Verizon Wireless disclosed late Thursday that several of its employees accessed and viewed President-elect Barack Obama’s personal cellphone account, and said it planned to discipline workers for the privacy breach.

"We apologize to President-Elect Obama and will work to keep the trust our customers place in us every day," the company’s chief executive, Lowell McAdam, said in a statement.

Verizon said it discovered the unauthorized account access this week and said it related to an account that has been inactive "for several months." The device on the account was a standard feature phone, rather than a smartphone with advanced email and data capabilities.

The company said it has put all employees with access to the account on leave, with pay, as it sorts out which of those workers accessed the account without a justifiable business purpose. Those who did not have a good reason to view the account will be punished, the company said.

Verizon Wireless, the nation’s No. 2 wireless carrier by subscribers, is a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC. The company is headquartered in Basking Ridge, N.J. and has 71,000 employees nationwide.

Read more @ WSJ

The iPhone 2.2 OS has been jailbroken via PwnageTool 2.2 and QuickPWN 2.2! But, you have to update your iPhone 3G using Pwnage Tool if you plan to someday unlock your iPhone 3G.

The iPhone 2.2 OS had gone live a mere day or so before the venerable and always reliable iPhone Dev Team released their iPhone 2.2 OS jailbreak solution. The Pwnage Tool jailbreak utility, that has been at the forefront of the iPhone jailbreak scene since its release, is now compatible with the iPhone 2.2 OS.

That means Joe iPhoneUser can now update their iPhone or iPhone 3G with a jailbroken version of the new iPhone OS. This is important because the PwnageTool-based iPhone 2.2 OS jailbreak is the only way to preserve your iPhone’s older baseband firmware.

The iPhone’s baseband firmware lies at the heart of the battle for a viable iPhone 3G software unlock solution. The iPhone Dev Team is working hard to discover an iPhone 3G soft-unlock solution, but be warned - you must update to iPhone 2.2 OS using PwnageTool if you ever plan to unlock your iPhone 3G. Of course, if you have and original iPhone, don’t care about unlocking your iPhone 3G, or have a Windows machine and don’t care about unlocking your iPhone 3G, you can easily jailbreak iPhone 2.2 OS using QuickPWN.

Follow this iPhone 2.2 OS jailbreak guide to ensure that your iPhone 3G’s baseband firmware is preserved for any future iPhone 3G software unlock solutions (First-generation iPhones can be unlocked regardless of iPhone OS version, this guide can be applied to iPhone 2Gs):

• Download the iPhone 2.2 OS firmware to your desktop (make sure to choose the appropriate version)
  • iPhone 2.2 OS - iPhone 3G
  • iPhone 2.2 OS - iPhone 2G (original)
• Download PwnageTool 2.2
  • PwnageTool 2.2- Mac OS X torrent file
  • PwnageTool 2.2 - Mac OS X direct download
• Fire up Pwnage Tool 2.2
• Select “Expert Mode”
• Select your iPhone version (iPhone 3G or iPhone)
• Click “Next”
• Allow Pwnage Tool 2.2 to find the iPhone 2.2 OS firmware that you downloaded to your desktop
• Select the iPhone 2.2 OS firmware
  • iPhone firmware filename - iPhone1,1_2.2_5G77_Restore.ipsw
  • iPhone 3G firmware filename - iPhone1,2_2.2_5G77_Restore.ipsw
• Click “Next”
• Select the “General” category
• Click “Next”
• General Settings:
  • If you have a legitimate iPhone contract with your carrier (for instance, and iPhone contract with AT&T), you will need to uncheck the box next to “Activate”
  • If you don’t have a legitimate iPhone contract with your carrier, you will need to ensure that the box next to “Activate” is checked - this will “Hacktivate” your iPhone or iPhone 3G for use on an official iPhone-carrier’s network (note, this is not the same as unlocking the handset for use with un-sanctioned GSM networks)
  • Change Root Partition size to 1000MB
• Click “Next” (Keep clicking “Next” until you get back to the “Build” screen)
• Select “Build”
• Click “Next”
• Save the custom restore file to tyour desktop
  • The file should be named - iPhone1,1_2.2_5G77_Custom_Restore.ipsw
• Wait for PwnageTool 2.2 to build your custom iPhone 2.2 OS firmware file
• When asked if the iPhone has been Pwned before, choose the appropriate option
  • iPhone 3G:
    • “NO”
  • iPhone (never Pwned - No pineapple logo):
    • “NO”
  • iPhone (previously Pwned - Has pineapple logo):
    • “YES”
• Connect your iPhone
• Follow directions to enter “Restore Mode”
  • Hint: Press the “Power” button slightly before pressing the “Home” button. Remember, press “Power” just a tick before pressing “Home”
    
