superglaze writes to tell us that VMware has announced a large effort behind their Mobile Virtualization Platform, promising the possibility of multiple operating systems on mobile devices. "The company described MVP as a 'thin layer of software' that will be embedded in handsets and 'be optimized to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones.' Asked whether MVP would offer something different from the abstraction already provided by mobile Java, VMware's European product director Fredrik Sjostedt told ZDNet UK that MVP would require less recoding. 'If you want to have an application run on a Java-specific appliance, you need to code it for Java,' Sjostedt said. 'What we're introducing with MVP is an [embedded] abstraction layer below that, between the physical hardware and the software layer.'"

An anonymous reader writes "As reported at TechCrunch, 'The iPhone is twice as reliable as the BlackBerry after one year of ownership, a new study by SquareTrade finds. SquareTrade, which sells extra warranties for cell phones and other devices, looked at the failure rates of 15,000 phones covered under its plans. The malfunction rate for iPhones after one year is 5.6 percent, compared to 11.2 percent for the BlackBerry and 16.2 percent for the Treo.' The full report (pdf) can be found at the SquareTrade site."

With the disclaimer "I'm both Irish and work for the EU Commission," reader VShael writes "The head of the Irish police force has requested that Irish cell phone providers (Vodafone, 02, Meteor, 3) retain detailed information on the web pages that people view over their handheld devices. This information would be held over for 'possible future criminal investigations', but would be gathered without a warrant, probable cause, or without the citizen being suspected of a crime. This request goes way beyond the European Union's data retention directive, which never included retention of web-based email. Representatives of Vodafone, O2 and 3 discussed the letter at a meeting with Mr Davis (6th November 2008) and questioned the legal basis under which they could retain this data. It is their understanding that the content of calls or e-mails, or details on webpages browsed, are excluded from the EU directive. As such, any retention or disclosure of that information would be a violation of existing EU data protection legislation."

twitter writes "Analysts at Bloomberg noticed the tumble in Microsoft's traditional software sales last quarter and blamed it on netbooks: 'The devices, which usually cost less than $500, are the fastest-growing segment of the personal-computer industry — a trend that's eating into Microsoft's revenue. Windows sales fell short of forecasts last quarter and the company cut growth projections for the year, citing the lower revenue it gets from netbooks. When makers of the computers do use Windows, they typically opt for older and cheaper versions of the software. Equipping Linux on a computer costs about $5, compared with $40 to $50 for XP and about $100 for Vista, according to estimates by Jenny Lai, a Taipei-based analyst at CLSA Ltd.' This is why MS declared war on the segment last year and palm top computers in previous years. While they may have successfully tamed the Asus EEE PC, they can't hold back everyone who wants to make a buck on cheap hardware and free software. Analysts have predicted the fall of MS's business model when computers break below $250/unit retail. We are there now, and it has shown in the bottom line."

pasokon writes "ZDNet reports on an Android bug in T-Mobile G1s with early versions of the firmware: 'When the phone booted it started up a command shell as root and sent every keystroke you ever typed on the keyboard from then on to that shell. Thus every word you typed, in addition to going to the foreground application would be silently and invisibly interpreted as a command and executed with superuser privileges. ... open the keyboard tray on your G1, ignore anything you see on the screen, and type these 8 keystrokes: (enter)-r-e-b-o-o-t-(enter). Poof, your phone will reboot.'"

arcticstoat writes to mention that Toshiba's latest line of high-powered laptops has three GPUs included. Both the Qosmio X305-Q706 and Q708 come with an integrated GeForce 9400M for day-to-day processing tasks but have a pair of GeForce 9800Ms in SLI that kick in when you need the extra horsepower. "The [Qosmio] X305-Q706 costs $1,999 US (£1,257) in the US, although we haven't seen any UK pricing on the laptops yet. The system comes with a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo P8400 and 4GB of RAM, while the costlier X305-Q708 comes with a quad-core 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9300 CPU."

