Latest Technology News

As the law enforcement crackdown against hacktivist groups Anonymous and LulzSec continued, British law enforcement on Wednesday announced the apprehension of "Topiary," a 19-year-old man from the Shetland Islands north of Scotland who has served as the spokesperson for the group.

Police were said to still be searching the residence where the individual was apprehended, as well as talking to a 17-year-old in the municipality of Lincolnshire in east central England in connection with the arrested. The person had not been charged or arrested.

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This week, the two largest open-source browser developers are drawing more attention to HTML5, and what software developers and web designers can do with it. For Google, it's a delightful HTML5 showcase, while Mozilla will directly engage developers in a one-hour, live briefing. (Before, any commenters cry Apple foul, my measure of "largest" is market share -- there Chrome and Firefox lead Safari on personal computers.)

Mozilla has announced the participants, date and time for its first Ask MDN event, which will take place via Twitter.

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Since 2009, Android supported three general screen size categories: small, medium, and large. But the introduction of tablet-specific Android Honeycomb in early 2011 brought support for the extra large screen size category and drove a wedge between Android phones and Android tablets.

You see, Honeycomb was created to specifically take advantage of the increased screen real estate of tablets, and the "extra large" screen category was born. But tablets with 7" screens like the original Samsung Galaxy Tab, the Dell Streak 7, and the Archos Home Tablet have awkward screen dimensions which make them fit into the "large" category, but really only when viewed in the landscape orientation. Because of this strange screen quality, 7" tablets didn't even support the version of Android built for tablets.

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Google has updated the alpha "Dev" build of Google Chrome to 14.0.835.2. This minor update is notable largely for the amendment of one of its multi-touch features to avoid a conflict with Mac OS X Lion, which released last week.

The latest build basically alters the browser's own multi-touch gesture for moving backwards and forwards through the browser's history to two-finger swipe gestures from its original three-finger swipe. This latter gesture is used by Lion to move between desktops and full-screen apps.

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Cloud-based file sync and sharing solutions are not exactly thin on the ground, as any user of Wuala, AVG LiveKive, Dropbox, SugarSync and SpiderOak will tell you. That's why being able to stand out from the crowd is especially important in this cramped marketplace.

YouSendIt has carved a unique niche for itself by offering services you won't find in rival products, such as its "Send a file" service and options for annotating selected documents with text, images and even an electronically scrawled signature. Until recently, much of this functionality was restricted to your web browser, but YouSendIt has just released two new free apps for Windows and iPhone to accompany its existing YouSendIt Express application, which runs on both Windows and Mac.

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The security software market is undergoing dramatic changes, says, Gartner, which released data for 2010 yesterday. Twenty-ten? Why'd it take so long? Gist: The five companies controlling the market have lost dramatic combined share compared to four years earlier. Get this: Microsoft isn't given as a reason.

I call out Microsoft because its entrance into the security software market seemed sure to sap longstanding vendors, or so some claimed five years ago. The company gives away for free products like Security Essentials, and its choosing to compete with longstanding partners was controversial. But as I explained in December 2006, Microsoft needed then and still needs now to protect Windows users from hackers and bot herders.

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Back in May, when Microsoft announced "Mango," the first major update to Windows Phone, the Redmond company named some new hardware partners who would launch devices running Windows Phone Mango: Acer, Fujitsu-Toshiba, ZTE, and Nokia. So far, Nokia's "Sea Ray" Windows Phone Mango device has been shown, and Acer's W4 was shown off at Computex in Taipei. Tuesday evening, Fujitsu Toshiba Mobile Communications officially announced its Windows Phone Mango device, known as IS12T.

IS12T includes some impressive capabilities, including a waterproof and dustproof chassis, a 13.2 megapixel camera, and 32GB of onboard memory, and will be available in Japan beginning in September 2011. Global availability and further specs have not yet been announced.

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With over 35 million users accessing its Content Delivery network worldwide, Pando Networks has access to tons of data about the movement of different types of files across the Web. Wednesday, the company released the results of a six-month real world study of traffic on its network within the United States, showing which areas have the fastest speeds and highest completion rate of file transfer.

Unlike the NTIA's National Broadband Map, this study relies on actual performance data and not just advertised maximum speeds, so it is interesting to see that Rhode Island, which NTIA ranks as the 5th fastest state in advertised speed is the fastest in actual speed, with the average of 894 kBps (or 7.1 Mbps).

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After a five-year hiatus, Verizon Wireless will return to RadioShack shelves starting September 15, the retailer announced Tuesday. The move would end a rocky two year relationship with T-Mobile, who as recently as April was accused by RadioShack of being in breach of contract.

Verizon lost its longstanding contract with RadioShack back in 2006, when the electronics retailer instead chose to partner with Cingular through 2015. The company also around that time renewed its contract with Sprint, which will be sold in stores through 2016.

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LucidChart is a fantastic example of how an HTML5 Web app can offer functionality comparable to a desktop application on any platform with an appropriate browser, and not even require a full-time connection to work. After having become the most popular paid app in the Chrome app store, and then launching full offline functionality at Google I/O this year, LucidChart on Tuesday announced it has raised a million dollars in seed funding from 500 Startups, 2M Companies, K9 Ventures, and other unnamed angel investors.

LucidChart was crafted in late 2009 to be the pure Web app version of Microsoft Visio, where multiple users can render and manipulate graphical charts in the Web browser in real time. It even has support for Visio .vdx documents.

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Editor's note: This article was commissioned by Dell. To learn more about Dell's solutions for improving responsiveness while reducing costs with virtualization, please visit Dell's site by clicking here.

Virtualization as a concept has become one of the most important technologies to come about in the modern PC era. The benefits are many: IT administrators love virtualization because it cuts down on administration and data center size and the bookkeepers approve of it as it cuts down on IT costs. Many businesses aren't taking advantage of its full benefits, however.

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Windows Phone 7.5, code-named 'Mango', has been released to manufacturing according to a blog entry by Microsoft's Terry Myerson, Corporate Vice President, Windows Phone Engineering.

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Microsoft debuted two new accessories Tuesday that will be ready for the important holiday shopping season. A wireless headset with Bluetooth capabilities along with a new media remote are expected, both sporting the gloss black enclosures that the newer Xbox 360's have shipped with.

The wireless headset will operate on Xbox's radio frequencies, but the company has also made it compatible with mobile phones and other devices through integrated Bluetooth support. Using it as a handsfree headset shouldn't be a problem: it looks very much like the standard mobile phone wireless headset.

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This can't possibly be the right way to endear tablet geeks to Honeycomb.

Today, Verizon announced that Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 goes on sale July 28th, with 4G LTE radios. That means Tab 10.1 and not Motorola XOOM will be the Android tablet big bandwidth grabber from the largest wireless carrier in the United States. XOOM shipped sooner, but with 3G radios. Early adopters have to send back their tablets for 4G LTE upgrades.

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Australian software company Auslogics has revealed a new free benchmarking tool, BenchTown, and an online community site, BenchTown.com, where you can compare your PC's performance with others. The benchmarking options are fairly standard, with your CPU, RAM, hard drive, 2D and 3D graphics performance being tested.

Each component has its speed checked in multiple ways, though -- RAM is tested for both bandwidth and latency, for instance -- and our initial tests suggest the results are reasonably accurate. Keeping things simple means you can get your final score quite quickly, in around five minutes, and if you want to focus on a specific area (graphics, say) then you can run only those tests for even faster feedback.

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