Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Arrested In London

Sky News has confirmed that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been arrested in London.

Assange was arrested by the Metropolitan Police on a European Arrest Warrant, on behalf of the Swedish authorities over allegations he sexually assaulted two women in Sweden.

It is thought that the Wikileaks founder was arrested by appointment at 9:30am and is due to appear at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court later today.

You can’t go minutes without hearing something regarding Wikileaks with today being no exception. The whistleblowing website has been subject to intense criticism from governments all over the world when it published confidential cables sent between senior US military officials just over a week ago.

The website then experienced minor downtime when EasyDNS pulled its DNS services that supported the site. Whilst the site remained available via direct IP addresses, Wikileaks immediately set about moving its operation to Switzerland, re-emerging with a new Wikileaks.ch domain.

In an effort to keep its acquired information readily accessible even while under duress the site started accepting mass mirroring across domains around the world. The list of mirrors which you can be found here currently lists over 355 sites with a number of them including IPV6 protocol.

Assange must must appear before the Magistrates court before 12.30pm, unless a judge gives permission for a later hearing. It is thought that he is still not aware of the full allegations against him.

More as it happens.

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The ISBN for wines, AVIN hits the 30 million wine labels

30 million wine labels that include wine name, region and varietals, along with other data, on a QR code, from 150 different wine producers – that’s the milsetone recently hit by AVIN, an “ISBN for wines” cataloging system.

AVIN is a unique 13 digit number, acting like an open standard and used for tracking wine, for over 25,000 different wines from 7,500 wineries. It’s been sponsored and financially supported for over three years now by Adegga (a wine social network).

We had a recent talk with André Ribeirinho, AVIN founder, where he told us that AVIN is building up a board of wine producers people to assure that the project will be sustained in the future, along with the needed independence to run it. Also André thinks that the QR Code, one of the two ways to represent the AVIN,  will be a non issue on the near future due to the widespread use in Europe and USA.

AVIN was created due to the fact that the bar code, already present on every bottle, isn’t unique – since different years have the same bar code – and it couldn’t retain essential wine information neither it’s web friendly. So, with a smartphone you can scan and extract information from the wine label itself. Wineries will be able to create and change their own code database information, through the AVIN API which will be soon public.

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FoursqWAR turns Foursquare into a turf war

TNW Quick Look

FoursqWAR is a strategy battle game built on top of Foursquare’s API.

Hits:

Imaginative use of the Foursquare API.Nicely presented.“Civvy” features let you use it for standard Foursquare checkins too.

Misses:

Only works well when friends are playing.Finding occupied buildings to challenge can be tough.The details:

It’s great when developers build something a bit different with a popular API and FoursqWAR from Irish developers Project Zebra is one such example. This iPhone game sees players compete to reach the top of a leaderboard by ‘attacking’ and ‘defending’ different Foursquare locations.

Selecting a location from the map view, you can occupy it with troops if it’s empty or you can attack if it’s occupied by another player’s forces. Through winning battles and occupying more buildings you gain points thus nudging you up the leaderboard.

Although you start the game with a small number of infantry troops, you’re able to swap them for stronger forces like humvees, a mortar team, bomb technicians and even John Rambo himself. In-app purchases can be used to boost your squadron further if you want a further boost.

The game is nicely presented, with a fittingly smart, military look and Apple Gamer Center medals to earn as you gain experience. Handy ‘Civvy’ options allow you to check in and view normal Foursquare data for each location in addition to playing the game.

The only real problem with FoursqWAR is that if you’re in an area where there aren’t any other players, it’s not much fun. While testing the game I found one location that had already been occupied, and there’ currently no way of telling enemy occupied locations from vacant ones without tapping on each one manually.

That said, if it sounds like fun and you can get a few local friends involved, FoursqWAR could be great fun.

The game is currently available for free, although a charge will be applied soon. So, it’s worth grabbing quickly if you’d like to give it a go. [iTunes App Store link]

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If We Were Samsung, We Wouldn’t Be Happy

Take That, love them or hate them, they have affected the lives of millions of women (and some men) for over a decade.
When Samsung announced that it would be sponsoring the Take That’s upcoming Progress Live 2010 tour and gave each member a Samsung Galaxy Tab to play with, you wouldn’t expect the group to be quite so obvious when promoting the company’s involvement.
It wouldn’t happen to Apple, would it?!

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MacBook Air Flash Guide

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HP Slate Officially Launches for $799

We all but gave up on the Slate, but Hewlett-Packard’s tablet computer was destined to reach the market after all, albeit in a slightly different flavor than it was originally envisioned.

The HP Slate 500 is a Windows 7-based tablet PC with a 8.9-inch, 1024×600 resolution screen, a 1.86GHz Intel Atom Z540 processor, a Crystal HD accelerator that should ensure smooth playback for HD (1080p) videos, two gigabytes of RAM (recent rumors predicted 1 GB), and a 64GB SSD.

It has a USB port and two cameras: a 3-megapixel one on the back, and a VGA camera on the front for making video calls. It also has Wi-Fi but, quite disappointingly, no 3G connectivity.

These specifications make the Slate one of the most powerful tablets on the market, but its $799 price tag also makes it more expensive than its chief rival, the iPad. However, HP has envisioned the Slate as a device aimed at business customers.
“It’s really like a full-function PC, it runs Windows, it will run your office applications, it just so happens to be in a slate form factor,” said Carol Hess-Nickels, director of business notebook marketing at HP.
What do you think about HP’s decision to make the Slate a Windows 7-based tablet, aimed at business customers? Is the price right, and is there a place on the market for such a device? Please share your opinions in the comments.

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Apple Starts Selling iPhone 4 Bumpers Again !!

