The goal is to replace the bag of manuals and navigation charts weighing as much as 40 pounds that are carried by pilots and navigators, said Captain Kathleen Ferrero , a spokeswoman for the command. "The airline industry is way ahead of us on this," she said in a telephone interview. "Most, if not all of the major airliners are already switching to tablets."

Foxconn executive Louis Woo said that he would actually like it if Apple demanded that the company double the pay of factory employees. Your move, Apple.

the speed with which Android handsets can be developed seems to be a key value of that operating system and one for which Microsoft does not have a good answer.  Nokia is now one year into its commitment to the Microsoft platform and it has a very limited portfolio to show for it (and limited sales as well.) As a result, Nokia’s Symbian business evaporated very rapidly. More rapidly than the company anticipated.

The dilemma for other vendors may well be how long will it take for them to develop a replacement for their Android portfolio in Windows Phone.

The opportunity cost of this switch is subtle and insidious but may be the root of why we don’t see a stampede toward Microsoft. Conversely, Android's contract-free, implement-at-will availability may be its greatest selling point.

Social messaging applications cost mobile network operators $13.9bn (£8.8bn) in lost SMS revenue last year, a report has claimed.

Analysis firm Ovum studied global use of popular services like Whatsapp, Blackberry Messenger and Facebook chat.

It concluded that mobile operators must "work together to face the challenge from major internet players".

By controlling the resource, aluminum unibody production in this case, Apple left very little space for maneuver for their rivals and ensured low production costs. Other unibody manufacturers can now dictate prices to Apple's rivals who have to pay. But the production capacities are low so they can only use such chassis in flagship products while Apple is using them in mass products. Apple rivals go to great lengths trying to change this situation: Intel created a fashion for ultrabooks and aluminum bodies seem only natural for them but manufacturers are not able to get enough production capacity to satisfy the demand for aluminum bodies. Instead they use the old trick: they make 'aluminum sandwiches' – aluminum sheets cover a plastic chassis. Naturally, this solution is not very elegant though it costs slightly cheaper (applicable to laptops $1000+).

This solution is too expensive to be used in laptops in the below $1000 bracket so manufacturers are forced to use all sorts of plastic there. This is a result of insufficient supply of needed components.

I’m reminded of a Louis CK joke. I’m going to clean up a little because I’m not Louis CK and this isn’t a live comedy stage. It really wouldn’t come across the same way otherwise.

“I’m totally opposed to stealing an Xbox. Unless Microsoft sets a price for them that I don’t want to pay, or there’s a new model in a warehouse somewhere and it won’t ship to stores for another few weeks. Because what else am I going to do? Not have that Xbox? That’s no solution!”

The world does not OWE you Season 1 of “Game Of Thrones” in the form you want it at the moment you want it at the price you want to pay for it. If it’s not available under 100% your terms, you have the free-and-clear option of not having it.

The director of the National Security Agency has warned that the hacking group Anonymous could have the ability within the next year or two to bring about a limited power outage through a cyberattack.

In other words, many companies are taking advantage of Internet Explorer’s poor cookie blocking implementation for their own purposes. Their excuse is that P3P is dead and IE’s cookie blocking would break their website, so they just work around the browser’s privacy controls.

We spoke to an Apple representative who confirmed that the settlement is for those customers who chose not to take a free case or return their phone back in 2010. It looks like holding out didn't get you much more than the option to take $15 cash instead.

Apple's dominance on tablets and smartphones presents a threat to accurately measure and optimize the performance of paid-search marketing campaigns… While Mac users also rely on other browsers, Safari remains the dominant search browser used on the iPhone and the iPad, which results in higher rates of undercounted conversions on Apple devices. All browsers can present challenges for advertisers, but Apple's focus on consumer privacy limits the viability of third-party cookie-based tracking systems.

Marin's research also suggests that the conversion tracking issue is a much bigger problem than previously thought. On average, advertisers using third-party cookie-based tracking systems are undercounting conversions by 38%, severely limiting visibility into campaign performance. The white paper, however, does provide somewhat of a workaround.

