While we’re not expecting people to queue around the block from their O2 store, or that police will need to be called to keep Dell fanboys from rioting because they can’t get one, we have to say that the Streak does not look too bad.

Although it is much smaller than the Ipad, Dell’s 5-inch tablet computer is capable of phone calling, full page web browsing and Sat Nav with voice navigation.

It runs the Android OS and packs a whopping 16GB of storage. And if that isn’t enough for you, you can increase it to 32GB by replacing the MicroSD card.

It has a 5 megapixel camera, an additional VGA front facing camera for video calls, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 512MB RAM and 3G, Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity. And it can multi-task, which is more than anything that Jobs’ Mob sells can do. We bet it will also run Flash, too.

O2 is offering the Dell Streak for free on ‘Data Only’ tariffs starting at £25 a month, ‘Voice & Data’ starting at £35 a month or on Business tariffs from £25.58 a month. If you’re looking to buy one with no contract it will set you back £399. µ

The male Googler in question is now subject to disciplinary proceedings, he told the FT.

That’s in spite of the news overnight that the firm applied for a patent on the technology in January.
Google has maintained it never intended to collect payload data from Wi-Fi packets. The practice was only exposed after German privacy regulators protested about Google’s previously undisclosed system for collecting SSIDs and MAC addresses as its fleet of Street View cars toured Europe.
“We screwed up. Let’s be very clear about that,” Schmidt said.
He told the FT that Google will begin handing over the intercepted payload data to German, French, Spanish and Italian regulators within the next two days. They are considering criminal investigations, while the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office was satisfied by a pledge to delete British data “as soon as reasonably possible”.
Google says it is conducting an internal review of its privacy policies as a result of the controversy, but will not restrict its engineers’ freedom despite the “clear violation” of its rules by the unnamed rogue coder.
“It would be a terrible thing to put a chilling effect on creativity,” said Schmidt.
Pass the sick bag, Eric.

The comments came during Tim Cook’s speech at the Goldman Sachs annual tech conference in San Francisco. In addition to the obvious Apple retail stores, consumers will be able to purchase the iPad from Apple directly and from “partners like Best Buy,” according to AppleInsider.

Cook didn’t mention whether AT&T would be selling the device in its retail locations, even though it did sell the iPhone models. One reason for the AT&T omission could be that the first iPads will only have Wi-Fi. The 3G, Wi-Fi combo models will come 30 days after the initial release.

After using the iPad for the past few months, Cook said consumers will have a hard time buying a Netbook after experiencing what the iPad can do.

Apple introduced two models of the iPad during a special event in January. Priced between $499 and $899, the iPad comes with up to 64GB of disk space, Bluetooth, a microphone, accelerometers, ambient light sensors, and digital compass with assisted GPS technologies.

The iPad is expected to be available in late March.

The iPhone operating system’s 6.2 percent jump in market share was tops among the major smart-phone platforms, followed by Android, which expanded its market share by 3.4 percentage points, from 0.5 for 2008 to 3.9 in 2009. Research in Motion also grew by 3.3 percentage points, tightening its hold on second place at 19.9 percent.

The overall leader in the worldwide smart-phone market is Symbian, used primarily by Nokia. The operating system, however, is losing a little of its dominance, falling from 52.4 percent in 2008 to 46.9 percent last year.

Microsoft’s Windows Mobile slipped from 11.8 percent to 8.7 percent in 2009. Palm’s webOS, which launched last year, has grabbed just 0.7 percent of the worldwide market.

Smart phone sales worldwide hit 172.4 million units in 2009, a 23.8 percent jump from 2008. And the pace is accelerating. In the fourth quarter last year, smart-phone sales increased by 41.1 percent to 53.8 million units compared with the year before.

- Ryan Kim

What’s a racy app? Apple’s campaign against sexy iPhone apps is on again.

The company has reportedly kicked out 5,000 sexually suggestive apps that have proliferated in recent months. The reason: Developers have been submitting more and more racy apps that are prompting complaints from users.

“It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see,” Apple’s Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, told the New York Times.

But there are some notable exceptions. The Playboy App and Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit app remain in the store.

Apple instituted parental controls last summer which were designed to help parents protect against offensive apps while giving developers more leeway in getting apps into the store.

The company held the line at nudity, despite some early confusion, but seemed to welcome a lot of titillating apps with scantily clad women.

This is another headache for edgy developers who are trying to make bucks off Apple’s App Store. Designers have griped about the opaque approval process and arbitrary rejections.

But here’s a case where a lot of apps that were approved are now being pulled.

- Ryan Kim

A daily dose of postings from The Chronicle’s technology blog (sfgate.com/blogs/tech)

The inquiry, disclosed late Tuesday, appears to focus largely on complaints that Google unfairly ranks the sites of the Internet competitors, in effect lowering their rank in search results that appear on Google sites.

Google denied violating European law or taking any action to stifle competition.

The European Commission inquiry is at an early, fact-finding stage and may not result in any action. But it appeared to be the first time that European antitrust authorities have examined Google’s conduct outside of a merger review. The inquiry also comes at a time of heightened scrutiny of Google in Europe, where the company has an even more dominant position in search advertising than it does in the U.S.

Google said the allegations were made by Ciao.de, a German subsidiary of Microsoft Corp., Foundem.co.uk, a U.K. price comparison site, and EJustice.fr, a French site specializing in legal search inquiries. Foundem and EJustice could not immediately be reached for comment.

