Spanish computer maker NT-K had its Android tablets impounded, at Apple's request, but has now been vindicated by a local court and is seeking damages from Cupertino for lost earnings and reputation.

Apple reckoned the A91 tablet, made by Nuevas Tecnologías y Energías Catalá - you must have heard of them - is a rip-off of the iPad design, just like the Samsung Tab, allegedly.

Since last November NT-K has had shipments of its fondleslab impounded on arrival from China. But in a triumphant blog posting the company has declared victory, with local media reporting that the Valencia court has dismissed Apple's claims - and lifted the ban.

Patent-watcher Florian Mueller opines that Apple has really screwed up this time.

NT-K are portraying the battle as a dominant, and foreign, company using its legal muscle to stop local competitors entering the market. It has been a year since the company's tablets were impounded following Apple's accusations, with Cupertino accusing the... Read more »

It started as a somewhat stupid, if entertaining, game (seriously, launching cartoon birds at thieving green pigs?). But soon Angry Birds became an incredibly successful stupid, if entertaining, game.

How successful? According to Finnish developer Rovio Mobile, Angry Birds has just surpassed the 500,000 download mark, making it one of the most successful games in the history of, um, gaming.

And that’s all in less than two years. Angry Birds first surfaced in December 2009 on Apple’s iOS. It proved such a runaway hit (with more than 12 million sales from Apple’s App Store) that Rovio rolled out versions for other platforms, including Google’s Android OS, Symbian, Windows, Mac OS X and PlayStation.

Not only that, the Angry Birds franchise has flown far beyond gaming platforms. Rovio says it has shipped more than 10 million Angry Birds toys worldwide and published numerous Angry Birds books, including, believe it or not, this cookbook.

Rovio also is set to open the firs... Read more »

VMware is no longer a member of the Java Community Process SE/EE Executive Committee, but Twitter has joined, according to election results finalized this week.

Azul Systems, maker of the Zing Java virtual machine, also won an open seat on the JCP board, which oversees and fosters the development of the open-source programming language. Ericsson, SAP and Intel were re-elected to ratified seats.

In addition, IBM, Nokia and SK Telecom gained re-election to ratified seats on the Java ME committee, while ARM Limited and Werner Keil won open seats.

VMware remains significantly invested in Java through its SpringSource division, which sells a range of products for Java application development and deployment.

Some 23 percent of eligible members cast votes in the election, according to a post on Oracle's official Aquarium blog this week. "That's much more than the 11% seen for the 2011 EC Special Election but probably less than what one could hope for," the post reads.

Facebook's fake account detection mechanisms can be defeated 80 percent of the time with the help of automated tools, researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) have found after an eight-week test.

The research team, composed of Yazan Boshmaf, Ildar Muslukhov, Konstantin Beznosov, and Matei Ripeanu, created a network of 102 bots designed to mimic humans on social networks, and released them on Facebook with the intent of befriending as many users as possible and collecting private information.

"Creating a user account on an OSN [online social network] involves three tasks: providing an active email address, creating a user profile, and sometimes solving a CAPTCHA. [...] We argue that an adversary can fully automate the account creation process," the researchers wrote in a research paper which they plan to present at the 27th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference next month.

This is not a new type of attack: malware threats like Koobface have long used automatically ... Read more »

Black Friday is coming more than three weeks early to Amazon this year.

The world's most ginormous online retailer got a head start today on hijacking our national - and my family's personal - heritage. I'm a direct descendant of those poor souls who 400 years ago stepped off the Mayflower, which was definitely not smelling like flowers anymore after a long trans-Atlantic journey, and said, "This has got to be better than England - we'll take it."

So I guess it's in the same spirit that Amazon today offers a bamboo cutting board at 40 percent off - in the hopes that an exhausted and desperate population will say, "That's gotta be better than what we'd normally pay at Crate and Barrel in early November - we'll take it."