[Safari's] blocking [of] third-party cookies can make iOS conversion rates appear lower than conversion rates on Windows, but the study found that the actual conversion rates for iOS, minus for the third-party cookie based undercounting, were on average 23% higher than on Windows.

When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too? We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies.

First make sure that you have a back up of your Windows 8 Registry file so that it will be useful in case you face some problems.

I finally decided today that even though sometimes I get some value from having comments here on Scripting News, in balance they're not worth the trouble. So I'm turning them off.

Bitcoin experienced a rough night on Monday as TradeHill, the second-largest Bitcoin exchange, announced that it was closing its doors. In a statement, CEO Jered Kenna cited regulatory problems and the loss of $100,000 in a dispute with one of its payment processors as major factors in the decision. He has pledged to open a new site once these issues have been resolved.

Magazines will continue to praise Kurzweil's techno-religion in sporadic bursts, and followers will continue to gullibly accept what he says because it is what they wish would happen. Kurzweil will die while brain-uploading and immortality are still vague dreams; he will be frozen in liquid nitrogen, which will so thoroughly disrupt his cells that even if we discover how to cure whatever kills him, there will be no hope of recovering the mind and personality of Kurzweil from the scrambled chaos of his dead brain.

My gut feeling is that we've passed beyond the era where it made sense to concentrate on Internet privacy controls and issues mainly in terms of specific technologies as we've done in the past.

As noted above, cookies are neither good nor bad, neither intrinsically righteous nor evil. Cookies, like the other local storage mechanisms that have now been implemented, are merely tools. And as with other tools, how they are used is under the control of the entities who deploy these complex functionalities…What we really need to be concentrating on are the fundamental issues of trust and transparency.

If we as users feel confident that individual firms are doing their best to be transparent about their policies and are handling our data in responsible manners, then putting our trust (and data) in the hands of those firms is a solid bet.

The only other firms I can think of with this kind of sustained inability to make their internal controls stick are on Wall Street. Google has already had to pay out a <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/25/business/la-fi-google-settlement-20110825">$500 million fine</a> for running advertisements for illegal pharmaceutical imports. And the company is already operating under a stringent consent decree with the FTC from the Buzz debacle. If those weren't sufficient to convince Larry Page to put his house in order, it's hard to know what will be. Sooner or later, the company will unleash on the internet a piece of software written by the programmer equivalent of a Jérôme Kerviel or a Kweku Adoboli and it won't be pretty, for the public or for Google.

People expected that Google would have a hissyfit because telcos are bastardizing Android instead of shipping it in the “pure” form offered by Google in the form(s) of the Nexus One and Nexus S. Google hasn’t. Why would they? Unlike Apple and Microsoft, their imperative isn’t the purity of the platform....

Think for a second – effectively every product Google makes is dedicated to getting you, or keeping you, on the Internet. The Chrome browser isn’t setting speed records because Google cares about you in a deep, meaningful way. It’s to make the time you use on the web, and on your computer, so painless and effortless that it becomes the way you always do things. Google’s true mission statement could to some degree actually be reduced down to:

To become your conduit and guide to everything, via the Internet.

As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.

A new version of the Google+ iOS app is rolling out to the App Store, and it comes with one of your most requested features: Instant Upload! Once enabled, all photos and videos that you take are automatically uploaded to a private album on Google+ - ready to share with your circles, or the world.

It’d be nice if the Journal wasn’t so caught up in its own “privacy scoop” that it paused to wonder if perhaps Apple has an agenda here as well. I’m not arguing Google doesn’t have an agenda – it clearly does. I’m as saddened as the next guy about how Google has broken search in its relentless pursuit of beating Facebook, among others.

In this case, what Google and others have done sure sounds wrong – if you’ve going to resort to tricking a browser into offering up information designated by default as private, you need to somehow message the user and explain what’s going on. Then again, in the open web, you don’t have to – most browsers let you set cookies by default.

"The Google code was spotted by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer and independently confirmed by a technical adviser to the Journal, Ashkan Soltani, who found that ads on 22 of the top 100 websites installed the Google tracking code on a test computer, and ads on 23 sites installed it on an iPhone browser."

