Review BlackBerry Storm 3

The handset is touted as the BlackBerry Storm 3 began teasing the world gadget enthusiast. In a video, a gadget that has the nickname Monaco was trying to show off.
Sightings Storm 3 itself actually has been known since some time ago. But this time, the presence of the handset feels more real because of the present in video format. Because earlier still limited to photographs and illustrations.
Because carrying the family name 'storm', the BlackBerry Storm 3 course is designed with full touch screen navigation. Unlike the first version that relies on Storm SurePress technology, Storm 3 in the video can be seen already switched to a capacitive touch screen technology.
As a result, when the touch screen capabilities on display, running so smoothly follow the direction of sweep of the fingers is running.
Research In Motion (RIM) complete the Storm 3 with a trackpad and four basic buttons at the bottom of the face, namely that serves to lift and close the phone, menu and back buttons.
Quoted from detikINET, Tuesday (22/02/2011), Storm 3 comes with 3.7-inch screen, carries a BlackBerry OS 6 and reinforced with 1.2 GHz processor. The cameras are buried is still limited to 5 megapixels, but it is claimed can record video with 720p capability.
Want to try out soon? Unfortunately, you still have to be patient. Because, according to news circulating, new RIM will be releasing this handset in September 2011.
Here are the specs and features of the BlackBerry Storm 3 version BGR:

    * Processor 1.2GHz
    * Capacitive touch screen 3.7-inch 800 x 480
    * Quad-band GSM / GPRS / EDGE
    * Tri-band UMTS / HSPA
    * 5-megapixel camera
    * 8GB eMMC (storage for apps and data), 512MB RAM
    * MicroSD slot
    * Magnetometer
    * Proximity sensor
    * Accelerometer
    * Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
    * 2.4GHz b / g / n and 5GHz a / n Wi-Fi + UMA
    * 3G Mobile hotspot
    * Optical trackpad
    * 1230 mAh battery
    * BlackBerry OS 6.1
    * OpenGL ES 2.0

Samsung asks to see Apple's next iPhone, iPad

In an interesting turn of events, Samsung's legal team has asked Apple to hand over next-generation versions of the iPhone and iPad to make sure its own future devices will not be subjected to the same infringement claims the company currently faces as part of Apple's lawsuit from last month. 

The motion, filed on Friday with the U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., and discovered by This Is My Next, asks the court to make Apple provide samples of the "final, commercial version(s)" of the iPhone and iPad, along with whatever retail packaging those products come in. Again, these aren't announced products, they're named in the filing as the "iPhone 4S," "iPhone 5," "iPad 3," and "third generation iPad." 

The news comes a week after Apple filed a motion to see final production samples of a number of announced, though unreleased, Samsung products, including the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and 8.9 tablets, and smartphones like the Galaxy S II, Droid Charge, and Infuse 4G. The idea behind that was to evaluate whether these devices would fall under the same intellectual-property infringement claims Apple had already placed on Samsung devices like the Nexus S, Captivate, Continuum, and Mesmerize in its original court filing. 

Nilay Patel, of This Is My Next, notes that as with Apple's handling of the request to see Samsung's unreleased products, the Samsung request asks only that Samsung's lawyers, and not the company's product teams, be allowed to see the Apple devices. That said, the retaliation preys on the element of surprise, historically one of Apple's biggest strengths when introducing new products.

Apple's lawsuit against Samsung (PDF), back in April, alleged that Samsung had copied Apple's mobile devices both in terms of user interface and design features. Apple also alleged that the Samsung devices in question infringed on Apple's patents, and resulted in Samsung practicing unfair competition. Samsung fired back by launching a wave of patent infringement lawsuits targeting Apple's products in multiple countries. 

The case continues to generate intense interest from tech onlookers. While the two companies compete, Apple and Samsung have historically been close business partners, with Apple making use of a number of Samsung components across the range of its devices. Nonetheless, the relationship has not kept Samsung and its telecommunications group from being targeted.

Twitter gives up details of anonymous tweeter

One of the fun aspects of Twitter is that you can pretend to be someone else--or just make a name up for yourself--and express your true feelings about so very many things. However, if your feelings happen to be seen as libelous, you might now have a problem.

For the Guardian reports that Twitter has revealed the name, e-mail address, and telephone number of a person who tweeted some rather critical notions about a local council in the U.K. The council of South Tyneside, in the rather chilly north of England, decided to petition a court in California in order to secure these details.

