Latest Technology News

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a lower court judgement that would force EchoStar to disable its DVR functionality in as many as eight million subscriber boxes, delivering what might be a fatal blow to the company's chances for victory in the case.

The panel of judges did however reject the lower courts ruling that Dish's workaround was "insufficient" to avoid infringement, giving the company some good news. Either way experts argue that the ruling likely means that the satellite television provider will be forced to enter into a costly settlement to prevent its customers from having their service interrupted.

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Music creation apps on Android, be they beatmakers, step sequencers, drum machines, or virtual synths, are pretty rare for as advanced as the platform has become. Despite the thousands of Android users, the platform is nowhere near as robust as iOS for the musically inclined.

But that isn't to say there aren't many potential Android musicians out there. Quite the contrary, I know there is a big potential audience to be had (at least anecdotally,) because most of the traffic on my Android-specific blog goes to my music app reviews.

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A team of researchers have discovered that iOS4 is secretly obtaining your location and recording it to a hidden file, raising obvious privacy concerns and questions as to why Apple would be storing such information. The researchers believe it is intentional, as the file is restored after backups and even when the user switches to a new device.

Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden of O'Reilly are presenting their findings at the Where 2.0 conference on Wednesday. They say the functionality appears new to iOS4, and they have attempted to contact Apple's security team on the issue but have not heard anything back.

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Dropbox has a juicy carrot and one big sick for subscribers. The cloud storage service announced 25 million users and revised terms of service. The new ToS is the stick and one that could beat away some subscribers. Among the updates to its service terms and conditions: alteration when it comes to "Compliance with Laws and Law Enforcement."

While the change won't affect the majority of the people, unless they are suspected of breaking the law, some subscribers may be put off, particularly since Dropbox previously indicated that not even its employees could access subscriber files. According to Dropbox's help docs: "Your files are actually safer while stored in your Dropbox than on your computer in some cases. We use the same secure methods as banks and the military to send and store your data...Nobody can see your private files in Dropbox unless you deliberately invite them or put them in your Public folder."

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LightSquared, the hybrid 4G/Satellite network wholesaler has announced a bilateral LTE roaming partnership with Cellular South, the United States' largest private wireless provider and ninth largest mobile network altogether. This is the first major wireless carrier partnership to be announced by LightSquared.

In January, LightSquared received clearance from the FCC to sell its network bandwidth wholesale, which is ultimately the company's plan. Its 4G and Satellite networks are being built to sell to current network operators fleshing out their 4G coverage or to sell to startup operators looking to offer unique services. LightSquared has no plans to be a consumer-facing network operator.

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It's the official iPhone first quarter 2011 shipments day. AT&T announced earnings before the bell, and Apple will do so after the market closes. For all those prognosticators predicting a huge exodus of iPhone users from AT&T to Verizon, please accept my big, wet, splatter-in-your face raspberry. Yum.

During Q1, AT&T activated 3.6 million iPhones, up 1 million, or 23 percent, year over year. Three months earlier, AT&T activated 4.1 million iPhones. The 500,000 unit decline reflects seasonal changes more than any substantive competitive sales impact from Verizon iPhone. Important metric: AT&T said that iPhone churn, meaning subscribers switching carriers, was about the same as Q1 2010. Total churn for all categories was 1.36 percent, up slightly (1.3 percent) year over year. Churn was 1.32 percent in Q4 2010.

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Writing is what I do for a living, but also for enjoyment. So I was intrigued when Moleskine for iPad popped up in Apple's App Store on April 15, 2011 (It's available for iPhone, too). The Moleskine notebook is the legendary journal of great writers.

Moleskine uses Ernest Hemingway in its marketing. He's not around to complain or dispute the pocket journal's value to him as a writer. During 1920s, Hemingway frequented several Paris cafés where other artists also used the journal to jot down thoughts, stories and sketches. Of course, this mystique is all marketing now. Use Moleskine, too, and you can be a great writer -- or at least feel part of the select community of artists.

