Back in 2009 a federal prisoner by the name of David Whitaker was the lead actor in an investigation of Google’s advertising operations. The United States government took action against the internet giant and had David Whitaker (an experienced con artist) pose as an agent for online drug dealers. Mr. Whitaker then spent over four months contacting Google (and being contacted in return) about advertising narcotics, steroids, and other illegal and controlled substances.

Along with having David pose as an agent, the government meticulously created aliases, false companies, and even used around $200,000 in their operation. David then contacted employees and executives regarding advertising the illegal substances and made it clear on several occasions that the operations were illegal – despite everything, both Google employees and executives continued working with David as their eyes were only on his money.

David Whitaker stated that he felt bad about the whole operation especially since he had grown to like several of the people he was dealing with but “I took ease in knowing they…knew it was wrong.”

Despite actively assisting someone advertise illegal products Google only got a slap on the hand and had to pay a mere $500 million dollar fine (nothing compared to their 40+billion dollars in cash). However this isn’t the only time Google’s had problems with advertising illegal products.

The lead prosecutor against Google in this case is Peter Neronha who stated that the settlement was incredibly important and “signals that, where evidence can be developed that a search engine knowingly and actively assisted advertisers to promote improper conduct, the search engine can be held accountable as an accomplice.”

On top of the evidence gained from David Whitaker the government also had some highly embarrassing allegations against some of Google’s top executives including Larry Page. Page is Google’s co-founder and apparently these executives were notified about the issues surrounding drug ads but that nothing was done about it.

The case against Google was held in a secret Grand Jury and not much else is known about it nor will the head prosecutor reveal more information regarding the evidence gained against Google. Unfortunately no Google executives agreed to comment on the situation either.

After the operation was ceased by the government and the evidence gained from Google Mr. Whitaker, who faced a hefty prison term of max 65 years, was sentenced to only six years however now he is due to release in just two. Google, on the other hand, has six private shareholder lawsuits against their executives and will hopefully change their advertising policies so that illegal actions are prohibited rather than encouranged.

IPv6 was announced and then disappeared. Today it is back again, but is not going anywhere this time. The Internet Society gave a public announcement Tuesday of the “World IPv6 Launch Day”. It is the beginning of the last stage of transitioning out of IPv4 and into IPv6. This launch day is still a little more than five months off, due June 6, but it is quite nearly a year following a 24-hour test run of the IP protocol. At that time quite a number of high profile businesses activated IPv6 AAAA record resolution on the domain for their main websites.

This IPv6 Day, last year, served as a confirmation about the hypotheses regarding interoperability across the Internet with already deployed computer systems. However, not everything went as expected. There were access difficulties, but they amounted to only a fraction of 1%. Most of those companies who participated in the event turned off IPv6, though a handful kept it operating. Those who turned it off reverted to the IPv4 legacy setup.

The dating period is finished. We are into the engagement period of our relationship with our newly beloved IPv6. Quite a few troubles that were connected to the operating systems of PC’s and portable devices, as well as those related to network devices, such as routers, have been adequately addressed and implemented. Now many of the same business who participated in the test last year have switched back on IPv6 and will run it even up to June 6^th.

Typically, you might expect IPv6 to affect those utilizing universities, or international and the small, advanced thinking tech companies. On June 6^th, though, we are talking about something much bigger. The major ISP companies will be activating IPv6, not only at their root servers, but along the line down to the customer level. About one percent of you will have IPv6 addresses after June 6^th.

Here is the catch. They are only applying it to a mere dribble of customers in order to test it again. As customers complain and problems arise in these customers’ connection issues, the ISP’s will try to adapt to the situations and create solutions. Then, as they can solve more of the problems, they will apply IPv6 to more customers and fix further issues as they present themselves.

I do not think ISP’s should be congratulated for this approach, because it means those customers will suffer for us all. This should be a voluntary program with incentives. However, with the major ISP’s getting onboard, it will motivate smaller ones to just in order to stay competitive. They will not want to be labeled inadequate because they refused to adopt a technology all the major players activated, and which was easily accessible to them. Every company will have to follow suit.

After months of waiting the Chronic Dev Team (a team of iOS hackers dedicated to freeing Apple products from their obnoxious constraints) began teasing followers with tidbits of information on the release of the jailbreak.

At first it was just tweets stating they were working on it tirelessly and that they “were close” and then, much to everyone’s delight, a video was released showing an untethered iPhone 4S sporting Cydia (see it here on YouTube). This video literally sent many into “check twitter every 10 minutes” mode – their perseverance was only rewarded with more frustration when the Chronic Dev Team released the Mac version of the iOS 5 jailbreak. Finally on the 21^st the jailbreak titled Absinthe was released for Windows.

Since the jailbreak was hosted on the Chronic Dev Team’s servers the first  hours after the release the servers crashed multiple times with only a lucky few getting their jailbreak done. Now, days later, the Dev Team is totaling the amount of jailbroken devices.

