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Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:22:44 -0500

Google's Nexus One 'Support' Mostly Passes the Buck
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:14:46 -0500Need support for Google's Nexus One smartphone? You can finally call Google directly -- but you might not get all the answers you're looking for.

A month after launching its so-called "superphone," Google on Monday began offering a dedicated phone support line for Nexus One customers. Consumers can call 888-48NEXUS from 4 a.m. to 7 p.m. PST to speak with a live support operator, but they may get directed elsewhere.

Google is giving directions on four types of questions via the old-fashioned telephone: Existing order status and shipping queries, technical support, repair and return issues, and T-Mobile service issues.

Customers seeking order status and shipping times need to have their 15-digit order number in hand and Google will dig up the information. However, Google is pointing customers in need of technical support or repairs and returns to phone maker HTC. And customers who have questions about their wireless service are being ushered to T-Mobile. So actually, the only service Google is providing is for status and shipping updates.

Customer Complaints Continue

Google is moving to address the negative publicity around its smartphone. Shortly after launch, customers began complaining about spotty reception and early cancellation fees. After hundreds of complaints on its forum, Google said it was aware of the issues that it said affected a small number of users and planned to fix the problem.

Google later came out with a fix and has lowered early termination fees from $350 to $150. But the memories remain and the complaints about lack of support continued. Google sells the Nexus One via an online store that, until Monday, only offered support through customer forums.

Those forums are still up and running and still still show problems ranging from spotty 3G coverage to touchscreen problems to missing audio on Bluetooth pairing to camera problems. The list goes...

Google May Add Facebook, Twitter Links to Gmail
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:58:34 -0500E-mail is about communicating with friends, coworkers and the world at large. So why should users have to switch over to Facebook or Twitter to post a status update? That seems to be the thinking behind the news that Google will roll more social-networking features into Gmail, the fastest-growing e-mail service.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Google will announce later this week a new Gmail feature that allows users to post ongoing streams of status updates while using the web-based e-mail service. A source told the Journal that Google will eventually seek to allow users to stream other Google services like YouTube videos and Picasa photos.

Twitter in Gmail?

In the short term, it's unlikely that having status updates in Gmail would cause much of a ripple at Facebook, which is a full-blown ecosystem of friends, advertising, third-party apps, groups and more.

The new feature sounds closer to Twitter, which is purely a status update service. There may be more room for Google to make some inroads there. A recent survey by RJMetrics found that the formerly torrid pace of new Twitter accounts has slowed to about 20 percent below the peak hit last July. These days, about 6.2 million new accounts are created every month.

But, it turns out, many of those accounts are vapor. Twenty-five percent of all Twitter accounts have no followers and 40 percent have never tweeted. "About 80 percent of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times," and "Only about 17 percent of registered Twitter accounts sent a Tweet in December 2009, an all-time-low," RJMetrics reported.

Not a Killer App

Twitter seems vulnerable to Google, while Facebook does not, exactly because tweets just go into the either while Facebook posts go to a (sometimes very broad) circle of friends. Just as interest in blogging has started to...

Analysts See iPad Price Drop, with Some Cannibalization
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:27:43 -0500Just weeks before Apple officially rolls out the iPad, financial analysts are making pricing predictions. But could the analysis itself hinder the initial demand for the pricey tablet computer?

The much-anticipated iPad is priced at $499 for the 16GB model, $599 for the 32GB model, and $699 for the 64GB model -- all available in March. The 3G models won't be available until April and will sell for $629 for the 16GB model, $729 for the 32GB model and $829 for the 64GB model.

Credit Suisse analysts said Apple will stay "nimble" with its pricing strategy and may even discount the devices if customers aren't buying. Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, sees irony in the reports: The comments could actually cause the result.

The Pricing Graveyard

"We certainly saw people rush out initially and buy the iPhone. When the demand dropped off after the first couple of weeks, Apple dropped the price sharply," Enderle said. "Of course, the iPhone over time has gone from about $600 to around $200, which is a fairly substantial drop in price."

Enderle predicts the iPad will go through a similar price drop, but adds that the coverage of Apple's willingness to stay nimble may actually slow initial sales -- especially among consumers who feel burned by buying the first iPhone too quickly.

"The $600 price range has been a graveyard for products, starting with the original iPod, which had to drop its price point very rapidly, all the way to the Sony PS3, which also died at that price point," Enderle said. "I expect they will drop out of that price area fairly quickly."

The Cannibalization Question

Will the iPad cannibalize Apple's other product lines? In a publicized note, Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope indicated cannibalization is not as large a concern as some may believe because there is...

Black Hawk Down: China Busted Hacker-Training Site
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:57:57 -0500The Chinese government has arrested three hackers who were running an online hacker-training business. The trio of hackers operated Black Hawk Safety Net, a company that collected nearly $1 million from more than 120,000 members.

The three unidentified individuals were arrested after using the now-defunct 3800CC.com web site to train and provide the necessary tools to wannabe hackers, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. Government authorities seized $249,000 in cash, nine servers, five computers and a car from the company.

Last year, China made it a crime to provide other people with hacking tools.