Apple had announced on September 10th that it will be discontinuing its free iPhone 4 case program after September 30th.

 The iPhone 4 bumper cases that were unavailable in Apple's Retail and Online stores during the program, first made their silent comeback to the retail stores on October 1.

Macrumors has just reported that they're also available on Apple's Online store.
Back in July, Apple had announced at the special press conference held last weekthat it will give free cases to all iPhone 4 customers to address concerns raised by iPhone 4 users about its antenna issue.

But in September, Apple decided to discontinue the program as it believed that iPhone 4 antenna attenuation issue is even smaller than it originally thought.

We had heard some reports that Apple had started selling iPhone 4 bumpers in its Retail stores from October 1. They're now available even on Apple's Online store.

iPhone 4 retina display analysis

The Bumper cases are available in all the six original colors and are priced at $29 each. They will ship within 24 hours after you order it.

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New Yahoo Messenger App for iPhone To Allow Video Calls To PC, Android Smartphones

Yahoo's VP of Mobile for the Americas, David Katz has revealed that Yahoo is working on a version of Yahoo Messenger for the iPhone and Android, which will allow users to make video calls like FaceTime. The application, which is still under development, will use the iPhone 4's front camera to make video calls both over Wi-Fi and 3G.

While the iPhone 4's FaceTime is a great feature, it is restricted to making video calls over Wi-Fi - and that too only to other iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G users. The Yahoo App on the other hand, enables video calling to other users logged on to Yahoo messenger either on a PC, iPhone or Android smartphones.

David Katz, Yahoo’s VP of Mobile for the Americas region has revealed the following details:

"The free app, will be available for both iPhone and Android phones and will allow smartphone users to not only conduct video calls with each other, but with anyone that currently uses Yahoo Messenger for video calls on their PCs."

The ability to make voice calls with users on the iPhone, Android smartphones and anyone using Yahoo messenger on the PC could transform it into one of the killer iPhone apps on the App store, especially when you consider that Yahoo Messenger has 80 million users worldwide.
Yahoo seems to be pretty confident that its iPhone app will be approved because applications like Tango and Fring that offer video calling via 3G and Wi-Fi have already been approved by Apple.

Apple has also clarified that “they do allow apps on the App Store that support video calling on Wi-Fi and 3G networks.”
So, it could be only a matter of time before the updated Yahoo Messenger app arrives in the App Store.

We'll let you know as soon as it is available in the App Store

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iTunes Instant: Faster And Easier Way To Search iTunes And The App Store

If one of your biggest complaint about iTunes is that it is slow then you’re not the only one. iTunes 10 that was released earlier in the month is a little bit faster but just not fast enough.

So Stephen Ou, a 15-year-old developer (can you believe it) from the Bay Area created iTunes Instant, which makes it a lot faster and easier to search iTunes and the App Store.

Stephen Ou apparently developed iTunes Instant in less than 3 hours using Apple’s own Search API.

iTunes Instant is exactly what I have been looking for, simple user interface with fast, real time search results (sorry I have been spoilt by Google Instant, the new search enhancement that shows results as you type).

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'Error 13001' While Syncing iPod? Troubleshooting

You can update and organize your favorite content on an iPod using iTunes. iTunes is a free software application, provided by Apple, which enables iPod to interact with your computer. You can also connect to the iTunes store and purchase and download desired audiobooks, podcasts, videos and other stuff. However, you can experience major problems while syncing your iPod with iTunes. As a result, you cannot update your iPod. The error messages with strange codes might bewilder you and you are left helpless. Such situations suggest that there are some serious issues with your iPod including corruption. To tackle corruption, you would be required to restore an iPod, followed by prompt iPod recovery using an updated backup. And, if no backup is available, there are other efficient ways (discussed later in this article) to get back your lost iPod content.

Imagine a situation, wherein, you have an iPod Classic. You connect the device to your laptop in order to update it and start the sync process. But, this time around something unusual happens and you get the following error message while syncing iPod to iTunes.

"Error 13001"
Due to the occurrence of the above error message, the sync process halts.

Cause:
The above error message can surface in any of the below-mentioned conditions:
If your computer is infected with a virus.
If there is an issue with the content (eg bad music files etc)
If a background process is causing an issue with the syncing process
If there is a problem with the device itself. For instance, iPod disk corruption

Resolution
To troubleshoot the above error message, you must consider the following iPod recovery steps:
Use MSCONFIG or Task Manager to turn off the following processes, which may be viruses causing interference with the sync process

1.herss
2.xvassdf
3.mmvo
4.kavo

1. If you find that the issue is not related to any virus, try and sync one type of content at a time (music, podcasts, photos etc). This would help you determine which type of content is causing the trouble. Replace the bad content or do not allow it to get synced.

2. If all of your content seem like causing the issue, then create a new user account. Log in to this new account and sync your iPod.

3. If the issue gets resolved, collect MSinfo32 report from both new and old accounts. Find out which processes are not active in the account you created recently.

4. If you still get the error message in a new user account, then it clearly indicates that the problem lies with your device. The iPod in question could be corrupted. In all such situations, you must restore the iPod right away.

Since restoration leads to serious data loss, you must download and employ a third-party iPod recovery software to retrieve the lost iPod content. They are quite easy-to-use and consume less amount of time in recovering music files, videos, audiobooks etc.

The best software to recover data from iPod Classic and iPod Shuffle is Stellar Phoenix iPod Recovery.

Available in two versions for both Windows and Mac, this application recovers almost all photo (JPEG, TIF, TIFF, GIF), audio (MIDI, AIFF, M4A, OGG) and video (AVI, MOV, ASF, WMV) formats. This iPod recovery software is completely safe and allows you to save scan results for recovery at a later time.

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