Ed Oswald

China is in the spotlight again after a US intelligence report accused the country of cyber espionage. The country is using the data stolen as a result to strengthen its own economy, and is a threat to both American progress and the economy overall, the report says.

"Many states view economic espionage as an essential tool in achieving national security and economic prosperity", the report reads. "Their economic espionage programs...could give these states a competitive edge over the United States and other rivals".

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Apple will require all apps in the Mac App Store to employ sandboxing beginning in March 2012, aiming to make apps safer from malicious attack. The Cupertino company informed all registered developers in an e-mail sent on Thursday. Apple had planned to mandate sandboxing beginning this month, but for undisclosed reasons delayed the requirement.

Sandboxing is a method which developers use to limit exposure to system processes. The application is run in a protected environment and given a limited set of resources. This in turn makes it much harder for attackers to break in. "The vast majority of Mac users have been free from malware and we're working on technologies to help keep it that way", Apple argues.

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Is Amazon Prime the best deal in tech? It just may be: Amazon now offers the capability for customers to loan out over 5,000 books for their Kindle or Kindle Fire devices. The Kindle Owners' Lending Library will allow for one book per month to be lent out, and there are no due dates.

To borrow a new book, the Kindle user "returns" the title on their device by lending out a new book: the older book will disappear.

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Here's a story that will make you think twice about what you share on Facebook. Researchers with the University of British Columbia's NetSysLab let loose what are called "socialbots" on Facebook, and came away with 250 gigabytes of personally identifiable data. The results of the study show that Facebook users need to be much more cognizant of exactly what they share, and who they add as friends.

A socialbot is a bot that comes in the form of a faked user profile. The bot friend requests users on the site, and then once the requests are accepted, it downloads the personal information on the profile. NetSysLab researchers report a success rate of up to 80 percent in tricking Facebook users into adding the fake profiles and making matters worse, Facebook's protective measures did little to detect or prevent the researcher's infiltration.

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Just like many other iPhone 4S users, I am experiencing poor battery life that has left me running for the charger far more than I would like to. The issues are a black eye on what has been an otherwise stellar experience with Apple's latest smartphone.

Although I never owned the iPhone 4, I am told by those who have used both that there is a definite decrease in battery performance. We should have known, though -- in the slides of the keynote introducing the 4S, astute observers noted the standby time advertised by Apple (200 hours) was a full 100 hours less than its predecessor.

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After years of promises and demos both from Samsung and a host of other companies, the flexible screen is set to finally become a reality in 2012. Samsung confirmed plans during its quarterly conference call.

"The flexible display, we are looking to introduce sometime in 2012", company spokesperson Robert Yi says. The company aims to introduce the first flexible screen device in the early part of the year. He adds that it would "probably start from the handset side".

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Let's face it: these days, a lot of us are accessing the Internet via smartphones, tablets, and other portable devices. It makes good sense that website owners respond to this trend, and ensure their sites play nice with mobile browsers.

Google knows this, and is launching a new initiative called "Go Mo", aimed at assisting developers in optimizing their content for mobile devices. The Mountain View, Calif. company has included site testing tools, best practices for creating mobile sites, and information to assist companies in locating qualified mobile web site designers.

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As a seasoned veteran user of each of the major smartphone operating systems, I must say Windows phone 7 is my favorite. Not because it has the most features, or is the easiest to use, or is the most open, or even the most closed (which apparently some people like), but because it is the most polished.

Apple's iOS has none of the customability, Android none of the perfection, and WebOS none of the usability that Microsoft has managed to scrape together into a gorgeous and unique OS. The structure of Windows Phone 7 means I rarely have to spend any time looking for what I want, and can spend more of my time doing what I want. Sure, there aren't as many apps to chose from, and Windows Phone lacks some features comparably. But the OS has refined, elegant form that sets apart it from competitors.

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Did you know that a laptop is stolen every 55 seconds in the United States?

I joined those ranks two weeks ago. While out on the road I made a stopover in Center City Philadelphia. Not thinking and in a rush to get to my destination, I left my laptop bag on the front passenger seat. I returned to my car to find the drivers-side window broken and the bag gone.

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Just a day after HP announced that it wouldn't be spinning off its PC division, with its new CEO Meg Whitman citing "together we are stronger", the same feeling does not extend to WebOS. British newspaper The Guardian reports on Friday that the company plans to shut down the division and more than 500 jobs could be cut.

HP acquired the rights to WebOS through its acquisition of Palm in April 2010. The software was meant to power HP's line of Palm smartphones and the TouchPad, but following the scrapping of both lines in August, the future of WebOS was uncertain.

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Nearly four months to the day after Google first unveiled its social network to the masses, the search giant on Thursday opened up Google+ to users of its Google Apps platform. While users of standard Google accounts have been able to sign up for the service without an invite since late September, those registered under a Google Apps account remained logged out.

Google claims that technical issues prevented a faster rollout for Apps customers, but did not specify the exact cause of the delays.

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Research in Motion will now need to fight off class action suits in both the United States and Canada, following a four-day outage earlier this month which started overseas but quickly spread worldwide. The outage left some without email, web browsing, and instant messaging for several days.

RIM apologized for the issues and offered free apps and enterprise tech support for its customers' troubles, but that was not enough. The US effort was filed on Wednesday in the US District Court for the Central District of California in Santa Ana, and the Canadian suit in the Quebec Superior Court. Both efforts seek class-action status.

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Three weeks after T-Mobile introduced a cheap no-contract 4G data plan through Walmart, the carrier on Wednesday revealed the promised 4G-capable phone to sell at the retailer: the Samsung Exhibit II 4G. The phone runs Android 2.3 "Gingerbread", and is exclusive to Walmart starting October 27 before being available nationally November 2.

The main attraction to the Exhibit II is T-Mobile's aggressive pricing. Consumers can purchase the device with no commitment for $199.99, and those choosing to add a two-year service plan would be able to pick up the phone for $79.99, not including the $50 mail-in rebate offered by the carrier.

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Mac users need to be careful of what they're installing on their computers following the discovery of a new Trojan making its rounds. Security firms ESET and Sophos both say the malware is actually a port of a Linux "backdoor Trojan" that has been around for nearly a decade.

"In terms of functionality, the Mac variant of the backdoor is similar to its older Linux brother, with only the IRC server, channel and password changed," ESET malware researcher Robert Lipovsky says.

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You would think the inventor of the iPod's next gadget creation might be some new consumer electronics gadget that will revolutionize the world once more. What if I told you Tony Fadell's latest creation is a new twist on something far, far less revolutionary -- the thermostat?

Fadell's new venture, Nest Labs, aims to create greener technologies. While it may seem somewhat odd for the company's work to begin with the thermostat, it actually makes sense. In our quest to stay comfortable in our homes, constantly fiddling with the thermostat actually wastes a lot of energy.

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