An Explosion at Apple Supplier in China, Foxconn, Kills Two Workers Putting Further Stress on iPad 2 Production

A huge blast took place at the Foxconn plant located in the Southwest of China this Friday evening, killing minimum two workers and leaving almost 16 wounded. Dark clouds of smoke were visible right after the blast took place in the building. Foxconn is the manufacture of Apple's largely demanded iPad 2 tablets. The Wall Street Journal published the official statement of Foxconn officials, as they declared that the situation is now under control, however, the cause of the blast remained unknown to them. Further in the statement, Foxconn said that "We are working with medical officials to provide treatment to the injured employees and we are working with government and law enforcement officials to contact the families of all employees affected by this tragedy,"

A video footage was revealed of the situation right after the blast by Sohu. The blast took place at precisely 7PM leading to a complete chaotic and panic struck scene at the site. The video displayed many workers, who were wearing surgical masks, running out of the building premises. M.I.C. Gadget’s reporter Herman Lai was very quick to arrive at the site and reported that the Chinese investigators are not considering the possibility of any human act to be involved which lead to the blast.

Al Gore's Current Accuses Sky Italia Had It Dropped Due To the Hiring Of Olberman

Cover of Al Gore

The former V.P. of Al Gore's Current TV cable network has blamed that Rupert Murdoch's Italian satellite TV Company has dropped the network in Italy because it had just employed Keith Olbermann, their liberal politics news anchor. Addressing these allegation News Corp, the father company of Sky Italia, has already declared that its disagreements with Current Italy are not related with any kind of politics but money. News Corp complained that it had to make such decision for Sky Italia since Current had proposed them to double the carriage fee.

In retaliation to this statement, the Vice Chairman of Current, Joel Hyatt, personally spoke on Thursday declaring that Current Italy had only made the proposal of increasing the its carriage by 2 euro cents per subscriber, i.e. 33 percent, due to its boost in viewer ratings in 2010. Hyatt also went on revealing that he had cordial negations with the C.E.O. of Sky Italia, Tom Mockridge, for agreeing to a timely renewal of the deal ahead of May 7 deadline, which was the expiry date of its previous agreement. Lastly, Hyatt straight forwardly claimed that "We were told by a very senior News Corp source that the order came from New York because we had hired Olbermann.”

James, the son of Rupert Murdoch, has been recently promoted to the post of Chief Operating Officer at News Corp's international operations and just moved to New York. While on the other hand, a Current TV spokesperson confirmed that Gore is still residing in Italy to make further appearances on talk shows for showing his sentiments against the decision.

CDC’s New Campaign Titled "Zombie Apocalypse" Gathers Record Breaking Page Views and Crashes the Website

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a blog post on its website regarding how to keep prepared for any "zombie apocalypse" in near future; it was a cheery attempt by the department to make more and more Americans to actually read about how to prepare for hurricanes. The blog post was so interesting that, owing to widely used social networks, it attracted record breaking internet traffic that the website even crashed, informed the department on Thursday. Originally the Zombie Apocalypse campaign was aimed to get support from social media, and a commendable effort of CDC's Public Health and Preparedness center to make more people aware of the upcoming start of hurricane season i.e. 1^st of June, 2011. CDC is a federal government health agency headquartered in Atlanta.

The popular blog post initiates writing: "There are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for." It goes on asserting "Take a zombie apocalypse for example. ... You may laugh now, but when it happens you'll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you'll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency." The blog was published only few days ahead of May 21, which is a predicted to be the “Judgment Day” by an evangelical broadcaster in California.

The spokesperson of CDC, Dave Daigle, stated on Thursday that "If you prepare for the zombie apocalypse, you'll be prepared for all hazards." The blog post goes very deep and identifies that the word ‘zombie’ is derived from voodoo practice of spirit possession, where the victims are stripped of consciousness. The post mentions that the ‘Zombies culture’ became popular, after immense success of the block buster horror movies like the one of George Romero “Night of the Living Dead." This movie was released in 1968 and showed the flesh-eating zombies wander about in the eastern seaboard after a disastrous radioactive contamination.

Sony Suspends Its Website Pages after Discovering Security Loophole

Sony Corp has suspended its website pages it brought online to help retrieve the user accounts of millions of users which were affected by April's data theft incident. Sony claimed that it had found a "security hole" soon after bringing the website pages online. According to the spokesman of Sony, Dan Race, the company had soon discovered the security hole on its webpage which could have let the hackers, who had stolen the data previously, to use their stolen data and access the accounts of the users.

Image via WikipediaRace elaborated saying "If I had your email and your birth date I could have potentially got access to your account." Consequently, soon after making the site online on Wednesday, Sony took the PlayStation Network password reset page down tentatively. The Qriocity music recovery page also faced the same treatment. Race declared that as soon as they fix the problem, Sony will bring up those pages on the website.

