The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has directed all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to prevent internet users from using technology that would allow them to privately browse the internet. A PTA spokesman said that the directive was intended only to stop militants from using secure Internet connections to communicate with each other, but admitted that this could only be done by preventing all Internet users in Pakistan from using virtual private networks ( VPNs), The Express Tribune reports. A VPN allows two or more users to share data without letting anyone else monitor it.Meanwhile, the PTA has become increasingly aggressive in blocking websites in the country. The entire website of Rolling Stone, a pop-culture and politics magazine, has been blocked since July. The PTA spokesman confirmed that the website has been blocked, but said he did not know why it had been done so.
A source at an Islamabad-based ISP said that they had been issued a notice to block a blog post by a writer, Matt Taibbi, on the Rolling Stone website, adding that however, ISPs are unable to block specific URLs on websites and have to block the whole domain.
The post in question was titled 'Pakistan's insane military spending up there with America's,' which quoted a column written by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times that criticised the Pakistan Army for having a vast budget that was used only to guard against India, and not to fight militants.
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IBM is working on a 120PB (petabyte) drive, which quite definitely is the largest we've ever heard of. To put this into perspective, most people buy 750GB drives these days, the IBM drive can store 120 million GB in comparison. That's enough space to store 24 million HD movies. IBM is attempting this feat by putting together 200,000 drives. According to MIT's Technology Review, this large array of drives requires 2 petabytes of space to just keep track of all file names and folder structures. We'd imagine keeping an index and linking so many drives together would also be a nightmare. The drives are lined up horizontally and to keep temperatures down, they are cooled using water rather than air. IBM's Bruce Hillsberg is aware that drive failures can wreak havoc with such large scale data systems. Data replication is being done to prevent data loss and the supercomputer responsible for handling the data is capable of running nonstop and without any performance loss even if a drive happens to fail. The entire system uses the GPFS file system, something that was also used in the IBM-Violin attempt at beating the 5GB/s file transfer speed barrier. 
Telecom regulator TRAI has asked leading telecom service providers, including Bharti airtel, Vodafone and Idea, to justify their decision to hike mobile tariffs by up to 20 per cent. "We have sent letters to all the companies which have recently hiked tariffs seeking justifications for the reasons as to why they have hiked the tariffs and the reasons for the same. The last one gone to Reliance Communications," TRAI Chairman J S Sarma said on the sidelines of an event. Recently, companies like Bharti airtel, Idea Cellular, Vodafone and Reliance Communications raised tariffs for their services by about 20 per cent in most operating circles. Most of the companies cited inflationary pressure in the country as being responsible for the tariff hike. Airtel had raised the tariffs for its 'Advantage' and 'Freedom' pre-paid tariff packages, which are based on per minute billing, to 60 paise per minute for local and STD mobile-to-mobile calls. Earlier, it was 50 paise per minute in this category. "Telecom is probably the only industry where, despite increasing inflation, tariffs have been falling unabated. Continuously declining margins, high 3G and BWA auction prices, constrained spectrum and rural roll-out aspirations leave us with little choice but to make some price corrections," Bharti airtel had said in a statement. 
Software updates are pretty common and there're also firmware upgrades available for everything from motherboards to cameras to even phones. However, it's not very often that you hear about a software update for a processor, and definitely not one that speeds up the CPU. Some of Intel's Sandy Bridge models will be able to operate at slightly faster speeds once the update is applied. The models to be upgraded are - Core i3 2312M, Core i3 2101 and the Pentium G622. With the updates, they'll operate at faster frequencies and will be offered more cache. Intel claims that with these updates, users should be able to notice a performance boost of roughly 10 to 23 percent depending on the kind of application. The question many are asking is that if the processors were able to operate at faster speeds, why didn't Intel set them to those speeds during the time of launch. The step is being looked upon as a marketing gimmick. The same performance could be achieved by users even without the update, if they chose to overclock the processors. As of now, it looks like the update software will only run on the Windows 7 operating system. 
A recently launched Chrome plugin called Music+ is sure to tide you over until that glorious day comes. Music+ is a plugin that was developed during the Echo Nest Social Music App Challenge. It uses the music intelligence service's API (as well as Facebook's API) to make it easy to find and listen to music while surfing the web. Simply install the plugin in Chrome, and start discovering music. At its simplest, you can pull up a toolbar in which you can search for playable music to listen to while browsing (courtesy of Rdio and MP3s on blogs). Those songs can be shared with friends on Facebook via message, or they can be posted as a playable stream on your wall. Start surfing, and the app gets interesting. If you go to a blog and highlight a band name and right-click, you can listen to songs by that artist instantly. However, the app really shines when used with Facebook. You'll have to disable secure browsing in order for it to work (which is a pain), but once you do, every artist on the site will have a "Play" button next to their name, allowing you to listen to tracks by that artist right within Facebook. You can then surf around the site as usual, without having to stay on the page to continue listening. The app also adds a column to the left of any band Page containing similar artists, an awesome addition when it comes to music discovery. It also allows you to add artists to your queue for later listening. All in all, this is an awesome app when it comes to facilitating music discovery. No more toggling over to YouTube or a music subscription service to check out a band while reading. It's all woven into the Facebook browsing experience. 