Glenn Fleishman writes "The reports earlier today on WPA's TKIP key type being cracked were incorrect. I spoke at length with Erik Tews, the joint author of the paper that discloses a checksum weakness in TKIP that allows individual short packets to be decrypted without revealing the TKIP key. I wrote this up for Ars Technica with quite a bit of background on WEP and WPA. Tews's paper, co-written with Martin Beck, whom he credits as discovering and implementing a working crack (in aircrack-ng as a module), describes a way to use a backwards-compatible part of TKIP to exploit a weakness that remains from WEP. ARP packets and similarly short packets can be decoded. Longer packets are likely still safe, and TKIP hasn't been cracked. Don't believe the hype, but the exploit is still notable."

narramissic writes "Starting on Monday, researchers from Nokia and UC Berkeley will kick off the Mobile Millennium project. The researchers hope that thousands of volunteers will download a free Java program that figures out by their movement and location when they are driving, and then transmits that information to the project's servers, which then crunch it into a Bay Area traffic map. 'The whole concept here is that if everyone shares just a little bit of what they're seeing ... then everyone can benefit by seeing the conditions ahead of them,' said Quinn Jacobson, a research leader with Nokia in Palo Alto."

mallumax writes "David Pogue of New York Times has reviewed the Pico, which is a pocket projector from Optoma. The review is quite entertaining (Pogue projects the images on to a plane's ceiling, leaving passengers baffled) and detailed. The highlights are: It is a pocket-sized projector which runs on batteries and can project images and videos from a variety of sources like iPhone, iPod and DVD players with a 480x320px resolution, with a maximum screen size of 65 inches at 8.5 feet. It uses a non-replaceable 10,000 hour LED lamp and a DLP chip from Texas Instruments. The battery lasts for 90 minutes and can be recharged through USB or with its own power cord. The device weighs 115g and comes with an inbuilt speaker which is practically useless. If you want one, it will set you back by $430."

Smelly Jeffrey writes "With the release of this whitepaper, the FCC unanimously approved plans for a new technology with strong supporters and even stronger detractors. White Space Wi-Fi effectively allows manufacturers of wireless devices to incorporate transceivers that operate on unused DTV channels. Although the deregulation is new, the idea seems to have caught Google's interest recently as well. It seems that this has been rather rushed through the normally stagnant channels at the FCC. While some view it as interference in the already crowded spectrum, it seems the FCC Chairman really likes the idea of re-purposing dark parts of the newly allocated DTV bands once more." Update: 11/06 18:15 GMT by T : You may want to look at Tuesday's mention of the decision as well, but the additional links here are interesting.

narramissic writes "Researchers Erik Tews and Martin Beck 'have just opened the box on a whole new hacker playground, says Dragos Ruiu, organizer of the PacSec conference. At the conference, Tews will show how he was able to partially crack WPA encryption in order to read data being sent from a router to a laptop. To do this, Tews and Beck found a way to break the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) key, used by WPA, in a relatively short amount of time: 12 to 15 minutes. They have not, however, managed to crack the encryption keys used to secure data that goes from the PC to the router in this particular attack. 'Its just the starting point,' said Ruiu."

An anonymous reader writes "T-Mobile's G1 phone, the first commercially available Android based phone, has been rooted. The exploit is extremely simple to execute, just requiring you to run telnetd from a terminal on the phone, and then connecting to the phone via telnet."

sidesh0w was one of a number of readers to alert us to the FCC's unanimous decision approving unlicensed devices to use the white spaces of the spectrum unused by television broadcasters, provided they take certain precautions not to interfere with licensed users. "Denying a tremendous last-minute lobbying effort by broadcasters, the vote on white space devices went ahead as planned today after a several-hour delay at FCC headquarters. When the vote came, though, it was unanimous. For the Democrats on the Commission, the devices are appealing because they offer a potential new avenue for broadband services, while the Republicans are pleased for the same reasons, but love the fact that this is a deregulatory order that focuses on less regulation and more competition."

kaiser423 writes "I'm looking to integrate some highly critical solutions into what would essentially be a remote, moving datacenter. No operators will be allowed at the site, and we may be able to have a high-speed INMARSAT data link. As a backup, we're planning to have multiple redundant low-speed Iridium data links. Essentially, we're looking to be able to power up/down and reboot some computers, and be able to start/stop some programs. We're willing to write the terminal interfaces necessary for our programs, and possibly do the remote desktop thing with some of our 3rd-party programs. But what is out there that would give us this type of access, work robustly over a high-latency, low-bandwidth stream, and would be tolerant to intermittent network outages? Please hold the pick 2 of the 3 jokes, I know they're contradictory goals; I'm looking for a compromise here! These boxes would regrettably nearly all be running Windows (with some VxWorks). Does anyone out there remember those days, and have any solutions that they preferred?" Read on for a few more details of this reader's requirements.