WordPress Does a Complete Makeover of Its iOS App, Also adding Quick Photos & Analytics

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Automattic has recently done a complete makeover of its WordPress iOS app, which have been minutely improved fixing many bugs along with the addition of adding two new features; analytics and photo-sharing. This latest version 2.8 of the app has fixed precisely 31 major bugs of the previous version, successfully eradicating almost three quarter of the errors which led the app to crash frequently before. Moreover all the issues related to the external keyboard setting and adding categories on the iPad have also been reviewed and mostly fixed.

Further two new features have also been added in the new app in its latest version, namely Quick Photo button and a Stats section. The Quick Photo feature allows the user to use the camera from within the app and capture a photo. The user can than quickly compose a blog post around it and publish in a minute. This feature has already been integrated in the PicPosterous, which is the iPhone app WordPress competitor Posterous. Even though the updated version of WordPress app is for all iOS devices, this new feature will be exclusively available for iPhone apps only.

Sony’s “Welcome Back” Package Offers Users Many Free Games, Movies and More

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After a month long wait, the highly criticized Sony's PlayStation Network has returned most of its features back online. Since the gamers were not able to interact online in internet gaming for a month, almost every user is equally anxious to log in their accounts, change their passwords, and resume the well deserved online gaming they have been patiently waiting for. In addition to that, the "Welcome Back" package of Sony also adds to the attraction; it was announced to compensate and make up for the downtime to all its users.

The “Welcome Back” package has awarded the effected users several offers for free games, movies and more. The PlayStation 3 users have been offered to choose any of the two free games it has put online, out of the list of five games in the “Welcome Package.” These five games are noted to be: Dead Nation, Infamous, Little Big Planet, Super Stardust HD and Wipeout HD. While for the PSP users, it has offered a list of four games, which have been put online for free, to select any two games and return to gaming. The list of four PSP games in the “Welcome Package” includes Little Big Planet PSP, ModNation Racers, Pursuit Force and Killzone Liberation.

New Lady Gaga album leaks ahead of May 23 Release

Lady Gaga's extremely anticipated latest album, titled "Born This Way," has found its way on the Internet on Wednesday i.e. five days earlier than its official release date of 23^rd May, 2011.

                                   Image via Wikipedia

The complete album, with all 14 songs, was exclusively streamed on Wednesday in Europe through an online website to its wide range of readers of Metro, which is a London-based free newspaper. Lady Gaga also guest-edited the newspaper edition published on Monday, as a part of her promotional deal for her new album. On the same day, i.e. Wednesday the 18^th, the music streaming service Spotify streamed the album for its premium subscribers of Sweden, Norway, Spain, the Netherlands and Finland.

It was not too late after that, when all the songs of her album had been pirated for free preview on the worldwide web. This also gave the opportunity for her native country fans to not only hear all the songs but also review them online. Four singles of the third Lady Gaga album were already released in the U.S., as its title track sold a record breaking one million copies within five days making it the most fastest-selling single ever in iTunes history.

As for the reviews, Rolling Stone magazine published an elaborated track by track review this Wednesday, asserting that regardless of the leaks Lady Gaga had "still managed to pack in some surprises". While Entertainment Weekly referred to the album as "an inconsistent blend of icy techno-pop and greeting-card empowerment that's more a triumph of production than songwriting." Dan Martin, representing a British music website NME.com, spoke about album in these words: "It’s like a relentless torrent of heavy metal rave pop." Martin further mentioned that "Born This Way" is "an exercise in the pushing of everything to its ultimate degree. And for all the black, white and silver, it passes that test with flying colors."

Schmdit Warns the Government; Anti-Piracy Laws Will Have Disastrous Effect on Freedom of Speech

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Google's recently acclaimed chairman, Eric Schmidt, gave a warning to the government regarding their intentions of blocking access to targeted illegal filesharing websites, he cautioned them that this action will have "disastrous precedent" for freedom of speech. He was addressing the media after his keynote speech at Google's Big Tent conference, which took place on Wednesday in London. Schmidt mentioned that Google well definitely attempt to restrict access to the Pirate Bay, and other "cyberlocker" websites, which are considered to be distributing illegal downloading. It is already a part of governments plan to tackle this online piracy with controversial methods like Digital Economy Act.

Schmidt stated that "If there is a law that requires DNSs [domain name systems, the protocol that allows users to connect to websites], to do X and its passed by both houses of congress and signed by the president of the United States and we disagree with it then we would still fight it." He also added "If it's a request the answer is we wouldn't do it, if it's a discussion we wouldn't do it."

Schmidt has assumed the office of Google's executive chairman just last month, as he had remained its chief executive for almost ten years. He labeled this act of the government to be very similar to the acts of the Chinese government to be placing restrictions over various websites. He declared "I would be very, very careful if I were a government about arbitrarily [implementing] simple solutions to complex problems.” He went on saying "So, 'let's whack off the DNS'. Okay, that seems like an appealing solution but it sets a very bad precedent because now another country will say 'I don't like free speech so I'll whack off all those DNSs' – that country would be China.”

He seemed highly concerned as he said "It doesn't seem right. I would be very, very careful about that stuff. If [the UK government] do it the wrong way it could have disastrous precedent setting in other areas."