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Finally, after three years, Google on Tuesday opened the United States maps in its Google Map Maker project to public editing.

Now, any user can submit or update mapping information in the browser-based Map Maker interface, from buildings and businesses to streets, footpaths, and bike trails.

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Google said Tuesday that it had begun to transcode all new videos on YouTube to the WebM codec, an open source effort supported by Mozilla, Opera, Adobe and others. The technology supports high-quality video using the HTML5 video tag, and is available for use under a royalty-free license.

The site has been at work transcoding YouTube videos in the catalog since Google first open-sourced the VP8 codec -- the basis for WebM -- in May of last year. Currently about 30 percent of all videos that make up about 99 percent of the views on YouTube have been transcoded, Google says.

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San Fransisco-based social network Tagged has announced that it will buy the popular Social/Instant Messaging Client digsby.

Digsby is a multi-platform Social and Instant Messaging Client available for Windows (eventually due on Mac and Linux) and brings a combined buddy list for all your AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber and Facebook Chat Accounts. Not only that, digsby delivers everything important from your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn accounts and has a fully featured email client integrated. With more than 3 million registered users as of today it will remain a standalone product in the 100 million user community Tagged.

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The relationship between Apple and Samsung looks to be taking a dramatic turn for the worse, as Apple sued the company over alleged copying of its iPhone and iPad devices in Samsung's own products. Specifically named was the Galaxy Tab tablet as well as the Nexus S, Epic 4G and Galaxy S 4G smartphones.

Apple filed the suit on April 15 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, and claims that the appearance and methods of operation of Samsung's devices directly violate patents held by Apple. Indeed, as of late the Korean electronics maker has mimicked Apple's popular products in its own efforts.

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"Blah, blah, blah" is the sound of analysts, bloggers and reporters sounding off about how Android handsets outsell iPhone -- true Google's OS is like Pac-Man gobbling smartphone market share. But cell phones are but one category among several vying to become the PC's platform successor. By that measure, at least in the United States, iOS' reach exceeds Android's by more than 59 percent, according to ComScore on "connected media devices" -- what I have longed called cloud-connected mobile devices.

ComScore measured the U.S. "unduplicated" install base of Android and iOS devices -- 23.8 million and 37.9 million, respectively. Apple claims to have shipped more than 100 million iOS devices -- iPads, iPhones and iPod touches -- but that's globally, and not all may still be in use. Assuming ComScore's methodology is accurate, install base is a good measure.

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LocalResponse on Tuesday launched the beta of its platform that lets businesses search and instantly respond to customers who have "checked in" at their location using Facebook, Twitter, foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Loopt, Flickr, Instagram and more.

Social media has allowed companies to more directly engage with consumers and tackle customer service issues or even sales head on.

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Internet Explorer's security zones provide support for more than 70 key settings, which gives you very fine control over what websites can and can't do on your system. These settings are spread around several dialogs, though, and it can be difficult to get a feel for your current configuration, or spot any problems -- unless you get a little help from IEZoneAnalyzer 3.

If you'd like an overview of your current security settings, for instance, don't waste time browsing around the Tools > Internet Options dialog. Just launch IEZoneAnalyzer, choose "Internet" in the Security Zone box, click "View Effective Settings," and the program will display your configuration in a single dialog. This includes the source of each setting, so you'll know if a particular restriction was applied by your preferences, machine preferences or Group Policy. And a couple of clicks will export this data to the clipboard, a CSV file, or even directly to Excel, if you'd like to run further analysis or just save it for posterity.

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German software house Jumping Bytes Software has released PureSync 3.0 for Windows PCs, a file backup and sync tool. Version 3.0 includes a number of bug fixes for both Personal (free for non-commercial use) and Professional Editions (€14.95; about US $21.50), but significantly adds to the feature set of the paid-for Professional Edition.

PureSync 3.0 Professional, which is unlocked via a license file after purchase, now supports synchronizing over FTP, plus the ability both to compress and encrypt files. It's also now capable of copying open and locked files and can provide email notification of a finished job, complete with log.

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