North Korea hacker threat grows as cyber unit grows: defector

It has been alleged that North Korea is secretly polishing its best university graduates to become computer geniuses, even by sending them abroad for further training just as their plan to enlarge its cyber warfare. It was revealed by a defector this Wednesday as he highlighted the previous cyber attacks by North and the amplified risk right today.

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The South has previously alleged the North for being responsible for a series of computer hack attacks this year, one of which was an "unprecedented act of cyber terror" in April that took down the entire computer network of the most important South Korean bank. Addressing a seminar on cyber terrorism in the South, Kim Heung-kwang, an official stated: "North Korea last year raised the status of its cyber warfare unit under the Reconnaissance General Bureau and increased the number of troops in the unit from 500 to about 3,000."

Kim is a runaway from the North, as he left the country in 2003 but now heads a defectors' group called North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity. Kim had been a professor at different colleges of North, so according to his sources, he claims that "these prodigies are provided with the best environment, and if they graduate with top grades, their parents in the provinces are given the opportunity to live in Pyongyang." He also added that "after studying at local universities, these students are given the special privilege of continuing their studies abroad."

Many analysts and other prominent figures have already alerted the North to discontinue any unconventional attacks it has been carrying against the South. The restrains between the countries are also tightened by several traditional military assaults like the shelling of a South Korean island last year which killed four people. The South has now publically warned that if ‘Pyongyang’ launches any other military assault next, it will strike back with nothing less than air power and bombs.

Furthermore, South Korea has also drafted a defense white paper earlier this year which gives formal warning that in case of anymore cyber attacks from the North it will retaliate in same capacity. The threat from North has definitely increased, but now the South also claims that it has become more intelligent and virulent. Just last month, the South accused the North for being the mastermind behind the computer crash at Nonghyup bank which affected millions of customers, despite the refutations by the North. South has also blamed the North Korean hackers for various hack attacks on government and corporate websites.

WSJ Releases Details of Apple’s Cloud Storage Service, iCloud - Set to Be Launched at WWDC

This Tuesday, unlike ever before, Apple made the announcement of the program line up for the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) scheduled next week.  The lineup revealed that the conference will include much-anticipated cloud storage service, named iCloud, along with iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion. Further news regarding iCloud has been published by Wall Street Journal which claims that Apple’s agreements with most music labels are a success. iCloud is fundamentally going to be a digital musical locker, quite akin to its rival services like Amazon’s Cloud Player and Google Music. Whereas WSJ reports that the distinguishing feature of Apple’s service will be the benefits of getting the music labels to sign deals, as it will consequently make it easier for users to access their libraries.

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Both rival services, Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player, currently make the users manually upload any song they want in their online locker, making the task of uploading complete music libraries a very hectic and tedious job. While Amazon still lets any songs bought from online Amazon store to be added to Cloud Player library automatically, the songs and libraries before the activation of Cloud Player account still need to be uploaded one by one. Whereas, WSJ has disclosed that Apple will, due to the signings with the music labels, allow its users to simply use the “scan and match” feature. This will let the users’ iTunes library to be scanned for all song files, and the ones recognized by the music labels will be automatically given access to from the Apple’s server. This will release the task of uploading entire libraries to the servers.

Sprint Submits Its Official Request to FCC of Blocking AT&T Deal with T-Mobile USA

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Sprint Nextel has finally submitted a formally request to the authorities pleading them to ban the deal of AT&T Inc's acquisition of T-Mobile USA in exchange for $39 billion. The official request stated that this deal "has no public interest benefit" and asserted that it will do nothing but hinder the competitive environment, regardless of whether there are conditions put to the deal or not. Sprint has been condemning this deal prominently because if the deal is done, it will form a new mobile operating leader in the country. The report specifically pointed out that even if FCC puts the condition on AT&T to divest its assets, even than this deal should not be approved.

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The official statement of Sprint was submitted on Tuesday which was the deadline to submit applications against AT&T to FCC. The report stated that "the proposed transaction would produce no tangible public interest benefits and would impose serious anti-competitive harms that cannot be remedied through divestitures or conditions."

On the other hand, AT&T declared in a statement that it still has the support of many groups, which include "community, civic and minority organizations," along with 13 governors. In order to put this deal into practice, AT&T needs the approval of FCC and Justice Department. AT&T has stated the chief reason for this acquisition, is to acquire T-Mobile USA's spectrum, which it needs to expand high-speed services along with improving its network performance. Denying the claims, Sprint stated that AT&T has no lack of spectrum. In fact Sprint also added that AT&T's problem is that it has "simply failed to upgrade or invest sufficiently in its network."

Court Declares That EPIC and Other Sidelined Privacy Group Should Also Be Distributed the Money of Google’s Settlement

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It has been recently accepted by a U.S. judge that in respect to the previous decision of settling over Google's Buzz social network issue, an Internet privacy group, EPIC, was left with no proper reason, hence it is now rewarded $500,000. EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, was previously ignored and not enlisted in the deal finalized by the court and implemented by the Federal Trade Commission last year. The case asserted that Buzz actually puts the privacy of Gmail users in great risk. Google finally made a settlement with FTC in March, 2011, and arranged to pay the fine to the listed independent privacy audit firms.