Twitter's privacy policy does state the following: "We may disclose your information if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation, or legal request; to protect the safety of any person; to address fraud, security, or technical issues; or to protect Twitter's rights or property. It seems that, in this case, several Twitter accounts had been the repositories of rather severe accusations. And the Guardian reports that suspicion had fallen on one of the council's own members, Ahmed Khan, who reportedly admitted that Twitter had contacted him to inform him of his unmasking. Khan reportedly said, though, that he was not the author of the material that is alleged to be libelous. Khan told the Guardian: "It is like something out of 1984. If a council can take this kind of action against one of its own councilors simply because they don't like what I say, what hope is there for freedom of speech or privacy?"

Well, now, talking of freedom of speech and privacy, where does this leave the distraught mind of world famous soccer player Ryan Giggs and the rippling muscles of his lawyers? Should you have missed seeing Giggs' Manchester United humiliated by Barcelona in yesterday's European Champions League Final, you might also have missed that Giggs reportedly tried to sue thousands of tweeters who revealed some slightly humiliating information about him. Giggs is one of many wealthy--but, perhaps, not ultimately wise--British people who took out a so-called superinjunction preventing a woman from publicly revealing details of a personal relationship with the married player.

What resulted was that thousands of tweeters--some famous, some not--took to Twitter to reveal his name, until, ultimately, a member of the U.K. parliament decided to make it official by standing up and blurting it ou tloud. (U.K. MPs can say what they want in the confines of their quaint little chamber.) The question is whether Giggs--and anyone else who feels that they have been illegally besmirched on Twitter--will now go through with the idea of simultaneously suing tens of thousands of people, something that would surely make a fine subject for the next John Grisham novel.

Google's top five standoffs--from Apple to Yahoo

When PayPal filed its lawsuit against Google yesterday for poaching a key executive for its mobile-payment business, it got us thinking about the growing list of enemies Google has made over the years. Sometimes Google takes heat for doing the right thing, as it did in China. After wrestling with censorship, the company chose to shut down its Google.cn site and redirected users to the uncensored Chinese-language Google.com.hk domain in Hong Kong.

But Google has also managed to alienate regulators, both in the United States and abroad. And as the company pushes into new markets, it's found a passel of new rivals with which to do battle.

So here, then, are the top five confrontations (not scientifically selected) in which Google has managed to mire itself: Apple: While Google's then-CEO Eric Schmidt sat on the board at Apple, Google developed its Android mobile phone operating system. It may not have seemed like a conflict of interest to Schmidt for the three years he served as a director. But the Federal Trade Commission raised some questions, even after Schmidt resigned. And Apple? It's CEO, Steve Jobs, felt betrayed enough that he reportedly railed on Google at an internal meeting, saying, "We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake, they want to kill the iPhone."

Yahoo deal: In 2008, Google was forced to back down from plans to create a search advertising partnership with Yahoo. The defeat, a rare one in Google's brief history, came as the company overreached, according to regulators and advertisers. The deal would have further strengthened Google's already massive lead in search advertising. It misjudged the opposition the deal engendered.

Street View: Shortly after launching Street View in 2007, Google caught flack from governments and privacy advocates for displaying photographs that included people's faces and car license plates. It creeped out users, showing people walking into adult bookstores and inadvertently flashing their underwear at Google's cameras. The company even acknowledged Google collecting e-mails, passwords, and URLs from Wi-Fi networks while the company was snapping images for its Street View service. The company continues to address the fallout from privacy concerns sparked by Street View.

Google Books: The company boldly sought to digitize every book ever written, making the world's literature available to anyone interested in any title. Quickly, the ambitious effort took heat for attempting to profit from books without the permission of copyright owners. When Google reached a settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, another batch of opponents stepped forward, complaining that Google would amass too much control as the only organization in the world with a license to scan and display books that have gone out of print but were still protected by copyright laws. In March, Google lost a round in that fight when a New York federal judge rejected the settlement.

Rogue online pharmacies: Earlier this month, Google disclosed a $500 million charge in its first quarter to cover the potential cost of resolving an investigation by the Department of Justice, reportedly for accepting ads from rogue online pharmacies in violation of federal law. The eye-popping amount suggests to some legal scholars that Google knew it was taking business from companies that broke the law. Google took steps to curtail advertising by illicit pharmacies in February 2010 and even won praise from the Obama administration in December for making efforts to block those ads. Now the company just needs to resolve the lingering dispute with the Justice Department.

