Apple is finally selling the iPhone 4 in white along the Eastern Hemisphere and throught out Europe as each market approaches April 28th. The U.S. and Canada are expected to follow just a few hours as mid night arrives. At the same time, advertising on on Apple.com shows availability of its sites in countries where the clock has past midnight, we are still waiting for online order to become available, even though third-party retailers seem to be allowed to open their dorrs.

Prior to the official release, the white iPhone 4 has been awarded to a handful of select customers as a few stores allowed for early sales of the device.

In a meeting with All Things D today, Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller spoke about some of the challenges that Apple has faced in bringing the white iPhone 4 market a full ten months later than had been scheduled.

After a continuing outage of its PlayStation Network and its Qriocity site, which allow consumers to play games and access entertainment content, Sony has revealed that personal information has been compromised by an “illegal intrusion” into its systems.

The company has requested that the more than 77 million people using PlayStation Network examine their credit reports going forward to ensure they haven’t been a victim of the outside threat.

It’s a difficult time for Sony, to say the least. And the chances of the company overcoming the damage to its PlayStation business and reputation anytime soon are slim. But for consumers, simply blaming Sony right now probably isn’t the best idea. Analyzing credit card statements and ensuring personal information hasn’t been compromised should be the first priority.

Beyond that, it might be a good time for everyone to have a bit of a refresher on online security. As the cloud becomes an increasingly important aspect of the average person’s daily life, they must keep in mind several security-related factors that are integral to limiting the impact such breaches might have on their lives.

Simply put, Sony’s PlayStation Network breach says quite a bit about online security. Read on to find out what that is:

1. No company can be trusted

Sony is a well-respected brand name in the technology industry. Yet it’s reputation and experience in the IT industry didn’t prevent hackers from penetrating its network and stealing customer information. If that doesn’t tell the average consumer something about trust, nothing can. No matter what the size of the company or how well-respected it is, it’s best not to absolutely believe that personal information is safe with it. Anything can happen. Sony’s breach is proof of that.

2. Share information only when necessary

It’s extremely important for people around the globe to only share information online when it’s necessary. In far too many cases, cloud-based services ask for personal information, credit card numbers, and even social security numbers. When it comes to the Web, sharing only what’s necessary to sign up for a service is always the best practice.

3. Some issues are beyond the user’s control

When IT managers evaluate the security of their organizations, they always consider human error. They realize that sometimes, people click on the wrong links, download malicious software, or engage in unsafe browsing habits. However, at times, security issues break out through no fault of the users. Sony’s PlayStation Network breach is a prime example of that. In those cases, there isn’t much a user can do.

4. Fight comfort

One of the worst mistakes a person can make when it comes to online security is fall into a sense of comfort with sharing information. It’s a major mistake for a person to believe that since nothing bad has happened so far, they can continue to share information across the Web with no chance of recourse. It only takes one breach or one mistake to wreak havoc. And in this case, Sony’s PlayStation Network issue is that one breach.

5. Is an offline world better?

By sharing information on the Web, more opportunities are available to Internet users, but is that really best? The offline world, while still rife with security issues of its own, is arguably a more manageable environment when it comes to safeguarding personal information. When given the chance to choose an offline option or to share information online, opting for the disconnected method might be best.

6. Keeping tabs is important

A key component in online security involves being proactive. Gone are the days when users can simply share information online and go about their day. Now, folks must constantly monitor credit card statements and credit reports to ensure information isn’t being stolen or used for illegal activities. The sooner an issue is discovered, the sooner it can be resolved.

7. The future is a scary place

Even though major breaches like the PlayStation Network issue happen more regularly than some want to admit, every sign points to the cloud becoming an even more important aspect of the average person’s daily life going forward. Realizing that, the future is looking scarier than ever. With bank information, credit card data, and social security numbers flying freely across the Internet each day, the chances of PlayStation Network-like issues cropping up again are growing greater by the hour.

8. Security tools are useful

Just about everyone knows about anti-virus and anti-spyware tools, but it’s important that those same folks use Web-security software, as well. Those options ensure encrypted communication, prevent phishing attacks, and perform several other security functions to limit the chances of folks getting themselves into trouble on the Web. Online-security tools won’t entirely safeguard unsuspecting victims, but they go a long way in helping one’s chances of staying safe.

9. The enemy is everywhere

There is a common misconception in the marketplace that cyber-criminals are only lurking on bank Web sites and other places where they might have the easiest chance of stealing financial information. But as the PlayStation Network breach has shown, they’re everywhere. And they won’t stop at anything to steal sensitive information from victims. The last thing any Web user should do is believe that any single site or service is safe from criminals.

