News has rippled through the Internet that Foxconn, the hardware company behind the first iPhone is prepped a 3G model for late May.  Gizmodo reports:

“The China-based Commercial Times has reported that Foxconn, the company behind the first iPhone, is prepping a 3G model for late May. With Apple’s anticipated announcement expected at WWDC in early June, Foxconn is preparing for shipments of three million 3G iPhones during that month. And through the product’s lifespan, the manufacturer anticipates shipping 24-25 million 3G iPhones. So does that mean we finally have a better rumor on our hands? UNCONFIRMED: APPLE PREPPING 4G iPHONE.”

Sony predicts that August will be their black month for the Playstation 3. Rising up out of the red and into the break even point earlier than expect is great news for Sony’s shareholders. Right before the beginning of this year holiday shopping season, which of course will send them sailing into the green, is music to shareholders ears. Grand Theft auto IV(GTA IV) will be released tomorrow(Tuesday) and is dubbed to be the fastest selling video game to date. While cracked versions have hit the underground scene for the past week, everyone will be rushing to the video game stores to pickup this hot new game.

Analysts previously predicted the break-even point for the PS3 for November of this year. Sony (SNE) is currently up 0.44%, so it appears that this news, so far, has not affected their stock price. The Inquirer reports.

Steve Ballmer recently hinted that if there’s enough public outcry they may delay the end-of-life cycle for Windows XP.  Dell is the first PC retailer that confirms they will be offering Windows XP as an option for their machines.

“Dell will take advantage of a licensing option in Vista Business and Vista Ultimate that lets PC makers provide XP under the Vista license, which Microsoft calls a “downgrade” license. (Enterprises with site licenses have these same rights with any version of Vista.) In essence, the user is buying a Vista license that it can apply to XP, and Microsoft can still claim a Vista sale.”

DRM, or Digital Retardated Management as I like to call it, has just brewed a lot of angry customers because of Microsoft.  All music that was purchased from Microsoft’s Music site is now worthless.  Microsoft has announced that since they cannot be bothered to live up to their end of the deal, they will eliminate the DRM licensing servers for music that was purchased.  This move is mainly because they will shift their focus towards the Zune’s DRM technology which is substantially different and more profitable for them.  All the music that was purchased and authorized for download can only be played on that one PC.  As long as that PC doesn’t crash you can play it as long as you want!  Which, if it’s running a Microsoft operating system, should be about 6 months.  DRM has become the new digital virus for the 21st century.  Purposely infected by corporations to help increase profits but at the cost of pissing off customers.  Welcome to the new Web 2.5.

Yahoo released their quarterly earnings report for Q1 of 2008 moments ago.  Apparently they beat analysts expectations by far.  Analysts were expecting Q1 revenue to be around $1.33 billion, $435 million net income or an EPS of $0.09/share.  But Yahoo surpassed these expectations with a Q1 total revenue of $1.8 billion, net income of $542 million, or $0.37 per share.

What does this mean for Yahoo and Microsoft’s bid on the company?  Apparently Microsoft announced this means nothing for their deal.  They said that the clock is ticking and their offer ends this week.  If Yahoo does not take the offer then Microsoft will get more aggressive with a hostile takeover.  Yahoo says that these new quarterly results shows that Microsoft’s offer is too low and they are still severely undervaluing Yahoo.

Other information taken from Tech Crunch:

• “Revenues were up 19% for the quarter compared to Q12007 in the U.S., and 11% internationally.
• Net revenues of $1,352 million were a 14 percent increase compared to $1,183 million for the same period of 2007.
• Operating income for the first quarter of 2008 was $121 million, a 28 percent decrease compared to $169 million for the same period of 2007.
• Yahoo has spent $14 million to date on outside advisors on the Microsoft deal
• They took a $29 million charge for severance arrangements.”

Looks like Apple will be selling iPhone’s in Italy without the burden of being locked into a contract.  This means that when consumers purchase the iPhone, they can use it with any compatible 3G service provider in any country in addition to Italy.  You can bet that US users will find a way to have these units shipped here.

Now why can’t they have this in the US?  Shows how much Corporations run this country.  Where every service that’s offered to consumers requires some sort of year long(at least) contract with an early termination fee.  The Inquirer reports that these particular units are more expensive in Italy.  I guess they had to make up for their loss contract profit somehow.

Fire in the hole!  Literally.  For those gamers out there with Xbox 360’s beware!  The Reg reports that a family’s house in Arkansas has burned down because of the power brick of the Xbox 360.  The fire caused $100,000 worth of damage to the home and according to the video below was not the first fire incident with these units.  Do I smell a class action lawsuit brewing?

Here we are another chapter forward in the Windows XP saga.  XP3 has been released to manufacturing and OEM’s.  Which means Dell, HP, and the rest of the big dogs will get it first.  Followed by trickling to the Microsoft Tech/MSDN subscribers and then the Microsoft Download Center(on or about April 29th).  Finally, home users will be able to get the Service Pack from Microsoft’s Automatic Updates in early June.

Sources: The Reg, Microsoft Forums

Microsoft has signed the letter of intent to acquire Xobni.  Xobni is “Inbox” spelled backwards and this company has changed the way you look at email.  TechCrunch reports:

“Two independent sources tell us that the Microsoft/Xobni deal is moving along and that the two companies signed an acquisition LOI in the last week. I have not yet been able to track down the price, but a previous offer of sub-$20 million was supposedly rejected by Xobni.

Bill Gates has publicly complimented the service, calling it “the next generation of social networking.”

