The European Union is in the process of proposing new laws on how large corporations handle users' personal data. Speaking at the Digital Life Design(DLD) conference in Germany on Sunday, EU Justice Commissioner, Viviane Reding, said she thinks governments need to find a balance between policing the internet to protect copyright and upholding freedom of expression. Reding was reacting to a US crackdown on hundreds of websites accused of offering pirated music or movies or counterfeit goods, as well as calls ...

The Nokia 700 is a beautiful phone, with a dreadful OS and some redeeming features. I tear it apart like a rare fillet in a New York diner. Overall design In a word, solid. In a longer word, rock-solid. The 700 smacks of passion. Its diminutive proportions may be too tiny for my meaty paws, but in a normal sized hand it rests comfortably, like a shivering metal kitten. The 0.9kg weight combined with a length of 11cm is a masterstroke of design. ...

A five-month-old video has a new, viral, lease on life. The video features Slovakian violinist Lukas Kmit, being interrupted by a Nokia ringtone. Rather than storming off or histrionically berating the phone’s owner, Kmit simply started playing the ringtone. The interruption took place while Kmit was giving a recital at a Jewish Orthodox Synagogue in Presov, eastern Slovakia. According to Cnet’s Chris Matyszczyk, the video went viral after a recent incident in which the marimba ringtone of an iPhone brought ...

I feel like we take compression for granted. It’s like the bass player in a band. While the lead guitarist or singer gets decorated with undergarments from the ladies, the unsung bassist grooves in the background, playing the vital role of filling out the low end of the frequency spectrum and blowing your hair back. Compression technologies and the network infrastructure upon which they function are key to delivering our LOLcats, Nyan Cats, Honeybadgers and Rebecca Blacks, but with all the attention given to terrestrial broadband ...

The jailbreak for both A5 iDevices running iOS 5.0.1, namely the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S has landed. Absinthe runs on both Windows and Mac PCs and is seemingly the easiest jailbreak process yet. Pod2g is the self-confessed “iOS security researcher” who developed the jailbreak along with Team Chronic. A simple process The jailbreak works on the iPad 2 running iOS 5.0.1 and the iPhone 4S running iOS 5.0.1 or iOS 5.0. Read more on Gearburn.com

Lamar Smith, the author of America's proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), has withdrawn the controversial bill. According to Reuters, the Texas congressman decided to pull the bill in the wake of mass online protests from people in the US and abroad. Smith's decision comes shortly after US Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said, "in light of recent events" he would postpone a critical vote that had been scheduled for January 24. Smith said that similar legislation would not be considered ...

The internet rejoiced as news of Stop Online Piracy Act's (SOPA) death spread like wild fire. The controversial bill has been the talk of the internet for the last week. A call to action from internet titans such as Google and Wikipedia saw the web go black on Wednesday in protest of a bill that they said would threaten the very nature of the net. Following Texas Congressman Lamar Smith's decision to pull the bill late Friday, "SOPA is dead" ...

Google’s spring cleaning campaign continues. The company just announced the closure of a number of products, including the popular Picnik online photo editor which, until recently, was integrated into Yahoo’s Flickr, for example. Google is also shutting down a number of underutilized services like the Google Message Continuity email backup service for enterprise customers, its Social Graph API and Urchin, the company it bought in 2005 and that formed the basis for Google Analytics. Needlebase, a database product Google acquired ...

Everybody is talking about mobiles. If the trends in 2011 were anything to go by, 2012 will revolve around mobile phones and tablet computing. So making predictions and talking about what there is to look forward to is pretty easy if you just want to stick to safe topics. Of course, with Solar Maximum all set for 2012, major solar storms could make it a tricky year for the mobile. So I've decided to take a look at non-mobile related ...

Google recently introduced search results heavily influenced by relevant signals from people's social circles and promoting G+ content in its search results. The move is an attempt to boost its nascent Google+ social network, which has had a rocky start. I predicted that this strategy would attract legions of marketers hoping to boost traffic to their client sites through new forms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. A torrent of spam on G+ could risk alienating early users of the social network. It ...