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So outside of making phone calls and playing music, the KIN is really, truly dead. Why even bother after that last, half attempt at a re-launch? We have no idea either. But Verizon is trying to make things right by letting users know now to back up their data now and going one step further, allowing them to pick a 3G phone of their choice for FREE. Offer is valid only through March 31st. Attached are some images from the pamphlet that Verizon is sending out to KIN customers. More can be found here.

Paul Allen's patent infringement complaint against the world and its dog has been dismissed. The court agreed with Google et al that it "lacks adequate factual detail to satisfy the dictates of Twombly and Iqbal" and also "fails to provide sufficient factual detail as suggested by Form 18". The court doesn't agree with Allen's Interval Licensing that the two cases do not apply to patent complaints, but it doesn't even need to go there: "The Court does not find it necessary to determine whether Form 18 is no longer adequate under Twombly and Iqbal because Plaintiff's complaint fails to satisfy either the Supreme Court's interpretation of Rule 8 or Form 18."

The malicious advertisement, for gift cards, originates from a bogus advertising agency called AdShufffle, with three f’s in the name. The name appears to be playing off legitimate advertiser AdShuffle. The malicious ad has appeared on sites for Runnersworld.com and OrganicGardening.com, among other sites that are still being determined. Runnersworld.com and OrganicGardening.com are published by the Emmaus, Pennsylvania-based Rodale Inc. A company spokeswoman said the ads have been taken down.

The principle concern these groups have is the Order's omission of "Paid Prioritization," or the ability for service providers to set payment tiers for different types of services and allocate bandwidth accordingly. "Paid prioritization is the antithesis of openness. Any framework that does not prohibit such economic discrimination arrangements is not real Net Neutrality," the letter said. "Without a clear ban on such practices, ISPs will move forward with their oft-stated plans to exploit their dominant position and favor their own content and services and those of a few select paying partners through faster delivery, relegating everyone else to the proverbial dirt road." AT&T's Hank Hultquist openly mocked these groups' knowledge of such issues in August, calling them the "Church of Extreme Net Neutrality," who preach the "old time religion of the dumb network" without taking all facts into consideration.

Just days after Radio Shack began a promotion offering $50 off the iPhone, and before the sale was set to expire, many of the U.S. retail chain's stores are sold out of their entire stock of phones. AppleInsider contacted a number of Radio Shack stores on Friday, and all but one, spoken to in Tennessee, indicated they are completely sold out of the iPhone 4. And even that one store only has the 32GB model available in limited quantities.

Cory @Doctorow's new short story collection, With A Little Help, is out! I read Chap 7 in the audio version:

RT @loic: the @leolaporte show at #leweb is up with @dens and @brenthoberman is up

Netflix announced Wednesday a new licensing agreement that adds many more episodes from such ABC network shows as "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost." The deal also adds episodes from shows not previously available for streaming, including "Brothers & Sisters," "Ugly Betty," and "Reaper."

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, turned down an offer of $15 billion from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, according to Fritz Lanman, Microsoft's senior director of corporate strategy and acquisitions. Lanman divulged information about the failed deal while speaking at the LeWeb tech conference earlier today.

Both Facebook and Twitter have closed accounts corresponding to Anonymous, a formerly 4chan-linked group organizing a string of DDoS attacks on organizations that refuse to work with WikiLeaks.

PayPal is the latest WikiLeaks opponent to be hit with a denial of service attack by anti-piracy group Operation Payback, joining the growing ranks of WikiLeaks opponents that have been targeted. Operation Payback has also indicated that Amazon is its next target. "The attacks slowed the Web site itself down for a short while, but did not significantly impact payments," said a PayPal spokesperson.

Apple's first retail store in Glendale, Calif., has attained cult status, as passionate fans of the company frequent the site solely because of its status as Apple Store No. 1. The Apple Store at Glendale Galleria actually opened the same day as another store in Virginia, but the Glendale store is listed as the first in Apple's rankings. As profiled by Reuters, the "unassuming" and "uncool" location still attracts attention from fans of the Mac maker.

ndy Rubin, vice president of engineering at Google, took to his Twitter account for the second time this week to make that announcement. "There are over 300,000 Android phones activated each day," he tweeted.

