People sue Apple over 'overheating' iPads

(ArsTechnica) -- Three iPad users claim that because the iPad will shut itself off after remaining in direct sunlight for long enough, it fails to meet the promises Apple made about using the device as an e-book reader.

The group has filed a federal class-action lawsuit in the Northern California district to "redress and end this pattern of unlawful conduct."

When the iPad's operating temperature reaches a critical level, it will force itself to shut down and display a message warning the user to let the device cool down before trying use it again. This warning is the same that iPhones and iPod Touches give before shutting down when they overheat, often after being left in direct sunlight.

The lawsuit alleges that the iPad "does not live up to reasonable consumer's expectations created by Apple insofar as the iPad overheats so quickly under common weather conditions." Apple lists the iPad's operating temperature as 32° to 95° F (0° to 35° C), so it's not hard to see that using it out in the hot sun can quickly heat up the device over the maximum temperature.

The plaintiffs seem to take particular issue with Apple claiming that "reading on the iPad is just like reading a book." This claim is patently false, according to the lawsuit, because a real book can be used in "the sunlight or other normal environmental conditions" without shutting off.

Most consumer electronic devices can be damaged from overheating if used in direct sunlight for long periods of time; not all of them have the automatic shutoff capability that the iPad does. (Sadly, my boom box from 1986 didn't have an automatic shutoff, and my Quiet Riot tape melted all over the inside when I left it playing by the pool on a hot summer day.)

However, during my hours-long marathon "Plants vs Zombies" sessions -- both indoors and in the shade of an apartment deck on a sunny, 82° day -- my iPad never became even warm to the touch.

The iPad may not work "just like a book" at the beach or out in the hot sun. Does that fact truly make Apple guilty of fraud, negligent misrepresentation, deceptive advertising, unfair business practices, breach of express or implied warranty, intentional misrepresentation or unjust enrichment?

The plaintiffs are seeking class-action status and asking for an injunction against Apple's "false" promises as well as "real" and punitive damages.

COPYRIGHT 2010 ARSTECHNICA.COM

Angelina Jolie Officially on Twitter - Is she dishing the dirt?

Angelina Jolie has joined Twitter. Or, to put it more accurately, Jolie reclaimed her name from an imposter who had been posting under it. So, what has Angelina been tweeting about? Brad Pitt leaving the toilet seat up? The children’s cute and clever antics? No and no. Angelina has produced zero tweets. Not one. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Don’t bother trying to follow her in anticipation of future Twitter excitement. Angelina Jolie’s Twitter account is currently locked. So, no tweets are coming in and no tweets are coming out. Basically, Angelina Jolie’s Twitter account is an abandoned, boarded up house. (Surrounded by an electric fence, with razor wire on top…)

Don’t worry though. All future tweeting is not lost. An insider told USMagazine.com that Angelina might fire up the old Twitter account eventually. Will she dish the dirt then? Eh… No. Sorry. The insider said, "If [Angelina Jolie] uses it, it will be for charity-related items or sharing links." Bah, humbug.

Why a top Facebook app maker vanished

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Facebook said Wednesday it has deleted all applications created by Pencake, wiping out widgets used by an estimated 45 million Facebook members.

Pencake, based in Hong Kong, developed the massively popular "Create Your Quiz" app. Unofficial data tracker AppData lists Pencake as Facebook's No. 3 most popular outside developer, trailing only Zynga and Electronic Arts.

But Facebook says Pencake built its vast user base by going rogue.

"We recently disabled applications created by Pencake for violating Facebook Platform policies," Facebook said in a prepared statement. "We enforce these policies regularly and will continue to take appropriate action against applications we find do not provide a trustworthy experience for users."

A Facebook rep declined to specify which policies Pencake violated, but she cited the "main principles" of the site's code of ethics, which discourage Facebook users from spamming or infringing on members' privacy.

Pencake has been known to push the boundaries on Facebook. Members and other developers have complained that the company's apps used spammy tactics like automatically publishing stories to users' pages.

Some Chinese developers even claimed that Pencake admitted in a Hong Kong paper to spamming users at one point, though the company also reportedly said that it was working to scale back those methods.

It would hardly be the first to build Facebook traffic in unsavory ways.

The most notorious scofflaw is Zynga, whose games include FarmVille, FishVille and Mafia Wars. The developer once piled users' Facebook pages with a constant barrage of game notifications, which helped it lure in more players.

Facebook eventually tightened the reins on third-party notifications, but Zynga had already grown powerful. It claims to have 235 million active users a month -- almost half of Facebook's total 500 million users.

