Facebook used to organize UK riots, clean them up

Scotland Yard has vowed to track down and arrest protesters who posted “really inflammatory, inaccurate” messages on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The platforms are being blamed in part for helping rioters in the UK organize.

On the flipside, the social networks have also been used to help organize clean ups after the disturbances. In Liverpool, 21-year-old bartender Charles Jupiter set up a “Liverpool Clean Up” Facebook page that brought about 100 volunteers onto the streets this morning to sweep up piles of broken glass and debris.

“I thought, ‘Not in my city’,” Jupiter told CBS News. “People were posting, ‘I’m embarrassed to be English, I’m embarrassed to be from London or Liverpool.’ I reposted and said, ‘I’m not. That’s why I’m going out there to help clean up.’”

The volunteers followed the same path taken by the rioters on Monday night who smashed bus stops and set fire to cars. A supermarket even supplied the groups with brushes, shovels, and binbags after hearing about their effort. If violence strikes again tonight, the volunteers said they will go back to doing the same work tomorrow morning.

Source : zdnet

Apple secures injunction against Samsung Galaxy Tab in E.U.

Apple has scored a major victory as a German court has granted a preliminary injunction against the distribution of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 throughout the entire European Union, with the exception of The Netherlands.

FOSS Patents‘ Florian Mueller reports that Apple already has a lawsuit open against Samsung in The Netherlands regarding the 10.1-inch tablet’s design.

Note that this is only a preliminary injunction. While it will take immediate effect in Germany, there is the possibility it could take longer in other countries.

Although Apple’s complaint hasn’t been published publicly yet, here is what has been made public, according to Mueller:

Apple asked the Landgericht (district court) of Düsseldorf, Germany, to order an injunction under which Samsung is threatened with fines of up to EUR 250,000 (US$ 350,000) for each violation or imprisonment of Samsung’s management for up to two years in the event of continued infringement. Those are standard sanctions under German tort law for contempt of a preliminary injunction.

This is a huge blow to Samsung as the international market was the best hope for stronger Galaxy Tab sales. With Europe out of the game, at least for the near future, it’s going to have a lot trouble making any kind of profit off this device — if that ever even happens.

It’s also obvious that Apple is going to take  up this lawsuit in every single country in the world if it has to in order to block the Galaxy Tab 10.1 forever.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company recently garnered another win against Samsung in Australia, where the Android-based tablet is being temporarily blocked from promotion and sale.

However, Samsung Australia released a statement last week stating that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 “will be released in the near future” because Apple filed a complaint against a “variant that Samsung Electronics had no plans of selling in Australia.” (Meaning, the U.S. version.)


Source : zdnet

Hacking becomes latest weapon in London riots

BlackBerry Messenger has been pinpointed as one of the main mediums that rioters in London have been using to communicate and, well, organize themselves, so to speak.

Now Research in Motion, as if they haven’t had a bad enough year already, is the caught in the middle.

RIM’s Inside BlackBerry blog was hacked into after the Canadian mobile phone maker agreed to cooperate and help British police forces. As of 9:30AM PT on Tuesday, the site was still down and just looked like a blank page.

And for once, it’s not Anonymous or LulzSec behind this security breach but rather an unknown group that is now being referred to as “TeaMp0isoN.” The Next Web has the group’s statement in full, but here’s a snippet of the overt threat to RIM:

You Will _NOT_ assist the UK Police because if u do innocent members of the public who were at the wrong place at the wrong time and owned a blackberry will get charged for no reason at all, the Police are looking to arrest as many people as possible to save themselves from embarrassment…. if you do assist the police by giving them chat logs, gps locations, customer information & access to peoples BlackBerryMessengers you will regret it, we have access to your database which includes your employees information; e.g – Addresses, Names, Phone Numbers etc. – now if u assist the police, we _WILL_ make this information public and pass it onto rioters…. do you really want a bunch of angry youths on your employees doorsteps?

For some, it came as a bit of a surprise that BBM is taking on the primary social media role in this turn of events rather than Twitter, which has been seen in other riots and revolutions in the last two years across the Middle East, most notably in Iran and Egypt.

However, as ZDNet’s Zack Whittaker described on Monday, BBM has taken on the role of, and even replaced, standard text messaging for many people in the United Kingdom, so it’s not that surprising after all in this case.

And although we’ve seen a number of attacks on governmental websites from Anonymous and Lulz Security, particularly during the AntiSec campaign that commenced earlier this summer, this occasion is quite different.

The attack is politically motivated, but these hackers chose to go after RIM rather than a London police department website instead. From one perspective, this makes sense as they’re trying to cut off the source of information.

Yet, in a comparative incident, Anonymous targeted a Spanish national police force website after three of its own were arrested for allegedly being involved in the attacks on Sony’s PlayStation Network.

But also, these hackers are directly threatening RIM employees. Anonymous and LulzSec have made it a point to go after governmental organizations and global corporations, which definitely did trickle down and affect innocent people, but they never threatened any of these people with violence.

Thus, someone has taken note of the power that hack attacks, and now turned it into a weapon that we haven’t really seen before.