Xobni, which launched at the TechCrunch40 conference last year, offers an outlook plugin for Windows users that significantly improves the desktop email experience (particularly search). They recently hired notable Yahoo’er Jeff Bonforte as CEO.

The timing on this is perfect as the New York Times and others are doing their seasonal focus on the problems with email. Xobni is one of the top startups trying to fix the problem.”

So you’re browsing the web after work one day at home.  You misspell the website you’re trying to access.  We have all done it, even the best writers in the world have typo’s.  But this article over at The Reg says that Internet Service Providers purposely bank off customer’s typo’s.  Those websites that you misspell and open up a blank page with a bunch of advertisements could be your ISP trying to make additional money from you.  Security researcher Dan Kaminsky said at this years ToorCon that these technique’s ISP’s use to make additional revenue could be insecure to the customers.  ToorCon is an annual hacker conference in San Diego where they discuss everything from device hacking, reverse engineering, to cryptographic algorithm’s.  Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Comcast, Verizon and at least 70 other Internet service providers are putting their customers at serious risk in their quest to make money from mistyped web addresses, security researcher Dan Kaminsky says.

Speaking at the ToorCon security conference in Seattle, Kaminsky demonstrated an exploit class he dubbed PiTMA, short for provider-in-the-middle attacks. A variation of man-in-the-middle attacks, it stole authentication cookies and injected arbitrary content into trusted web pages by exploiting weaknesses in an ad server Earthlink used when returning results for non-existent addresses.

Once upon a time, mistyped domain names resulted in a browser returning a simple 404 error that said the address didn’t exist. Then ISPs realized they could make money by returning a failure notice that included banner ads and other content. This ad injection is done through the magic of the domain name system. As a result, browsers get fooled into thinking a request for qww.microsoft.com is a legitimate address that’s controlled by the same network responsible for www.microsoft.com.

“Guys, anything goes wrong on that subdomain [and] it isan element of the parent,” Kaminsky said. “It can access cookies, it can do other things. Normally a subdomain is trusted by the parent. Not this time.”

For the past few years, company’s have been investing heavily outsourcing their departments to India.  The top departments outsourced are usually customer service and IT related call centers.  It looks like this outsourcing business strategy may become a thing of the past, at least for India.  The Inquirer reports that the slow US economy is having a big impact on outsourced company’s in India.  Additionally, the Indian government’s fiscal policies no longer makes India an attractive outsource hotspot like it once did before.  Could this be the end of India call centers?  Or perhaps will we move them to other countries?  Time will tell.

–Update– The case was dropped for obvious reasons.

The greedy wallet mongers at the RIAA are at it again.  Instead of suing a low income working mom with two kids or a college student, this time they fire their law-guns at a homeless man.  At the time he was “served” his summons and complaint, he was living at a homeless shelter on April 9th, 2007.  Since then it was a charade between the lawyers and the court trying to find the guy to sue him.  As I said two posts ago, the RIAA and its practices are WRONG.  Their fascism business strategy needs to be significantly altered or they need to be put out of business.  They are attacking everyone and their grandmother that does not abide by their rules.  It’s not right that they want to charge a lot more for CD’s and only pay artists 9% of the money they generate for them. 

Farecast.com has been acquired by Microsoft for $115 Million. Farecast is an airfare prediction website that uses it’s own algorithm’s to help predict the best time to purchase airline tickets. The company was founded in 2003 by Oren Etzioni, which is also the founder of MetaCrawler and is a professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. According to Wikipedia, the site has collected over 175 billion airfare observations to date.  Microsoft will most likely integrate Farecast’s services into its own barrage of networks and online content.  For example they may utilize Windows Spaces or Windows Live to help advertise the service.

I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit at the opening excerpt of this article over at The Inquirer.  Although I’m not one for bashing Apple users, especially for my recent respect of the company and its products, but I thought it was humorous:
“Wi-Fi positioning accurate to within one or two continents.  THAT APPLE users are pretty much helpless basket cases is a given. But to discover that the pastel-hued gadgets on which they base their designer lifestyles are about as much use as a chocolate teapot is more amusing than a duck shooting Dick Cheney by mistake.”

Although this technology(dubbed “feature”) would be nice if it actually works correctly.  I think there might be a future security concern here.  This feature is supposed to triangulate the position of the iPhone user with WiFi access points within your area(for um “tracking” purposes so you know where you are).  The article complains that this feature currently is pretty useless but IF they did get it working what happens if you could reverse the technology?  What if you could triangulate the users position just by using the same technology but look up their positions from the access points instead?  This means you could find that person as long as they’re within range of your access point.  I’m sure this technology has safeguards against such a practice but as with everything in this industry, NOTHING is secure.

When Viruses, Trojans, Malware, and Spam isn’t enough researchers have found a more brutal way to hack your computer.  For years, hacking software has been the norm to gain access to someone else’s computer or network.  Now, Samuel King from the University of Illinois says hacking the hardware or the chips is the next level.  A snibbit from the article:

“New research has shown that it is in fact possible to alter chips in such a way as to leave computers helpless to back-door attacks, which would be almost impossible to detect.

To prove their point, researchers set up a demo of such an attack yesterday, in San Francisco, at a security conference called the Usenix Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats. The alarming demo showed how a processor running a Linux operating system was left totally vulnerable after a malicious firmware laden chip was given instructions to allow an attacker to log on to the computer without any trouble at all.

Needless to say, this will just hype up the paranoia at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) , who already issued a warning back in 2005 about how offshore integrated circuit manufacturing could give rise to dangerous security breaches. After all, if you let pesky foreigners handle your chips, who knows what they might do to them.”