• If you followed the directions correctly, you will be rewarded with a blue window exclaiming your success - this is a good thing
  • Click “OK”
• You will see “I Can Haz Success”
  • Quit Pwnage Tool 2.2
• Fire up iTunes
  • You will be told your iPhone needs to be restored
  • Click “OK”
• Option+Click Restore (VERY IMPORTANT)
  • Make sure you hold down the “Option” key on the keyboard while clicking on “Restore”
• Choose the “iPhone1,2_2.1_5F136_Custom_Restore.ipsw” from your desktop
  • Click “Open”
• Wait
• Wait some more
• After some more waiting, you will be told that your iPhone that your iPhone has been restored
  • Click “OK”
• Disconnect iPhone AFTER iTunes recognizes it
• Restore backup of iPhone data
• Start enjoying your jailbroken iPhone or iPhone 3G running iPhone 2.2 OS!

Source: IntoMobile

I’m live from Virgin America’s Beta run of their Wi-Fi service, over San Francisco, and there are a few things you should know about how its going to work when most airlines go live in 2009. And yes, I am posting this live from 15k feet over the Pacific Ocean.

1. Your last bastion of Internet Free peace is gone. Forever. You’ll be forced to work on flights instead of valium napping or reading comic books, and your boss will expect you to be checking email. Time to plan a camping trip.

2. Total bandwidth is not as fast as Cable Modem, but it seems faster than slow DSL. (We were sharing 3.6Mbps down and 1.8Mbps up, which isn’t bad at all, on this Virgin America test flight, and it felt this fast when benching.)

3. But bandwidth is shared between customers. Aircell’s GoGo a 3GHz EVDO-Rev A related tech modded for ground to air, started crawling as soon as other passengers signed on. (I got a test result measuring 66kbps down at one point, but Ryan showed about a mbit down. )

4. You have to pay. Virgin America charges, for example $9.95 for flights under 3 hours, and $12.95 on flights over 3 hours.

5. You will still need to close your laptops and shut off your devices until you reach cruising altitude.

6. Most airlines, even those that are not blocking ports, are blocking known VOIP ports. For our sanity. Although I WAS able to initiate a really solid iChat video session, but they may filter this on real flights. (See Below, courtesy of Nick Bilton from the NYTimes.)

7. Although plenty of airlines will have Wi-Fi by the end of next year, I prefer Virgin America because they’ve got 110v AC power plugs in coach.

8. WiFi porn won’t be blocked by Virgin America (or American Airlines according to a test we performed earlier this week). But blocking porn is silly — people can easily play porn on DVDs or predownloaded files, but people generally have refrained so there’s no reason to think they’ll do otherwise now.

9. Flights using Go Go service will be able to connect to a VPN.

10. You can file share with other computers on the 802.11 a/b/g Wi-Fi network. That’s good for gaming, but also, make sure your firewall is up.

Source: Gizmodo

A group of Facebook engineers - Jack Lindamood, Kevin Der and Dan Weatherford - have created a small project called Palantir at a Facebook Hackathon event. The project is named after The palantír of Orthanc, a crystal ball-like object from The Lord Of The Rings (yep, they’re nerds).

