California-based mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) Telestial on Tuesday announced it had dropped its international 2G and 3G roaming rates to the lowest in the industry.

Customers who buy one of Telestial's Passport or Passport Plus SIM cards can now connect to data networks in France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and 21 other European countries for as low as $1 per megabyte. The company's prepaid SIM cards are compatible with mobile networks in 180 countries worldwide and require a SIM-unlocked GSM 850/900/1800/1900 phone for activation.

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Android Open Source Project engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru on Tuesday announced the portions of Android 3.2 covered under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) have been released to the Android Open Source Project.

Android uses several different Open Source licenses, but the majority of the code falls under the Apache Software License 2.0. Things like the Linux kernel and Bluetooth stack fall under the GNU licenses.

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Groupon has nothing to fear from Google. Yet. But the methodical Google Offers expansion shouldn't be ignored -- today two other cities join Portland. Google Offers beta launched in the Oregon city on June 1.

Google announced New York and San Francisco as coming soon on that day. Next up, revealed today: Austin, Boston, Denver, Seattle and Washington, DC and possibility Google Offers could reach 10 major metropolitan areas by early autumn.

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Black hat security group Anonymous has exposed 90,000 military email addresses stored on servers from consulting firm and U.S. government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. The hacker group said the breach was done to expose the corruption of government and related corporate entities.

Booz Allen Hamilton deals with all branches of the armed services as well as the defense and intelligence communities of the U.S. Government. It claims to provide, among other things, "strategy and technology solutions that help deter 21st century threats and meet complex mission requirements."

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There are so many ways of storing your data online these days that accessing it all can become rather a chore. FTP soon gave way to accessing storage via your web browser which, while convenient in terms of not needing another program, is quite restrictive.

Such problems fuelled the development of Cyberduck. Yes, it's an FTP client, but it's also capable of giving you quickly and easy access to a wide range of other online storage providers too via a single client, including Amazon S3, Google Docs and WebDAV. Version 4.1 has just been released, promising a raft of the under-the-hood improvements, new WebDAV implementation and a tweaked user interface in Windows.

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Now Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg should worry. Google+ is scarcely two weeks old and invite-only but growing like a weed. Ancestry.com founder Paul Allen (not to be confused with Microsoft's cofounder of the same name) estimates the 10 million-user number based on a cunning surname analysis.

I wouldn't be surprised at the 10 million number. Over the weekend, I saw a sudden and stunning surge in people following me who aren't early-adopter techies. Many are friends who didn't receive invitations from me, by the way. Sorry guys.

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Rogue Amoeba Software LLC has announced updates to its Airfoil application for Windows and Mac. Airfoil allows users on Windows and Macs to wirelessly stream music to compatible devices on an Apple Airport Express network, including AirTunes-connected speakers and hi-fi systems, as well as iPhones, iPod touches, iPads and other computers running the complementary AirFoil Speakers software.

The updates, which are platform specific, include a redesigned user interface in Windows for greater ease of use, plus full support for third-party Airplay devices on Mac, and greater controls for those running the free AirFoil Speakers add-on to control playback of streaming media.

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That's the stunning statement made by Robert Siciliano, a security and identity theft consultant, blogging for McAfee today. The post's title is nearly as provocative: "McAfee Reports Most Malware Ever in Early 2011".

Siciliano writes based on the McAfee Threats Report: First Quarter 2011, which released on June 1 and has gotten modest coverage among bloggers and journalists.

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There is nothing that riles my ire like data taken or given without context (or out of it). That's the case with new smartphone data released today by ComScore. The chart above is more or less self-explanatory. Well, at first glance it is.

"During the three months ending in May 2011, 76.8 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones", according to a ComScore Data Mine blog post. "Among smartphone owners, Apple accounted for 26.6 percent of devices". Research in Motion ranks second.

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It's been a little more than a year since HP acquired struggling smartphone pioneer Palm, and now the Palm name is history.

HP on Monday announced it is reorganizing its HP Palm brand into a new group called the webOS global business unit, led by Stephen DeWitt, who replaces former Palm CEO and webOS leader Jon Rubenstein.

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Microblogging service Twitter said Monday that more than one million applications have now been registered, representing the work of over 750,000 developers. This is a marked increase from last year, when just 150,000 registered apps existed.

With such an explosive growth rate, this means a new app is registered with Twitter every 1.5 seconds.

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The graph I've embedded above comes from a survey conducted on behalf of virtualization software company Parallels, and it succinctly illustrates one of the main questions related to the value of mobile and embedded technology: When one machine duplicates the functionality of another, do you consolidate?

The survey, which polled a modest group of 210 individuals, shows a nearly perfect split between those who would consider consolidation and those who wouldn't (50.5% said they would, 49.5% said they would not.) It is a question of special value to a virtualization company like Parallels, and proof that device convergence is still a tough nut to crack. When one device gains the ability to do the job of another, users still aren't convinced they should drop the device that's been "replaced."

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Windows 7 continues to charge ahead as a successful operating system release for Microsoft. CEO Steve Ballmer revealed in a Monday keynote at the annual Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles that the number of licenses sold worldwide has now surpassed 400 million.

Microsoft's latest version of Windows already runs on a little over 27 percent of all worldwide computers, according to data from Net Applications. Even though Windows 7's share has nearly doubled in the past year, it still has not been able to unseat the market leading Windows XP, still running on over half (51 percent) of all PCs.

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Early this afternoon, I trucked over to the Google search page, saw the doodle above and wondered: "Who's birthday is it? Who is Google celebrating today?" Doodles are fairly common commemorating special days. It's my birthday. What a funny coincidence it seemed, but wasn't. The Google doodle is for me.

Have you seen a personalized doodle like this before for you? It's new to me, and I'm thinking it all has to do with Google+ and new user profiles associated with it. I've been logged into Google on other birthdays but never noticed the doodle in the past.

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"Indestructible" rootkits, "fatal" trojans, "hellish" viruses -- malware has always been a great topic for generating scary headlines. There's generally no need to worry, though. Almost whatever the threat, if you can just wait for a while then a free (and often simpler) solution will turn up.

The latest variant of the Popureb Trojan, for instance, hides itself away in your Master Boot Record, and hooks a hard drive port driver in an attempt to protect itself from being overwritten. It's so deeply buried that Microsoft initially recommended reinstalling Windows if you were infected, but a few days later they changed its advice to point out that a little work with the Recovery console could get your PC back to normal. Or alternatively, a free Webroot tool can detect and remove the threat for you in just a couple of clicks.

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