Datamation Staff

AFP: Smartphone manufacturer Samsung Electronics has filed a lawsuit against Apple in France, alleging that the iPhone and iPad infringe on three of Samsung’s patents on UMTS technology. The move is the latest action in an increasingly heated legal battle between the two companies. Last week, Apple won a ban on Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones and […]

BBC News: What if a supercomputer could predict world events before they happened? Researcher Kalev Leetaru of the University of Illinois’ Institute for Computing believes they probably can. He recently fed news articles into the “Nautilus” supercomputer at the University of Tennessee. Nautilus analyzed the articles for mood and location and created graphs for the […]

Computerworld: According to a new survey from staffing firm Robert Half Technology, e-mail may be on its way out. Fifty-four percent of CIOs surveyed predicted that real-time communications methods, such as instant messaging, SharePoint, Chatter and Yammer, would become more popular than traditional e-mail. “Employers are looking for the right people to deploy these tools […]

Cnet: Chairwoman Cher Wang of smartphone manufacturer HTC reportedly told the Economic Observer of China that her company is interested in purchasing its own operating system. “We have given it thought and we have discussed it internally, but we will not do it on impulse,” she said. HTC currently uses the Android and Windows Phone […]

Computer Weekly: A new report from G Data Security Labs finds that malware for smartphones and tablets increased 273 percent in the first half of 2011 when compared with the first half of 2010. On average, hackers release a new strain of mobile malware every 12 seconds. The most common type of malware is cross-platform […]

InformationWeek: Samfirmware, a ROM supplier for smartphone manufacturer Samsung, has sent out two interesting tweets about Samsung’s mobile operating system plans. “Samsung will support Windows phone till end 2012,” read the first. “It’s true about Samsung and Windows Phone. Windows Phone market is smaller than Samsung’s own OS Bada,” said the second. Samsung has not […]

The Register: Judge William Alsup has ordered Larry Page, CEO of Google, and Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, to sit down together to try to reach a settlement in the Java patent infringement lawsuit. The two Larrys must report September 19 at 9am Pacific time, and they may have additional mediation sessions September 20 and […]

Bloomberg: A German court has upheld the temporary ban on sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab in that country, saying that it looks too much like Apple’s iPad. “The crucial issue was whether the Galaxy tablet looked like the drawings registered as a design right,” said the judge in the case. “Also, our case had nothing […]

NYTimes: For the first time ever, Google has released details about the about of electricity consumed by its data centers. Those facilities continuously draw 260 million watts of power–enough to power 200,000 homes, or about one-quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant. The company estimated its 2010 carbon footprint at 1.5 million metric […]

FoxNews: Last night, a number of Microsoft’s cloud-based services experienced outages, including Office 365, MSN.com, Live@edu and Windows Live Hotmail. More than 365 million customers were affected, many of them located in Europe or the Asia Pacific region. The company issued a fix for the problem around 2:00 am ET, and Office 365 was back […]

InfoWorld: In response to the DigiNotar hack which resulted in the issuance of fake Google SSL certificates, the Mozilla Foundation is requiring all certificate authorities (CAs) to complete unprecedented security requirements. Mozilla, which maintains the Firefox Web browser, has given the 600+ CAs eight days to audit their infrastructure, note their dependencies on other CAs, […]

Mashable: On Thursday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo revealed a number of statistics about the micro-blogging service: 100 million people log in to Twitter at least once a month. 55 million people log in to Twitter from a mobile device every month. 50 million people log in to Twitter every day. 200 million people have registered […]