Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Facebook Is Building The Facebook Phone Right In Front Of Our Eyes

It has been reportedly working on a mobile operating system for its own phone since 2010. The original OS was shelved, then a new team came in, and worked on it again. But, right in plain view Facebook is assembling the core applications needed for successful smartphone operating system. This week it rolled out “Facebook [...]

More Android malware sprouting up amidst 2012 Olympics

Android has been cited time and again as the mobile operating system most plagued by malware. It might not come as a surprise then that cyber criminals are taking advantage of the 2012 Summer Olympics as an opportunity and a cover-up for more malware. Anti-malware and anti-virus solutions provider Webroot has issued a warning that [...]

New York to London in an hour – by train

By Mark Halper | June 4, 2012, 9:35 PM PDT A giant sucking sound might one day help whisk passengers from New York to Beijing in 2 hours. Above, a mockup of the inside of an ET3 vacuum train. __ You could call it a pipe dream. That’s how the BBC refers to it on [...]

Windows 8 Consumer Preview is VERY Buggy

So the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is finally available. I’ve been running it for a couple hours and I’ve crashed it at least 50 times. In EVERY Metro app, when I clicked my mouse too many times (trying to figure out how things work), my PC would lock up for around 5 minutes and would [...]

R.I.P. Steve Jobs

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died today at age 56. Apple changed their homepage to an image of Mr. Jobs with the words Steve Jobs 1955-2011. Steve has suffered from pancreatic cancer in the past, there’s been no word on what finally caused his death. I myself am about the furthest thing away from an Apple [...]

Canadians Can Now Rent Movies From the Android Marketplace

Google has finally enabled the movie rental service for Canadians that have Android version 2.1 or greater.  Prices range from $3.99 to $4.99 for HD movies. You get 30 days from the time of purchase to start watching, once you start you have 48 hours to finish.

Why Hackers Write Computer VirusesWhy do hackers hack?

Why do hackers hack? Why create a worm that sends out an email to everyone in your contact list, or a Trojan that deletes your term papers? Is it mischief, malice, money, or something else entirely? Find out at Gizmodo

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is The Most Followed User on Google+

In somewhat comedic news the Facebook founder has more followers than Google’s own Larry Page or Sergey Brin!

Google’s Real Time Search Disabled

It seems the deal that allowed Google (and Bing) to have access to Twitter’s firehose of data has expired and Google decided not to renew the deal.. for now. Google says they plan to integrate Google+ data into it’s Real Time Search, but will continue to work with Twitter. Tweets and other realtime data streams [...]

Facebook’s “Awesome” New Product Has Been Leaked

The news has leaked that the new “awesome” product with be a video chat feature built on top of Skype. Supposedly it will have a desktop feature as well although there has been no confirmation of that. This all just speculation at this point, but the sources and the blogosphere seem pretty sure and with [...]

Google Pulls Yongzh’s *oid Emulators

via Phandroid: Arguably, but not really, the most popular emulators on the Android Market have been yanked by Google. The *oid line, developed by Yongzh, seems to have finally rubbed Google, or some console developers the wrong way. Engadget has noted that Mr. Zhang has moved his line of emulators to the SlideME store where [...]

Rogers Confirms April 28th Release Date for Xperia Play and Arc

Rogers, with special guest Sony Ericsson, hosted a launch party tonight in Canada where they showed off their upcoming Sony’s Xperia Play and Arc smartphones. During the festivities, Peter Farmer of Sony Ericsson took the stage and officially announced an April 28th launch date for Rogers Canada. So, if you’re currently with Rogers you can [...]

Dry Cleaners Claim Over 17,000 USB Sticks Were Left in Laundries in 2010

Let’s face it: 99.9 per cent of surveys are just inbox spam, dreamt up by PR agencies in need of a quick coverage fix for their demanding clients, and with such a small pool of respondees that you’d be better off asking your Facebook friends for their opinion instead. Not this one, though. Oh sure, [...]

Egypt Leaves the Internet

Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, [...]

Canada’s ISP’s Start Taking Advantage of the New Usage Based Billing Options

Metered Internet usage (also called “Usage-Based Billing”) is coming to Canada, and it’s going to cost Internet users. While an advance guard of Canadians are expressing creative outrage at the prospect of having to pay inflated prices for Internet use charged by the gigabyte, the consequences probably haven’t set in for most consumers. Now, however, independent [...]

The World’s Fastest Gaming Laptop

It seems that Maingear is claiming that its latest laptop the eX-L 15 is the world’s most powerful 15.6 inch gaming laptop, which is some claim. However, having looked at the choice of specs and features available, they may be just right in what they are claiming. The buyer gets to choose from the following Sandy [...]