Jay Freeman (aka saurik) is a leading part of the hacking team that produced the jailbreak. Via Twitter saurik released some astonishing figures: “So, @MuscleNerd’s 205k number was just the number of on-Cydia iPhone 4S’s; I believe that is now 494k. iPad 2 5.0.1 adds an additional 463k.” Additionally it was reported that Absinthe was downloaded over a million times so far and this is only a few days after the release of the jailbreak – imagine what the totals will be a week from now!

Jailbreak Your Device in 5 Easy Steps!

1. Jailbreaking your iOS 5 device is incredibly easy. First go to the Chronic Dev Team’s site http://greenpois0n.com/  and choose the correct file at the top right (there is Mac or Windows).
2. Once you’ve downloaded the files connect your ipad 2 or iPhone 4S to your computer and then launch the Absinthe program.
3. Once that is launched you’ll be told to back up your device so do so. If you attempted to download the Mac jailbreak and use that on your iDevice then you will likely lose all of your data when reverting the jailbreak as we attempted that and found out firsthand what impatience does!
4. Now that you’re all backed up and ready to go then hit the “Jailbreak” button on the right side of the Absinthe program. It will now begin the jailbreaking process starting off with a restore so be patient as it can take a while!
5. After the restore is done unlock your phone and then click the Absinthe icon and your device will reboot after it’s made contact with the GreenPois0n servers. In a few moments your device will be done rebooting and your Absinthe icon is going to be replaced by a glorious Cydia one!

Textbooks are a real problem that desperately needs addressing. For centuries they have been printed and little has changed. Textbooks require too many tangible resources to produce and once they are published, the information is outdated almost instantly.

A more recently acknowledged problem is that the backpacks of school children are now 25% of their own body weight. Back problems and bad posture are the school children’s disease in this day and age. Something must be done about it and Apple has taken it on.

These children are children of technology and their learning aids must match. They could benefit from Apple’s Multi-Touch textbooks. Of course, these textbooks could be made on any platform, but Apple happens to be the company pulling it all together. Granted, it is long overdue, but then, no one else is doing what needs to be done.

The pages of the textbook now come to life at the fingertips of the child. 3-D objects can be rotated, a photo is now a stack of photos, and the page is turned by sliding the finger along the bottom. More importantly, the student can highlight and take notes, as well as search the text. Best of all, the child can carry every book on their iPad.

This is all great, but you have to ask yourself how these so-called “textbooks” are any different from websites. Once the pages contain interactive elements, we are no longer talking about books of text. These are indeed websites contained in an archived format that is readable by a software interface (basically a browser).

I doubt Apple has thought through the impact this may have on the academic and publishing industries either. If Congress wants to go after the culprit for the damages to the economy, namely depriving millions of jobs, they should start with the computer industry giants. Piracy has far less an impact than Silicon Valley.

Professors try hard to win publishing contracts, because it means big money to supplement their mediocre salaries. Apple will be depriving them of this. Apple may argue that they can still publish, and that although the sale price is much lower per text, that they will reach a larger audience through the Internet. However, the academic publishers have perfected their reach in their market. The Internet will not reach more universities, since publishers already supply all universities.

Aside from the economic impact, both pros and cons, there are some invaluable features. One of the most useful is the automatic study cards created from your highlighting. Not only that, each color of highlighting produces a different study card set.

Apple puts out the app to make these books, iBooks 2, for free, but to use the textbooks you have to pay $14.99 . If you want to make your own textbook, you can publish it and make a few bucks, but for this you will need iBooks Author app.

Microsoft has developed a newer tradition of requiring hardware manufacturers to meet certain requirements in order to be able to advertise themselves as “Designed for Windows”. Typically these requirements have not interfered with the user customizing their own system. After all, “The PC” is short for what used to be called the “IBM Compatible PC” and designated a modular, interchangeable and basically open system, customizable by the owner. Microsoft began changing this when made their licenses a lease of the operating system, essentially retaining full ownership of your copy of their software. This was the first step toward the closed universe, and many technicians were prophesying such.

While the new “Designed for Windows 8” requirements for hardware manufacturers is mostly inert, such as the 10G free space requirements, there is a clause that reminds us of what politicians do to slip in an unpopular constraint. The clause includes a set of requirements for firmware.

To qualify for Microsoft’s certification, a system must employ Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, or UEFI, with its Secure Boot enabled. UEFI has clear advantages, such as faster boot time, processor independence, and modularity. It acts in many ways, like the old BIOS system, initializing the mainboard, probing for connected hardware, and relinquishing control to the operating system.

One obvious need for UEFI is that BIOS is incapable of booting from 2 TB and larger hard drives. While it was first created by HP for x86 and Itanium computers, in 2005 it was expanded to operate on x86-64 systems. The latest development has seen it also built for ARM systems. If your system has a Sandy Bridge processor, then it utilizes UEFI.

