Daily News

TechCrunch is reporting that a Google-branded phone is expected to arrive in early 2010. While no hardware specifics are available, the device will be running the Android OS, and it will be designed entirely by Google. Recent reports also suggest that the phone may be data-only, utilizing VoIP for calls.

They were long planning to have the phone be available by the holidays, but it has now slipped to early 2010. The phone will be produced by a major phone manufacturer but will only have Google branding[...].

You may recall the fiasco over the Sidekick last month. The Microsoft subsidiary Danger, which maintains the data systems that stored Sidekick user data, such as pictures, reported a failure and loss of all customer information. T-Mobile subsequently stopped selling the device. Now the device is back on store shelves at $149.99, or $25 cheaper than its earlier price.

Initially, T-Mobile said that nearly all of the data was irrevocably lost and offered users gift cards and refunds. However, nearly a week later, Microsoft said it had restored nearly all the lost data.

The Cray XT5, which comes in at number one in the 500 top supercomputers in the world, is getting a performance bump. The supercomputer's 37,376 processors are being upgraded from quad-core to six-core AMD Istanbul processors. The $20 million upgrade resulted in performance of 1.759 petaflops, or the equivalent of 1,759 trillion calculations per second.

"The most interesting thing about the Jaguar is that they have actually upgraded an existing supercomputer," says John Fruehe, director of Opteron product marketing for AMD. "And they have managed to double its speed."

A judge in San Francisco ruled that Psystar, the Florida-based company that installs OS X on its custom Mac-clone computers, infringed on Apple's right to exclusively create derivative works of its software. Psystar's summary judgment against Apple, which argued Apple misused its copyright, was denied. The two companies are expected to go to court in January.

In addition, Psystar was found to be in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing Apple's protection barrier that prevents installation of its operating system on third-party hardware.

A researcher has discovered a zero-day flaw in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 that could be exploited to remotely crash a computer. Microsoft is aware of the hole and is currently working on a patch. The recommended quick-fix is to disable TCP ports 139 and 445.

"Microsoft is concerned that this new report of a vulnerability was not responsibly disclosed, potentially putting computer users at risk," the advisory said. "We continue to encourage responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities."

Dell has announced its upcoming Android-based touchscreen phone dubbed the "Mini 3." The phone is set to release later in the month in China and will also be available in Brazil before the end of the year. While the Mini 3 will not be released in the United States, Dell confirmed it has future plans with carries such as AT&T and Verizon.

"Our entry into the smartphone category is a logical extension of Dell's consumer product evolution over the past two years," said Ron Garriques, president of Dell's global consumer group, in a statement. "We are developing smaller and smarter mobile products that enable our customers to take their Internet experience out of the home and do the things they want to do whenever and wherever they want."

Rumor has been circulating the web about a possible release of Google's Chrome OS within the coming week. Chrome OS is an open source operating system built on top of a Linux kernel that focuses on web-driven applications. It is believed that the OS will initially be geared towards netbooks with full desktop and laptop support coming shortly.

Launching the OS as soon as possible makes sense, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. "I would expect the Chrome OS will show up shortly because they need the ecosystem ready by the end of 2010," he told TechNewsWorld.

Yesterday, an employee of Microsoft was quoted as saying that the Windows 7 design team tried to match the graphical beauty of Apple's OS X software in the Redmond, Washington company's latest operating system release. It now appears that one of the design team's members has come in to bat cleanup and dispel any rumors that have surfaced as a result of the quote.

[...] the post, written by Brandon LeBlanc, continued, "Unfortunately, this came from a Microsoft employee who was not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7. I hate to say this about one of our own, but his comments were inaccurate and uninformed."

Screenshots found hidden on Sony's European Playstation website suggest a few changes coming in an upcoming PS3 firmware update. One of those changes includes Facebook access through the console. While nothing has been announced, a PS3 Facebook application makes sense; the Xbox 360 is launching the functionality next week, and it seems as if every smart phone released in 2009 already has a native Facebook application.

Intel has agreed to pay Advanced Micro Devices $1.25 billion to settle several anti-trust lawsuits pending in Delaware and Japan. The lawsuits alleged Intel had paid several companies to limit their use of AMD processors in the companies' products. As a result of the deal, previous disputes of processor patent rights will be resolved by an extended, five-year cross-licensing agreement, and AMD will drop any litigation against Intel.

Intel has already been ordered to pay a €1.06bn fine over its anti-competitive practices this year, when the European Commission found the chipmaker had illegally tried to dissuade PC manufacturers and retailers from using AMD's rival products.

The guys over at [H]ard|OCP got a sneak preview of AMD's new Eyefinity technology and their upcoming GPU lineup. While there's not a whole lot of information about GPU power, the Eyefinity tech demoed seems like it has potential, especially in the high-end market. You will be able to seamlessly play your computer games across a total of six monitors per graphics card. I'm not sure how much I'm into the whole multi-monitor gaming setup, but apparently the sneak-peak was quite impressive.

It has been a good long while since I walked into a GPU demo that truly gave me a "Wow!" feeling. In fact the experience even surpassed "Wow!" It was more like, "Holy sheepdip Batman, that kicks ass!" I was simply blown away by the Eyefinity experience.

Motorola introduced its first Android smartphone at the Mobilize 09 conference in San Francisco on Thursday. The device is jam-packed with features, as would be expected with an Android device, and it differentiates itself through its MotoBlur interface. MotoBlur will stream content directly from social network feeds so you can access all of your social news easily without having to open up multiple applications.

The phone will run Android 1.5 Cupcake and offer access to Google's various services, including Google Maps with Street View, Google Voice Search, Picasa, and GTalk. The smartphone supports a number e-mail clients, such as Yahoo, Windows Live, and other POP3 and IMAP services, and syncs with Microsoft Exchange, including calendar.

At Apple's rock event yesterday, Steve Jobs unveiled the new iPod Nano that now comes with a video camera. The folks over at iFixit have already taken apart this very compact iPod, and they offer some cool photos of the device's components.

Removing the internals... It's a tight squeeze, but we got them out. Getting this iPod open wasn't easy. We don't recommend trying this at home.

The US Government plans to start testing the use of OpenID to let users interact with government agencies through a single login account. The program will be supported by ten organizations that will act as digital identity providers. The goal of the program is to make government websites more interactive. Users will be able to securely access a whole slew of government resources, register for programs, and even be able to customize library searches.

Who would have predicted say, 5 years ago, that you would some day be able to use commercial identities on government websites? Evidently, this raises questions about privacy and security but if these initiatives can garner enough public support, government validation of open identity frameworks could be a boon for the ecosystem of the open, distributed web.

A new zero-day flaw discovered in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 does not affect Windows 7 as previously reported. While the vulnerability is present in Windows 7's Release Candidate, the issue has been fixed for the final version of the software. Microsoft has yet to report when it will release a patch for Vista and Server 2008.

The flaw could allow an attacker to gain control of a system, although Microsoft said that "most attempts to exploit this vulnerability will cause an affected system to stop responding and restart."