Headlines
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Good news for Motorola Mobility: The company's shareholders have voted to approve its acquisition by Google, by overwhelming numbers.
- Bad news for Motorola Mobility: Lemko Corporation has filed suit against the company, alleging the theft of source code from Lemko software.
- Congressman Lamar Smith, one of the Stop Online Piracy Act's principal sponsors, has begun backtracking from some of the bill's more controversial elements in the face of vehement criticism from the tech community. Speaking of which: Leonard Napolitano, Director of Computer Sciences and Information Systems for Sandia Labs (part of the U.S. Department of Energy), has warned that the bill would "negatively impact U.S. and global cybersecurity and Internet functionality." Opposition to the bill has led to a wide-ranging coalition, ranging from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Texas Congressman Ron Paul to the European Parliament.
- "A fund manager accused of running an $11 million scam promoting phony access to coveted shares of Facebook and Groupon Inc before their public debut was arrested on criminal charges on Thursday," reports Grant McCool.
- Samsung is resisting Apple's requests for internal documents, as part of the seemingly endless legal grudge match between the two companies.
- According to Don Reisinger, "Porn bigwig Manwin Licensing International has filed a lawsuit arguing that the new .xxx top-level domain arises from a monopoly aimed at hurting the adult film industry."
- AOL senior executive Brad Garlinghouse is leaving the company—the latest in what apparently been a mad dash for the exit at the troubled ISP-cum-Web-portal-cum-whatever-it-is.
Security
- Slashdot brings word that BIND, the widely used DNS server software, has been crashing all around the Internet, due to a zero-day exploit.
- "Hackers destroyed a pump used by a US water utility after gaining unauthorized access to the industrial control system it used to operate its machinery, a computer security expert said." Dan Goodin has the story.
- Sean Gallagher:
At the upcoming MalCon security conference in Mumbai, Austrian independent developer and security analyst Peter Kleissner is scheduled to release the first known "bootkit" for Windows 8—an exploit that is able to load from a hard drive's master boot record and reside in memory all the way through the startup of the operating system, providing root access to the system. The exploit allegedly defeats the security features of Windows 8's new Boot Loader.
Hardware
- DigiTimes is reporting that Apple is slowing down production on the iPad 2, possibly in preparation for a forthcoming iPad 3.
- Patently Apple, meanwhile, has revealed two recent Apple patents with an eye toward mobile computing: The first spotlights a Macbook with rotating display, while the second involves crack-resistant glass.
Cool Technology
- Microsoft has begun accepting pre-orders for the Surface, its coffee-table-sized touchscreen computer.
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