The most important aspect of UEFI, the one setting the Linux world’s anger ablaze, is the use of certificates. While the principle is innocuous, its employment in ARM for Windows 8 certified systems locks out alternative operating systems. It uses nothing more devious than standard public key infrastructure technology. At least one certificate is stored in the firmware. Every piece of software during the boot process must present a signature that is found in one of the certificates. Without a valid signature the computer will not boot.

Microsoft has compromised on the x86 systems, allowing them to put into custom mode, so alternative operating systems can boot. However, on ARM systems, there is no custom mode. They are required to be locked with only one certificate present, that from Microsoft. Now you can see what has the penguins at Linux companies and forums waddling about, mumbling angry words to each other. However, Microsoft is fighting a real battle with hackers and must take appropriate measures to secure their systems, even at the expensive of freedom of competition. It may come to the courts to decide if they are flexing their monopolistic muscles again.

Source: ars

Revisiting their original Series 9 laptops Samsung decided to spice the collection up with two new Series 9 laptops. These two are not actually termed “ultrabooks” however they are incredibly thin and weigh next to nothing. The two laptops are a 13.3 inch and a 15 inch laptop. The 13.3 inch model weighs just 2.5 pounds while the 15 inch model weighs only one pound more.

These two new Series 9 laptops boast beautiful dark aluminum cases that make them sleek, lightweight, and incredibly durable. Additionally Samsung is using a new trick that will delight customers: fitting a larger display on a smaller chassis. Their 15 inch display model is set in a 14 inch chassis while the other 13.3 inch display is fit on a 12 inch chassis.

So how does is the display size larger than the chassis size? Well you can thank a thin new bezel display for that. The actual screens have also been enhanced as well. Both models have a 1600 x 900 pixel resolution and are matte displays with 400nit.

Don’t worry these new Series 9 laptops are backed with some impressive specs aside from the matte and bezel displays. The base models for each of them come with a 1.6GHz Core i5-2467M processor, Intel HD 3000 graphics, and 128 GB mSATA SSD. Additionally the 13.3 inch model has 4GB of RAM while the 15 inch has 8GB. On top of that the removable six cell batteries apparently have six hours of use (something that would definitely need to be confirmed with actual user testing).

So how much will these brand new Samsung Series 9 laptops cost you? Well the 13.3 inch model will cost you $1,399 while the 15 inch one will run you $1,499. For the additional RAM and bigger screen I definitely think the 15 inch is worth paying a hundred more bucks for.

Overall the prices for these laptops are a little high however they are just coming out and will definitely reduce in price later on. Other comparable laptops drop under a thousand bucks which, when you consider the specs and beautiful design of these new Samsung Series 9 laptops, is well worth it.

Samsung truly has brought an innovative and new computer to the CES this year. The revised Series 9 laptops are a refreshing change from the multitude of Mac look alikes. If you are in the market for a new laptop then definitely consider getting one of these models. The stunning design of these Series 9 laptops will definitely turn heads – you can’t miss the unmistakably thin chassis made from the dark grey aluminum.

Qualcomm Chief Executive Paul Jacobs had the pleasure of announcing the thinnest and lightest e-reader at the CES 2012 the other day. It’s called the Hanvon C18 and Hanvon utilized Qualcomm’s new energy efficient mirasol display for their new e-reader.

Mirasol is a technology Qualcomm has been working on for several years and it is a solution to the energy consuming LCD displays that other devices utilize. Mirsol is a type of display screen that utilizes soft indirect light which is then tuned and reflected back at the viewer. Overall the Mirasol display uses 1/10^th of the power to create a vivid image than an LCD screen does.

The Hanvon C18 is not the only company to use the new mirasol display; in fact it’s the third company within two months to utilize it in an e-reading device which means we can definitely expect to see Qualcomm’s new display more widespread in the future.

So, back to the Hanvon C18 e-reader, what makes it different from other e-reading devices like the Kindle or Nook? Well, for starters it is incredibly light – it weighs only 300 grams which is just over half a pound! Next, this device is only 10mm thin making it simple to fit into any purse, book case, or incredibly large back pocket!

The display is a 5.7 inch XGA touchscreen that utilizes the mirasol technology as mentioned above. Hanvon C18 runs on a 1.0 GHz Snapdragon processor and it runs on a custom Google Android core Operating System. Thanks to the mirasol display you can also safely assume that the battery will last you weeks and it will also be able to support video as well as other media formats.

A big draw to the Kindle and Nook is the book selection however Hanvon has this covered. The Hanvon C18 will have access to thousands upon thousands of e-books, over a hundred different newspapers, and more than three hundred magazines. Additionally users can utilize the handwriting recognition feature termed Hanvon Input that is unique to this device.

If you are looking to get your paws on this nifty e-reader then you will not have to wait too long. It will be out on shelves around mid February of 2012 however neither Hanvon or Qualcomm have disclosed how much it will cost. Unfortunately for anyone outside of China they will likely not see this device as it is specifically designed for the Asian market, but they could see the mirasol screen being utilized in the near future.

Sad to say the Hanvon C18 will not be available to North American residents – another e-reading device would have been great to have on the market to help lower the prices more for us consumers.