The number of corporations arming workers with tablets will double early next year, a research firm said today, citing its recent survey of more than 1,600 IT buyers.

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Apple, Oracle and EMC are involved with CPTN Holdings LLC, the Microsoft-led consortium that is purchasing 882 patents from Novell for US$450 million, according to a Dec. 9 posting on the website of German antitrust authority Bundeskartellamt, or Federal Cartel Office.

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itwbennett writes “Who loves robots? You may love them more or less after seeing what 2010 gave us, robot-wise. It’s not the rise of the machines yet, but that teddy bear creeped us out.”

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The Hindu

Nokia files more patent complaints against Apple CNET The company filed patent-infringement claims against Apple in the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands today. A total of 13 patents were included in the company's filings, bringing the total to 37 total claims against Apple. … Nokia Apple patent row escalatesBBC News Nokia Expands Patent Lawsuit Against ApplePC World Nokia Takes Apple Patent Battle to EuropeThe Mac Observer Apple Insider -FierceWireless -ZDNet (blog) all 291 news articles »

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PC Magazine – Sunbelt Software reports a new trend in rogue software. Instead of imitating antivirus or other security software they pretend to be defraggers and system tune-up utilities.

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STEC today announced that for the first time a major equipment manufacturer, IBM, has incorporated its MLC-based SSDs into both high-end external storage arrays.

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Whammy666 writes “JBI, Inc. announced that it has entered into a formal Consent Order with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Region 9, which will allow the Company to immediately run its Plastic2Oil (P2O) process commercially and begin construction of an additional processor at its Niagara Falls, New York P2O facility. JBI has developed a process that takes waste plastic destined for landfills and converts it into diesel fuel, gasoline, and natural gas with very little residue. The process is said to be very efficient thanks to a special catalyst developed by JBI and an attention to process optimization. That plastic water bottle you tossed in the trash could soon be fueling your car instead of sitting in a landfill for 1000 years.”

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DailyTech

And then there were three: A look at Chrome OS Computerworld Computerworld – A year ago, Google began discussing the idea of offering a full operating system based on its Chrome browser. This month, Google revealed further details of its plans and began shipping a first run of test units so … Google Chrome Makes Enterprise PushPC World Google invades the human bodyDailyTech Chrome Browser Sandboxes Flash To Protect Against MalwareTechCrunch Phandroid.com -Ars Technica -Infosecurity Magazine (US) all 71 news articles »

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Gadget Venue

RIM's North American Verizon Share is Shrinking: Concerned? TMCnet If RIM and its prized BlackBerry (News – Alert) hope to claim more of the smartphone market, the provider should seek to do so outside of Verizon. According to a Rethink Wireless piece, RIM's share in … Apple Verizon iPhone Coming in Early 2011: AnalysteWeek When is the Verizon iPhone Coming?PC World Verizon iPhone: Analyst expects 9 million units to sell in 2011Christian Science Monitor Beatweek Magazine -Afterdawn.com -Forbes (blog) all 55 news articles »

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The U.S. Department of Commerce recommends a new privacy bill of rights and an enforceable privacy code of conduct for online firms.

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FOX Toledo Online

A Call for a Federal Office to Guide Online Privacy New York Times A Commerce Department task force, seeking to develop a framework for online privacy that would benefit both consumers and businesses, called Thursday for the creation of an office within the department that would work to strengthen … US Dept. of Commerce: New Online Privacy Rules NeededPC World Obama administration calls for privacy bill of rights for online consumersWashington Post Obama administration calls for online privacy bill of rightsCNNMoney Wall Street Journal -The Associated Press -Reuters all 407 news articles »

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An anonymous reader writes “Wikileaks cables released overnight revealed that Australia’s top cyber spy agency (akin to the NSA) was unprepared for cyberwar in the view of other intelligence agencies in 2008. Australian agencies were so concerned they asked US intelligence to provide the framework to defend the country’s critical information infrastructure, modelling on the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative. Spooks also discussed how Israel was preparing to take down Iran’s nuclear program and how to stay relevant when so much information that was classified was now open source and available to anyone.”

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Ben Patterson – Starting early next year, Apple’s one-stop shop for Mac apps of every stripe is set to go online. Just don’t expect to find any demos, trials, betas or other “lite” versions there. First announced back in October during the Mac …

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Wired (blog)

Apple's 'App of the Year' Gets a Load More Features PC Magazine Flipboard, the award-winning "social magazine" built for the Apple iPad, has released a major update that includes richer social features and faster browsing. The update adds Google Reader (the "most-requested feature") and Flickr feeds as well as … Flipboard: Apple 'iPad app of the year' adds Google Reader, Flickr contentSan Jose Mercury News Is Flipboard Too Much Fun to be Useful?GigaOm Flipboard adds Flickr, RSS feeds and status updatingElectronista Mobile Burn -MocoNews -Wired News all 40 news articles »

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Continuing its ongoing legal battle against Apple, Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia on Thursday said it has filed infringement claims against the iPhone maker in the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands covering more than a dozen patents Nokia asserts are its own.

