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The price of the acquisition is in the tens of millions, they said — between $50 million and $100 million.

RT @CNET: Nielsen: 5 million Americans no longer watch traditional TV

RT @TheNextWeb: Security firm: iOS Provisioning Profiles could be vector for Apple's first big malware wave by @p ...

Netflix ISP Speed Index | Compare global internet service provider speeds | |

“There’s been a drumbeat of rumors about Apple working on more than one version of the iPhone,” said Jan Dawson, chief telecommunications analyst at the New York office of London- based consulting firm Ovum. “The thinking is, if Apple does several devices it would help dampen the singular effect of having only one phone a year.”

In agreeing to settle a case brought by 38 states involving the project, the search company for the first time is required to aggressively police its own employees on privacy issues and to explicitly tell the public how to fend off privacy violations like this one.

Google opened registration for its annual I/O developer conference today at 7 AM PDT, and just as it did last year, the event sold out pretty quickly. This year it took only 49 minutes for all the $900 (or $300 for school students and faculty) tickets to get gobbled up, even with the requirement that registrants have both Google+ and Google Wallet accounts (likely not much of a limiting factor, given the crowd). But server issues seem to have frustrated many attempted registrants early on, likely extending how long tickets remained available.

Samsung Targets Galaxy 4 at Apple’s Core IPhone Market - Bloomberg | “There’s been a drumbeat of rumors about Appl...

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ordered the government to stop issuing so-called NSLs across the board, in a stunning defeat for the Obama administration’s surveillance practices. She also ordered the government to cease enforcing the gag provision in any other cases. However, she stayed her order for 90 days to give the government a chance to appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Apple analysts react to Galaxy S4 launch with a variety of wild insights | 9to5Mac | |

More broadly, this case underscores how computer crimes are prosecuted much more harshly than analogous crimes in the physical world. For example, count one of Keys’ indictment charges him with conspiracy to cause damage to a protected computer. The damage was altering a news article, the equivalent of vandalism. Under the CFAA, this is a felony with a maximum punishment of five years in prison. Meanwhile, California state law criminalizes physical vandalism – like spray painting graffiti on a freeway sign– as a “wobbler” meaning it can be punished as either a misdemeanor—which comes with a maximum of a one year sentence—or a felony. If charged as a felony, the court can impose a sentence of 16 months, 2 years or 3 years.

Has Veronica Mars ruined Kickstarter? They’ve certainly expanded its boundaries, reaching (and then some) the highest goal in the site’s history. But the risk that the entertainment industry will try to shunt future costs to individual consumers—any more than they already do, that is—seems remote. Two millions dollars is a hefty sum, but in Hollywood terms, it’s a pittance, budgeting the kind of movie studios pick up after it’s made, if they notice it at all. Let Disney try hawking T-shirts and set visits to fund Iron Man 4 and see how far they get. The Veronica Mars movie was appealing because it seemed like an underdog, and it got to seeming that way through years of failure, endless reports that creator Rob Thomas had again come up short on convincing the corporate powers-that-be to take a shot. There aren’t many shows with such a galvanizingly dismal track record.

But the relative numbers are still surprising: Despite claims that it has over 100m monthly active users, Google+ barely moves the needle for sites across the network, while Reader is a healthy source of readers.

RT @TheNextWeb: Google may be readying an Evernote rival as 'Keep' makes a brief appearance online by @jonrussell

Loren Brichter isn't a household name. Nor are the mobile apps he has built, which include a Twitter client called Tweetie and a Boggle-like word game called Letterpress.

Panasonic planned to end plasma TV panel production at its main plant in Amagaskai in western Japan around fiscal year 2014, the Nikkei said, adding that the company had already written off the value of production equipment there.

RT @RWW: Recent evidence suggests the Russian Federation - not China - is the king of cyberattacks reports @TheTechScribe ...

RT @dbfarber: FBI turns to Internet to solve $500 million Gardner heist via @CNET

In 2010, Auernheimer and 27-year-old Daniel Spitler took advantage of a hole in AT&T's iPad user database, which offered access to its iPad 3G users' email addresses when a relevant ICC-IDD (the number that authenticates a SIM card to AT&T) was entered into a web panel. The duo created a script that randomly queried AT&T's website with ICC-IDs, amassing hundreds of thousands of addresses. Chat logs cited in court show Auernheimer and Spitler discussing using the script for a phishing operation or "lulz" before Auernheimer argues for giving the information to Gawker. On the night before his sentencing, Auernheimer said on Reddit that his only regret was being nice to AT&T by giving them time to patch the flaw, adding that he "won't nearly be as nice next time."