Google's $12.5 bn buy of Motorola Mobility might hurt Apple's ability to pressure the Android ecosystem and the iPhone maker may try to strike back by buying up more patent troves, Jefferies & Co said. The brokerage sees Nokia , InterDigital , and Research In Motion's patents as potential targets for Apple. Google has been under pressure to build a patent portfolio after losing out to Apple, Microsoft Corp and others in a recent auction of bankrupt Nortel's assets. Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility is an attempt by the Internet search giant to fend off increasingly aggressive legal attacks from rivals such as Apple. 
Yahoo! India, today announced the launch of "Movieplex", a video destination allowing users to enjoy licensed full-length movies for free through the Internet on demand. Yahoo! India will collaborate with movie production houses to bring numerous "Bollywood" movies online to users for a piracy-free, quality 
Google announced Monday morning that it will acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. Motorola is one of 39 manufacturers of handsets that use Google's Android operating system. Buying a hardware company is an unusual move for Google. The acquisition, Google said in a statement, "will enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem." Google CEO Larry Page expanded on what that might mean in a blog post. In addition to citing Motorola's home devices and video solutions business, Page references recent patent wars that Google believes to be anti-competitive. "The U.S. Department of Justice had to intervene in the results of one recent patent auction to 'protect competition and innovation in the open source software community' and it is currently looking into the results of the Nortel auction," Page writes. "Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google's patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies." Android will continue to be an open platform, and Motorola will continue to be run as a separate business, Page added. 
Firefox 6 is in the wild, with Mozilla making the code available for its latest browser despite not making an official launch statement. With Google's Chrome taking an increasingly large bite out of the market, Apple's Safari benefiting from the familiarity of users with iPhones and iPads and Microsoft having something of a browser renaissance of late, there is significant pressure on Firefox. Firefox 6 final is not officially out until Tuesday, but, according to The Register a blogger at TechnoBolt has outed the availability of the code for Linux, PC and Mac. Just to mix things up a little, Mozilla will release a beta version of its successor Firefox 7 and an early build of Firefox 8 on the same day, the first evidence of the company's decision to make incremental tweaks rather than sweeping changes for each browser. Mac, Windows and Linux versions of the software are available on the company's FTP, bringing improved HTML 5 handling. Also included in the latest browser is extended CSS support, better display of iFrames and a data management window to control the plundering of your personal data by websites. 
Google+ Inc's new social-networking service may grow to claim 22 per cent of online US adults in a year, passing Twitter Inc and LinkedIn Corp. to be the second- most-used social site after Facebook Inc, a survey found. Google+ has signed up 13 per cent of US adults and will add 9 percent over the next year, according to the survey from Bloomberg/YouGov. In the same period, Facebook will lose about 2 percentage points of US adults to keep 69 per cent of that population, while Twitter and LinkedIn continue to grow their portion of users. Started in late June, Google+ is growing faster than Facebook and MySpace Inc. did in their early days. The service, which lets people connect with and manage groups of friends on a website, gained about 25 million users worldwide in less than a month, estimates market researcher ComScore Inc Facebook has more than 750 million active users. "Google+ is tracing a path similar to Facebook's initial growth -- building excitement in a core group of early adopters," said Michael Nardis, head of YouGov investment products, in a statement about the survey. Katie Watson, a spokeswoman for Mountain View, California- based Google, declined to comment. Jonathan Thaw, a spokesman for Facebook, and Matt Graves, a spokesman for Twitter, also declined to comment. Bloomberg and London-based market researcher YouGov Plc polled 1,003 online US residents 18 and older from July 29 to August 2 for the survey. The results showed Twitter will add almost 3 percentage points of US adults online over the next year to claim 20 per cent of the population. LinkedIn will also have signed up 20 per cent of those people, after gaining almost 2 percentage points within the year, the survey found. Among survey respondents who had signed up for Google+, 45 per cent said they read content on the site every day, compared with Facebook's 62 per cent of users. Twitter has 42 per cent of its users return daily, while LinkedIn has 8 per cent. Google+ usage is likely to take away from the time people spend on Facebook, the survey found. Some 30 per cent of people who use both services said they plan to reduce the amount of time they spend on Facebook. Some 31 per cent of Google+ users polled said they have already abandoned their accounts or not written any posts yet on the site.