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EUGENE, OR—Oregon Ducks center Jordan Holmes expressed concern Saturday that he may have said or done something to make sophomore quarterback Darron Thomas call so many shotgun formations in the Ducks’ 37-20 win over Oregon State.

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This April, when she signed into law Arizona’s tough new anti-immigration policy, Gov. Jan Brewer bravely showed the nation that if the federal government wouldn’t take the most draconian measures imaginable to deal with illegal aliens, then she would do it on her own.

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Apple’s Mac App Store will officially open for business on January 6th (along with CES in Las Vegas). But some developers are still unhappy with some of Apple’s terms including a prohibition on free demos, beta software, and some types of content.

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Digital Trends – On Wednesday, Apple released the 10.1.1 update for iTunes that was intended to fix crashing issues — not cause new ones. Upon installing the update, some users are reporting that they are unable to open iTunes without it immediately quitting, effectively locking them out of iTunes.

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donniebaseball23 writes “Cloud gaming provider OnLive has secured a patent for an ‘apparatus and method for wireless video gaming.’ The patent gives substantial leverage for OnLive over competing brands in the cloud-based gaming market. ‘Hundreds of people have worked incredibly hard for more than eight years to bring OnLive technology from the lab to the mass market, not just overcoming technical and business challenges, but overcoming immense skepticism,’ said OnLive CEO Steve Perlman. ‘It is gratifying to not only see people throughout the world enjoying OnLive technology in the wake of so many doubters, but also receive recognition for such a key invention.’”

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Fox News

Woman Never Experiences Fear ABC News Snakes, spiders, haunted houses and scary movies may evoke shrieks of fright in many people, but there's one woman who doesn't seem to be afraid of them — or anything else. She goes only by the initials SM to … Brain-damaged woman feels no fearmsnbc.com A woman with no fear could help traumatised soldiersTelegraph.co.uk The No-Fear Woman (And What Her Brain Reveals)Discovery News Science News -Science Now -The Associated Press all 218 news articles »

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Reuters – News Corp’s social networking site MySpace and Google Inc have reached a multiyear search and advertising agreement, ending months of uncertainty surrounding the partnership.

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wiredmikey writes “Google announced today that it will be extending Chrome’s sandboxing technology to include the Flash Player plug-in. ‘Sandboxing’ technology is a method of isolating an application from the rest of the operating system and tightly controlling its resources. According to Google, the new sandboxing feature adds an additional layer of protection and will help protect users against malicious pages that attempt to hijack systems or steal information from the system.”

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Last year we put out our first ever public Call for Writers. Over the past year we've added many new faces to AnandTech and we're looking to do it again. It takes a great deal of time to cover the products that we do on AnandTech and we continue to have more to review and analyze than we have time to actually review and analyze them. We need your help.

1) A sample of a product review you've written. This can be any product in the categories mentioned below, the review can follow any format and be of any length. Ultimately your content would live on AnandTech, so take a look at our reviews and how we do things and keep that in mind as you submit your sample. You don't need complete testing. If you don't have things to compare the product being reviewed to just outline how you would test, what tests you'd run, what you'd compare to and how. Obviously the more complete your sample is, the better it looks

 

2) A sample guide. This can be a how to, a tutorial, or anything of the sort. I'd caution you against submitting a guide to building a PC, try to do something a bit more unique.

 

3) A sample analysis piece/column/editorial. This would be something similar to our Micron ClearNAND analysis or my take on the Google Chrome OS announcement. Again, these are just examples, think of something creative on your own

 

4) A sample set of blog/news posts. We're looking to bring back some tech news to AT with the new site. Submit a handful of interesting stories along with your brief analysis. These can be product announcements, interesting revelations around the web, drawing attention to a forum post, etc…

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darthcamaro writes “Two years after Sun released MySQL 5.1, Oracle has picked up the ball with the official release of MySQL 5.5. New features include semi-synchronous replication, InnoDB by default and new SIGNAL/RESIGNAL support for exception handling. Above all, Oracle stressed that they are committed to further MySQL open source development and that they see it as a complementary technology to their proprietary Oracle database.”

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Reuters – Apple Inc’s iPad and bustling retail business have encouraged investors to shrug off the shaky economy and snap up the company’s shares as 2010 comes to a close.

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Ben Patterson – LG’s well-leaked 4-inch Android smartphone has finally broken cover, boasting such mouth-watering features as full-on 1080p playback and recording, dual cameras and — best of all — a dual-core processor, the first of its kind for a smartphone. When will …

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PC World – The European Union has issued new public procurement rules that broadly favor open source technologies.