Last year, Google also had to agree to resolve another separately filed lawsuit, registered by a complaint from a Gmail user. A part of the deal negotiated and agreed at that time, stated that more than $6 million will be distributed among the major groups which were supporting Internet privacy issues. This list of the group did not include EPIC, which later took Google to court again and filed a legal claim against the announced decision. EPIC, along with few other gathered groups, asserted that Google has cleverly made the deal to channel most of the funds to the same groups which already "receive support from Google for lobbying, consulting, or similar services."

Google’s former CEO and Executive Chairman, Schmidt, Reviews Its Rivals Including Microsoft, Apple, Facebook at an Interview

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Eric Schmidt, Google’s co-founder and executive chairman, stated that his company is a member of “gang of four” kings leading the consumer technology. His list of these four kings including, except Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook hence it specifically ruled out Microsoft. He was giving an opening interview at the All Things D conference, held in southern California. Schmidt was very certain to ignore the world’s largest software company in the race of enterprise, he stated that Microsoft was “not driving the consumer revolution in the minds of consumers.” He explained that most of the profits of Microsoft are gained by the corporate sales and not from consumers. Schmidt did not even include the Xbox gaming system in the evaluation as he stated it was “not a platform at the computational level.”

Schmidt made it sound like a threat for Microsoft, that it should be afraid of Google and its enterprise space. Schmidt declared that we are all seeing “the death of IT as we know it,” as innumerable companies are taking the major step of moving their data from local servers to online servers. Microsoft is one of the great rivals of Google, in the race to release better cloud-based services in the market.

Schmidt had ambivalent words for Apple; Google has partnered Apple in some cases like search and maps, but it is also among its chief rivals in cases like mobile operating system. Schmidt admitted that Apple has very “beautiful products” in the market, but also stated that the company is a little too harshly on its iOS developers. He said, on the contrary, that the developers of Android relatively enjoy more freedom in the app development and releasing sector. He stated that “Apple’s model is the reverse of the Google model,” adding that “the Google model is, let the market decide.”

Apple Extends Its iWork Apps to the iPhone & iPod Touch Models Too

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It has been a complete year since the launch of Apple’s record breaking tablet iPad, along with which Apple also released its office suit titled iWork. It was not only released exclusively on iPad, but also remained exclusive to the tablet until now. Apple has now announced that it will be extending its office suite, which is actually a bundle of productive apps, to be compatible with the small screens of iPhone and iPod touch as well. The iWork apps of Apple, which include a Keynote, Pages and Numbers, will all be available for download in the App Store, at a retail price of $9.99 each. These apps are aimed to give the users elite experience, while using Apple’s smooth operating system and its multi-touch interface, to create presentations, write documents and calculate through spreadsheets. The only reason anticipated for why Apple only kept these apps exclusively for the iPad, and not to other iOS devices like iPhone and iPod, is that these features like advanced word processing would not have been so comfy to do on small screens like iPhone or iPod Touch.

The announcement by Apple today declared that it has now updated all the iWork apps to work in full compatibility on smaller screens, like the ones of iPod touch and iPhone. Even though each of Pages, Keynote and Numbers will be retailed for $9.99 on the iPhone App Store, it will still be free for download to the users who have already purchased these apps on their iPad in advance. Functionality and features of the apps are almost entirely the same as they are on the iPad.

If Twitter Releases a Built-In Photosharing Service, How Worse Can It Affect Services like Twitpic, Yfrog

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Rumor on the street is that Twitter is soon going to announce its own managed photosharing app, obviously being immensely sync able with Twitter, maybe even also integrated with the original microblogging service. Third-party photosharing services, like Twitpic and Yfrog, which were currently working closely to serve the needs of the large Twitter user base, are now seeing complete bad luck ahead, if the rumor is discovered to be true. Alexia Tsotsis, a technology reporter, informed TechCrunch this Sunday that “according to multiple sources, Twitter is on the verge on announcing its own built-in Twitpic competitor.” She also anticipated that “photosharing is the next logical step of Twitter expanding its in-app experience. It’s basically grabbing at low-hanging fruit.”

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The rumors were furthermore confused with reality when Liz Gannes, a writer of a technology blog, All Things D, also supported the rumors and stated that Twitter is expectedly going to reveal its plans for the photosharing service by this week at the D9 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. This Wednesday at the conference, the C.E.O. of Twitter, Dick Costolo, has personally planned to speak publically. Gannes stated in her article that “Currently, Twitter users who wish to post photos in their tweets must host them elsewhere, with popular options including Twitpic, Yfrog, Instagram and Flickr. Users then include links to the photos within their tweets.  Many Twitter clients, including those developed by the company, use the links to go fetch the images and display them inline. But the process could certainly be smoother.”

Companies like Twitpic and ImageShack, owner of Yfrog, have their entire business and identity on risk, as they have been running an extremely profitable business by selling more and more ads with the image they display through tweets. Moreover Tsotsis also mentioned that “It’s only natural that [Twitter] would spend more resources on photosharing, especially considering how much money is being poured into the white hot space and that images were the crux of the success of competitor Facebook.” Gizmodo published an article by Kelly Hodgkin, their chief writer, which affirmed that there is “no word on what will happen to TwitPic and Yfrog support if Twitter develops it own solution. We would like to think Twitter would be open to any service, but the company has become increasingly anti-competitive.”