10. The fewer, the better

Though just about every site and service wants users to offer up personal information, it’s best to limit the exposure of that content as little as possible. For the most part, signing up for a single service in each category, such as social networks, online gaming, and cloud-based storage, is best. Offering up credit card information to every site a person comes across only maximizes the chances of a security breach. On the Web, the fewer the points of exposure, the better.

If you’re likely to contend in the consumer electronics company after that you’d better possess a strong understand of commercial design as well as materials technology. Otherwise, you’re yet another manufacturer trying to eke profit from lusterless slabs of commodity plastic. With the exception of the actual MacBook, Apple’s whole Mac lineup is currently cut through light weight aluminum. Nevertheless, Apple’s already been captured experimenting with it’s recently acquired Liquidmetal materials recently, even as gossips swirl around brand new ultra-lightweight and durable carbon fiber components and enclosures. Conjecture about the latter has been fueled through an Apple patent software for any process that might make use of carbon fibre supplies woven to the reinforced device enclosures of mobile telephones, laptops, desktop computers, and pills. Interestingly enough, the actual obvious app was filed through Kevin Michael. Kenney (developer of the very first all carbon fiber bicycle frame) on behalf of Apple company in ’09, a man who transformed their work title in order to “Senior Composites Professional from Apple company Inc.” upon LinkedIn at some time following March First (based on Google cache). Of course, a carbon fibre laptop is far from unique — simply research the Sony G11 through 07 or 2008′s Voodoo Envy 133 if you want to observe how it’s carried out. But if Apple constitutes a wholesale change in order to carbon fiber in the months forward then you can anticipate the group associated with me-too OEMs to follow match a year later.

It is a familiar face, sure, there is however a vital ingredient thrown right here that’s been missing on JBL’s prior iDevice docks: AirPlay. We are nevertheless waiting around (and waiting around) to see in the event that Apple’s going to increase its certification program to permit third-party suppliers a chance to add in AirPlay video clip buffering, but for now, JBL’s benefiting from what is out there. The actual On Air Cellular AirPlay loudspeaker dock — that is delivery how to Best Buy as well as Apple Stores following becoming taunted a couple weeks back — has become good as well as official, allowing consumers in order to easily flow their iTunes library from Apple computers, Computers, iPhones, apple ipods or even iPads right to the pier. Apart from a rather unorthodox design (that ought to significantly help in order to scattering jams in a 360-degree fashion), you’ll also find one Liquid crystal display, digital FM radio, a built-in noisy alarms, DSP technology along with a amazing adapter that allows it to be put on because headwear at the next excellent. We are guessing that final bit helps make the $349.Ninety nine cost entirely much more palatable.

Chances are you’ve spent time and money building a assortment of photos, music, and other data. Usually the worth of this content is more than simply monetary, but additionally sentimental. Thursday is World Backup Day, an indication that you ought to probably secure your data before you decide to lose it. Get backed up today with Carbonite Online Backup.  Save by using this Carbonite Coupon.

The day was cooked up by a select few of Reddit users who wanted to remind people from the need for copying data as well as aid them along the way.

“Once a year isn’t frequent enough for backing up data,” Reddit user Edman274, among the World Backup Day creators, said on the website. “World Backup Day was created to spread awareness and also to get anyone who has never backed up data to begin. Once you learn how easy it’s, it can be done anytime you would like.”

The World Backup Day site also provides resources regarding how to backup data. It gives step-by-step options for three different manners of securing data: USB stick or external hard drive, DVD/CD-ROM/Blu-ray, or online backup.

“It’s a good idea to backup files regularly as well as in at least two separate places, just to be secure,” the group suggested.

There are a growing number of options for data storage in the cloud. Amazon recently debuted its cloud player music storage service. Google is also expected to launch an identical service, called Google Music. Additionally, Apple is said to be revamping its cloud-based storage service, MobileMe. Use our Carbonite Coupons to get backed up

However, it’s not the very best idea to assume that the digital submissions are safe in the cloud, which is what World Backup Day seeks to remind people.

3 years ago, Firefox 3 set the record for most downloads inside a 24-hour period, cracking 8 million and positioning itself like a viable option to Internet Explorer.

Firefox 4 released today to the general public in particular after 12 public betas, two release candidates, and nearly a year of development, faces a hugely different landscape. (Download Firefox 4 here for Windows, Mac, and Linux.) Microsoft’s Ie continues to be dominant browser. And in under three years, a significant chunk from the browser market has had a shine to relative newcomer Google Chrome.