More than 195 million Internet users were attacked by viruses and Trojan horses online within the last six months of 2009, and the accounts and passwords of 110 million users were stolen, according an annual report by the China Internet Network Information Center. Increasing users' trust in the Internet has become "a problem pressing for solution at present," the report determined.

Two men, identified as Li Qiang and Zhang Lei, were listed as the founders of Black Hawk Safety Net in a separate case from 2007. The founders were arrested at that time after their involvement in a virus that caused problems on both private and government computers in the city of Macheng, Xinhua reported.

Delayed Reaction

News of the arrest, however, comes nearly three months after the three were arrested by police in the Hubei province. The delayed announcement comes just weeks after China's government has denied having any knowledge of a major attack on Google's China-based service. Google, however, came under attack by what many believe was a Chinese hacker.

Some believe the attack was done to sabotage Google's service in China in an effort to increase the number of users and advertisers who frequent Baidu, Google's China-based competitor.

"The digital spying in this case and several other...

U.S. Is Forming New Climate-Change Agency
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:00:00 -0500The Obama administration on Monday proposed a new agency to study and report on the changing climate.

Also known as global warming, climate change has drawn widespread concern in recent years as temperatures around the world rise, threatening to harm crops, spread disease, increase sea levels, change storm and drought patterns and cause polar melting.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced NOAA will set up the new Climate Service to operate in tandem with NOAA's National Weather Service and National Ocean Service.

"Whether we like it or not, climate change represents a real threat," Locke said Monday at a news conference.

Lubchenco added, "Climate change is real, it's happening now." She said climate information is vital to the wind power industry, coastal community planning, fishermen and fishery managers, farmers and public health officials.

NOAA recently reported that the decade of 2000-2009 was the warmest on record worldwide; the previous warmest decade was the 1990s. Most atmospheric scientists believe that warming is largely due to human actions, adding gases to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.

Researchers and leaders from around the world met last month in Denmark to discuss ways to reduce climate-warming emissions, and a follow-up session is planned for later this year in Mexico.

"More and more people are asking for more and more information about climate and how it's going to affect them," Lubchenco explained. So officials decided to combine climate operations into a single unit.

Portions of the Weather Service that have been studying climate, as well as offices from some other NOAA agencies, will be transferred to the new NOAA Climate Service.

The new agency will initially be led by Thomas Karl, director of the current National Climatic Data Center. The Climate Service will be headquartered in Washington...

Haitian Earthquake Update: Relief Gaps Spread
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:02:14 -0500After weeks of delays and bottlenecks, the international relief effort in Port-au-Prince is becoming somewhat routine. People line up for food and water daily, and roads are clogged with trucks and military vehicles.

An hour's drive north in the mountains, the picture is different.

"The aid hasn't gotten here," said Gillaine Warne, an agronomist with Partners in Health, which runs a hospital in Cange co-founded by Paul Farmer, now the United Nations' deputy special envoy to Haiti.

"There's been a huge influx of people, and they are growing short of food," Warne said. "We're seeing some really desperate farmers, and heaven forbid they have to eat their seed."

Nearly a month after the magnitude-7.0 earthquake Jan. 12, Port-au-Prince residents still complain about what to them seems chaotic and unfair aid distributions. Yet in interviews last week across the city and its suburbs, nearly all surveyed said they had benefited in some way from the help.

"The aid is not very well organized, but it's getting here," said Elibere Josef, a money-changer at a gas station. "The international community is doing what it can."

Flaws in Effort

There are gaps in the effort, however, and one is that relief supplies are not getting to rural areas where the United Nations estimates 482,000 refugees from Port-au-Prince have fled. Tens of thousands of people who were living in Port-au-Prince for jobs are returning to their impoverished home villages. Others left the capital in the hope of finding someplace better.

Many are finding that things are often no better in the country's outlying areas, even if there are buildings standing.

In Mirebalais, a town of about 115,000 people, Mayor Moise Ocxama says about 20,000 people have arrived. Most of them are sleeping with relatives, he said, but others are bedding down at a public school.

The only aid Mirebalais has seen is a single...

Faster and Greener? Go Online and Save the Planet
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:02:42 -0500This should make netizens feel better about themselves: being online and saving the environment can go hand in hand.

For example, shopping online, instead of traveling to the stores by car, means cutting back on gas consumption and associated emissions.

But there is a downside. Many online surfers are unaware of the enormous energy consumption that goes with running the Internet. Still, even though end users aren't the biggest consumers, they can still do a lot to keep energy consumption under control and even save a little money for good measure.

Online service providers run the computing centers that serve as the "hotspots of energy consumption," says Siegfried Behrendt of the IZT Institute for Future Studies and Technology Assessment in Berlin. About half the energy consumed goes just to cooling the centers. After all, a room full of mainframe computers needed to run these systems gives off incredible amounts of heat.

On top of that comes the energy consumption of normal consumers. "Altogether, that means that all information and communications technology devices in Germany had a consumption of 55 terawatt hours in 2007," says Behrendt. "That equals 10 per cent of all power consumption."