The software patent system is totally askew. We need to look no further to see this than the recent news that Apple was granted a patent on sliding to unlock a mobile device. (Edit: It actually was granted back in February, but the case pinged again, and so we're all revisiting it.) It's bad enough that a governing body somewhere actually believes that you or I aren't smart enough to come to the natural conclusion on our own (that's basically what a patent means - it's a unique idea or process), but the fact that it existed on an old Windows CE device in 2005 was totally overlooked.

The [DoCoMo] deal [in Japan] was a breakthrough for Macromedia. Instead of giving away the flash client, the way it had on the PC, Macromedia could charge for the client, have it forced into the hands of every user, and continue to also make money selling development tools. The company had found a way to have its cake and eat it too! In late 2004, the iMode deal was extended worldwide (link), and I'm sure Macromedia had visions of global domination.

Unfortunately for Flash, Japan is a unique phone market, and DoCoMo is a unique operator. The DoCoMo deal could not be duplicated on most phone platforms other than iMode. Macromedia, and later Adobe, was now trapped by its own success. To make Flash Lite a standard in mobile, it would have needed to give away the player, undercutting its lucrative DoCoMo deal. When you have a whole business unit focused on making money from licensing the player, giving it away would mean missing revenue projections and laying off a lot of people. Macromedia chose the revenue, and Flash Lite never became a mobile standard.

On Pinterest, every pin ties back to an external link. We used RJMetrics to extract the top-level domain of those links for the pins in our sample. What we found was a pretty tremendous long-tail effect. In our sample of about a million pins, over 100,000 distinct source domains existed.

The owner of an online social network cannot be obliged to install a general filtering system, covering all its users, in order to prevent the unlawful use of musical and audio-visual work

Could this happen on Android is a fairly cut-and-dry question. The answer is no, as in, a snowball's chance. No, nien, nyet, non. Why it can't happen on Android still only hints at the bigger problem.

As a mobile phone, the Galaxy Note is positively gargantuan. It’s almost 6 inches long and over 3 inches wide. When you hold it up to your ear, it pretty much covers the entire side of your face. You look like you’re talking into a piece of toast.
The Note is so big, an iPhone can almost fit within its display. And it dwarfs even the more-bloated crop of recent Android phones, like Samsung’s own Galaxy S II series, whose screen can be as large as 4.5 inches. And while it can fit into a large pocket or handbag, the Note isn’t going to slip unobtrusively into your jeans or a small purse. It weighs 6.28 ounces, nearly 30% more than the iPhone and nearly 50% more than some Galaxy S II models.

The flaw came to light by analysing more than seven million public keys which are used to secure online transactions, email messages and other web services.
The researchers discovered that a flaw in the process for generating random prime numbers – a critical component of the public key encryption – resulted in thousands of public keys sharing common prime numbers.

"What surprised us most is that many thousands of 1024-bit RSA moduli, including thousands that are contained in still valid X.509 certificates, offer no security at all," the research paper states.

Theodore Essex, administrative law judge for the International Trade Commission, wrote in his Jan. 31 decision that Microsoft’s negotiations with Barnes & Noble over the use of Android in the Nook were “certainly hard bargaining,” but he concluded they didn’t qualify as patent misuse.
“Even assuming that these transactions and the related evidence establishes that Microsoft is bent on eliminating Android as a competitor, the mere fact that Microsoft is targeting Android for destruction is insufficient to establish an antitrust violation let alone patent misuse,” he wrote.

Don't blame it on Microsoft: The lion's share of vulnerabilities last year were in third-party applications, with 78 percent of all bugs, versus 10 percent in Microsoft software products, according to a new report published today.
Secunia's annual report for 2011 found that the number of endpoint flaws jumped past 800 bugs, more than half of which were considered very critical.

So the tie-up, now approved by European and American regulators, is about more than simply patents, as Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt has himself acknowledged. Any visitor to both Motorola’s substantial stand at Mobile World Congress and Google’s I/O conference in 2011, however, could probably have guessed that.
At MWC, Moto’s representatives were as keen to show you the security alarms, the set-top boxes and the other emerging technologies as they were the tablets and the mobile phones. Cut to Google’s own show, I/O, and there the company demonstrated its plans for Android@home, with tablets turning on lights and used to stream music. The fit is about much more than patents.