But in this rough economy, do we really need an extra 23 days of bargains? Judging by how quickly Amazon sold out of its first "early Black Friday deal" today - this Bluetooth speaker set at half off was gone in a few hours - it looks like the answer isn't so much a "yes" as a... Read more »

Some evidence suggests that thieves are targeting the handset more than ever.

The good news is that, thanks to technology from Apple, as well as third-party security apps, authorities have a better chance of catching the bad guys and retrieving the phones. Not only can the device's GPS system help hunt down a handset, but apps such as iGotYa will snap photos of whoever is in possession of the phone.

The bad news is that sometimes, the cops grab innocent people.

Last week, police in Petaluma, Calif., kicked in the door of Moriah Stafford, and arrested her and her 44-year-old son, according to a story in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. The pair were initially charged with possession of stolen property, after police found Stafford with another woman's iPhone. Police had used the phone's built-in GPS system to track the phone within three feet, according to the newspaper.

The charges were dropped when Stafford explained that she found the woman's iPhone in a department st... Read more »

Start-up Calxeda is making an end run around the limitations of power in data centers by using chips normally used for mobile phones.

The company today is launching its EnergyCore "server on a chip" around the ARM processor, which yields a server that runs at 5 watts or 1.5 watts when idle. Hewlett-Packard plans to build a line of energy-efficient servers around EnergyCore.

The EnergyCore processing unit is well suited for "big data" applications that crunch large amounts of data in parallel, such as analytics, media streaming, or in-memory databases, according to the company. Since it's a 32-bit processor, it's still not suited for complex, high-performance computing tasks better served with 64-bit processors.

Three-year-old Calxeda, which was founded by former Intel and Marvell engineer Barry Evans, set out to redefine the server by starting from scratch, company executives told the Austin Statesman. The company has raised $48 million from venture capital companies and ARM Holdings, which ... Read more »

Cyber attacks traced to China targeted at least 48 chemical and military-related companies in an effort to steal technical secrets, a U.S. computer security company said Tuesday, adding to complaints about pervasive Internet crime linked to this country.

The targets included 29 chemical companies and 19 others that make advanced materials used by the military, California-based Symantec Corp. said in a report. It said the group included multiple Fortune 100 companies but did not identify them or say where they were located.

"The purpose of the attacks appears to be industrial espionage, collecting intellectual property for competitive advantage," said the report.

Security experts say China is a center for Internet crime. Attacks against governments, companies and human rights groups have been traced to this country, though finding the precise source is nearly impossible. China's military is a leader in cyberwarfare research but the government has rejected allegations of cyberspying and says i... Read more »

Britain and the United States rejected calls from China and Russia for greater Internet controls on Tuesday at the opening of a major cyberspace conference, but Western statesfaced accusations of double standards.

Ministers, tech executives and Internet activists are meeting over two days in London to discuss how to tackle security threats and crime on the Internet without stifling economic opportunities or freedom of speech.

While Western states worry about intellectual property theft and hacking, authoritarian governments are alarmed at the role the Internet and social media played in the protests that swept the Arab world this year.

"Too many states around the world are seeking to go beyond legitimate interference or disagree with us about what constitutes 'legitimate' behavior," Foreign Secretary William Hague told the meeting.

"We saw in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya that cutting off the Internet, blocking Facebook, jamming Al Jazeera, intimidating journalists and im... Read more »

The main phone network in the West Bank and Gaza has suffered a sustained attack by computer hackers, the Palestinian Authority (PA) says.

 

It says most of the Palestinian territory has lost internet service.

 

PA spokesman Ghassan Ghattib said the attacks started in the morning and came from multiple sources around the world.

 

He said he did not know if the hacking was linked to the Palestinian leadership's successful bid to get membership of UNESCO on Monday.

 

The move by the UN's cultural and scientific organisation was strongly criticised by Israel and the United States.

 

The US immediately announced it was cutting off all of its funding to UN body.

 

Prolonged lack of access to the internet would prove costly to many Palestinian businesses.

 

The PA says the crash has been caused by computer hackers sabotaging the Paltel telephone network. Engineers are working to resolve the problem.... Read more »