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Launch for the Nintendo 3DS on Oxford Street

Technology fans were kitted out with foil space blankets to beat the chill outside the HMV store in Oxford Street where the first Nintendo 3DS was sold in the UK at a minute past midnight.

There were similar queues outside the Apple Store in Regent Street, London, where the iPad 2 goes on sale at 5pm on Friday. The first Apple fans arrived at 7.30am yesterday – more than 33 hours early.

At the front of the queue for an Nintendo 3DS at HMV was Marwan Elgamal, 21, from Wembley, north London.

The student, who slept on the street outside the store on Wednesday, was also the first person to officially buy a Nintendo Wii when it was launched in the same way in 2006.

He said: ''I'm just really passionate about the consoles and I think they are amazing and just make me want to play.

''Wednesday night was really cold but it will be worth it to get one and I can't wait to get home and play it.''

Comic Russ Kane and rapper turned soul crooner Plan B also attended the launch event in London.

Around 100 stores are opening at midnight including shops in Aberdeen, Belfast, Dundee and Liverpool.

The console, which has two screens, a built-in motion sensor, three cameras and can also double as a pedometer, claims to offer glasses-free 3D technology.

An HMV spokesman said: ''The release of Nintendo's 3DS is shaping up to be the biggest launch ever for a games console – we've already seen massive demand through online and in-store pre-orders in recent months, and now it looks like tens of thousands of gamers will have been queuing for midnight launches all around the country.

''Demand will, no doubt, just keep building in the months ahead – appealing to serious gamers and casual players alike. The 3DS is a groundbreaking piece of technology that will not only take gaming to the next level, but will help to lay the foundations for 3D to become a standard entertainment format – it's a real game-changer.''

Reports from Japan, where the console has already been launched, said it is able to tell if users are playing bootleg copies of games and disable itself.

Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk

Users of Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 will see this Firefox 4 upgrade offer after selecting "Check for updates" from the browser's Help menu.

Firefox 4 got off to a strong start today, with 1 million copies of the new browser downloaded in the first three hours.

If it keeps up the early pace, Firefox 4 will easily beat Microsoft's claim that users downloaded 2.4 million copies of its Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) in the first 24 hours of availability last week.
Firefox 4 upgrade offer

Although Firefox 4's out-of-the-gate download tally was impressive, Mozilla executive Mike Beltzner said that it was behind the launch numbers of Firefox 3.6, which shipped in January 2010. During the first three hours, downloads averaged between 5,000 and 6,000 copies per minute, less than half the 12,000-per-minute pace of the previous version.

At around 9 a.m. PT Beltzner noted that it was just the start of the day on the west coast of the U.S., and noon on the east. He encouraged users to hit Mozilla's download servers.

"What better way to spend your break than by downloading Firefox 4," said Beltzner during a live Webcast hosted by Mozilla.

Mozilla has posted a real-time download calculator on its site.

When the new browser reached one million downloads, Mozilla developers and employees rang cowbells, cheered, and watched as someone dressed in a Firefox mascot costume danced around the room.

Tuesday's release marked the end of more than a year of development by Mozilla, which issued the first "alpha" edition of the browser in February 2010. Firefox 4 was originally scheduled to ship last November, but bugs and other delays forced it to announce in October that it would instead wrap up development early this year.

The code designated as final today was identical to Firefox 4 Release Candidate 2 (RC2), a last-minute update that Mozilla issued last Friday.

Mozilla's Firefox 4 was the second major upgrade shipped by browser makers in just over a week. On March 14, Microsoft launched the final version of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9).

Firefox 4 features a new tab manager, dubbed "Panorama," boasts an overhauled interface that resembles Chrome's minimalist design, and supports GPU acceleration to boost page composition speeds.

Hardware acceleration has become a point of contention between Mozilla and Microsoft. The latter has touted IE9 as the only browser to "fully hardware accelerate the entire Web platform," while Mozilla has criticized its rival for abandoning Windows XP users. IE9 runs only on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Microsoft today again defended that decision.

"The developer community has been vocal that they want to push the Web forward," a Microsoft spokesman said in an e-mail. "The browser is only as good as the operating system it runs on and a browser running on a ten-year-old operating system tethers the Web to the past. The time has come to stop focusing on lowest common denominator, and to really push what's possible with innovations like full hardware acceleration."

Some Mozilla developers have used stronger words to describe Microsoft's argument that IE9 is the best browser on Windows.

"Microsoft's message that IE9 is the apex of what a browser can do with the GPU is nonsense," said Robert O'Callahan, a New Zealand employee of Novell who works full time on Mozilla's graphics infrastructure. In a post to his personal blog, O'Callahan said, "Microsoft's PR about 'full hardware acceleration' is a myth."

Mozilla technology evangelist Asa Dotzler was even more blunt. "Microsoft, stop making bull**** claims about hardware acceleration," Dotzler titled a post to his personal blog two weeks ago.

Users can download Firefox 4 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from Mozilla's site.

Source:
http://www.computerworld.com

Sony and LG are locked in a legal battle over Blu-ray technology in the PS3. Photograph: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Dutch police have seized several thousand PlayStation 3s at Sony's biggest European warehouse in the latest stage of its acrimonious patent battle with LG.

LG has won a court order enabling it to seize all new PS3 across the Netherlands – including those already in Dutch homes – in a dispute that centres on Sony's allegedly infringing use of Blu-ray technology belonging to LG.

The injunction means that LG is tightening the net on PS3s in Europe, having already ordered customs officers to seize thousands of the consoles last week.

