Welcome to the Morning Briefing for 29th April 2012, where we highlight the tech stories from across the web that broke while you were sleeping and what we are watching here at techgeek.com.au.
Here’s what we are watching:
- Kim Dotcom has been caught up in a political scandal that is plaguing the National-led coalition in New Zealand, with allegations that a minister may have broken election laws by not disclosing Dotcom’s donation to his unsuccessful mayoral campaign. We have more on our story here.
- Windows Phone is rumoured to be getting a ‘boost’ with US carriers after it was reported that they are getting “sick of taking orders from Apple”. While it still has a long way to go, the fact that Verizon is working with them and AT&T pushing more promotion for the Lumia 800, it might still has life in it.
- Meanwhile, a little known device known as ‘Microsoft Virtual’ has appeared, and speculation is rife that it could be Windows Phone 7 virtual machine for Windows 8. If that turns out to be true – then get ready to run those apps from your phone to your tablet (though, hopefully, there will be some universal set of code so you can design for the two screens)
- An FCC investigation released by Google has revealed that staff knew about the Wi-Fi sniffing problem, according to TechCrunch. Google was eventually fined by the FCC – not because of the sniffing, but because it was being obstructive in the FCC’s investigation.
- Copyright troll ‘World Digital Rights’ – we even had no idea who they are – has caused problems for an American metal band known as All Shall Perish. The company sued 80 IP addresses on behalf of the band. One problem: the company wasn’t acting on behalf of the band, nor the record labels. The company is a bit of an enigma, since the only records we could find is the apparent contact of the company.
- A bug that let Firefox users easily reset passwords of other users’ Hotmail accounts has been fixed in a day – good going Microsoft. At least they have patched it after being told about it, unlike some other companies (Apple)
- And the Samsung Galaxy S III could be a dual-core phone only in the US. Despite announced that a new quad-core Exynos 4 Quad processor would be in the phone, the US edition will likely support LTE, but will have to use the Qualcomm chips. I say patent laws is the reason.