Latest News - Page 3094

Twitter recently gave itself itself the power to censor particular tweets in particular countries, but this latest move tops them all. Two friends had planned a trip the the United States, as most people would dream of doing, with Leigh Van Bryan posting a tweet just weeks before his trip that he was going to "destroy America."

Now, a level-headed person would take that as someone who is excited about going to the U.S. with a friend, and is looking to have a great time. The U.S. didn't see it that way, and did not think it was said in a positive tone, where things escalated, quite a bit. Bryan and his friend, Emily Bunting, arrived at the Los Angeles International Airport, where they were questioned by U.S. special agents who had spotted their tweet.

They were questioned for over five hours, after which they were placed into an illegal immigrants van and were put behind bars, separately, for 12 hours. Bryan was questioned in regards to his tweet, where he jokingly said he would be "digging up Marilyn Monroe." The tweet where the U.S. believed Bryan was a "terrorist" was:

I'm one of these people. Where in the hell is Half-Life 3. My latest editorial even covers it, where the last words are "Where are you, Gordon Freeman?" We need him, and we need him now. There seems to be a push from the community, too, which is great.

A quote from the group:

Hasn't the world, or WikiLeaks, learnt anything? If the U.S. Government wants you, they'll come and get you. No matter what country, no matter if you're not a U.S. citizen, or whether you're on water - they'll find a way. Kim Dotcom would've thought he was safe with MegaUpload, after all. The latest out of WikiLeaks is that they want to move their servers offshore in an attempt to avoid prosecution from the U.S.

Citing "multiple sources within the hacking community," told FoxNews.com that those backing WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, have been working behind the scenes to move the servers to international waters where they would find themselves under maritime law. This means that once they are far enough away from land, then maritime law is what you "report" to.

But moving servers onto the open sea isn't going to solve WikiLeaks problems overnight. Jim Dempsey, Vice President for Public Policy with the Washington, D.C., think tank Center for Democracy and Technology has said that moving the servers offshore wouldn't go any good unless those who are running WikiLeaks also moved offshore, where he's quoted;

A RumorTT post about an Apple product that isn't the iPhone or iPad? What's going on! The latest news from Apple.pro claims that the seventh-generation iPod Nano is set to sport a camera. Not only a camera, but it will bring sexy the camera back.

The picture above is just a leak, so the usual salt application and over-the-shoulder-throwing is required. The next-gen iPod Nano pictured is a prototype, so things could change. This prototype is said to have a paltry 1.3-megapixel camera, but is a non-final version.

Rumor has it that the next-gen iPod Nano is just two months away from release, so if you're after a new iPod Nano in the coming weeks, months, we would suggest waiting so you can grab one of these ultra-small, camera-equipped, clip-equipped iPod Nano's.

Later this year, and much more in 2013, we should see Kinect on, or in, notebooks. Ultrabooks are set to be the new craze, Windows 8 will power these new Ultrabooks and Microsoft wants to step in between and place a Kinect motion-based device.

The Daily has some "sources inside Redmond" who have been kind enough to give some details on the upcoming Kinect-powered Windows 8 portables. It has been stated that it will be an "exclusive relationship," where Microsoft will license the technology out to manufacturers such as ASUS, but with conditions. Partners using Kinect won't be allowed to use competing motion-control tech in their devices, for example.

Prototypes are "in the wild," where Microsoft technicians have used them in places with a lot of audio and visual background noise, such as coffee shops and bars. It's also been said that Kinect absolutely kills battery life. One solution mentioned hints toward a clip-on unit, with its own battery pack.

Apple are having to appeal a Chinese court ruling in December of last year, where they were rejected of iPad trademark ownership in China. This could open up Apple to trademark infringement lawsuits from a local company. Apple filed an appeal on January 5 with the Higher People's Court of Guangdong Province, according to a statement from Proview International.

Proview International is a small Chinese display monitor company that claims control over the iPad trademark in mainland China, and the same company that is stirring up a storm over at Apple. Apple had originally filed a lawsuit against Proview to take control of the trademark, but back in December of last year, the Shenzhen Municipal Intermediate People's Court rejected Apple's claim.

Within the lawsuit, Apple claimed that a Proview subsidiary in Taiwan had actually sold the iPad trademark rights to a U.K.-based company called "IP Applications." From there, the trademark rights were then sold to Apple in 2010. The Shenzhen court ruled the transfer of trademark rights were only made through Proview's Taiwan subsidiary. Proview's Shenzhen-based company did not actually attend trademark negotiations, and did not formally transfer any trademark rights, according to the court.