Zynga reportedly sucks in revenue of $1 million a day daily, mostly from users paying real money for virtual goods like tractors and animals for their online farms.

Social gaming is fast becoming an M&A battleground, with Zynga one of the few remaining independent developers with a sizeable user base. Electronic Arts (ERTS, Fortune 500) jump-started its presence by snapping up Playfish in November for $275 million in cash plus other incentives, and Disney acquired Playdom this week in a deal it valued at up to $763 million.


Comment by Sodiq: China and India have the largest population on earth and as well as the Largest population of Hackers.


Source: CNN Money

Microsoft's chance to show it still leads

SEATTLE (CNNMoney.com) -- It's a pretty good time to be Microsoft -- but the company still has a lot to prove.

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and the full roster of Microsoft's top executives are meeting with financial analysts on Thursday to map out Microsoft's strategy for maintaining its leadership in the corporate market and catching up to Apple and Google in the consumer space.

Analysts will be especially tuned in for what Microsoft says about its plans for tablets, Windows Phone 7, Bing and Kinect -- businesses that all lag behind their rivals.

The company is coming off of one of its strongest quarters ever in terms of revenue and profit, as Windows 7 and Office sales have soared on renewed demand for PCs. Microsoft has sold nearly 200 million Windows 7 licenses, demonstrating an ability to bounce back from the Windows Vista debacle. Many corporate clients, which make up about three-quarters of Microsoft's customer base, are beginning to refresh their computers and software, and most are expected to migrate to Windows 7 and Office 2010 by the end of next year.

The software giant has also embraced cloud computing in a way that impresses industry analysts. Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) responded to Google Apps' threat to Office by launching a very functional, free online edition of Office 2010 in June. Microsoft's unique "Azure" cloud platform helps businesses save money by moving existing applications built on Microsoft's platform -- as many corporate applications are -- onto remote servers that are supported and serviced by Microsoft, allowing for remote access to data.

For consumers, on the other hand, Microsoft is struggling to keep pace with its competitors.

With search engine Bing, Microsoft has integrated some innovative and compelling ideas to make search more visual, intuitive and predictive of users' intent -- Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) has even copied many of Bing's most unique features. Bing has grown its share of the search market by about 50% in a little over a year, and the revenue-sharing deal with Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) may help it gain scale.

But Bing still trails Google by a vast margin, and it continues to hemorrhage cash.

And then there's Windows Phone 7, one of Microsoft's biggest question marks.

With its last software release, Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft did fairly well in terms of global smartphone market share, but the company was is badly in the United States to more feature-rich phones like the iPhone, Research In Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry and Android-based devices.

Windows Phone 7 is a complete redesign of Microsoft's mobile offering, focusing on a simple and unique user interface. But it's not slated to debut until this fall -- an eon in the fast-moving phone field, where the iPhone and Android continue to gobble up market share.

Tablets are also a glaring question that Microsoft will need to address on Thursday.

With the early success of Apple's (AAPL, Fortune 500) iPad, many analysts are predicting that the tablet space will be one of the fastest-growing tech segments this decade, alongside smartphones. But Ballmer has only vaguely articulated a very generalized strategy for tablet computers, namely that Windows 7 will be on tablets "soon." But the CEO famously canned a turmoil-fraught Microsoft tablet project that had been in the works almost a decade before the iPad came to market. Analysts want more concrete answers about how Microsoft plans to compete in tablets.

Xbox is perhaps Microsoft's greatest source of strength with consumers, outside of Windows.

With the much-hyped, controllerless Kinect accessory set to go on sale this fall, Microsoft hopes to grow its user base even more by adding on the casual gamers who have embraced Nintendo's Wii. Microsoft loves to sell Xbox's ability to download media and stream it across a PC, Zune or Windows Phone. The consumer cloud is a high-growth space that many tech companies are quick to embrace, but given its lack of success so far with Zune media players and Windows Phone, Microsoft has to be concerned about what happens if/when Apple allows its users to stream their iTunes libraries across multiple devices over the Internet.

Microsoft's consumer divisions, which include mobile, have failed to consistently make money for the company. The company let entertainment division chief Robbie Bach head out the door in May.

Here's a telling sign of how challenging Microsoft is finding that market: Though it has many questions to answer on the consumer front, Don Mattrick, who replaced Bach, is not scheduled to speak on Thursday.

Source: CNN Money

All news on this site are Trademarks and Properties of Google and Companies which names are mentioned herein

Sodiq Aiyedun

Kanye West performs for Facebook, joins Twitter

(Sod-a-Blog)

NEW YORK — With the release of a new album approaching, Kanye (KAHN'-yay) West is making sure he's up to date with the social networking sites.

