Not satisfied to simply trump Google’s daily device activation numbers, Steve Jobs added insult to injury at the Apple press conference  this afternoon, claiming that unspecified “friends” have been counting handset upgrades in their statistical totals and not just newly activated phones.

As you might imagine, Google was not terribly pleased at this turn of events, and issued the following retort: “The Android activation numbers do not include upgrades and are, in fact, only a portion of the Android devices in the market since we only include devices that have Google services.” Now, we don’t honestly know who’s telling the truth here and we’d like to be able to take both companies at their word, but this isn’t the first time even during this particular Apple shindig that questionable claims were thrown out as fact.

Source: engadget

Apple® will broadcast its September 1 event online using Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™. The live broadcast will begin at 10:00 a.m. PDT on September 1, 2010 at www.apple.com.

This broadcast is the property of Apple and is protected by US copyright law and international treaties. Any reproduction or distribution is strictly prohibited without prior written approval from Apple. Please contact Apple Public Relations with any questions.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork, and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple is reinventing the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced its magical iPad which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.

Source: Apple

When Apple gave its highly publicized explanation of the iPhone 4 antenna issues to the press back in July, CEO Steve Jobs said that Apple would give all iPhone 4 users a free case  as an interim solution while the company researched the problem further. An executive with Mexican mobile carrier Telcel has now claimed that after September 30, Apple will release revised iPhone 4 hardware that does not exhibit the same signal attenuation flaw.

While announcing the launch of the iPhone 4 in Mexico, Telcel’s Director of Value Added Services, Marco Quatorze, told CanalMX that initial units would exhibit the same antenna problems as those released so far in the US. He also said that Apple would be providing free cases to all iPhone 4 buyers who request one from its website.

However, Quatorze also said that after September 30—the date Jobs promised an update on the antenna issue and the date that the free case program expires—Apple will begin supplying revised iPhone 4 devices that “do not have the reception malfunction.”

MacRumors notes that it is unusual for a carrier executive to have such advance knowledge of Apple’s plans, or to be allowed to share it if he did. However, Quatorze also said that Telcel will have a number of options for early buyers to upgrade to the revised hardware without having to extend the usual two-year contract. Apple did not to respond to our request for clarification at the time of publication.

Source: arstechnica

Internet service providers often tell their clients that they offer “bullet-proof hosting.” Whistle-blower organization Wikileaks, it seems, will settle for nothing less than “bomb-proof.”

Some portion of Wikileaks’ servers have been moved to the “Pionen” White Mountains data center owned by Swedish broadband provider Bahnhof, as first reported by Norwegian news site VG Nett last Friday. That data center will store Wikileaks’ data 30 meters below ground inside a Cold-War-era nuclear bunker carved out of a large rock hill in downtown Stockholm. The server farm has a single entrance and is protected by half-meter thick metal doors–fitting safeguards, perhaps, for an organization that raised the ire of several powerful military forces last month when it released thousands of classified Afghanistan war documents.

Earlier in August the copyright-flouting Swedish Pirate Party began hosting Wikileaks’ IT operations, and it’s not clear exactly why it’s chosen to move Wikileaks’ servers to the Pionen facility. The threat of law enforcement physically seizing the organization’s equipment, after all, is much less likely than a legal attempt to gain direct access to Wikileaks’ data. Last year the Swedish government put a crack in the country’s strong free speech protections when it passed a controversial law allowing surveillance of Internet traffic by the FRA, a law enforcement agency.

But Stockholm-based Bahnhof executive Jon Karlung tells me in an interview that the company’s data center is “a kind of metaphor” for Bahnhof’s commitment to resist any sort of intrusion, physical or legal. “We’re proud to have clients like these,” he says. “The Internet should be an open source for freedom of speech, and the role of an ISP is to be a neutral technological tool of access, not an instrument for collecting information from customers.”

Karlung says Bahnhof has not yet complied with Sweden’s new FRA surveillance law. “We have an unbroken chain of fiber-optic cables that cover 2,300 kilometers,” says Karlung. “We’re positive that [government agencies] haven’t installed any equipment yet. That day will come, and when it does we’ll inform all clients that they’re surveilled by the Swedish government.”