(Source : http://news.cnet.com)

Smart software cracks sound-based CAPTCHA security

Efforts to make the web more accessible have unwittingly made it less secure, according to computer scientists who have developed software to crack the audio CAPTCHAs used by websites as part of their sign-up process.

You're probably familiar with traditional CAPTCHAs, the obscured words used to verify that a new user is a person rather than a bot, but the image-based security measure is difficult for visually impaired people to use. To help such users websites also offer audio CAPTCHAs, in which a computerised voice reads out letters or digits distorted by noise, but their security hadn't been as extensively studied as the visual versions.

Now, researchers have used software called Decaptcha to crack commercial audio CAPTCHAs used by eBay, Microsoft, Yahoo and others, with success rates from 41 to 89 per cent. The system known as reCAPTCHA - developed by the original inventors of the CAPTCHA and now owned by Google - was more resilient to attack, with only 1.5 per cent of CAPTCHAs broken. Even such a low success rate renders audio CAPTCHAs useless, as an attacker in control of a large botnet of infected computers can easily afford to make 100 attempts for every successfully created account.

Decaptcha uses a number of audio-processing techniques to remove noise and identify the individual digits in an audio CAPTCHA. The software has to be trained for 20 minutes on each type of CAPTCHA and can then solve tens of CAPTCHAs per minute on an ordinary desktop computer.

The researchers say their techniques leave most modern audio CAPTCHAs unusable, and alternatives must be developed. Decaptcha struggles only with CAPTCHAs that include semantic noise, which are sounds that share characteristics with spoken digits such as music or vocal tracks. For example, reCAPTCHA uses background conversations to obscure the digits, making it hard for the software to pick them out.

Humans can also find these CAPTCHAs difficult to understand, however, which means reCAPTCHA has a high failure rate. The researchers suggest using music rather than vocal tracks could create CAPTCHAs that are still hard for Decaptcha but easier for humans, because we can tune in to the correct sounds. They presented their work yesterday at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in Oakland, California.

Google App Engine goes for Go language

Go, Google's experimental programming language, is coming to the company's App Engine cloud-computing service--and a bit closer to reality in the process. Google hopes to use Go to tackle modern programming challenges such as getting useful work out of chips with multiple processor cores. Getting new languages to catch on is difficult, though--it took Sun Microsystems years with Java, and its Fortress never really caught on widely. 

But incorporating Go into App Engine could help make it more relevant, or at least easier to test out, by reducing the hassles involved in trying it. App Engine is a service for running software on Google's infrastructure--a higher-level foundation than the nuts and bolts Amazon Web Services provides, but a lower level than full-fledged applications such as Google Docs. 

The company announced the Go move last week at the Google I/O show and released a new Go software development kit (SDK) to let programmers try it out. So far, though, the SDK is as far as the average person can get, because Google hasn't publicly released the service. "You don't even need to have Go installed beforehand because the SDK is fully self-contained.Just download the SDK, unzip it, and start coding," said Go team members David Symonds, Nigel Tao, and Andrew Gerrand on the Go blog. "We will soon enable deployment of Go apps into the App Engine hosting infrastructure...Once full deployment is enabled, it'll be easy to push your app to Google's cloud." 

App Engine started with the ability to run software written in Python, a popular language within Google. Second came Java, which is widely used to run server software. Go, while not the fixture of mainstream computing the first two languages are, has attracted a very active programming community. The language is an open-source software project. 

Go on App Engine can handle the full go language and, when programs run, they can tap into most of the standard suite of libraries of pre-built tools that come with Go. In addition, Go is adapted for several App Engine features designed to let applications run at large scale, such as the Datastore interface for storing information in a database. 

However, some elements of Go are missing for now--including one part of the Go sales pitch, the ability to spread jobs more easily across multiple threads that run in parallel. "Although goroutines and channels are present, when a Go app runs on App Engine only one thread is run in a given instance," the Go team members said. "That is, all goroutines run in a single operating system thread, so there is no CPU parallelism available for a given client request. We expect this restriction will be lifted at some point." 

Even in its preliminary form, Go should appeal to some coders, said

"It's...an interesting new option for App Engine because Go apps will be compiled to native code, making Go a good choice for more CPU-intensive tasks," said Google's Scott Knaster in a Google Code blog post. "Plus, the garbage collection and concurrency features of the language, combined with excellent libraries, make it a great fit for Web apps."