Mozilla flips the switch from version 3.6.15 to version 4 as Firefox possesses a lot more than 400 million active users. (Mozilla has opened a download tracker at glow.mozilla.org.) The new version from the browser sports several massive changes, including a radically redesigned interface, significantly faster browsing speeds, strong support for that still-in-development HTML5 and other “future-Web” tech, and competitive features like synchronization, restart-less add-ons, and tab grouping. You can read the official CNET reviews of Firefox 4 in the Download.com pages for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Browser speed remains an essential point of comparison. But as the five major browsers allow us over the past year, their speed differences have grown to be more muddled. For instance, Mozilla noted that after Firefox 3 was released, it took “60 milliseconds to alter Gmail from showing one message to another with Firefox 3… compared with 413 milliseconds for IE 7 and 227 for Firefox 2.”

Current browser benchmarks that look only at JavaScript place them all within the same ballpark now, so the point of comparison has begun to shift to graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware acceleration. This allows the browser to shove certain rendering tasks to the computer’s graphics card, freeing up CPU resources while making page rendering and animations load faster. These tasks include composition support, rendering support, and desktop compositing, and there are few benchmarks that are capable of testing it.

One interesting publicly available benchmark may be the new JSGameBench from Facebook, which looks to test HTML5 in real-world gaming situations. The Firefox 4 beta was the fastest tested without WebGL and was the second fastest with it. Mozilla’s own tests put Firefox 4 at three to six times faster than Firefox 3.6.

Mozilla remains a leader in developing the Web, and interestingly that role has led it to attend on building out one of the more interesting minor features in Firefox 4. The new do-not-track feature supports a header on Internet sites that tells sites and advertisers not to track you, which means you don’t see targeted ads as often. Ie also supports the header, and it includes robust, configurable support for blocking ad trackers; Firefox 4 relies on add-ons like AdBlock Plus to achieve the list blocking.

Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox development at Mozilla, explained throughout a conversation a week ago at CNET’s San Francisco office that Mozilla is much more concerned with the bigger problem of why ads were targeted to begin with.

“Beyond blocking the ad loads, which you can do with add-ons, this is a business-social trust situation between sites and users. We need individuals to vote with their feet, or at least wish to have that conversation. We’ve spoken to numerous advertisers. By and large, they want to be good citizens here,” Nightingale said. As a current solution, though, which makes users entirely dependent on advertiser behavior, that is prone to fall short of what individuals want.

Another security repair in Firefox 4 fixes a hole that affected all browsers until last summer–a vulnerability so old that it was mentioned in the documentation for CSS2 about ten years ago. The exploit is a CSS sniffing history attack, in which malicious code can access your browser history by manipulating link appearance and elegance. What made the bug so desperately to repair is that the simplest solution–to prevent all link style manipulation–would end up like throwing the baby out using the bathwater, Nightingale had said within an interview at Black Hat 2010.

Nightingale also addressed other changes in Firefox 4 as supplying the feature in question without playing fast and loose with a user’s data. Firefox 4 removes the “lucky” automatic search results from the location bar’s search functionality because Mozilla had “concerns about sending a lot of private data in the location bar to search engines. We will get there,” he added, “but as with Sync you want to do it right.”

Sync is another new feature in Firefox 4 and is possibly one of the best implementations from the feature across the competition. Not only can you synchronize your data across traditional PC versions of Firefox, but you may also sync your bookmarks, passwords, preferences, history, and tabs with your Android or Maemo-running phone or tablet. However, Sync debuted in 2008 as an add-on coupled with a notably rough beginning. Fortunately for user data, so it used to delete seemingly when needed, Mozilla fixed the problems by using it.

Combined with the Android support, Sync gets two security features right. The first is that Firefox encrypts your data before sending it over an encrypted link with its servers, where it remains encrypted. Mozilla said hello couldn’t access the data even when somebody there desired to. The second is you have the option of setting up your own personal sync server. In an age by which private data stored by corporations gets hacked and stolen with shocking regularity, setting up an individual sync server is an excellent method to ensure that you bear the responsibility for your own personel data. The only issue with the feature is that it doesn’t yet support syncing add-ons, an issue that’s a minimum of partially tied to Firefox’s nascent restart-less add-on network, also debuting in version 4.

Other big changes in Firefox 4 include a minimalist interface having a condensed menu button that closely resembles that of Opera 11 and Chrome 10; app tabs; tab groups for keeping tabs organized; an overhauled add-on manager that also supports restart-less add-ons; and expansive support for HTML5, CSS3, and also the aforementioned hardware acceleration for Direct2D and Direct3D on Windows, OpenGL on Mac, and XRender on Linux.