Wikileaks has likely spread its servers well beyond any single data center, including other facilities in Sweden and Iceland, and it’s also posted an encrypted file labeled “insurance” on its site, potentially to be used as a threat of further data spillage aimed at preventing attacks on the site or its volunteer staff.

In the coming weeks, Wikileaks has said it will release another 15,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan. As the controversy around the site mounts, it may need every protection it can find.

Email overload has finally met its match. Tomorrow, Gmail is rolling out a new feature called Priority Inbox  that is going to be a Godsend for those of you who dread opening your email. In short, Google has built a system that figures out which of your messages are important, and presents them at the top of the screen so you don’t miss them. The rest of your messages are still there, but you don’t have to dig through dozens of newsletters and confirmations to find the diamonds in rough.

The beauty of the system lies in its simplicity — it’s nearly as easy as Gmail’s one click spam filter. There’s almost no setup: once it’s activated on your account, you’ll see a prompt asking you if you want to enable Priority Inbox. You can choose from a few options (the order of your various inboxes and if there are any contacts you’d like to always mark ‘Important’) but don’t have to setup any rules or ‘teach’ Gmail what you want it to mark important. It just works, at least most of the time.

The system uses a plethora of criteria to decide which messages are most important: things like how frequently you open and/or respond to messages from a given sender, how often you read messages that contain a certain keyword, and whether or not the message is addressed solely to you or looks like it was sent to a mailing list. If you come across a message that’s been marked important when it shouldn’t have been, you can hit an arrow to tell Gmail it’s messed up. Likewise, if a message that should have been flagged gets sent to the ‘everything else’ area, you can promote it. Through these actions Gmail gets progressively smarter, so the system should work better over time.

I’ve been using the service since late last week and have found it to work very well. Occasionally messages that shouldn’t have been marked ‘Important’ are flagged, but I’ve yet to encounter an urgent message that slipped into the ‘everything else’ section. My colleague MG Siegler, who has also had the feature active, has had similar success.

It’s great. I love it. But it isn’t perfect.

My biggest gripe so far is the fact that there’s no way to tell why a given message has been deemed important. Oftentimes it’s obvious — emails from my coworkers are generally given the golden arrows, as are messages from PR contacts whom I frequently communicate with. But occasionally there are oddballs that have been marked important for no apparent reason.

Sure, it’s easy to tell Gmail that ‘this message is not important’ and strip its golden badge. But what if the message was marked important for a reason that is usually sound (perhaps it contains a reference to TechCrunch Disrupt, for example)? It would be nice if I could tell Gmail something to the effect of “this sender is never important”, but not to start frowning on whatever keywords the message contained. Still, it’s a great start.

Of course, this introduces a new dynamic to the way a lot of people are going to be reading email. Email intros will become ever more important, because you’ll want to ensure that your message gets marked with coveted ‘important’ tag.  It also has much broader implications. Increasingly, content will be displayed to you based on its importance rather than its time stamp — not just when it comes to browsing email, but for social networks and other content as well.

Priority Inbox will be rolling out to Gmail and Google Apps users alike over the course of the week.

Google’s YouTube video site is negotiating with Hollywood’s top movie studios to launch a pay-per-view movie service by the end of this year, according to the Financial Times.

YouTube is the dominant online destination for user-generated content. But the Google division wants to turn it into an international on-demand movie service in an effort to head off Apple in the digital distribution of film and TV shows.

Google has been emphasizing its advantage of having the world’s most popular search engine and YouTube, the FT said, citing unnamed sources.

“Google and YouTube are a global phenomenon with a hell of a lot of eyeballs – more than any cable or satellite service,” one executive with knowledge of the plans told the FT. “They’ve talked about how many people they could steer to this … it’s a huge number.”

Negotiations have been taking place for a few months, but they have taken on more urgency because Apple could be launching its own counter-move this week. Rumors suggest that Apple will upgrade its ailing Apple TV service this week at a press conference in San Francisco on Sept. 1. Google will likely have to compete with Netflix and Hulu as well.

