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NEW YORK — Verizon Wireless would seem to be a big winner after its expected announcement Tuesday that it will start selling the iPhone and break Apple Inc.’s monogamous relationship with AT&T Inc. in the U.S.

But for several reasons, the iPhone’s arrival to Verizon would be poorly timed, and Verizon’s gains won’t be as clear-cut as one might believe.

There’s no doubt a Verizon iPhone would attract millions of buyers, and it would give the country’s largest wireless carrier a chance to catch up with AT&T in attracting high-paying smart phone customers.

Since the iPhone’s debut in 2007, AT&T has been its exclusive distributor in the United States. That means, for the most part, that the iPhone doesn’t work with other carriers, and anyone who wants an iPhone needs to get service through AT&T. Many people held back because they already had service with Verizon or another carrier they liked or were apprehensive about congestion on AT&T’s network, particularly in New York and San Francisco.

Rumors about a version of an iPhone for Verizon have swirled for years, but they have been rising in recent months. The Wall Street Journal has reported that an event Verizon is holding Tuesday is indeed for a Verizon iPhone, to go on sale at the end of the month.

Verizon, Apple and AT&T wouldn’t confirm that.

Full Story:huffingtonpost.com

Craigslist appears to have surrendered in a legal fight over erotic ads posted on its website, shutting down its adult services section Saturday and replacing it with a black bar that simply says “censored.”

The move comes just over a week after a group of state attorneys general said there weren’t enough protections against blocking potentially illegal ads promoting prostitution. It’s not clear if the closure is permanent, and it appears to only affect ads in the United States.

The listings came under new scrutiny after the jailhouse suicide last month of a former medical student who was awaiting trial in the killing of a masseuse he met through Craigslist, a popular site that lets users post classified ads, often for free.

Craigslist’s adult services section carried ads for everything from personal massages to a night’s companionship, which critics say veered into prostitution.

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster said in a May blog posting that the company’s ads were no worse than those published by the alternative newspaper chain Village Voice Media. He cited one explicit ad which included the phrase: “anything goes $90.”

Craigslist has been caught for years in a murky legal fight that centers on how much responsibility the company bears for its ads, said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law and computer science at Harvard University.

Prosecutors can argue Craigslist is an “intermediary” to the crime of prostitution, Zittrain said, but such cases are hard to prove. He said prosecutors must essentially prove that Craigslist knew an ad was a solicitation for prostitution; ads on Craigslist are typically worded more vaguely.

Nonetheless, to avoid a legal showdown, the company has tried to keep “inappropriate activity” off its site by screening ads.

It’s unclear if Craigslist felt the attorneys general had a good argument, or if it simply got tired of spending time on the issue. But saying adult services were “censored” rather than just removing could be seen as a message to prosecutors, Zittrain said.



Full Story:PCmag.com 
Open-source social network Diaspora is set to launch on Sept. 15, the service’s creators announced in Thursday blog post. But can it do battle with Facebook?

“We have been coding. We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15,” they wrote.

Site creators Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy describe Diaspora as a “distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy.”

Those computers are known as “seeds,” which will be owned by the user – hosted by them directly or on a rented server.

“Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your Facebook profile, tweets, anything,” they wrote in an April blog post.

At this point, the team is focusing on “clear, contextual sharing,” they said Thursday. What information is shared with everyone, and what information is only shared with close friends? “We know that’s a hard UI problem and we take it seriously,” they said.

Diaspora initially had plans for a plug-in framework that would let newly invented content integrate easily with every seed. After joining Pivotal Labs in early June, however, Diaspora prioritized and has since pushed back plans for plug-ins and APIs. “Our original goals remain the same, and these features are still in our timeline,” they said.

After the launch, Zhitomirskiy and Sofaer will take leave from New York University to develop and maintain the site as a long-term project.

“We have shifted our development timeline accordingly, and the first release will be the beginning of something great, not a finished summer project,” they said.

Full Story:ABCNEWS.go.com

As August nights get cooler, we begin begrudgingly counting down the remaining summer days. Once Labor Day passes, it’s back to school time for millions.

The best part of going back to school is clearly the shopping. Even though a new notebook can go a long way in preparing you for the new year, the iPhone also has a ton of apps that will help to get you organized and in the right mind-space to focus and learn.

Last year we brought you 10 awesome applications and now we are updating and adding to that list, ensuring you have a smooth transition when returning to those hallowed halls.

From the college-bound to those who are still lucky enough to enjoy recess, here is a list of the best back to school apps.

Full Story:abcnews.go.com

Google Inc. is adding a free e-mail feature that may persuade more people to cut the cords on their landline phones.The service unveiled Wednesday enables U.S. users of Google’s Gmail service to make calls from microphone-equipped computers to telephones virtually anywhere in the world.

