Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

Tim Berners-Lee urges government to stop the snooping bill Exclusive: Extension of surveillance powers ' a destruction of human rights ' Ian Katz guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 17 April 2012 16.34 EDT The government ' s controversial plans to allow intelligence agencies to monitor the internet use and digital communications of every person in the UK suffered a fresh blow on Tuesday when the inventor of the world wide web warned that the measures were dangerous and should be dropped. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who serves as an adviser to the government on how to make public data more accessible, says the extension of the state ' s surveillance powers would be a "destruction of human rights" and would make a huge amount of highly intimate information vulnerable to theft or release by corrupt officials. In an interview with the Guardian, Berners-Lee said: "The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor internet activity is amazing. "You get to...

Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google's Sergey Brin Exclusive:   Threats range from governments trying to control citizens to the rise of Facebook and Apple-style 'walled gardens' ·            o       ·          Ian Katz ·          guardian.co.uk ,   Sunday 15 April 2012 13.07 EDT Sergey Brin says he and Google co-founder Larry Page would not have been able to create their search giant if the internet was dominated by Facebook. The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the   internet   three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder   Sergey Brin . In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were "very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world". "I am more worried ...

Suspected Anonymous Hacker Busted By FBI — Thanks To A Racy Photo April 13, 2012 4:22 PM The photograph that the FBI used to track Higinio O. Ochoa, that was posted on the Twitter account of @MissAnonFatale, allegedly Ochoa’s girlfriend (Photo Credit: Twitter) HOUSTON (CBS Houston) - The evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigations gathered against an alleged Galveston hacker didn’t come from a techno-chase through the expansive Internet. Instead, the FBI used the information embedded in a photograph of his girlfriend’s breasts. Higinio O. Ochoa, 30, is a Linux administrator by day, but by night he’s accused of being part of the group “CabinCr3w,” an affiliate of the hacktivist organization Anonymous. According to Gizmodo, Ochoa allegedly used the Twitter handle @Anonw0rmer to link to a site boasting personal information on law enforcement officials, along with a picture of a young women in a low-cut shirt that read, “PwNd by w0rmer & CabinCr3w.” The FBI found the image ...

By Hana Stewart-Smith | April 13, 2012, 5:33am PDT Summary: Temporary blackouts leave China’s Internet users unable to access many Chinese Web sites as well as other unblocked foreign sites. Chinese Telecoms deny any network issues. At approximately 11am local time yesterday, Internet users around China reported significant Internet blackouts. Not only were they unable to access some Chinese sites, but also many foreign Web sites that had not previously been blocked. The issue was not isolated to China. Web users in Hong Kong and Japan also reported issues with accessing Chinese sites. A number of explanations immediately came to light, with the most viable cause being the 8.7 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia on Wednesday, that might have damaged undersea cables. However, reports from China’s major telecommunication companies — China Telecom and Unicom — suggest that this was not the case. China Telecom confirmed that the earthquake had not interfered with the underwater cables in...

By Zack Whittaker | April 11, 2012, 3:25am PDT Summary: Microsoft’s Windows Phone is in trouble. While HTC and Samsung have fallback plans, so does Nokia. Can Microsoft continue its lead as the third leg in the mobile two-horse race? Microsoft was resting much of its efforts in Windows Phone on the Nokia Lumia 900, and Nokia’s stake in the project was vital to its future smartphone building success. Described by one colleague as the “only good phone” to come out of the Microsoft–Nokia joint venture, its flagship phone was hit with a critical bug, the Windows Phone marketshare is slipping, and the Windows brand itself is waning in the wake of Apple’s success. Fortune described the Lumia 900 as a “sexy, award-winning smartphone is going on sale Sunday at half the price of the iPhone, and it’s launching on a blazing fast 4G network.” “What’s the catch?” they asked. “Two things: The phone, called the Lumia 900, is made by Nokia — and it’s running Microsoft’s Windows Phone software.” ...

By Noah Feldman Apr 8, 2012 3:00 PM PT To be the swing voter, you have to be willing to swing. In the last three weeks, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has shown how it’s done. First he wrote the majority opinion in a landmark 5-4 case establishing a constitutional right to an adequate lawyer in plea-bargaining negotiations. Liberals were enthused. Yet in his tough questioning during the Obamacare arguments, he shook up the conventional wisdom that mandatory coverage would be upheld comfortably. Liberals were not enthused. Then, as a coda, he wrote the majority opinion in a 5-4 case allowing jails to strip-search anyone being put into the general prison population -- even without suspicion, and even after the most trivial misdemeanor arrest. The same liberals who loved him in March are prepared to loathe him in April. What principle, if any, explains Kennedy’s vote in the strip-search case? Kennedy-watchers know that he is deeply sympathetic to arguments based on human di...

