 percent to 9.75 percent in California on Sept 15, about two weeks before the start of the fourth-quarter. Third-party sellers on Amazon.com saw a drop in sales during the quarter, compared to other states, according to an analysis by e-commerce firm ChannelAdvisor.


It also started collecting sales tax in Pennsylvania in September and in Texas in July.


Amazon’s fourth-quarter results should provide clues on whether consumers changed their shopping habits when faced with higher taxes on their purchases from the company’s website.


ChannelAdvisor, which helps merchants sell more online, analyzed its clients’ sales on Amazon.com in California, and compared them to other states before and after the sales tax kicked in.


Before Amazon began collecting the tax in California, ChannelAdvisor client sales were 5 percent to 10 percent above other states. The week before the September 15 start of the tax, sales spiked as high as 70 percent compared to other states.


“The surge before the tax went into effect was much larger than I thought it would be,” said Scot Wingo, chief executive of ChannelAdvisor. “Californians definitely bought a lot in the three or four days before the tax went into effect.”


After Amazon began collecting tax, its California sales leveled with other states. Then, in early November, they slipped as much as 10 percent below other states, ChannelAdvisor data showed.


During one of the busiest holiday periods, in late November and early December, sales dipped further in California vs other states. Toward the end of the holiday period, client sales in California recovered, the data showed.


“There was a sales impact of about 10 percent at the worst point of the dip,” Wingo said. EBay, another Amazon rival, is an investor in ChannelAdvisor. Wingo also owned Amazon shares, but sold them in the fourth quarter for personal tax-related reasons.


Amazon’s tax collection in California had the most impact on fourth-quarter sales of more expensive items priced at $ 200 to $ 250, Wingo said.


PRICES, PROFIT


Amazon probably lowered prices by 8 percent to 9 percent on items most affected by this, although it is tricky to separate such reductions from the usual holiday season promotions that were also happening, Wingo said.


The extra price competition may dent Amazon’s profitability in the fourth quarter, Morningstar’s Hottovy said.


Amazon is expected to make 52 cents a share in the fourth quarter, on revenue of $ 22.3 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. In late October, the company forecast operating results ranging from a profit of $ 310 million to a loss of $ 490 million.


Hottovy expects $ 22.4 billion in revenue and an operating loss of $ 210 million, or a $ 135 million loss after excluding stock-based compensation and other operating expenses.


BEST BUY


In California, Texas and Pennsylvania, Best Buy said it saw a 4 percent to 6 percent increase in online sales during the holiday versus the rest of its chain.


The retailer also saw an increase of 6 percent to 9 percent in online orders that are picked up in its stores in those three states compared with the rest of its chain.


Overall, Best Buy reported better-than-expected holiday sales last week, sending its shares up more than 10 percent.


“This makes Amazon equal to everyone else. They no longer have that sales tax advantage,” said Anne Zybowski, vice president of retail insights at Kantar Retail. “If this had happened to Amazon when they were just a bookseller years ago, they may not be as big as they are now.


Despite the tax changes, Amazon’s consumer electronics prices were still at least 5 percent below Best Buy’s during the holiday season, Zybowski said. But Best Buy may have benefited from even a small change in this area.


“Particularly in consumer electronics, any narrowing of Amazon’s price advantage at the margin is important because Best Buy brings service and other shopper benefits to the category,” she said.


Best Buy will take away people’s old TVs when they buy a new one and the company’s Geek Squad service will install devices in shoppers’ homes, services Amazon does not provide, she noted.


An Amazon spokesman declined to comment when asked if the company saw an impact on fourth-quarter sales from the collection of sales taxes in the three states.


In the past, Amazon executives have said there was little or no impact from such changes in other regions.


Several analysts have argued that shoppers use Amazon for its vast product selection and convenient, fast shipping and returns, and not just its low prices.


“While not great for Amazon, it’s just one of many consumer benefits its service offers,” said Ken Sena, an analyst at Evercore Partners. “And while there may be early effects from this change, I still see usage trends remaining in Amazon’s favor.”


(Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)


Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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