Rovio Mobile, the guys and gals behind the crazy successful Angry Birds, has enjoyed much success with their bird-slinging game. Right up to the point where chief executive, Mikael Hed told the Midem conference in Cannes this morning:

Hed explained that Rovio sees it as "futile" to go after pirates through the courts, apart from when it feels the products they are selling are harmful to the Angry Birds brand, or ripping off its fans. Rovio see piracy as a way to attract more fans, even if its not making money from it. This is where Hed is quoted with:

Nearly twelve months ago, I wrote a news piece about the launch of AMD's Radeon HD 6990 where I said it "punches all other GPU's in the nuts", and it seemed to be a catchy title, that just spilled out of my mind, into my hands, and onto the screen. A lot of what I type happens this way, I guess it's just my hektik writing skillz, maybe.

Anyway, a leaked roadmap for AMD's Radeon HD 7000 series has found its way onto the tubes, and it unveils the Q2 2012 launch of AMD's dual-GPU HD 7990, which will most likely kick every other GPU in the nuts this time. Exact launch timing, is "TBD", but there are some other tid bits included in the roadmap.

We should expect the HD 7870 "Pitcairn XT" to sport 2GB of RAM, and the HD 7850 "Pitcairn Pro" to also sport 2GB of RAM. Launch timing on these two GPUs are an expected March launch, which isn't too far away. Next up we have the HD 7770 "Cape Verde XT" and HD 7750 "Cape Verde Pro", both sporting 1GB of memory and have launch times of just two weeks from now on the 15th of February.

In a curious move, Valve have made some of their titles available through a rival digital distribution platform, Impulse. Impulse was acquired in 2011 by GameStop, which is another curious move. When your main source of income is from selling games, it would make sense to have some of PC's biggest games available on your platform.

Valve's games are now available through Impulse, which include Left 4 Dead and its sequel, Portal 2, The Half-Life Complete Collection and The Orange Box. Strangely, all games require Steam activation, which means you'd have to be using Steam at the end of the day. This hasn't affected Impulse, where they've said in a blog post:

Mozilla have just pushed out Firefox 10 to the masses, with some new features, HTML5-based features, as well as some nifty Developer tools and the usual fixes and improvements. First up, the forward button is gone, well, kinda, it does not show up until you've clicked back - then the forward navigation button will show itself.

Mozilla have said that most add-ons are now compatible with new versions of Firefox by default, anti-aliasing for WebGL has been implemented into Firefox 10.0 as well as CSS3 3D-Transforms now being supported. HTML5-wise, we have the new element for bi-directional text isolation as well as supporting CSS properties. Not only that, but Full Screen APIs now allow you to build a web application that runs in full screen.

Developers get some lovin', with Mozilla adding IndexedDB APIs that more closely match the specification, as well as an "Inspect tool" with content highlighting, and also a new CSS Style Inspector. Some of the problems fixed include a Mac OS X-only problem, where after installing the latest Java release from Apple, Firefox used to crash when closing a tab with a Java applet installed, this is now fixed. Also another problem where some users experienced a crash when moving bookmarks, has been fixed.

Lenovo have unveiled plans to upgrade its ThinkPad Tablet to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich in Q2 of this year. Lenovo will release the ICS-based upgrade over-the-air (OTA) but has not giving specific timing on when this will happen.

The Ice Cream Sandwich update won't enable some hardware-specific features such as Android Beam, which uses NFC (near-field communications) technology to share Web content, maps and directions between devices simply by tapping them together. The ThinkPad doesn't have NFC capabilities.

The update will give Lenovo an edge over the competition, that is, until the competition unleash the power of Ice Cream Sandwich on their respective tablets.

Samsung have added another candidate to their Galaxy line up of smartphones, with the announcement and release of the Galaxy S Advance. Galaxy S Advance sports a 1GHz dual-core CPU, 4-inch, 480x800 Super AMOLED display, up to 16GB of memory, as well as 768MB of RAM.

Galaxy S Advance also supports HSPA connections for speeds of up to 14.4Mbps, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, 1.3-megapixel front-facer, Android 2.3 Gingerbread, and the usual bunch of Samsung apps available through Hubs and ChatON services.

Pricing is currently unknown, but we should see a rollout to begin in Russia next month, followed by Europe, Africa, Middle East, Southeast and Southwest Asia, Latin America, and China. Currently, the U.S. is left out of its release schedule.

Microsoft reached a development milestone this morning, the beginning of the "Office 15" Technical Preview Program. Office 15 is the codename for the upcoming next-generation version of the Microsoft Office products and services, and the Technical Preview is the first time that Microsoft share their work with a select group of customers under non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).