Let's return to the big question - good, bad or indifferent sales?

Piper Jaffray had been predicting 5.6m will be sold this year (calendar year 2010), but on getting those official Apple numbers revised it downwards, to 4.3m. Forrester is rather less positive: it thinks 3m. iSuppli has the frankly hard-to-believe 7m in 2010, tripling by 2012.

The breach is a potential embarrassment for Luxembourg-based Manwin, which runs some of the world's best-known pornography websites.
A small sample of the hundreds of thousands of pieces of user data allegedly compromised were posted to the Internet earlier this week. E-mails, user names, and encrypted passwords were divulged, and in some cases it was possible to infer porn users' full names and country of origin.
The hacker claiming responsibility for the breach told the Associated Press that he carried out the attack to draw attention to the site's vulnerability.

Maybe Justin Timberlake and friends weren't so crazy after all. Myspace, the once dominant social-networking site that faded into obscurity during Facebook's rise to dominance, added 1 million new users over the past month, according to the company.

"The numbers tell an amazing story of strong momentum and dramatic change for Myspace," said Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Myspace. "And the 1 million-plus new user accounts we've seen in the last 30 days validates our approach."

Down 6% in 2011, that's where, according to the NPD Group

If it weren't for tablets and mobile phones, 2011 would have been a miserable year for the U.S. consumer electronics industry. Total U.S. retail sales for the year were $144 billion, down 1% from 2010, according to a report issued Monday by the NPD Group.

Nokia Lumia 800: delightful smartphone but with a few irritations. If you have one, I recommend that you do not let the battery fully discharge – a challenge since the battery life is not the greatest – since if you do, you may have problems turning the phone on again.

RIM UK PlayBook shipments took off in Q4 as price cuts finally convinced distributors to increase their orders.

According to data from Context, the number of RIM fondleslabs sold to UK wholesalers during Q4 was up nearly three fold on a sequential basis to 32,000 units, taking market share to 3.4 per cent.

…some are arguing that Apple has single-handedly redefined the concept of a cellphone with the iPhone's giant touch-screen interface, making devices such as the BlackBerry Pearl, launched just last September, appear relatively clunky and outdated."Nobody does industrial design as well as Apple does it today," says Carmi Levy, senior vice-president of strategic consulting for AR Communications Inc. "But you can bet your next mortgage payment that RIM's engineers are already working on the next design that mimics and probably leapfrogs the iPhone. That's the name of the game."

[Co-CEO Jim] Balsillie IS the first to admit some will find the iPhone's look appealing, but he says he's doubtful the device will have much of an impact on RIM's overall sales. For one thing, he says, the iPhone will hold little appeal for RIM's core business market and its need for secure information technology systems, which RIM has been providing for years with its corporate BlackBerry email servers.

AOL today announced that its video search results are powered by blinkx. In turn, blinkx will incorporate AOL's premium video assets into its current index of over 35 million hours of content, making them easily searchable and accessible to users around the world.

The partnership expands the quantity and quality of AOL's video search results and also delivers integrated Safe Search tools that block adult oriented content from minors.

The big deal is that privacy and security is not a big deal in Silicon Valley. While technorati tripped over themselves to congratulate Mr. Morin on finessing the bad publicity, a number of concerned engineers e-mailed me noting that the data collection <a href="http://gawker.com/5883549/dont-forgive-path-the-creepy-iphone-company-that-misled-us-once-already">was not an accident</a>. It would have taken programmers weeks to write the code necessary to copy and organize someone’s address book. Many said Apple was at fault, too, for approving Path for its App Store when it appears to violate its rules.

In other words, Google is going to start controlling Android more tightly by stealth: it will sell the best phones, with rapid, regular updates that its erstwhile-partners can’t match. Within a few years, I fully expect Motorola to have overtaken Samsung as the number one Android vendor. And, what’s more, I wouldn’t be surprised if Samsung hadn’t forked Android and ended up producing its own Samsung-only variant, with its own App Store.