The Hollywood studios, meanwhile, want to launch new movie services to make up for the decline of DVD movie sales and rentals. The FT said viewers of the Google movie service would stream rather than download movies at a rate of $5 for new films. YouTube has been beta-testing a film rental service since January.

Source: MediaBeat

Cisco has made an offer to acquire Skype before they complete  their IPO process, says one of our more reliable sources. We have not been able to confirm this rumor one way or another via other sources, which isn’t surprising. A company in lock down during the IPO process is usually even more tight lipped than normal.

But if true this would be one very big acquisition. Skype insiders are hoping for an out of the gate valuation of $5 billion or so, we’ve heard. Presumably Cisco would have to bidding in that range to make it interesting.

Google was also rumored to be sniffing around Skype, but antitrust concerns may have persuaded them not to make an actual offer.

Source: TechCrunch

Facebook has filed a legal petition in opposition to the teaching-based social media platform Teachbook for employing the suffix ‘-book’ in its brand name.

Teachbook, a Chicago based firm, portrays as an online community meant for teachers. The social network platform aides’ professional teachers to have a knowhow of lesson plans and at the same time have tutorial videos with friends and contemporaries on the platform.

Facebook on the other hand claims that the firm is making use of the goodwill in order to build its own brand. Not only that the social networking site believes that if firms start using the “generic plus BOOK” every now and then it would lead to dilution of brand.

Through a statement released a Facebook official said, “There is already a well known online network of people with ‘book’ in the brand name. Of course the Teachbook folks are free to create an online network for teachers or whomever, and we wish them well in that endeavour.”

Source: TopNews.co.uk

“Citing concerns about Oracle’s lawsuit against it, Google has backed out of the upcoming JavaOne conference. ‘Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally,’ Google’s Joshua Bloch said in a blog post. The move may signal eventually fragmentation for Java, with Google conceivably splintering off the Java-like language it uses for Android.”

Source:  slashdot

With the release of the first versions of Chrome 7, we noticed a subtle speed increase in graphics-heavy websites  and suggested that Google is improving Chrome’s overall graphics performance. Our readers later found that GPU acceleration can already be manually activated in Chrome. Google has now officially confirmed that “there’s been a lot of work going on to overhaul Chromium’s graphics system” and that the browser will “begin to take advantage of the GPU to speed up its entire drawing model.”

It is the feature that Microsoft has been promoting for several months for its upcoming IE9 beta and a feature that is about to be activated in Firefox 4 Beta (5) early next month. Browser are beginning to take advantage of the multithreading capabilities of graphics processors to speed up their 2D and 3D performance. Google said that the functionality has been integrated in the “tip-of-tree Chromium” lately and the team “figured it was time for a primer.” Google says that it will be using the GPU to “speed up its entire drawing model, including many common 2D operations such as compositing and image scaling.”

The foundation of the GPU acceleration in Chrome is a new (modified) sandbox process called the GPU process. Via this process, Chrome can take graphics commands from the renderer process and send them to OpenGL or Direct3D. This approach enabled Google to separate the rendering of a web page into different independent layers, such as  CSS, images, videos, and WebGL or 2D canvases. While some layers can be rendered on the GPU already, such as WebGL, others still depend on the CPU (text, images). Google says that blending the layers again by using the CPU would have erased all GPU speed gains, so Chromium now combines the layers by using the GPU. You can try this already simply by launching Chromium with the -enable-accelerated-compositing flag switch (make launch the browser from the command line menu and use the switch as an extension. Example: C:\Users\Wolfgang\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe -enable-accelerated-compositing)

Google said that it plans on offloading more and more work onto the GPU to “achieve impressive speedups”. Details are provided in a separate document on Google’s site.

The latest Nightly Builds of Chrome (Chromium) have also been equipped with a new “labs” feature that is apparently designed to deliver experimental features. It can be accessed via an about:labs command in the URL bar and shows, in this latest version (Chromium 7.0.508.0 Build 57738) vertically organized tabs on the left side of the screen, which resembles the navigation structure of a website. It’s an interesting concept if you have a widescreen monitor that can accommodate side tabs, but it may be a rather useless feature on smartphones or even netbooks. I personally like Mozilla’s Tab Candy (Panorama) approach to organize tabs much better.

Source: ConceivablyTech