April 4, 2012 6:18 PM Ada Poon, Dan Pivonka, Fantastic Voyage, scientists, Stanford STANFORD (CBS13) - In the 1966 film “Fantastic Voyage,” a submarine, full of scientists, is shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the bloodstream of a seriously wounded diplomat. Forty-six years later, the idea sounds less far fetched. In a Stanford lab, engineers are perfecting their fantastic voyage. “And then, we can make it smaller,” said electrical engineer Professor Ada Poon, Ph.D. Poon says smaller is the name of the game. “We have been in this project for more than four years. So we encounter a lot of obstacles along the way and then we solve them one by one, said Poon. Instead of a battery, which takes up lots of space, the device that will be used for travel is powered wirelessly with electromagnetic radio waves. “The prototype we built is 3mm by 4mm. You can see here that we have a 2mm by 2mm receiving antennae,” said Dan Pivonka, PhD. The result is a new class of medical devi...

By Zack Whittaker | April 11, 2012, 3:25am PDT Summary: Microsoft’s Windows Phone is in trouble. While HTC and Samsung have fallback plans, so does Nokia. Can Microsoft continue its lead as the third leg in the mobile two-horse race? Microsoft was resting much of its efforts in Windows Phone on the Nokia Lumia 900, and Nokia’s stake in the project was vital to its future smartphone building success. Described by one colleague as the “only good phone” to come out of the Microsoft–Nokia joint venture, its flagship phone was hit with a critical bug, the Windows Phone marketshare is slipping, and the Windows brand itself is waning in the wake of Apple’s success. Fortune described the Lumia 900 as a “sexy, award-winning smartphone is going on sale Sunday at half the price of the iPhone, and it’s launching on a blazing fast 4G network.” “What’s the catch?” they asked. “Two things: The phone, called the Lumia 900, is made by Nokia — and it’s running Microsoft’s Windows Phone software.” ...

11 April 2012 Last updated at 17:34 ET     Steve Jobs described Apple's strategy as an "aikido move" Technology giant Apple and major book publishers are being sued by the US Department of Justice over the pricing of e-books. The US accuses Apple and Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon and Schuster and Penguin of colluding over the prices of e-books they sell. This lawsuit is over the firms' move to the agency model where publishers rather than sellers set prices. But Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon and Schuster have already settled. The case will proceed against Apple, Macmillan and Penguin "for conspiring to end e-book retailers' freedom to compete on price", the Justice Department said. "As a result of this alleged conspiracy, we believe that consumers paid millions of dollars more for some of the most popular titles," Attorney General Eric Holder said. 'Effectuate their conspiracy' "To effectuate their conspirac...

Forget a chip in your forehead – the ‘mark of the beast’ is the cell phone Paul Joseph Watson Infowars.com Tuesday, April 10, 2012 The development of a new microchip for cell phones that knows the user’s location to within a few centimeters confirms the fact that contrary to biblical fears about mandatory implantable microchips, people have willingly exchanged their privacy for convenience and that the cell phone itself is the de facto “mark of the beast”. “Broadcom has just rolled out a chip for smart phones that promises to indicate location ultra-precisely, possibly within a few centimeters, vertically and horizontally, indoors and out,” reports MIT Technology Review. “In theory, the new chip can even determine what floor of a building you’re on, thanks to its ability to integrate information from the atmospheric pressure sensor on many models of Android phones. The company calls abilities like this “ubiquitous navigation,” and the idea is that it will enable a new kind of e-com...

APRIL 05, 2012 Firefox and Google have compelling reason to develop for Metro: Microsoft stacked the deck in the way Windows 8 handles default browsers By   Woody Leonhard   |   InfoWorld Firefox and Google have a vested interest in coming up with a Metro version of their browsers. As Firefox architect Brian Bondy   puts it , "If a browser does not support Metro, it is seriously at risk of losing the default browser status, and therefore significant   market share ." Why? Because Microsoft has stacked the deck. Here's how it works. Just as in Windows 7, you need to set a default browser in Windows 8. In Windows 7, the default browser handles all the things you would expect a browser to handle: links in email messages and documents, rendering HTML files, the usual browser shtick. Windows 8 is considerably more complicated because you have two versions of IE, one for the Legacy Desktop and one for the Metro Start screen. In Windows 8, if you choose IE as your def...

By Galen M. Gruman Created 2012-04-03 03:00AM Here we go again. The iPhone 5 will have a large screen more like that of the Android flagship, the Galaxy Nexus [1]. Or maybe it won't. According to all the gossip, it will have an LTE 4G radio, just like the new iPad [2]. As always, the rumor mill is a mix of highly suspect blogger fantasies and "duh" predictions, such as the inclusion of 4G. But let me be the first to tell you that whatever the next iPhone features, it won't be the name "iPhone 5." I predict that the iPhone 4S [9] is the last numbered iPhone, and the next model will simply be the iPhone. Apple long ago dropped version numbers for its Mac and iPod hardware. The Apple TV never got them in the first place. The latest iPad drops the numbering for that product line. All that's left is the iPhone, and you can bet it too will join the versionless set. The reason is simple: There's no need for numbers. The Mac and iPod are mature product l...