Syber News

You’ll recall that after Apple’s iPhone 4 press conference, in which they showed that other phones exhibit the same signal attenuation issues as the iPhone 4 (except that instead of a finger touch, it took a hard grip), Apple posted videos of the other phones on its site. Those videos have disappeared, now, at least from the U.S. site.

As first noted by TechCrunch, if you go to Apple’s U.S. website and look at the page set up for “Antennagate,” you’ll see the signal attenuation videos of rivals’ phones are gone. The same is true of Apple’s Asian site. However, if you go to the Canadian site, at least at the time of this writing, the videos are still there.

If the videos were gone from all the sites, one might assume it was because of some pressure exerted by other manufacturers. Perhaps that legal pressure only works in the U.S. and Asia. Or perhaps the Canadian webmaster is just a little slow.

At any rate, the videos can still be found on Apple’s YouTube channel. Even there, however, they are no longer featured. You have to dig for them.

http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2010/07/apple-removes-rivals-signal-attenuation.html

Wikileaks has posted a mysterious new file on their Afghan War Diary page. The file is titled “Insurance,” and is 1.4GB in size, larger than any of the other files on that page. It is also encrypted.

The new file was posted days after the massive leak of information on the war in Afghanistan, which first surfaced last Sunday.

CrytoMe, a separate document leaking site, theorizes that the new file is just what the name implies: insurance in case of “an attack expected to come from DoD and Justice or parties unknown.”

U.S. authorities have done much saber-rattling in the last few days, implying, or in some cases overtly threatening legal action against Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange. On Thursday, both U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen strongly condemned WikiLeaks and its posting of the Afghan War documents at a Pentagon press briefing.

Mullen’s words were particularly direct and strong, as he said:

“Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”

http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2010/07/mysterious-encrypted-insurance-file.html

It was reported earlier this week that Apple’s begun actively investigating the performance issues that some many are seeing on the iPhone 3G with iOS 4. Sluggishness, battery drain, and more issues have been reported. Still, it appears at least a band-aid for the sluggishness issues may have been found.

Neowin.net is reporting that disabling Spotlight Search on the iPhone 3G remedies the sluggishness issues. It should be noted that the iPhone 3G’s CPU is significantly slower than that on the iPhone 3GS, much less the iPhone 4. It appears that despite the fact that the iPhone 3G version of iOS 4 does not contain certain features of the new OS (like multitasking) it may still be pushing the two-year-old device to its limits.

To disable Spotlight Search, the suggestion is to go to “Settings -> General -> Home Button -> Spotlight Search” and to deselect every option. This will halt background indexing on the iPhone 3G.

However, reports are already emerging that the “fix” only seems to work for a day or so. Hopefully Apple will come up with a proper solution, soon.

http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2010/07/workaround-for-iphone-3g-ios-4.html

Samsung confirmed on Friday what has been suspected: the Galaxy Tab tablet PC that it earlier said would ship during Q3 2010 will be Android-powered.

A Samsung executive announced in June that the company would begin selling a tablet named the Galaxy Tab in Q3. However, the executive did not announce that OS would be on the tablet. Based on the names of Samsung’s current Galaxy S smartphones, it was an obvious guess that the device would run Android, but it was still a guess.

On Friday, however, Samsung confirmed to Reuters that the Galaxy Tab would run Android, althogh it is unclear if that would be Android 2.1 or 2.2. The device, shown above via a leaked image, will have a 7″ screen, forward and rear-facing cameras, GPS, wi-fi, AMOLED screen, and TouchWiz UI. The all-important price is still not known.

http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2010/07/samsungs-galaxy-tab-to-be-android.html