Technology & Internet

Apple iPhone OS 4.0 Jailbroken; Next iPhone Photos Appear

Apple iPhone news is heating up as an early jailbreak for iPhone OS 4.0is released

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Apple Details iPad’s Battery Replacement Plan

When one thinks of Apple, a single word often comes to mind: battery.

It’s no secret that the Cupertino-based developer has inched the totality of its product lines toward non-replaceable batteries. So what happens, then, when your iPhone or Macbook Pro battery loses its ability to hold much of a charge? What about the iPad? Will you have to run back to your local Apple store to pick up a replacement?

Apple just announced the terms of the deal for the iPad and, all jokes aside, it’s just like the iPhone’s battery replacement service… but bigger!

Apple’s warranties provide for varying measures of support depending on the product lines–iPhone owners get a free battery replacement if their devices’ capacities drop below 50 percent within the first year of ownership–the company offers its own battery replacement service for affected products.

Provided your iPad hasn’t gone through some catastrophic amount of damage–”as result of an accident, liquid contact, disassembly, unauthorized service or unauthorized modifications,” suggests Apple–then you’ll be eligible to take advantage of the company’s battery replacement service.

But what does that entail? First, you’ll have to shell out $99 (plus $6.95 for shipping and whatever your local tax happens to be) for the opportunity for a brand-new device. And I phrase that as I do for a very specific reason.

When you send your iPad off to Apple, you aren’t just getting your same ol’ iPad back in the mail after one week or thereabouts. Opting for the company’s battery replacement service will basically put you on the list for a refurbished iPad–although the exterior case of the device will be brand-new, the underlying product will be one that’s gone through Apple’s fix-it procedures in some capacity. Naturally, any data you’ve kept on your old iPad device will go the way of the dinosaur: You’ll want to back up all your settings and information prior to asking Apple for a new battery.

This is the exact same treatment that iPhone users receive, minus $20 to the overall cost of the replacement. It’s interesting to note that the replacement fee isn’t tiered at all, meaning that even the lowest of devices–the $499, 16GB iPad–will cost the same amount to replace with a refurbished product as the $829 64GB device. That can be a confusing issue for consumers, but you have to keep Apple’s battery replacement service in perspective.

When Apple receives a device for battery replacement, it essentially sticks the product in a “to be fixed” bin. In order to guarantee a rapid turnaround time for the iPad you’ve sent in, it’s easier to grab an identical item that’s been previously fixed off the shelf and send it your way. Once your device is fixed, it’ll go in the waiting line for someone else suffering from a near-dead battery. You’re not paying Apple for a refurbished unit per se; you’re paying for the entire process.

That’s not quite the case with battery replacement services for the replacement-unfriendly MacBook Pro. Given that the laptop system could be a person’s entire–and only–computing setup, Apple suggests that the data on the device could be preserved during the course of a normal battery service appointment. As well, one can take a MacBook Pro to any Apple retail store for same-day repair–not so with Apple’s portable devices.

Privacy commissioner probing Google Buzz

Concerns around Google’s recently unveiled Buzz feature are deepening with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada looking into the social-networking tool.

Valerie Lawton, a spokesperson for the office, said on Tuesday that Buzz is being investigated to see whether it violates Canadian privacy laws.

“We understand the public concern about privacy issues related to Google Buzz,” she said. “Our office is looking at the issue.”

Lawton added that the office may comment further on Wednesday.

Google has ignited a hailstorm of criticism with Buzz, which adds real-time communication and media-sharing features found on popular social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to its Gmail service.

Buzz users can share status updates, news stories, videos and photos, and they can link in feeds from sites such as Twitter and Picasa.

The company unveiled Buzz last week as a feature inside Gmail. Once launched, Buzz automatically searched the user’s most emailed contacts and added them as followers, thereby inadvertently exposing potentially sensitive communications.

One user blogged about how Buzz automatically added her abusive ex-boyfriend as a follower and exposed her communications with a current partner to him. Other bloggers commented that repressive governments in countries such as China or Iran could use Buzz to expose dissidents.

In the United States, the Electronic Privacy Information Center said it plans to lodge a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission because Buzz is forcing Gmail users into a social networking service they don’t necessarily want.

Over the weekend, Google promised to implement changes, including a disabling of the auto-follow function in favour of suggested followers, to give users more control over their privacy. Buzz product manager Todd Jackson admitted the new service hadn’t been properly tested and apologized for the snafu.

“We’ve been testing Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course, getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn’t quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild,” he told BBC News.

Google Canada spokesperson Wendy Rozeluk said the company has been talking with federal and provincial privacy officials, but would not comment on what was discussed.

The company is moving to implement changes as quickly as possible, with some of them taking effect this week, she added.