Sony will fight to have the blockade lifted at an emergency hearing in the Hague's civil court of justice tomorrow.

LG argues that Sony PS3s infringe a number of its patents relating to playback of Blu-ray discs. The Korean company has been granted an investigation into the PS3's Blu-ray use by the US international trade commission, after seeking a "permanent exclusion order ... excluding entry into the United States" of the games console.

Tomorrow's court battle will be one of the first times the Asian giants have come head to head in patent disputes stretching almost seven years.

LG is likely to apply for the consoles to be destroyed, while Sony will apply for the blockade to be lifted. A court judgment on what happens next could be returned tomorrow or in the coming days.

Customs officials at Rotterdam and Schiphol, the main import points for PS3s for both the UK and wider Europe, are understood to have extended a blockade on two Sony shipments made last week.

Sony, which imports about 100,000 PS3s into Europe each week, is attempting to get all the restrictions lifted.

If Sony is found to have infringed LG patents, it could be forced to compensate the South Korean manufacturer for each PS3 it has sold around the world, which could cost hundreds of millions of pounds.

A spokesman for Sony said: "Sony was notified at the end of February by customs authorities in the Netherlands that an inspection would be made into imports of [PlayStation 3s]. We believe this is due to a petition made by LG Electronics, alleging that Sony may be infringing LG patents related to Blu-ray technologies.

"However, this is only a preliminary injunction, that has resulted in shipments being temporarily withheld. It does not indicate any acceptance of LG's allegations. We consider these allegations unwarranted, and will take appropriate measures including filing a claim of opposition to courts in the Netherlands. We will not comment on any further details."

Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk

Your Android phone has a built-in kill switch for nasty apps. And Google, apparently, is not afraid to use it.

Over the weekend, the search giant announced that it had remotely wiped “a number” of malicious Android apps from users’ phones, programs that earlier in the week had been identified as malware and pulled from Android’s app store. “We are remotely removing the malicious applications from affected devices. This remote application removal feature is one of many security controls the Android team can use to help protect users from malicious applications,” Google wrote on its mobile blog, linking to an explanation it posted in June of a built-in functionality for deleting apps from users’ phones.

Google also wrote that it’s contacting law enforcement about the issue and updating Android devices with a fix for the exploit used by those apps–pirated copies of legitimate programs with malicious code weaved in–designed to prevent any further compromise of users’ data. The company added that “we are adding a number of measures to help prevent additional malicious applications using similar exploits from being distributed through Android Market and are working with our partners to provide the fix for the underlying security issues.”

Exactly what those “measures” might be, Google isn’t saying. A Google spokesperson I contacted declined to comment beyond the text of the company’s blog post.

But Chris Wysopal, the chief technology officer of security vulnerability analysis firm Veracode, speculates that Google is likely introducing signature-based scanning to the Android Market, a tool for identifying malware and making sure that similar instances of malicious code are blocked from the Market in the future, just as viruses are identified and blocked by signature-based scans on PCs.

“This relies on someone external to Google finding the first malware and reporting it. In this case the trojan apps were pirated so the original developers were tipped off,” Wysopal wrote to me in an email. “This is definitely an improvement, but I expect malware writers to adjust.”

The last time Google deleted applications that were already downloaded to users’ devices was in June, and its targets were two proof of concept apps built by security researcher Jon Oberheide. As I wrote at the time, that use of its kill switch seemed to be a loud warning to malware writers about the company’s ability to remotely destroy their tools. After all, Oberheide’s apps were designed to show the possibility of creating an Android-hosted botnet, not to actually create one.

But as cybercriminals increasingly look to mobile platforms as new targets, their malware is no longer a mere demonstration–and nor is Google’s ability to nuke those apps from orbit.

Source:
http://blogs.forbes.com

Steve Jobs Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs takes the stage during an Apple iPad 2 event in San Francisco. Photograph: Beck Diefenbach/Reuters

It's not hard to read Steve Jobs' surprise appearance at Wednesday's iPad 2 unveiling as a mark of desperation. Is Apple so in need of a boost to its share price that it needed to haul Jobs out of medical leave?

The audience was thrilled that Jobs showed up: "We've been working on this product for a while, and I didn't want to miss it. Thank you for having me," he told the audience. All Things Digital's Kara Swisher said it would be so.

But was his appearance designed to distract us from an underwhelming launch? His introduction seemed to try even harder than usual to build up Apple and to knock its rivals - from ebook and app download numbers to dismissing the competition's attempts at tablets.

What were we left with after that? A faster processor, a dual-core A5 chip, that will mean it can operate twice as fast and render graphics up to nine times faster.

A front-facing camera that will allow Apple to push Facetime, but was an obvious omission from the first iPad and one that Apple, rather annoyingly deliberately held back so it had something to add this time around. A less logical rear-facing camera - who's going to use the iPad to shoot anything?

Those improvements could all have been made to the original iPad, though you can't count a black and white version as an improvement. Lighter, thinner, maybe. Is there really much incentive to buy an iPad 2?

The stats Apple revealed are more impressive, all designed as part of that share-boosting drive: 100m iPhones shipped, 200m iTunes accounts and more than $2bn paid to developers. That means Apple's revenue from apps has been $6.6bn. If the news industry doesn't revolt, and if Apple's rivals don't make too much headway on paid-for apps, Apple will be making a lot more in that direction.

But Steve Jobs' appearance undermined Apple's obligation to cultivate a new public face of Apple, apparently for the short-term benefit of a stock-price boost. Long term, that's succeeded in keeping the succession the main story.

Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk