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How do you like them, Apple?

BlackBerry World now has more than 10,000 applications on its shelves. This would be more impressive if Android didn't have ten times that number, and iOS more than twice what Android's got.…

Tracking software 'potentially unwanted'

YouGov recently confronted survey participants with an odd offer to download software that would track users' surfing habits.…

NX3e - e for exciting

EMC has signalled that a new mid-range storage system is coming - a low-end one in the $10,000-$75,000 area. We reckon it's the Celerra NX3e, and we're spilling the beans here.…

bonch writes "A new study on Greenland's and West Antarctica's rate of ice loss halves the estimate of ice loss. Published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the study takes into account a rebounding of the Earth's crust called glacial isostatic adjustment, a continuing rise of the crust after being smashed under the weight of the Ice Age. 'We have concluded that the Greenland and West Antarctica ice caps are melting at approximately half the speed originally predicted,' said researcher Bert Vermeeersen."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Block ministerial veto too

Ministers should not be able to block freedom of information (FOI) requests, according to amendments to FOI legislation proposed by a Liberal Democrat MP. A Labour former minister has said that the law should extend to media companies.…

'If you would like to start a war, please press one'

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has extended its contract with BT to provide fixed telecommunications services.…

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Fate of Pentagon hacker still rests in politicians' hands

The coalition government's decision to review extradition law has been welcomed by family and supporters of Gary McKinnon, even though it's unlikely to have an immediate effect on his case.…

Dove World Outreach Center is out of reach

Red-nosed pastor Terry Jones, who plans to burn copies of the Koran and Jewish text the Talmud at the weekend, has either had his website hacked or his ISP has pulled the plug.…

Pledge to work together

The UK and Chinese governments have agreed to coordinate policies and development of copyright law. The governments have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) pledging closer working on the issue.…

Economy class social networker?

Review LG's first Android phone was the InTouch Max, which impressed with its slide-out Qwerty keyboard, social networking features and low price. Dispensing with the keyboard and utilising a lower quality camera, the Optimus adds to LG’s growing range of Android handsets, and offers social networking features with a few other tricks besides.…

coondoggie writes "This month the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will begin looking for technology that will let wireless communications work through the most extreme interference. From the article: 'The CommEx program will assess next generation and beyond jamming threats and then develop advanced interference suppression and avoidance technologies to successfully communicate in the presence of severe, traditional, and novel types of interference that are orders-of-magnitude more severe than what are currently addressed by the most advanced systems, DARPA stated.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

'Streaming' search doesn't give a f**k

Google's "Instant" search engine includes a blacklist for words and phrases involving what the company considers "violence, hate, or pornography."…

thelostagency writes "Girish Kumar, managing director of Aiplex Software says his company is being hired by the film industry to attack online pirates. He says if a provider did not do anything to remove the link or content hosted on its site, his company would launch what is known as a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the offending computer server. From the article: 'Kumar said that at the moment most of the payment for his company's services came from the film industry in India. "We are tied up with more than 30 companies in Bollywood. They are the major production houses." As for Hollywood films, he said they, too, used his services.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an interesting and funny look at 526,000 OkCupid users, divided into groups by race and gender and all the the things each groups says it likes or is interested in. While it is far from being definitive, the groupings give a glimpse of what makes each culture unique. According to the results white men like nothing better than Tom Clancy, Van Halen, and golfing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

wiedzmin writes "This month, officials from the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), armed with fingerprinting machines, iris scanners and cameras hooked to laptops, will fan out across the towns and villages of southern Andhra Pradesh state in the first phase of the project whose aim is to give every Indian a lifelong Unique ID (UID) number for 'anytime, anywhere' biometric authentication. While enrolling with the UIDAI may be voluntary, other agencies and service providers might require a UID number in order to transact business. Usha Ramanathan, a prominent legal expert who is attached to the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in the national capital, said that, 'taken to its logical limit, the UID project will make it impossible, in a couple of years, for an ordinary citizen to undertake a simple task such as traveling within the country without a UID number.' Next step, tying that UID number and biometric information to to their RIM BlackBerry PIN number."

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AustinSlacker writes "An Iowa school district's lunch program asks children as young as 5 years old to memorize a four-digit PIN code so it can monitor what they eat in the school cafeteria - prompting some parents to claim it's an unhealthy case of 'Big Brother.' An over reaction by parents or an unnecessary invasion of privacy?"

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All Steve Jobs's horses and all Steve Jobs's men ...

Just hours after Apple released iOS 4.1 to great fanfare, hardware hackers found a way to jailbreak devices that run the new operating system. More surprising still, there doesn't appear to be anything Steve Jobs can do to stop them in the near future.…

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Sergey Brin gets in your head

Analysis Google is on a mission to make web search as fast as the human brain will allow. On Wednesday morning in San Francisco, as she unveiled Google Instant, a radical overhaul of the company's search engine that updates search results as you type, uber-Googler Marissa Mayer called it "search at the speed of thought." We can safely classify that as an exaggeration for effect, but Mayer's bon mot at least gets to the heart of Google's intentions.…

Sonny Yatsen writes "A new study suggests that the Viking Landers might have found organic compounds on Mars, but failed to recognize them because of the methodology used to detect organics. The findings may suggest specific strategies that would improve on the way organic compounds are detected on the red planet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Founders sing a new Songza

Digital music site Amie Street has been bought by Amazon, but the founders of the user-fueled music service aren't abandoning their efforts to bring social networking to music lovers.…