Latest Technology News

Has a locked cell phone ever frustrated you? The Electronic Frontier Foundation is now organizing consumers and software developers to tell their "real stories" on this subject to the US Copyright Office.

Under a new campaign, the EFF's FreeYourPhone.org is now soliciting petitions and other help from the public in its efforts to convince the Copyright Office to grant exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The game of lowering expectations continues for Microsoft this morning, as financial analysts fear that the company's fiscal second quarter numbers will fall shy of expectations, when it reveals its performance numbers tomorrow afternoon.

That's actually a pretty safe bet. Last October, the company targeted $17.3 billion in revenue as its low end of its guidance target. CFO Chris Liddell told analysts at that time that the company would be able to squeak through that number based on a lowering of its operating expenses.

Qualcomm may now be a key industry holdout against a proposal to extend the digital television switchover deadline from February 17, potentially to June 12.

While Verizon and AT&T have each indicated that they would not object to a proposed extension to June 12, Qualcomm reportedly wrote a letter to Congressional representatives asking them not to delay the switchover because of how it would affect the company's rollout plans.

One of the smartest Internet analysts in the business, Heather Dougherty of Hitwise, revealed some potentially prophetic data yesterday: Based on the samples of traffic that Hitwise tracks, it would appear US-based traffic associated with social contact service Twitter is at least equivalent to US-based traffic on news sharing service Digg, at about 21 out of every 1,000 hits.

Now, it's worth noting that Digg traffic tracked by Hitwise isn't exactly plunging, though Dougherty's chart does appear to indicate it's trending slightly down.

The 2006 Veteran's Administration breach will always hold a special place in our hearts for targeting a population who deserved much better protection, and the TJX breach of 2007 will live forever in the legends of security professionals who can't fathom how the security-light retailer managed to stay in business after such a heaping helping of incompetence, but the newly revealed hole at Heartland Payment Systems gets some special price for sheer scope of theft. Even the head of the company isn't sure, but the company handles over 100 million transactions every month.

The company does know what was not compromised, according to a release this morning: merchant data or cardholder Social Security numbers, unencrypted personal identification numbers (PIN), consumer addresses or telephone numbers; Heartland's check management systems; Canadian, payroll, campus solutions or micropayments operations; Give Something Back Network; or the recently acquired Network Services and Chockstone processing platforms. And they really knew how to kick off the damage-control effort: Announce when all eyes are on the inauguration, and pick up a URL for their breach-info site that emphasizes the year the breach apparently occurred (2008) rather than the year it was revealed (2009).

The BlackBerry Bold and Storm models have already swept southward into the US like some of those classic, cold Canadian currents, but neither model has performed in the market to the potential that analysts have expected. The number one and two reason folks use BlackBerry, it's believed, are for secure e-mail and for practical applications. But it's in that number two category that BlackBerry is perceived to be falling behind the iPhone and even Symbian, and now manufacturer Research in Motion is working to do something about that.

This week, RIM is accepting applications from third-party developers for their software to appear on what's being called the BlackBerry Application Storefront. This will be a tricky concept to pull off, particularly for RIM, since unlike Apple, RIM has maintained relationships with its supporting carriers for exclusive apps distribution. So while there will be one "main" portal, RIM is arranging with its supporting carriers -- like Rogers and Bell in Canada -- to enable their own "flavors" of the Storefront.

Meeting another milestone for the open source effort to extend Microsoft's .NET platform outside of Windows, the Mono Project -- backed by Novell, but with a little help from Microsoft too now and then -- is celebrating the release of version 2.2 this week.

Perhaps the most important addition to this latest release is full support for SIMD (Single Instruction / Multiple Data) extensions, which should provide orders of magnitude in performance improvements for developers who are building .NET games -- and there are more of these developers in high places than you might think -- to run cross-platform. "When the Mono runtime's SIMD optimization are active the operations on the structures defined in this namespace are mapped to hardware operations which can improve the performance of your graphics, multimedia or 3D operations significantly," reads a recent edition to Mono's online documentation.

Must a programming methodology be a philosophy in order to survive the corporate boardroom? Maybe, but when the philosophy itself doesn't tread water for long, then what happens?

During the late 1980s and early '90s, during what was then my dual career as a software developer, I was something of a contrarian about a major methodology of my business: I believed, and actively advocated, that the design of programs should not tightly associate data with the code that utilizes it. I was told at the time I was not only rebutting a methodology, I was threatening a fundamental tenet of business, and some said I was against a way of life.

The once oft-heard phrase, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM," certainly extends to IBM's stocks today, as the company released a sunny fourth-quarter earnings report.

Late this afternoon, IBM reported a gain in net income to $4.43 billion, up from $3.95 billion in Q4 2007. That works out to Q4 2008 earnings of $3.28/share, much better than the predicted $3.03/share, with returns of $8.93/share for the full year. Revenues were slightly squishy at $27.1 billion, off from the $28.1 billion predicted by analysts.

New Administration, new(ish) botnet? Maybe the perpetrators of Waledac have that sort of sense of history. They're definitely taking advantage of everyone else's sense of the importance of the moment.

The latest malware pitch appears tailored to would-be purchasers of commemorative gear. According to analysts at MessageLabs, fully 0.2% of all spam on Tuesday is "related" to the new president and the activities around his inauguration.

Belkin has been receiving a lot of unfavorable attention recently for reportedly offering to pay for favorable Amazon product reviews. The company's president, Mark Reynoso, posted a letter confirming the behavior, but attributing it to a single employee.

"It was with great surprise and dismay when we discovered that one of our employees may have posted a number of queries on the Amazon Mechanical Turk Web site inviting users to post positive reviews of Belkin products in exchange for payment," Reynoso wrote.

Microsoft's earnings report on Thursday is expected to go hand-in-hand with delays in building construction, plus possible job layoffs. But employee perks (including a Starbucks hot coffee program) look likely to survive.

Times are getting tougher, even at Microsoft. In a recent review of its financial costs, Microsoft figured out it could save $88 million in fiscal year 2010 by getting rid of perks such as a Starbucks hot beverage program ($1 million), food subsidies ($8 million), and a campus shuttle ($14 million), wrote Jeff Tartakoff, a blogger for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The Google Support forum over the weekend was clogged with users complaining that their iPhone-optimized iGoogle page (google.com/ig/i) was redirecting to the standard Google mobile page (google.com/m/ig).

An iGoogle team member addressed the complaints by saying, "We've decided to direct iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page. We've found that people hit iGoogle from lots of different phones -- we want to ensure you'll all see the same version. Most or all of your existing content should translate over to the standard mobile version. The only exception would be any gadgets that aren't compatible with most mobile browsers."

Steve Horowitz, one of Google's team leaders on Android mobile OS development, has been appointed Chief Technology Officer of Coupons Inc., online promotions company responsible for Coupons.com

Online retail has been seen as a growth channel for many years, but has not proven to be immune to recession spending cutbacks. ComScore showed 2008 online holiday spending to have dropped around 2% against 2007. Analysts expected the drop in sales to be much steeper, were it not for the discounts that major online retailers offered.

While President Obama and several million of his fellow Americans were shivering on the National Mall this morning, Macon Phillips and his team were swapping out files and posting the all-new whitehouse.gov.

Phillips is the Director of New Media for the White House and had the signal honor of f1srt p0st!!!1 on the new White House blog.