“We’ll be making some significant product improvements over the next few days based on user feedback,” she said. “The user always comes first.”

Social networking websites have kept Canada’s Privacy Commissioner busy recently.

Last summer, the commissioner’s office forced Facebook to make sweeping changes to its policies after finding that the site violated Canadians’ privacy rights. Last month, assistant privacy commissioner Elizabeth Denham said she was again looking into Facebook after receiving complaints that the website has not followed through on its promises.

Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart also last week announced upcoming consultations relating to privacy and cloud computing, another service of which Google is a big proponent. Stoddart said that by storing an increasing number of documents and files on servers hosted by third parties, Canadians are potentially making themselves vulnerable to privacy violations.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/02/16/google-buzz-privacy.html#ixzz0fl3ODn2w

Elections an acid test

KARACHI: President Asif Ali Zardari has said that the upcoming local bodies elections will prove that the people of Pakistan are with the ruling party – Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).

Addressing a press conference on Saturday, the president expressed that the government is determined to foil any conspiracy to destabilise Pakistan.

He said that the terrorists in the country are out there to weaken the national economy.

Talking about some of the development projects initiated across the country, Zardari said that dams are being built in all the four provinces to meet the growing energy demand of the country.

He further assured that the people of Balochistan will be compensated for the land they gave up for the building of dams in their province.

During another address in Lahore, the Federal Minister for Information Fauzia Wahab reaffirmed that the construction of 12 dams is underway in different parts of the country, adding that the government is also adopting alternative energy sources such as solar and wind. –DawnNews

Early flood warning system

COPENHAGEN: The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) tried to bring together the various Himalayan countries (India, China, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh) on one platform at the recently concluded COP 15, although it has not been easy given their history of conflicts instead of cooperation.
Pakistan is a member country and its villages in Chitral and the Northern Areas face increasing threats from climate change in the years to come.

They are particularly vulnerable to glacier outburst flooding and river/stream flooding as snow and ice melt faster than before.

ICIMOD’s attempts to draw attention to this remote region have resulted in some positive actions and on Tuesday ICIMOD and the government of Finland announced that they had signed an agreement (dated 15th December) on a collaborative project to establish a regional flood information system in the Hindukush-Himalayan region.

Finland is providing a maximum of 2 million euros over three years (2009-2012) for the project which will be implemented by ICIMOD in close collaboration with the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the six regional partner countries.

The long-term goal is to minimise the loss of lives and livelihoods by providing timely warning of floods and thus reduce flood vulnerability in the region, which includes the Indus river basin.

The project aims to develop a regional framework for cooperation on sharing flood data and information amongst participating countries. It will also establish a flood observation network in selected river basins.

The technical capacity of partner organisations on flood forecasting and communication aspects will be enhanced, and resources provided to procure the necessary equipment for rainfall and flow measurements at selected sites.
The incidence and intensity of water-related hazards and disasters are expected to increase in the Himalayan region as a result of climate change leading to more frequent and damaging cycles of floods and drought. ICIMOD is also planning to conduct a “climate impact assessment” in the Himalayan region.
According to Andreas Schild, the director general of ICIMOD, the Himalayas now face the same challenge, so everyone has to cooperate in the face of climate change.

“We tried to create awareness about the relevance of these mountain systems in the global community. They are early warning systems of climate change and affect the water availability for the people living downstream.”
Millions of people depend on the water of the Himalayas and we need to understand the changes in ice, snow and precipitation in the years to come. He called upon the Himalayan countries to join forces to study the region.

Google to let publishers limit free website access

WASHINGTON Dec, 06 2009: Google, under fire from Rupert Murdoch and some other newspaper owners, said Tuesday it will let publishers set a limit on the number of articles people can read for free through its search engine, AFP reported.

Google?s announcement came as the News Corp. chairman, who has threatened to block the Internet giant from indexing his newspapers, and other US media heavyweights gathered here to discuss journalism in the Internet age.

Murdoch, speaking at the two-day meeting hosted by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), said newspapers ?need to do a better job of persuading consumers that high quality reliable news and information does not come free.?

Good journalism is an expensive commodity,? said the 78-year-old Murdoch, who repeated his intention to begin charging readers of News Corp. newspapers on the Web.

Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, accused Murdoch and other newspaper publishers meanwhile of being in ?digital denial? and said they needed to ?stop whining.?

Murdoch has blasted Google and other news aggregators for ?stealing? stories without sharing advertising revenue and has reportedly been holding talks with Microsoft about making News Corp.?s content accessible exclusively through the software giant?s new search engine, Bing.

Acknowledging that ?creating high-quality content is not easy and, in many cases, expensive? Google said in a blog post it was changing its ?First Click Free? program.