He joined Twitter on Wednesday, one day after going to the offices of Facebook, in Palo Alto, Calif., to preview some of his new material.

Videos of him rapping a cappella while standing on a conference table have been posted on YouTube. On his website afterward, West posted a letter to Facebook, thanking the staff for their support: "Your energy was a gift so electric, so genuine, that it really helped me give my best."

An e-mail request for comment from Facebook was not immediately returned.

West's new as-of-yet untitled album is expected to be released Sept. 14.

YouTube is owned by Google Inc.

Public data snatched from 170 million Facebook profiles

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Public but personal details from more than 170 million Facebook profiles were harvested from the site and made available in a downloadable torrent file this week.

Ron Bowes, a security researcher and blogger, wrote a software program to scan Facebook's public directory of profiles. Users can choose to opt out of that directory, but most stick with Facebook's default setting and allow their name and a few other personal details to publicly searchable.

"Once I have the name and URL of a user, I can view, by default, their picture, friends, information about them, and some other details," Bowes wrote on his blog at SkullSecurity.org.

Bowes' exploit did not involve breaching users' privacy settings or obtaining any passwords, and all of the information he gathered is openly available on Facebook's site. However, the sheer size of his data haul is significant: Bowes' chunky 2.8 gigabyte file includes names and URLs for 171 million Facebook profiles. Facebook has an active user population of 500 million.

Bowes created a torrent for his cache, making it available through sites such as Pirate Bay. He also did some preliminary data mining: Facebook's most-common user name is "jsmith," and the most popular first names on the site are Michael, John and David, Bowes found.

While Bowes called the information's easy accessibility "a scary privacy issue," Facebook downplayed his exploit.

"This information already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook. No private data is available or has been compromised," Facebook said in a statement. "Similar to the white pages of the phone book, this is the information available to enable people to find each other, which is the reason people join Facebook."

The company reiterated that its privacy controls allow users to adjust their settings so that they do not appear in a search on Facebook or through search engines.

0:00 /4:01Facebook CEO responds to privacy issue

Though the information Bowes culled is public, his approach still violated Facebook's terms of service. The site prohibits collecting user information "through automated means," which includes harvesting scripts like the one Bowes created.

Facebook is typically aggressive in cracking down on policy violators. The company said Wednesday that it deleted all applications created by Pencake, a top outside developer whose widgets were used by 45 million Facebook members, because Pencake broke Facebook's rules.

But Bowes doesn't seem concerned. He's already planning the next phase of his Facebook data dive. Bandwidth constraints stopped him from gathering users' public photos and other openly available details, this time around.

"So far, I have only indexed the searchable users, not their friends," he wrote in his blog. "I'd like to tackle that in the future, though, so if anybody has any bandwidth they'd like to donate, all I need is an ssh account and Nmap installed."


Source: CNN Money

Rick Ross Calls Kanye West Sessions 'The Chronic All Over'

Kanye West is working with a bevy of talent to complete his next project, the still-untitled follow-up to 808s & Heartbreak. Racking up studio time with him are producers RZA, NoID, Pete Rock and DJ Toomp and artists like Clipse's Pusha T, Nicki Minaj, Consequence and Kid Cudi. And according to Rick Ross, who holed up in the lab with 'Ye for his Teflon Don track "Live Fast, Die Young," the experience was what he imagined it must have been like to watch another famous producer cook up a classic, namely, Dr. Dre.

"It's like everybody is a student: You walk into a session and it's all about the subject at hand," Ross told MTV News during his appearance on the first episode of "RapFix Live."

"I was just like, Wow. I listened to [Kanye's] beats, and we working on what I'm doing, but then he's in another room cooking up something ... and just the intensity that you have to have to create albums that are gonna stand the test of time for years. He's such a great producer himself, and to have a Pete Rock over your shoulder just working on a particular sound and DJ Toomp, No ID, and Nicki Minaj, I see what's going on. It's The Chronic all over. That's exactly what I said when I walked into the room: This is The Chronic, this is how it had to be."

Earlier this year, 'Ye teased his fans with the first offering from his forthcoming album, the energetic "Power." Since then, he's yet to release any of his own material but he appeared alongside Ross on "Life Fast," which he also produced. And the Chicago MC recently shot a video for "Power" in New York, but at press time, there was no word on plans for its premiere or his album's potential release date.

Are you as eager as Ricky Rozay is to hear a new album from Kanye? Tell us in the comments section!
This report is from MTV News.