All calls in the U.S. and Canada will be free through at least the end of the year. That undercuts the most popular PC-to-phone service, Skype, which charges 1.2 cents to 2.1 cents per minute for U.S. calls. It also threatens to overshadow another free PC-to-phone calling service called MagicTalk that was just introduced by VocalTec Communications Ltd.

Skype, Google and many other services have been offering free computer-to-computer calling for years.

Google hopes to make money on its PC-to-phone service by charging 2 cents or more per minute for international calls. The international rates will vary widely, sometimes even within the same country. Google posted a rate chart at https://www.google.com/voice/b/0/rates.

Full Story:HuffingtonPost.com

NEW YORK — Facebook users carrying their smart phones will soon be able to check in to real-life locations such as restaurants, bars or live concerts.

It’s the first foray by the world’s largest online social network into the frenzy of location-based services. Rising with the popularity of smart phones, such services let users find coupons, earn quirky merit badges or simply share with friends where they are.

The new feature is called Facebook Places. Sharing your whereabouts with friends is its main focus and some have noted that the feature “borrows heavily” from existing services like Foursquare and Gowalla, who are partnering with Facebook on Places.

Check-ins will be available on Facebook’s iPhone application Wednesday with a free update users can download, as well as on the site’s touch site used by many other mobile phones.

Facebook explained the feature in an introductory blog post: “You have the option to share your location by “checking in” to that place and letting friends know where you are. You can easily see if any of your friends have also chosen to check in nearby.”

Places will let users tag other friends in their check-ins, as is currently possible with photos or status updates, and will enable users see others who have also checked in to their location.

Having wrestled with privacy concerns in the past, Facebook has attempted to strike the right balance with Places and has given users a variety of tools to control what location information they share and with whom. As the New York Times reports, “Mr. Sharon said that Places would have a series of privacy controls intended to give users the power to decide with whom they would share check-ins. Users will, for instance, be able to remove themselves after they are tagged. There will also be special privacy controls to protect minors, he added.”

Full Story:Huffingtonpost.com
Despite past statements by federal agencies that images from body scanners were not and could not be saved or recorded, a government agency has admitted to storing approximately 35,000 body scan images, CNET reports.

According to CNET, “U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.”

The resolution and detail of the body scan images varies depending on the technology used in the scanner (i.e. X-ray backscatter vs millimeter wave. See full-body millimeter wave images below, via TSA.gov).

Privacy advocates have denounced the machines for generating images so graphic they are tantamount to “virtual strip-searching,” and, in the UK, minors were recently barred from passing through the controversial full body scanners over child pornography fears.

Full Story: Yahoo.com

Americans now spend more time using social networks and online games than they do on e-mail, according to a Monday report from Nielsen.

In June, U.S. Internet users spent about 22.7 percent of their online time on social networking sites, up from 15.8 percent just one year ago, the report said. About 10.2 percent of their time was spent gaming, up slightly from 9.3 percent last year. This increased focus on Facebook, Twitter, and Farmville resulted in a drop for e-mail. Users spent 8.3 percent of their online time using e-mail, down from 11.5 percent last year.

Despite this drop, e-mail and instant messaging, which took up 4 percent of a user’s online time, is not headed into obscurity, Nielsen said. It is still the third most popular online activity, while IM came in at number five.

“Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the web, 40 percent of U.S. online time is spent on just three activities – social networking, playing games, and e-mailing, leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie,” Nielsen analyst Dave Martin said in a statement.

Coming in at number four were online portals, at 4.4 percent of online time.

The scenario changed a bit when examining Web use on mobile phones.

Full Story: Yahoo.com

For the first time ever, sales of Android handsets have outpaced those of the Apple iPhone.

According to Nielsen (via GigaOm), Google Android phones now account for 27 percent of U.S. smartphone sales among new phone buyers, eclipsing the 23 percent share held by the iPhone.

The numbers cover a rolling six-month period and are reported quarterly. Based on the chart embedded in the linked story, Android popularity has skyrocketed, from a mere 6 percent share in the fourth quarter of 2009 (when it was half of even Windows Mobile’s pathetic market share) to 27 percent today. The iPhone slipped from 34 percent in that quarter to 23 percent.

That said, the top spot remains — as it has been for over a year — occupied by RIM, which holds a 33 percent share of cell phone buys.

As GigaOm notes, the phenomenal rise of Android — up 886 percent worldwide since a year ago — is a rare occurrence in the tech business, since the Android platform is now two years old and reaching a maturity level that should actually indicate a period of slowing growth. The site suggests, however, that compared with competitors like the iPhone and BlackBerry operating systems, Android is still just a baby.