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The Guardian (blog)

Apple slates Jan. 6 launch for Mac App Store Computerworld Computerworld – Apple today announced that it would open its Mac App Store on Jan. 6, 2011, beating its self-imposed deadline by several weeks. "The App Store revolutionized mobile apps," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a statement … Apple crashes CES party with Mac App StoreBetaNews Mac App Store Open For Business Jan. 6InformationWeek Macworld releases the ultimate iPad companion bookMacworld NASDAQ -Gotta Be Mobile -Ology all 266 news articles »

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AP – Julian Assange is swapping a Victorian prison cell for an English country mansion after a judge granted bail to the WikiLeaks founder wanted in Sweden for questioning on sex-crimes allegations.

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PC World – A business-friendly version of Google’s Chrome browser is ready for prime time, the company announced on its Chromium blog.

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An anonymous reader writes “Former Google employee, Gmail creator, and FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit has come right out and said what many people are thinking (or hoping for). On his FriendFeed page, Buchheit made a post titled ‘Prediction: ChromeOS will be killed next year (or “merged” with Android).’ In it, he bluntly says that Google’s netbook-centric Chrome OS is as good as dead. ‘Yeah, I was thinking, “is this too obvious to even state?”, but then I see people taking ChromeOS seriously, and Google is even shipping devices for some reason,’ Buchheit writes. ‘Because ChromeOS has no purpose that isn’t better served by Android (perhaps with a few mods to support a non-touch display).’”

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Emulating the gallantry, adaptability, and dedication to duty displayed by English gentlemen in such shining moments as the Imperial occupation of India and adventurism in darkest Africa, BP CEO Tony Hayward’s flip, and often arogant, response to the Deep…

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As the first Sikh elected to India’s highest office, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has helped change the face of…okay, just so we don’t get too ahead of ourselves here, we should probably explain what a Sikh is.

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CBC.ca

WikiLeaks founder released from British custody Bloomberg By AP LONDON (AP) — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been released on bail following a week of legal drama over his extradition. The 39-year-old Australian is fighting moves to take him to Sweden, where he faces sex-crimes allegations related to a … WikiLeaks' Assange to Walk Out of JailVoice of America Freed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was kept in solitary confinementTelegraph.co.uk WikiLeaks founder released from British custodyHouston Chronicle Times of India -Sky News -Christian Science Monitor all 8,531 news articles »

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wiredog writes “The Atlantic reports the news that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has a new section of their website dedicated to documenting COBOL’s history. An exhibit will open at the museum this spring.”

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eldavojohn writes “Back in 2006 there was a lot of talk of testing String Theory. Well, today CERN has released a statement for the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment. The short of it is simply that as far as they could tell “No experimental evidence for microscopic black holes has been found.” The long statement indicates that since the highly precise CMS detector found no spray of sub-atomic particles of normal matter while LHC smashed particles together, the hypothesis by String Theory that micro black holes would be formed and quickly evaporated in this experiment was incorrect. These tests have given the team confidence to say that they can exclude a ‘variety of theoretical models’ for the cases of black holes with a mass of 3.5-4.5 TeV (1012 electron volts). Not Even Wrong points us to the arxiv prepublication for those of you well versed in Greek. While you may not be able to run around claiming that String Theory is dead and disproved, evidently there are some adjustments that need to be made.”

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Washington Post (blog)

Facebook's facial recognition knows who your friends are msnbc.com Facebook, iPhone, Twitter and Wii. Technology evolves at the speed of light. Msnbc.com's tech reporters and editors look at the gadgets, games and innovations changing our world. Pre-caffeine tech: Creepy tech we love and hate. Also, cats! … Facebook Adds Facial Recognition to Photo TaggingPC Magazine Facebook unveils Facial Recognition photo taggingMobile Burn Facebook Photos Use Facial Recognition for Easier TaggingeWeek Geekosystem -Fortune -ABC News all 329 news articles »

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itwbennett writes “Since the Gawker and McDonald’s hack attacks, the web has been overrun with admonishments for using weak passwords. But weak passwords have their place too, says blogger Peter Smith. Like, for example, on Gawker, where he really doesn’t care if it gets cracked. ‘Life is too short to be worrying about 24 character passwords for trivial sites,’ says Smith. And, to put things in perspective, your good passwords are pretty weak too. In a 2007 Coding Horror article, Jeff Atwood points out that the password “Fgpyyih804423″ was cracked in 160 seconds by the Ophcrack cracker.”

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deek writes “Spanish gamer site NicaGamerz.com have reported that it’s now legal to sell the PS3 Jailbreak modchip in Spain (Google translation of Spanish original). According to the article, one reason for the legal ruling is because Sony removed the ability to run GNU/Linux on the console. One can only wonder if Sony will soon rush out a firmware update that will re-enable the OtherOS feature, and appeal the court decision. Oh the irony of that thought. The legal ruling was made on the 13th December (Google translation). There are only 5 days to appeal, starting from that date.”

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