Google, which seems determined to map every square inch of the planet, on Monday released Street View images from four of the seven tallest mountains on earth. One lucky engineer, who happens to be a passionate mountaineer, led the Google Mountain Enthusiast team during a project that was strictly a labor of love for all involved.

the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. The first £1 million ($1.5 million) prize has been awarded to five people: Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and Louis Pouzin for their contributions to the Internet protocol, Tim Berners-Lee for creating the World Wide Web and Marc Andreessen for his work on the Mosaic browser.

The issue goes beyond cellphone unlocking, because once we buy an object — any object — we should own it. We should be able to lift the hood, unlock it, modify it, repair it … without asking for permission from the manufacturer. But we really don’t own our stuff anymore (at least not fully); the manufacturers do. Because modifying modern objects requires access to information: code, service manuals, error codes, and diagnostic tools. Modern cars are part horsepower, part high-powered computer. Microwave ovens are a combination of plastic and microcode. Silicon permeates and powers almost everything we own.

According to Russell Holly from Geek.com, Google’s upcoming unified messaging app is called Babble, and is likely to be unveiled at Google I/O in mid-May. Details are scarce, but Holly claims the report comes from multiple sources that he doesn’t specify. According to the report, the service will behave consistently across multiple platforms (mobile, PC, ChromeOS, web, Google Plus) allowing users to continue their conversations regardless of the medium. Moreover, Babble will let users start a Hangout with any contact directly from the user list and send photos from the chat window like it’s currently possible on Google Plus Messenger.

Most of Google’s chat services over the years have been cobbled together from sealed off manipulations of an open chat platform called XMPP. The service is flexible, scalable, and has served Google well for quite a while. Google’s recent decision to block non-native XMPP requests is the first step towards building their own closed communications platform. In order to use Google’s chat service, especially the new Babble service, you’ll need to be using it the way Google wants you to use it. That’s not going to sit well with many users at first, but the quality and performance of the service will be more than enough to make most users happy.

The attack, demonstrated on Friday at the Black Hat security conference in Amsterdam, takes just seconds to execute. In some cases, it requires no interaction by victims, researchers from Malta-based ReVuln (@revuln) told Ars. It works by manipulating the uniform resource identifiers EA's site uses to automatically start games on an end user's machine. By exploiting flaws in the Origin application available for both Macs and PCs, the technique turns EA's popular game store into an attack platform that can covertly install malware on customers' computers.

Some suggested that in Apple’s next mobile operating system, Ive is pushing a more “flat design” that is starker and simpler, according to developers who have spoken to Apple employees but didn’t have further details. Overall, they expect any changes to be pretty conservative. For the past few years, Apple has unveiled versions of its mobile operating system in the summer.

According to a recent report from The Financial Times, Google might also be getting into the smartwatch game. And unlike Glass, which was developed in the company’s experimental X Lab, the watch (not pictured above) is said to be under development by the Android unit, possibly indicating that Google sees it as a more immediately viable product. According to FT’s source, the Google watch is separate from Samsung’s recently-announced effort.

Today, it’s LG’s turn to join the smartwatch fray, albeit unofficially. The Korean electronics maker is allegedly developing a product that would compete with Apple’s and Samsung’s similar offerings. The information comes from a “source familiar to the matter” quoted by the Korea Times. Moreover, LG is also developing a product that is similar to Google’s Glass.

Update: We've had a little more time to explore the hack and have yet more bad news to report. Yesterday a number of users were told they'd need to wait three days before enabling two-step verification. As a result, these accounts are fully vulnerable to the exploit. As of right now, the only surefire way these individuals can avoid the security threat is by changing their birthdate through Apple's account settings page. This option is located at the bottom of "Password and Security."

That's right: Eric Schmidt uses a BlackBerry. Why? He likes the keyboard, he says. One could question why Schmidt uses a BlackBerry: there are Android phones you can buy now! which offer a keyboard. Here's the Samsung Replenish in the US - though it reminds us of another make (can't think which just now) and only runs Gingerbread 2.3 - you know, from December 2010. Still, the reviews are good. (Plenty more here: tick the "QWERTY keyboard" box under "Style" on the left margin.)