One “future-Web” tech that Nightingale said probably won’t come to Firefox before version 5 is support for WebSocket. “The specification had security problems, and then we turned them back,” he said. He added that users can enable it at will through the “websocket” options in about:config.

Even though it took a lot more than two and a half years for Firefox 4 to get here, expect that point to get axed like a tree inside a rainforest for Firefox 5. Mozilla intends to put Firefox with an accelerated release schedule, much like Google has been doing with Chrome.

It’s really no secret that Netflix has grand plans to expand its global footprint that now feeds media to some 20 million North American subscribers. Hell, the organization was boasting of the “significant dollars” allocated to its 2011 international expansion plans just four months ago. While nothing’s official yet, we’ve unearthed several tantalizing openings posted to the Netflix job site during the last few days that could point to an imminent launch. Notably, Netflix’s customer service answering services company in Hillsboro Oregon is preparing to grow its scope of operations beyond North America. Two new job postings for a Training Supervisor and Quality Assurance Analyst both mention the need to get ready for “rapid” international expansion and “will support a particular country / region outside of The united states.” The Training Supervisor has been hired specifically to teach customer service reps in preparation for that future international growth. Neflix is looking for fluency in English along with Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian and European), and Spanish (Latin American and European), leaving things pretty wide open regarding the countries targeted for initial launch.

We can say for certain that Netflix had plans to launch in the united kingdom long ago in 2004 — plans which were ultimately scrapped in order to focus on its core US business (and later Canada). But when not the UK only then do we should a minimum of expect to see Netflix target the European continent first if your statement related to CEO Reed Hastings from long ago in January of 2010 still rings true: “the big marketplace for Hollywood content (following the U.S.) is Europe…Third is Asia. Fourth is the rest of the world.” Can’t let Amazon possess the sell to itself now can we Reed?

Amazon recently introduced their awesome new Cloud Drive service, which was strangely without iOS support. Weblog TUAW discovered an easy, albeit imperfect, way to listen to your music from Mobile Safari.

Amazon’s Cloud Drive service doesn’t support Mobile Safari, so you can’t stream music quite like you’d on your pc. However, if you’re just itching to hear a particular song that isn’t on your iPhone, iPad or ipod touch, you can stream single songs from Cloud Drive quickly and easily.

Head to the Cloud Drive interface (not the Cloud Player interface) and use the sidebar to navigate to the track you need to pay attention to. Most of the main window will not work, but once you see the track indexed by it, just hit the check box next to it and hit the “download” button. Whether it’s an MP3 file, Safari will stream it in its own little window, not a problem.

Unfortunately, this method is far from perfect. You have to do this for each song you want to listen to, and it fails with AAC files, just MP3. Still, it’s an improvement on nothing, and until we get some kind of iOS support from Amazon, it’ll do inside a pinch.

Here’s an interesting thing about Google’s new +1 tool, which lets users vote up search results. At launch, Google is keeping recommendations from the new +1 voting tool out of its ranking algorithm, even though it does consider shares on services like Twitter as a signal in the core search engine results.

Plus-one-ing (or nevertheless, you write that!) a link doesn’t make it appear higher searching results-yet. The search result turns up within the same order it might have, annotated with information about people who have +1′ed it.

Having seen plenty of confusion relating to this, we accompanied with a Google spokeswoman this morning to talk through just how this works.

Eventually, the master plan would be to consider +1 votes as one of many signals in Google rankings, she said. But right now, while +1 activity is simply getting started, Google is excluding it from the ranking algorithm. Simply that’s because early +1 users could warp search engine results before there’s enough data.

Update: This topic appears to be confusing even at Google. Google just clarified via email that +1′s from people in users’ social circles is going to be included as a signal within their personalized results, although not overall search engine rankings.

Currently, Google does use Twitter shares to help rank core search engine results. Which was part of its big social search launch in February.

So for now, sharing a link on Twitter counts for additional within the Google search algorithm than +1′ing it on Google.

Though Google may not re-rank yet depending on +1, people who join take part in the trial will begin seeing +1′s using their friends and also the rest of +1 testers immediately.

So they won’t crowd the page, if a link has been +1′ed more times of computer has been shared on Twitter, the +1′s can have up, the spokeswoman said. If there has been more Twitter shares than +1′s, those will show up.

Google does not yet count public Facebook “likes” as a social search signal, although it plans to, Director of Product Management Mike Cassidy told NetworkEffect earlier this month. At the time, Cassidy maintained that the omission of Facebook data wasn’t because of tension between Google and Facebook over personal data sharing. Rather, he explained, it was a “technical issue” that might be resolved soon.