Gourville talks about the ’9X problem’ — "a mismatch of 9 to 1 between what innovators think consumers want and what consumers actually want."1 The 9X problem goes a long way to explaining the tech industry folk wisdom that to spread like wildfire a new product has to offer a tenfold improvement over what’s currently out there.

there’s a problem with changing the mentality about email because most people don’t get as much email as [venture capitalist Fred] Wilson or I do. So it just looks like we’re complaining for being popular or something. BUT the fact of the matter is that as more and more of the world spends more time online, more and more people will feel email overload.

since Gmail added OAuth support in March 2010, an increasing number of startups are asking for a perpetual, silent window into your inbox.

I’m concerned OAuth, while hugely convenient for both developers and users, may be paving the way for an inevitable privacy meltdown.

Even the most fragmented, forked, customised and mangled ‘Android’ device has an open web browser and data connectivity and can drive mobile use of Google Search. Indeed, saying that an Android device like the Kindle Fire ‘has no Google services’ might be true in one sense but misses the underlying point – the browser itself is by far the most important Google Service on any device.

Joining the large crop of businesses and organizations dropping the BlackBerry, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration plans to provide employees with Apple’s iPhones and iPads instead.

The government agency, based in Washington, cited the steep cost of Research in Motion’s software, which is used to secure and manage BlackBerry devices, as the primary reason for the switch, which was first reported Thursday by The Loop. The agency has distributed about 3,000 BlackBerry devices among 20,000 workers, and plans to move to the Apple devices beginning in May.

The MacBook Air is simply best in class when it comes to hardware. The build is outstanding, the touchpad works better with Microsoft’s operating system than any other laptop trackpad out there, and the display makes Windows look better than ever. All that combined with very snappy performance makes the Air more enjoyable to use than many of the other ultrabooks on the market, including the higher end $1,110 Asus Zenbook and the $1,200 Lenovo IdeaPad U300s.

The device, which exists as a prototype and will eventually be sold as a branded item to consumers, is the company’s most significant venture into hardware. While the initial purpose of the device will be for streaming music, the eventual use could be much wider.

Google has never shown that it has any of the characteristics necessary to build, market, and sell consumer goods.

Google Inc. is developing a home-entertainment system that streams music wirelessly throughout the home and would be marketed under the company's own brand, according to people briefed on the company's plans.

Rarely do I find a need to call out the W3C folks (or anyone, for that matter), but the recent post by Daniel Glazman (@glazou), co-chair of the W3C CSS working group, pushed me over the edge.

In his article, he calls for everyone to, get this, stop using -webkit in their sites. He equates webkit, now a popular engine for most new mobile browsers, to IE6. Moreover, he calls it a “threat to the open web”.

<em>Seriously?</em>

In a distinct departure from the agreement voiced between Apple, Cisco and Microsoft regarding the need for fair, transparent, understandable and consistent licensing policy for open standards, Google has promised to continue to wage Motorola's increasingly hostile patent wars.

Google Inc. is developing a home-entertainment system that streams music wirelessly throughout the home and would be marketed under the company's own brand, according to people briefed on the company's plans.

The effort marks a sharp shift in strategy for Google, which for the first would time would design and market consumer electronic devices under the Google brand. The company has up to now mainly focused on developing the operating system that powers devices such as smartphones, tablets and televisions and allowing other companies to build and brand the hardware that uses it.

Google's Android unit has led a multi-year effort to develop the new entertainment device, which is expected to be unveiled later this year, people familiar with the matter said.

Sinofsky also said that the Windows-on-ARM machines will come with several Office apps — Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote — that have been tuned to run in a very battery-efficient manner. But Sinofsky said that, although those applications will run in the traditional Windows desktop, they will be the only programs allowed to do so, other than components of Windows itself.

“There are no other compiled dekstop apps that are available,” Sinofsky told AllThingsD. All of the other apps for Windows on ARM will be the new-style “Metro” apps.

Windows 8 for Intel and AMD chips, by contrast, will be able to run all of the kinds of programs that have traditionally run on Windows, inside a Windows 7-like desktop environment.

Today we closed our round of investment from Enterprise Ventures and Blue Fountain.

In total, provided we hit certain milestones next August, and with the Knight Foundation money, this means we have a cool $1,000,000 of capital.