Samsung’s 7-inch tablet isn’t “dead on arrival” after all. In fact, Samsung has sold more than a million of them in less than two months. Released in mid-October, the Galaxy Tab is the first serious contender to Apple’s iPad. It sports a 7-inch touchscreen and runs a modified version of Google’s Android operating system. “I can confirm 1M Galaxy Tabs sold globally,” a Samsung spokeswoman said in an e-mail statement.

The long-awaited Internet book store, which opened Monday in the U.S., draws upon a portion of the 15 million printed books that Google has scanned into its computers during the past six years. About 4,000 publishers, including CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster Inc., Random House Inc. and Pearson PLC's Penguin Group, are also allowing Google to carry many of their recently released books in the new store.

Google briefly showed off Android 3.0 on a prototype tablet Monday night, and the operating system's features include the ability to see apps side-by-side on the screen, something that will also come to Android-based phones, said Andy Rubin, Google's head of Android. Rubin used a Motorola tablet to demonstrate 3.0, also called "Honeycomb," which has been developed specifically with tablets in mind, at the "D: Dive into Mobile" conference hosted by AllThingsD.

Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook, may be the world’s youngest billionaire. But he’s already pledging to give away most of his wealth. He and 16 other households have joined the Giving Pledge, a campaign by Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett to commit wealthy individuals to giving away at least half of their holdings during their lifetimes or after their deaths.

Ahead of official figures on Thursday from the NPD research firm, analysts at Wedbush Morgan Securities expect sales of 1.075m Xbox 360 consoles in November, up 31 per cent on a year ago, compared with 975,000 Wii sales, down 23 per cent. They expect 650,000 Sony PlayStation 3 units sold, down 8 per cent year-on-year.

Seeking to end the brinksmanship that left many cable television customers in the Northeast without access to the first two games of the World Series this year, the Federal Communications Commission will consider changes to the rules governing negotiations between cable providers and broadcast networks, an agency official said Wednesday.

The white iPhone 4 is actually a fake. Woz purchased a set of white front and back plates from the young entrepreneur that Apple later shut down, and modded his iPhone 4 with the plates.

AT&T Inc. is the worst-rated cell-phone service provider, suffering a significant drop in ratings since last year, according to a new survey of readers of Consumer Reports, the influential product-review publication. MORE VIDEO WATCH: Cell Phone as Credit Card? WATCH: Cell Phone Saves Man From Bullet WATCH: Cell Phone Rash Verizon Wireless, the former top provider, was beaten by U.S. Cellular, a regional carrier in 26 states. The results are based on the opinions of more than 58-thousand ConsumerReports.org subscribers, who provided feedback on their customer service and overall satisfaction.

Rovio CEO Mikael Hed talked about the game at this week's Le Web 10 in Paris. TechCrunch was there and reports that Hed said the company has not only sold 12 million copies of the game to date, but they've also seen 30 million downloads of the free version of the app.

The FCC has just released its latest report on the sate of broadband in the US of A (PDF alert), and the results are… less than encouraging, and for a number of reasons. The agency found that around two-thirds of Americans’ broadband connections don’t actually qualify as broadband under its definition. (Broadband to the FCC is 4 mbps down/1 mbps up.) What’s sorta odd is that this isn’t a result of the lack of infrastructure or anything, but a result of people choosing low speed plans.

Eight percent of online Americans use Twitter, according to a Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project released Thursday. The study is the first by Pew that specifically examines Twitter users. Worth noting: Pew discovered during its survey that 74 percent of adults are online (the survey is comprised of people 18 and older). That means that about 6 percent of the entire adult population in the United States users Twitter.

Vi Hart: Blog

The key, though, is that democracies have a process for creating such restrictions, and as a citizen it sickens me to see the US trying to take shortcuts. The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us “You went after Wikileaks’ domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don’t like the site. If that’s the way governments get to behave, we can live with that.”