First Click Free directs readers from Google or Google News to a story on a newspaper?s website but prevents them from having unrestricted access.

Google noted, however, that some readers were ?abusing? the program by returning to Google or Google News and clicking through to other stories.

?Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free,? Google senior business product manager Josh Cohen said. ?Now, we?ve updated the program so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing.?

Without naming any companies, Murdoch hit out at news aggregators saying they are ?feeding off the hard-earned efforts and investments of others.?

?To be impolite it?s theft,? he said.

The News Corp. chief also said ?the old business model based on advertising only is dead.?

In the future, good journalism will depend on the ability of a news organization to attract readers by providing news and information they?re willing to pay for,? Murdoch said. ?In the new business model we will be charging consumers for the news we provide on our Internet sites.?

Noting that the Wall Street Journal is already charging online, he said: ?We intend to expand this pay model to all our newspapers in the News Corp. stable: the Times of London, The Australian, the rest.?

Some critics say people won?t pay,? Murdoch said. ?I believe they will.? He also warned against seeking government help for the newspaper industry, which is battling declining print advertising revenue, falling circulation and free news on the Web.

?The prospect of the US government becoming directly involved in commercial journalism ought to be chilling to anyone who cares about free speech,? Murdoch said.

Huffington rejected Murdoch?s criticism of news aggregators saying they actually drive traffic to newspaper websites.

?In most industries, if your customers were leaving in droves, you would try to figure out what to do to get them back,? she said. ?Not in the media. They?d rather accuse aggregators of stealing their content.?

?It?s time for traditional media companies to stop whining,? she said.

Also addressing the FTC event was Steven Brill, a co-founder of Journalism Online, a company which is seeking to help news organizations make money on the Web.

Brill said market research suggests that some news sites may be able to get 10 per cent or more of their readers to pay online for content of ?distinctive value.?

Mobile phones not linked to brain

Brain and Mobile

WASHINGTON Dec, 06 2009: A very large, 30-year study of just about everyone in Scandinavia shows no link between cellphone use and brain tumors, researchers reported on Thursday.

Even though mobile telephone use soared in the 1990s and afterward, brain tumors did not become any more common during this time, the researchers reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Some activist groups and a few researchers have raised concerns about a link between cellphones and several kinds of cancer, including brain tumors, although years of research have failed to establish a connection.

?We did not detect any clear change in the long-term time trends in the incidence of brain tumors from 1998 to 2003 in any subgroup,? Isabelle Deltour of the Danish Cancer Society and colleagues wrote.

Deltour?s team analyzed annual incidence rates of two types of brain tumor ? glioma and meningioma ? among adults aged 20 to 79 from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden from 1974 to 2003. These countries all have good cancer registries that keep a tally of known cancer cases.

This represented virtually the entire adult population of 16 million people, they said.

Over the 30 years, nearly 60,000 patients were diagnosed with brain tumors.

?In Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, the use of mobile phones increased sharply in the mid-1990s; thus, time trends in brain tumor incidence after 1998 may provide information about possible tumor risks associated with mobile phone use,? the researchers wrote.

They did see a small, steady increase in brain tumors, but it started in 1974, long before cellphones existed.

No significant pattern

?From 1974 to 2003, the incidence rate of glioma increased by 0.5 per cent per year among men and by 0.2 per cent per year among women,? they wrote.

Incidence of meningioma tumors rose by 0.8 per cent a year among men, and rose by 3.8 per cent a year among women starting in the mid-1990s. But this was mostly among women over the age of 60, who were already among those most likely to have brain tumors, they noted.

In addition, it became easier to diagnose these tumors because of better types of brain scans.

Overall, there was no significant pattern, they said.

?No change in incidence trends were observed from 1998 to 2003,? they added. That would have been when tumors would start showing up, assuming it took five to 10 years for one to develop, they said.

It is possible, Deltour?s team wrote, that it takes longer than 10 years for tumors caused by mobile phones to turn up, that the tumors are too rare in this group to show a useful trend, or that there are trends but in subgroups too small to be measured in the study.

It is just as possible that cellphones do not cause brain tumors, they added.

Most scientific studies show no association between cellphone use and brain tumors and researchers trying to find a connection have failed to find any biological explanation for how a mobile phone might cause cancer.

?Because of the high prevalence of mobile phone exposure in this population and worldwide, longer follow-up of time trends in brain tumor incidence rates are warranted,? Deltour?s team advised. Dawn.com

Melting sea ice dilutes water

HONG KONG Nov, 20 2009: Melting of the Arctic sea ice due to global warming is diluting surface waters and this is endangering some species of shellfish which need minerals in the water to form their shells and skeletons, scientists have found.