RIM shouldn’t back down from helping U.K. authorities try to suppress these riots. But the breach of RIM’s website is serving as a warning to both law enforcement officials and the tech companies working with them about the new face of cyber security threats that is growing in popularity — especially amongst younger generations — and it is taking on a much more dangerous tone.

Source : zdnet

Windows Phone 'Tango' to be Microsoft's lower price-point operating system?

Until today, I’ve said nothing on my blog about Tango — the Windows Phone operating system release supposedly slated to arrive after Mango but before “Apollo” (Windows Phone 8). The reason? I couldn’t find any of my trusted contacts who had heard of Tango.

But after an alleged Tango screen shot leaked late last week (which I first saw via WPCentral.com), word of the next Windows Phone OS update is slowly percolating through my network.

Digitimes first mentioned Tango in June 2011, citing an official with OEM Compal who mentioned Mango and its follow-on, Tango. Some were speculating that Mango would be Windows Phone OS 7.1 and Tango, 7.5. However, more recently, we’ve learned that while the Mango OS is version 7.1, the Mango phone handsets are what will be labeled as 7.5. So it’s somewhat murky as to whether Tango actually will be labeled as Windows Phone OS 7.5 or not.

Microsoft isn’t talking about anything post-Mango and, as usual, is none too keen on commenting on codenames. Mango only recently was released to manufacturing. But a couple of my sources are now saying that Tango is real and it is, indeed, the next version of Windows Phone OS.

One of my contacts who asked to remain anonymous said he believed there would be at least one and maybe two Tango releases hitting before the Windows Phone 8 Apollo release. He said Tango was “all about Nokia” and focused on hitting the lower-price point for Windows Phonesthat Microsoft and Nokia execs have been promising. My contact also said the Tango release may be focused largely or even exclusively on the Asian market.

Another of my contacts said that Tango and SeaRay (the codename for Nokia’s expected first Windows Phone) are often mentioned in the same breath. But Tango is an operating system update and not a handset, said the contact who asked for anonymity, said. (SeaRay is expected to be running Mango when it debuts, most likely later this year.)

The Windows Phone team’s plan seemingly is to deliver one major operating system update per year. That’s making me think Tango is likely considered a more minor release, given that Apollo/Windows Phone 8, is (last I heard) a late 2012 deliverable. By the way, Microsoft execs also have said that, at least for now, all Windows Phone OS codenames end in the letter “O” (hence NoDo, Mango, Apollo).

In other Windows Phone news, 21-year Microsoft veteran Charlie Kindel –  who most recently was Windows Phone General Manager in charge of the Developer Experience — is leaving Microsoft to found a Seattle area startup. Kindel’s replacement is Matt Bencke, who has been in that role for a number of months. Kindel said he had been working on special projects related to Windows Phone and the cloud (none of which he can talk about) over the past few months, while figuring out what he wanted to do next.

Back to Tango: Anyone out there have more details (like operating system version number, release date, target market) for Microsoft’s next Windows Phone OS update?

Source : zdnet

Visa uses carrots, sticks to boost mobile payment adoption

Visa is planning to roll out dual mode chips in it infrastructure in an effort to step up mobile payment adoption. Meanwhile, Visa is deploying a mix of carrots and sticks to get merchants on board.

Specifically, Visa is aiming to prepare payment infrastructure for NFC (near field communication) mobile payments. Google has pushed NFC payments and other mobile phone players are aiming to turn your smartphone into a wallet. Visa will support EMV and NFC. EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa, is a global standard for credit and debit payment cards. EMV has been popular abroad, but lags in the U.S. In a blog post, Visa said:

For several years, Visa has been talking with clients and merchants on this subject – and now more than ever before, we’re hearing confirmation that chip is the right direction for the U.S. Over the last year, for example, we’ve seen financial institutions issuing chip cards to international travelers. And some large merchants have already begun installing chip terminals.

Visa will also push dynamic authentication to overcome any security worries and encourage adoption. With dynamic authentication it would be hard to use a card at a point of sale system even if payment data is compromised. Visa will support personal identification numbers (PINs) and signatures—so called static authentication—but expects both to give way to dynamic authentication.

According to Visa the following initiatives will boost dynamic chip authentication adoption:

• Starting Oct. 1, 2012 Visa will expand its technology innovation program to the U.S. Merchants in the program can eliminate the requirement to prove that they are PCI data security compliant as long as 75 percent of Visa transactions come from chip enabled terminals. Given that PCI compliance can be a pain, Visa is betting that merchants will move to support mobile payment systems such as NFC.
• April 1, 2013 is a deadline for processors and sub-processors to support merchant chip transactions. Service providers will have to support additional data that’s needed to verify that each transaction is unique.
• Shift liability for fraud. Visa said it will shift liability starting in Oct. 1, 2015. Today, point of sale fraud is absorbed by card issuers. If a merchant hasn’t adopted contact chip terminals liability for fraud may shift to the merchant’s acquirer. Fuel vendors will have an additional two years before liability shifts.

Those three items will serve as a stick for Visa to push mobile payment and contactless system adoption.