That also means carbon dioxide emissions linked to computer use rival those associated with the domestic German air travel market. "That is considerable and has some serious climate politics repercussions."

That doesn't make the Internet bad. It's still a good thing. But private users can become a part of the problem if they just surf without a goal, clicking randomly. Every Google search consumes energy, reports the UBA, a German environmental group -- perhaps not much individually, but it adds up.

Experts recommend targeted use of search engines for quicker access to desired information. "It's also a question of time use," says Behrendt.

There is no shortage of intelligent ways to put those computing...

Children of Older Mothers at More Autism Risk
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:03:51 -0500A woman's chance of having a child with autism increase substantially as she ages, but the risk may be less for older dads than previously suggested, a new study analyzing more than 5 million births found.

"Although fathers' age can contribute risk, the risk is overwhelmed by maternal age," said University of California at Davis researcher Janie Shelton, the study's lead author.

Mothers older than 40 were about 50 percent more likely to have a child with autism than those in their 20s; the risk for fathers older than 40 was 36 percent higher than for men in their 20s.

Even at that, the study suggests the risk of a woman over 40 having an autistic child was still less than 4 in 1,000, one expert noted.

The new research suggests the father's age appears to make the most difference with young mothers. Among children whose mothers were younger than 25, autism was twice as common when fathers were older than 40 than when dads were in their 20s.

The findings contrast with recent research that suggested the father's age played a bigger role than the mother's. Researchers and other autism experts said the new study is more convincing, partly because it's larger. Older mothers are known to face increased risks for having children with genetic disorders, and genes are thought to play a role in autism.

The study was released Monday in the February issue of the journal Autism Research.

Maureen Durkin, a University of Wisconsin researcher who also has studied the influence of parents' age on autism, said it's important to note that the increased risks are small and that most babies born to older mothers do not develop autism.

Durkin said the overall low risk for autism "may be the most important take-home message," especially for prospective parents

The study was based on records of all...

New Zealand Student Auctions Virginity for Tuition
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:04:16 -0500A New Zealand teenager who says she auctioned her virginity online for $32,000 to raise tuition money did not break any laws but it might be risky for her to follow through on the deal, police warned Wednesday.

The anonymous 19-year-old student offered her virginity to the highest bidder on the Web site http://www.ineed.co.nz under the name "Unigirl," saying she would use the money to pay for her tuition. She said in a post that more than 30,000 people had viewed her ad and more than 1,200 had made bids before she accepted an offer of more than New Zealand dollars 45,000 ($32,000).

Unlike similar New Zealand Web sites, bidding and correspondence between buyers and sellers on the ineed site is private so it is not known what bids Unigirl's offer received.

Web site owner Ross McKenzie said the site's policy was that as long as an ad was legal and did not offend the general standards of society, "it was OK." He confirmed Unigirl was a member on the site.

Prostitution is legal in New Zealand under laws considered more liberal than many countries. Prostitution among consenting adults is allowed in brothels and on the streets, and offering sexual services in print ads and online is also legal.

National police spokesman Jon Neilson said no law appeared to have been breached.

But "we would suggest it's not a safe practice," Neilson told The Associated Press. "There are definitely issues of personal safety" in using chat rooms, social dating networks and other Internet sites that can be used to arrange meetings between strangers.

Unigirl, in her initial post, described herself as attractive, fit and healthy. She did not post a photograph of herself, and bidders did not appear to have a way of confirming any of the details of her posts.

Unigirl said she was desperate for money...

MySpace-Suspension Rulings Muddle Issues
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:05:51 -0500Federal appellate judges wrestling with whether schools can discipline students for Internet speech posted offsite reached different rulings Thursday in two Pennsylvania cases.

One 3rd U.S. Circuit Court panel upheld the suspension of a Schuylkill County eighth-grader who posted sexually explicit material along with her principal's photograph on a fake MySpace page.

However, a different three-judge panel said that school officials in Mercer County cannot reach into a family's home and police the Internet. That case also involves a MySpace parody of a principal created by a student at home.

And, in dissent, a judge in the first case said his colleagues were broadening the school's authority and improperly censoring students.

"This holding vests school officials with dangerously overbroad censorship discretion," Judge Michael Chagares wrote in refusing to uphold the March 2007 suspension of a Blue Mountain Middle School student. "Neither the Supreme Court nor this Court has ever allowed schools to punish students for off-campus speech that is not school sponsored and that caused no substantial disruption at school."

School boards, free-speech advocates and others had been awaiting the rulings for clarity on how far schools can go to control both online speech and offsite behavior.

"The law was unclear and now it's in a state of chaos," said lawyer Witold Walczak of the American Civil Liberties Union, who argued the Mercer County case.

Similar cases have surfaced across the country, with different rulings, but none have reached the Supreme Court. Judges are therefore left to rely on decades-old Supreme Court case law on the limits of school discipline for guidance.

Lawyer Anthony Sanchez, who represents the Hermitage School District in Mercer County, called the issue ripe for high-court review.

"With technology, ... we're in a very different world than we were when those other opinions came out," Sanchez said late Thursday. He did not immediately know if...

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