In a paper published in Science, they warned that this has serious implications for ecosystems in the Arctic.

?Organisms that are likely to be affected are from the family of pteropods, also mussels and clams on the sea floor,? said Fiona McLaughlin, research scientist at Canada?s Institute of Ocean Sciences?s department of fisheries and oceans.

Pteropods are minute swimming sea snails.

?It puts the food chain at risk. These organisms are a food source for fish that are a food source for seals and bears. The food chain in the Arctic is quite a short one, so it?s quite vulnerable,? she told Reuters by telephone.

Meltwater from sea ice pours into the Canada Basin and researchers in Canada have been monitoring the quality of water in the basin, the largest freshwater reservoir in the world, since the late 1980s.

McLaughlin said there was now sufficient evidence to show a fall in the concentration of aragonite, a mineral or calcium carbonate that is needed in shell formation.

?Sea ice is so pure it has very few of these (carbonate) ions. It means that when we are melting this ice, which by its nature more acidic, we are making surface waters more acidic,? said McLaughlin.

?The shells can?t maintain themselves, they are now susceptible to dissolution … Instead of being a source of carbonate for these organisms to use, the surface waters are now corrosive to them,? she added. ?Reuters

Swine flu in India

NEW DELHI Nov, 10 2009: More than 500 people have died from swine flu in India since the first fatality was reported in August, the health ministry said Monday.

The western state of Maharashtra has seen the largest number, with 207 deaths from the influenza A (H1N1) virus, the ministry said in a statement.

Besides the 502 deaths, more than 14,000 people have tested positive for swine flu across India since it was first detected here in May, it added.

More than 5,700 people have died worldwide since the virus was first discovered in April, with most of the deaths in the Americas region, according to the World Health Organization.

NASA counts down for Mars rocket test

WASHINGTON Oct, 27 2009: The US space agency began the countdown Tuesday for the test launch of a rocket designed to replace the aging space shuttle fleet and one day take astronauts to the Moon and Mars.

Barring bad weather, a four-hour window will begin at 8:00 am for the launch of the Ares I-X rocket from Florida?s Kennedy Space Center, a key test for the future of US space exploration amid deep uncertainty about the program.

After a ?call to stations? to begin the countdown at 1:00, the US space agency said some 30 team members began work at Kennedy?s Launch Control Center.

But while NASA scientists said they had ?no issues? with the 327-foot prototype, the world?s largest at present, the weather could thwart the launch.

The forecast for Tuesday shows only a 40 per cent chance of favorable weather. NASA needs just 15 minutes of good weather to launch.

If weather concerns cloud the test launch, the next window will be on Wednesday, when the forecast is 60 per cent favorable. The flight will be delayed until next month if bad weather persists.

The flight, NASA said, will allow the agency to ?test and prove hardware, models, facilities and ground operations associated with the Ares I launch vehicle,? which is seen as a first step in US human space flight after the shuttle is retired.

NASA will gather data collected by more than 700 sensors placed throughout the rocket during the ascent of the integrated stack.

Only the first stage of Ares I-X ? a modified solid-fuel motor from the shuttle program ? will be tested, while the upper stage and capsule are mock ups.

Data obtained during the two-and-a-half-minute flight will help the?US?space agency determine whether the prototype is safe and stable in flight before the new generation of launch vehicles is used to take astronauts into orbit.

A team of experts has projected that will not happen before 2015, leaving a five-year gap after the shuttle is retired in 2010.

The test launch comes as the White House studies a report by a high-level commission set up by President Barack Obama to review plans for post-shuttle human space flight established by his predecessor, George W. Bush.

The panel chaired by Norman Augustine, a former executive at aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, concluded that the?US?human space flight program ?appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory? and was seeking to achieve goals not matched by resources.

The Ares rocket has suffered major development problems, and its hefty price tag has fueled criticism of NASA, an agency notorious for its cost overruns.

The initial budget for the Constellation program, which includes Ares rockets, was set at 28 billion dollars, but has swollen to at least 44 billion.

Augustine Commission member Ed Crawley said last week that Ares I was ?not the right ship? for post-shuttle space flight.

?The question is not can we build Ares I, but should we build Ares I,?Crawley?said.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration?s yearly budget is about 18 billion dollars, 10 billion of which are plowed into the human space flight program, chiefly in developing the successor of the space shuttle: the Ares one rocket and the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle.

The Augustine Commission said an additional three billion dollars a year are needed for NASA to meet Constellation program goals or take human space flight the next step beyond the existing International Space Station (ISS).

The commission?s review of the Constellation program proposed several alternatives, including sidestepping the rocket and going straight to the Ares V family of launch vehicles, which would take astronauts back to the Moon and eventually on to Mars.