Wired has an interview with Alan Kay on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the idea of the laptop computer. Kay's vision, which he dubbed the "Dynabook," was for a 2-pound, 1-Mpixel color computing device. "... the Dynabook was never built. But it greatly inspired the devices we now call laptops, although it's taken four decades to slim the tech down to the point where usable computers actually weigh as little as two pounds. To honor his achievements, Mountain View's Computer History Museum on Wednesday will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the legendary Dynabook. [Quoting Kay:] 'The Amazon Kindle is kind of a subset of a Dynabook — too much of a subset. The screen is too small, it is not very capable of dynamics, the keyboard is poor, etc. But it does have several limited service ideas that are good. The next version of a Kindle could be really exciting.'"

jeevesbond writes "The Register reports that Asus president Jerry Shen has revealed his company will be phasing out all sub-10" Eee PCs. According to Shen, the 'standard' netbook next year will be a 10" model with a hard drive running XP. Shen also said XP is outselling GNU/Linux on netbooks by a ratio of 7:3. This is somewhat contrary to news from the UK earlier in the year that GNU/Linux units were out of stock while XP machines sat unsold. Are Brits more open-minded than the rest of the world when it comes to choosing an OS?"

danaris writes in to inform us that John Gruber has done some digging on the reported rejection from the App Store of Opera Mini, and has written up his findings. Some choice excerpts: "My understanding, based on information from informed sources who do not wish to be identified because they were not authorized by their employers, is that Opera has developed an iPhone version of Opera Mini — but they haven't even submitted it to Apple, let alone had it be rejected. ... If what they've done for the iPhone is [to get] a Java ME runtime running on the iPhone — it's clearly outside the bounds of the iPhone SDK Agreement. ... What Opera would need to do to have a version of Opera Mini they could submit to the App Store would be to port the entire client software to the C and Objective-C APIs officially supported on the iPhone. It could well be that even then, Apple would reject it from the App Store on anti-competitive grounds — but contrary to this week's speculation, that has not happened."

narramissic writes "The iPhone crowd is still dominated by affluent males between the ages of 18 and 35, but in a series of surveys ending in August, ComScore found that iPhone purchases grew fastest among people with annual household incomes between $25,000 and $50,000. The growth rate in this group was 48 percent, compared with just 16 percent among people with incomes above $100,000. And the down economy isn't going to turn this trend around, says ComScore Mobile analyst Jen Wu. 'I don't see there's going to be much of a slowdown, just because wireless devices are so much more of a necessity than they used to be,' Wu said." In other iPhone news, an anonymous reader points out a NYTimes story about the rise in car-related applications and uses for the iPhone, which points out that programmers are just beginning to "appreciate just what can be done with an iPhone and other advanced cellphones that know where they are and just how quickly they are going someplace else." Another iPhone story mentions that "Opera's engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple won't let the company release it because it competes with Apple's own Safari browser."

CWmike sends along a ComputerWorld piece which predicts that "netbooks like the Asus Eee PC, the Dell Mini 9 and the HP 2133 Mini-Note will soon cost as little as $99. The catch? You'll need to commit to a two-year mobile broadband contract. The low cost will come courtesy of a subsidy identical to the one you already get with your cell phone. It's likely that HP is working with AT&T (they're reported to be talking), which announced a major strategic shift a couple of weeks ago that should result in AT&T stores selling nonphone gadgets that can take advantage of mobile broadband, including netbooks. What's more interesting is that low income and cheapskate buyers are starting to use iPhones as replacements or substitutes for netbook, notebook and even desktop PCs. The author's take: A very large number of people are increasingly looking to buy a single device — or, at least, subscribe to a single wireless account — for all their computing and communications needs, and at the lowest possible price."

TheTieGuy writes "HP recently released their TouchSmart Application Development Guidelines to third party developers, allowing anyone to port and create touch-friendly applications that integrate and run within the TouchSmart Software suite on their popular TouchSmart PC. As part of the release, HP has gotten behind Capable Networks' Touchsmart Community website and forum to distribute the guidelines to developers while providing an environment for TouchSmart developers to interact. Also on the site is a download hub that allows TouchSmart developers to upload and share their creations with TouchSmart owners in a central location. To kick off the new development initiative, the TouchSmart Community is running a promotion that will send one developer (travel expenses paid) to demo their software in the HP booth at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, along with a free TouchSmart PC, HP MediaSmart Server, and a month of promotion in the community."