John

Middle-East mobile operator Emirates Telecommunications, known as Etisalat, is suspending its network and services in India, following a court order cancelling the mobile licenses of its Indian joint venture.

The move will affect close to 1.7 million mobile subscribers of the Indian startup, which is still a fraction of the about 894 million mobile subscribers India had at the end of December, according to data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

The U.S. Air Force has abruptly cancelled a plan to buy nearly 3,000 iPad 2 tablets, just days after a news site raised questions about including a Russian-developed app for encrypting and reading documents.

The original plan, posted in late December on the Federal Business Opportunities website, was to buy 2,861 iPad 2 machines to be used as electronic flight bags carrying digital versions of charts and technical manuals. The procurement specified the use of GoodReader, a popular iPad document reader developed by a Moscow, Russia software developer, Yuri Selukoff, of Good.iware. The same application, which has been well-reviewed by bloggers and tech sites, has been used in two other similar deployments, one for Alaska Airlines and another for Delta.

Researchers at Stanford University have discovered a way to break state-of-the-security video Captchas of the sort deployed by companies such as NuCaptcha with a 90 percent success rate.

Rather than presenting users with a conventional static but scrambled series of letters and numbers, NuCaptcha's video version offers partially rotating text that also moves from left to right across the screen, in theory making it much harder for computer systems to reliably detect which elements of the image are the correct ones.

Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system will have the U.K. version of English as a display language option, to address customers in that country, and some other countries like South Africa, India, Ireland, and Australia that use the version of the language.

Windows 8, the next version of the company's OS, will also have 13 new language interface packs (LIPs) that install on top of a standalone Windows display language, Ian Hamilton, a program manager in Microsoft's Windows International Team said in a blog post on Tuesday. The packs contain localized user interface elements for the most commonly used Windows features.

Concerned about Google and others snooping on your online activity? Then you might want to install a free browser add-in called Do Not Track Plus that can tell Google (and other marketers) to mind their own business.

The app, made by Abine, of Boston, is designed to block advertisers, social networks, and marketers from tracking you online via your Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer browsers. More specifically, Abine says its Do Not Track Plus plugs the hole that has allowed Google to circumvent browser privacy protection in both the Internet Explorer and Safari browsers. In short, it blocks Google's attempts to activate +1 and DoubleClick activity in your browser—even when it's built-in protections have been circumvented by Google.

Microsoft's privacy protection feature in Internet Explorer, known as P3P, is impractical to comply with while providing modern web functionality such as cookie-based features, Google said Monday in response to an accusation from Microsoft that Google had bypassed privacy protections in Internet Explorer.

Google is already facing allegations that the company circumvented privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser to plant cookies on users.

Microsoft's privacy protection feature in Internet Explorer, known as P3P, is impractical to comply with while providing modern web functionality such as cookie-based features, Google said Monday in response to an accusation from Microsoft that Google had bypassed privacy protections in Internet Explorer.

Google is already facing allegations that the company circumvented privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser to plant cookies on users.

A patent filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office last fall shows that Google is creating a Siri-like voice interface for controlling television via Android phones.

According to Patently Apple, the patent describes a cloud-based system for issuing voice commands to an Android phone, which will then control a set-top box, smart TV, DVR, or other device.

Photography, it's often said, is "painting with light." In fact, understanding how to use ambient light and your camera's flash is generally the best way to improve your photos, since you can do everything else right, but if the light is wrong, you won't like your photos. I've written about using your flash before--such as "Two Ways to Freeze Action With Your Flash." This week, let's focus on five critical tips for getting better photos with light and flash.

1. The More Diffused Your Light Source, the More Pleasing the Light

I'll call this the First Law of Lighting--in fact, I'd say that it's the fundamental principle behind most of the advice you hear about lighting a photo.

The board of directors of Samsung Electronics has decided to spin off the company's LCD (liquid crystal display) panel manufacturing unit, it said Monday.

The new company, provisionally named Samsung Display Co. will be launched on April 1, and will have an investment of 750 billion won (US$665 million) in capital, the company said.

Three lawmakers from the U.S. House of Representatives have asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether last week's report of privacy violations of Safari users by Google violated a consent agreement the company had reached with the FTC last year.

Google's alleged circumvention of do-not-track controls on Apple's Safari browser could have a wide sweeping impact because Safari is a major web browser used by millions of Americans, according to a letter to the FTC on Friday from Republican Representatives Cliff Stearns of Florida and Joe Barton of Texas, and Democrat Edward Markey of Massachusetts.

How much is a Twitter account worth to you? According to a company trying to collect damages from a disgruntled employee, each of its Twitter followers is worth $2.50 a month. At that rate, the account of a technology powerhouse like Lady Gaga would be worth $3.6 billion a year.

The lawsuit [PDF] now before a federal district court judge in Northern California involves an online mobile phone news and reviews website called PhoneDog and former employee Noah Kravitz.