Anyway, it’s a video of the earth showing Facebook activity visually and geographically. One view shows activity as dots of light that flow upward. Another view shows connections between people around the globe as it occurs. The images above show a little of it, but you really have to see the video to appreciate it. You can see it here.

Facebook says they are strongly considering productizing this, but for now it isn’t on the roadmap. If they do go forward with it, presumably you’ll be able to watch friend connections happening all over the world.

We have all heard of Cyber Bullying where a group of users online would taunt and stalk helpless users until they break down online and even offline but this is a case where it went a bit too far.

19 Year Old Abraham K.Biggs was broadcasting live on Justin.TV a popular live video site where he was being cheered on by users of a bodybuilding forum to do outrageous things, the stunt went too far when they saw Abraham take a dose of pills and hours later noticing no activity and had to call the EMT’s and Police to the address. Later, a Broward County Examiner, confirmed the death to newteevee.

The video and all details pertaining to the actual incident have been removed and a statement from Justin.tv read "As for the broadcaster incident last night, we don’t comment on individual videos, however, our policy prohibits inappropriate content on Justin.tv. We rely on the community to flag videos that they feel are objectionable. Once a video is flagged, it is reviewed and quickly removed from the system if it violates our Terms of Use.".

This isn’t the first case either, last year a man from Great Britain hung himself live on video in front of hundreds of viewers and there was even a movie made about a murderer broadcasting murders on live video which was dependent on hits. Writing this article makes me think that we need to find a way to govern this sort of broadcasting so there are not more cases of this sort of activity. Gone of the days where the internet was simple and nice to use.

Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager, Internet Explorer has officially announced that there will be one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009, followed up by the final release. The next release will be called ‘release candidate’ and will put an end to the ‘beta’ tag.
Dean also expressed that very selective changes will be done to the next and final release and has promised that the team would be very clear about product changes between the update and the final release.

If you need to get your hands on IE 8 now, you can download the IE 8 Beta 2 and also provide your valuable feedback to the team

Apple’s iPhone has been used for everything from following the 2008 election to deciding where to grab a bite on the go. Now, it’s helping lead-footed drivers avoid costly speeding tickets.

NMobile and Trapster are two mobile applications that provide up-to-date, detailed maps of speed-enforcement zones with live police traps, speed cameras or red-light cameras. After launching, each application pulls up a map pinpointing the locations of speed traps within driving distance. An audio alert will sound as vehicles approach an area tagged as harboring a speed trap.

Both applications rely on the wisdom of the crowds for their data. Users can report camera-rigged stop lights and areas heavily populated with radar-toting police officers through the application or on each company’s Web site. Eagle-eyed motorists using either application can also contribute information on the location of newly spotted speed traps from the road with a couple of taps on the iPhone.

Then, using the iPhone’s GPS location detection, the applications warn drivers when they are approaching known or reported traps.

NMobile and Trapster join the 8,000-plus offerings currently available for download in Apple’s iPhone Application Store, ranging from the practical to the silly.

For example, iBeer, an application that makes use of the smartphone’s accelerometer and sensors to simulate a frothy pint of ale, and Pocket First Aid and CPR Guide, which offers tutorials for treating conditions from snake bites to hypothermia, are both hovering among the ten most popular paid applications.

For start-up companies like Trapster, the popularity and capabilities of the iPhone has revolutionized the mobile application playing field.

“The game-changer was the iPhone,” said CEO and founder Peter Tenereillo, who saw a significant jump in Trapster’s user base after an iPhone-compatible version of the application was released in October. “We’ve had 100,000 people start using it in the last five weeks.”

Mr. Tenereillo estimates more than 100,000 data points are currently mapped worldwide on Trapster, which is free.

NMobile founder Shannon Atkinson declined to provide detailed data, though he did estimate that “well over 1,000” users had downloaded the application since it became available last week. (The application, originally priced at $9.99, is dropping to $4.99 Friday morning.)

Read more @ NYtimes.com