Because Microsoft are only at the early stages of Office 15, they can't share too much about what's included, or being worked on in the new Office suite of software. Of course, there is a tease. CVP of Development, Microsoft Office Division, PJ Hough, said in the Office Blogs:

According to the leader of Sony's French gaming division, Sony will most likely be the last to announce its next-generation console. Philippe Cardone, CEO of PlayStation France, told Le Point that they are in no rush to reveal details on their next-gen console.

This is fuelling rumors that Sony aren't even at a prototype design stage for the PS4, which means it can't be shown off to developers or at gaming events such as E3. Sony claims that there is "no pressure", but considering that Sony's console ranks third behind Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii, you would think they would be out of the "meh" stage and into the "we need to have another console out in 2 years, max."

With the Wii U launching this year, Microsoft's next-gen Xbox launching next year, Sony will be in a lot of trouble. Wii U won't have the best graphics, but once the next-gen Xbox comes out and stomps all over the PS3 in terms of functionality, features, and graphics... what will Sony do? Sit back and let Microsoft take all the glory? Sony needs to let the PS4 prototypes loose to companies, now.

Pictures of Sapphire's non-reference, single fan Radeon HD 7950 have floated onto the surface of the web and it looks quite interesting indeed. It's reported that the single fan model will most likely stick to AMD's reference clock speeds of 800MHz core, 1250MHz (5GHz GDDR5 effective) speeds.

The PCB is Sapphire's usual sexy blue color, with the cooler quite compact and as previously mentioned, just a single fan design. Display output wise, we have two mini-DisplayPort, one HDMI and one DVI. It has also been reported that the maximum factory overclocking permitted by AMD to AIB (Add-in Board) partners is 900MHz for the core, and stock memory clocks.

Does this card cater to your needs? A single fan, non-reference HD 7950 is quite good for those who want to build HTPC's. Will you get one?

It was only a few weeks ago that we reported about a mouse carcass dissolving in a can of Mountain Dew, but another mouse story has found its way onto the wonderful Internet, and this time it's a bit more interesting.

Gholam Hafezi went to an ATM to take out 700 Swedish Kronor when:

A new trailer has for Gearbox Software and SEGA's new Aliens-themed, Aliens: Colonial Marines is out, this time it's a cinematic trailer. The trailer features a decent music track in the background as well as a tease of things to come.

Watch it above, but if you want to just read about it, then don't blame me for spoilers: The trailer shows off a couple of different floors of a structure, where we can see marines lock 'n' loading, preparing to fight an onslaught of near-unkillable aliens.

Acid drops through the levels, through the metal and lands on a nasty looking alien. It of course opens its mouth and reveals its second chomper. Anyone who is an Alien/s fan and says they're not excited about this, needs to be checked out. Let's hope Gearbox do well with this game.

Nintendo have released their Corporate Management Policy Briefing/Third-Quarter Financial Results Briefing, and after sifting through the numbers, I've found some juicy information on their next-generation console, Wii U.

Nintendo have confirmed they will show off the final unit and discuss details at the upcoming E3 2012 event, which is held in Los Angeles in June. After E3, Nintendo will organize an opportunity in Tokyo where they can showcase the same things to Japanese wholesalers and financial analysts who can't make it to E3.

They tease launch timing saying that it will be between the E3 show and the end of the year, with Nintendo President, Satoru Iwata confirming this by saying:

I remember winning spelling tests, or just doing a good job on some homework in school and getting scratch 'n' sniff stickers. It made me feel like I'd been awesome, and can prove it by sniffing my stickers. Well, now you can sniff... your jeans.

Naked and Famous Denim have created a pair of scratch 'n' sniff jeans, where the effect of the smell is created using a coating of micro capsules that hold a bit of 'perfume' which is baked into the surface of the jeans. Scratch the jeans and the scent is released.

The raspberry scent still comes through, even after the jeans have been washed. Imagine a "new jeans smell", where you could possibly not wash your jeans for months at a time. I'm sure there's plenty out there that would love this feature. Myself, I prefer my jeans washed. Raspberry smell could come in handy, though.

The rumor mill is going crazy at the moment with news on Microsoft's upcoming next-generation Xbox console. A games industry source has told Kotaku that the next-generation Xbox will have support for Blu-ray, expanding its disc capacity for games from DVD's 9GB to between 25 and 50GB of data.

A "reliable source" of Kotaku's has also stated that Microsoft intend on incorporating some form of anti-used game system as part of the next-gen Xbox. At the moment it's not clear whether this would not allow you to install a copy of a friends' game, that they've already used, on your console. If so, this would stop the renting of games, second-hand sales, and more.

Another hot rumor is that the the next Xbox will ship with the next-gen Kinect, which would sport an on-board processor, which was originally intended for the Kinect, but didn't make it into the final design. A Microsoft rep told Kotaku: