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study released today by a UC Berkeley research group revealed that for some Internet users on some ISPs, using a search engine and typing in a word such as “apple” or “bloomingdales” would redirect the user to websites for Apple or Bloomingdale’s rather than to a page or search results about the keyword in question. The Berkeley project, called Netalyzr, was created to measure DNS behavior. However, over the past few months, the Netalyzr team noticed some unexplained and unexpected redirections across at least 12 ISPs in the United States.

When we asked about the more likely scenario, Balasubramani said, "I think they were trying to get at the speaker and they looked around for a statute that shoehorned their conduct into and sent that to Google and said ‘turn over the information.” Historically, Google and You-Tube are far more likely to cough up an anonymous animator's real name when there's a criminal case, as opposed to just an internal affairs investigation into some personnel issues.

Amazon is prepping for a massive invasion of their 7-inch Android tablets in Q3. Apparently, Amazon’s manufacturing partner Quanta (who also makes the Kindle and Playbook) expects to ship around 3 million of their dual-core tablets to the online retailer by October. This translates into roughly 800,000 to a million units every month for the remainder of Q3. This is actually a lot more than what Digitimes first reported with 700,000 to 800,000 units being shipped each month this quarter. As far as Amazon’s 10.1-inch quad-core tablet goes, the “Hollywood” isn’t expected until sometime next year and is currently being manufactured by Foxconn.

If she were alive, it would be the 100th birthday of comedian Lucille Ball. For that anniversary, Google’s done a special logo, in the shape of a television and which plays several clips from classic “I Love Lucy” episodes.

Amazon’s rumored Kindle refresh could be fast incoming, with the retailer seemingly clearing inventory of the existing third-gen model with a refurb price cut. Having been roughly $10 cheaper than new models since March, this week Amazon slashed refurbished Kindles down to $99.99 for the WiFi version and $129.99 for the 3G version.

According to Jumptap, Southern and Western states like Florida, Texas, California, and Oregon over-index for Android. Whereas the Midwest and New England states are dominated by Apple devices. Strangely, New York state is neither. It is one of the few remaining Blackberry strongholds. (I’m sorry, that’s just embarrassing, and I live in New York).

This ruling is profoundly disappointing, to say the least. And it certainly doesn't bode well for the rights of folks whose websites might be targeted under the PROTECT-IP Act now pending in Congress.

Notorious spam king Sanford Wallace is facing federal fraud charges for allegedly breaking into Facebook accounts and sending 27 million spam messages in 2008 and 2009.

Data released Thursday by comScore shows that Microsoft's average share of the U.S. smartphone OS market over the three months ended in June came in at just 5.8%, down from 7.5% from the three months ended in March, and down from 8% for the three months ended in January.

Hamburg's data protection official has written to Facebook to demand it stops running the facial recognition programme on German users and deletes any related data. Johannes Caspar said the German authorities would take action if Facebook did not comply and could face fines of up to €300,000 (£262,000). "Should Facebook maintain the function, it must ensure that only data from persons who have declared consent to the storage of their biometric facial profiles be stored in the database," he said. The software offered potential for "considerable abuse" and was illegal.