Facebook Soon To Allow You To Encrypt Your Connection Via SSL

Gawker.com reports: Facebook finally provided a way to keep any random jerk in the café from hijacking your account. But you have to go out of your way to enable this protection, and you might have to wait. Still: Jump on this. Facebook has at long last offered an option to use the encrypted “HTTPS” protocol, a [...]

Hugh Hefner Announces Uncensored Playboy iPad App

Apple iPad users, you are in for something exciting! Though this might sound a bit bizarre, we have reasons to believe it is happening.  Playboy founder Hugh Hefner seems to be bent on popularizing his way of celebrating the female body on to the Apple iPad too, with a new explicit Playboy app in the works. [...]

Verizon’s 4G LTE Network Launches Dec. 5

Here we go: Verizon’s LTE network is launching on Dec. 5 in 38 markets and 60 airports—going nationwide by 2013—with two USB sticks from LG and Pantech supplying the superfast goodness. But just how fast is it? Verizon says in “real-world, loaded network environments,” you can expect 5-12Mbps downstream, and 2-5Mbps upstream. The pricing’s not surprising: [...]

Web Store, the Most Important New Feature in Chrome

Even if Google didn’t mention it in the release notes, Chrome 7 has support for installing web apps, but Chrome Web Store is not yet released. The store will be the most important new feature in Chrome 8, which will be launched very soon. “Chrome 8 is the first version that supports the Chrome Web Store,” mentions [...]

iPhone, Android neck-and-neck as ‘most desired’ smartphone in U.S.

Yahoo News reports: Looks like the days of RIM ruling the U.S. smartphone roost are drawing to a close: A new survey finds that the iPhone has pulled even with BlackBerry among current smartphone owners. When it comes to which smartphone OS is the “most desirable,” though, it’s iPhone vs. Android, not iPhone vs. BlackBerry. [...]

AVG Free Broke My Computer!

If you are using AVG Free 2011, please head this warning. DO NOT UPDATE! The update that was pushed out December 1, 2010 will break your computer and put it into a “boot loop”, this means it will never load Windows and just keep rebooting. Hopefully you got this warning before you applied this update [...]

Chrome Is Now The Web’s Most Popular Browser

It has finally happened. It took a little longer than anticipated, but Chrome has now passed Firefox as the browser most often used to visit TechCrunch. For the month of November, Chrome is number one for the first time, edging out Firefox 27.80 percent to 27.67 percent. Back in early September, on Chrome’s second birthday, Google’s [...]

Windows Phone 7 Gets Jailbroken

Windows Phone 7 is “finally” jailbroken! ChevronWP7, the unlocker tool, works with every WP7 phone and allows for the side loading of apps, the use of private APIs, and access to low level functionality. Basically, it unleashes your WP7 phone. It’s easy to jailbreak too: just download the tool, connect your phone, and run through [...]

Facebook unveils social messaging system, with Facebook email addresses

Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, today unveiled a new social messaging feature on Facebook (official blog post) at the company’s headquarters that aims to consolidate different communication mediums into one primary place. Users will be able to manage different e-mail addresses, their text messages, and Facebook messages directly from one application. The Messages application would display [...]

Google announces new photo format: WebP

digitaltrends.com reports: Google is pushing for the future of photo formatting to be done in WebP, leaving JPEG in the dust. WebP (pronounced weppy) has been under development by Google and reduces file sizes by 40 percent compared to JPEGs. That means faster downloads from websites and less strain on networks. Richard Rabbat, product manager [...]

RIM likely to use QNX tablet operating system in BlackBerry smartphones

On April 9, 2010, RIM announced it had acquired the rights to the QNX operating system, at which time the system source code was no longer available to developers. After the acquisition, RIM further developed QNX to power its tablet PlayBook. Citing advantages of the new OS, a source that spoke to us on condition [...]

Can The Blackberry ‘BlackPad’ Offer Competition To The iPad?

pcworld.com reports, Despite growing competition from Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android platforms, Research In Motion (RIM) reigns supreme in the U.S. smartphone market. Its market share tops 40 percent, and it’s shipped more than 100 million BlackBerry devices. RIM’s new BlackBerry 6 operating system and rumored Bold 9800 handset are getting rave reviews. And the [...]

Google Me coming this Fall?

ZDNET reports: Eric Schmidt has confirmed that we could be getting “Google Me” sometime this Fall. This Google Me service will introduce what Google calls “a social layer” into online search, video and Google Maps. The Wall Street Journal and Reuters quote Google CEO Eric Schmidt saying the company will integrate social networking elements to [...]

Amazon Kindle Pokes Fun at Apple iPad in New Commercial

Via intomobile.com: There’s no doubt that the Amazon Kindle is one popular and terrific reading device. And in many ways, the Apple iPad isn’t so bad either. After all, the latter does support the Kindle app, as well as iBooks and the Barnes & Noble Nook app. However, the reading experience on it hasn’t been [...]