“We do believe it’s natural for competition officials to look at online advertising given how important it is to the development of the Internet and the dominance of one player,” a Microsoft spokesman said, adding it hasn’t been contacted by the EC.

A European Commission spokesman could not be reached.

Julia Holtz, Google’s senior competition counsel, wrote in a blog post that the Foundem complaint argued that Google’s algorithms demoted their site in Google’s results and that EJustice’s complaint “seems to echo those concerns.” She wrote that Foundem is a member of an Internet organization called ICOMP, which is a Brussels- based organization founded by Microsoft to campaign against Google in Europe. Ciao, the Microsoft subsidiary, has complained to Google about its terms and conditions, she wrote.

“While we will be providing feedback and additional information on these complaints, we are confident that our business operates in the interests of users and partners,” she wrote.

Ms. Holtz acknowledged the importance of rankings in driving traffic to Web sites, and that the company is “the first to admit” that its search is not perfect. Ranking Web sites is a “very hard computer science problem to crack,” she said.

Google had previously disclosed the German Cartel Office had been looking into the complaint by Ciao, the details of which have not been made public. That complaint now appears to have been escalated to the European Commission’s antitrust authority, Directorate General for Competition. The German authorities are also examining complaints by mapping site Euro-Cities A.G. and an association of German publishers. Italian authorities are also investigating a similar complaint by local publishers.

The European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm and antitrust regulator, looked closely at Google’s conduct in the advertising market in connection with Google’s purchase of DoubleClick Inc. but cleared the deal in 2008.

The Internet company has also raised hackles in Europe on the privacy front, including with its “Street View” technology that shows photographs taken on public thoroughfares. And Google has shortened the amount of time it stores records of searches after pressure from an EU advisory panel on privacy issues.

The inquiry in Europe comes as the U.S. Justice Department has its own pending investigation into a legal settlement between Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission is also reviewing Google’s attempt to acquire mobile advertising company AdMob Inc.

Buzz lets users publish updates and photos to groups of fellow Gmail user or publicly to the web, and lets others comment on them. Public posts go up on a user’s Google Profile page, while private ones are read and commented on inside of Gmail. That makes Buzz a sort of hybrid between Facebook’s more closed social network model and Twitter’s focus on more public posts.

But many users were turned off by Google’s decision to auto-generate social networks for users, based on who they communicated the most with on Gmail. Compounding that, Google decided that those lists would be published by default when users set up their profile accounts, meaning users had to unclick a box to keep that list private. While users had to decide to make a public profile and turn on Buzz in order to have their follower lists made public, many expressed outrage that Google was putting the contact list of domestic violence victims, journalists and political dissidents at risk.

Google apologized and quickly retreated. It changed a number of defaults, most notably making the list of followers into a suggested list, that users had to decide to accept, and making the checkbox for making follower/following lists more obvious (though the default stays public).

But Buzz’s privacy woes have yet to subside. Last week, the search and ad giant decided it would make early users go through the same confirmation screen that current users do, a Google employee told Wired.com. The aim is to make sure that no users are unaware that their contact lists are public

The same Google employee noted the irony that Facebook grew by leaps and bounds by asking its users to give Facebook access to their Gmail contact lists, in order to find people to add as friends or to invite to join Facebook.

Facebook also removed the option to keep one’s Friends list private in December, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg chalked up to evolving privacy mores.

Oddly, those concerned about privacy and social networking have overlooked a feature unique to Google Buzz. Last year, Gmail accounts defaulted to using HTTPS connections for e-mail sessions, which carries over to Buzz. That means that all non-public Buzz conversations are extremely difficult for eavesdroppers, whether they be overeager IT administrators at schools or businesses, Wi-Fi sniffers or governments monitoring IP packets for banned keywords.

The programmer in question was just a freelancer and was not responsible for carrying out the attacks, claim the researchers who apparently have spoken with the programmer. Apparently, the programmer would prefer his work not be used in such “offensive efforts” as carrying out attacks against major companies, but that he “has to toe the line now and again” if he wants to do the kind of research he’s good at doing.

“He would rather not have uniformed guys looking over his shoulder, but there is no way anyone of his skill level can get away from that kind of thing. The state has privileged access to these researchers’ work,” the researchers told FT.

The discovery comes just days after another team of US researchers traced the origins of the attack back to Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU) and Lanxiang Vocational School in China, according to the New York Times. The universities in question, however, have denied involvement.

“We were shocked and indignant to hear these baseless allegations which may harm the university’s reputation,” one SJTU spokesperson told the state-run Xinhua news agency. (Xinhua also ran another story about how incredibly “bored” Lanxiang Vocational School is with these accusations, with officials claiming that they are politically oriented and unfounded.)

As Cyber Defense Agency founder Sami Saydjari told the Times, however, it won’t be possible for US researchers to truly look into those details without the help of the mostly-uncooperative Chinese government. “We cannot trace it beyond borders. We need the cooperation of the Chinese,” he said.

Good Voodoo

Haven’t heard of VUDU? It’s one of several online movie services competing for what’s bound to be a very competitive market in the coming years, particularly as home broadband speeds increase. With the FCC intent on seeing 100-megabit connections in 100 million U.S. homes, more consumers will likely stream movies online rather than trekking down to Blockbuster or waiting for Netflix discs to arrive.

Today, VUDU is a small fish in a big pond, one filled with well-funded sharks such as Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, and Apple TV/iTunes. Best Buy and Blockbuster, both of which have teamed with online movie service Roxio CinemaNow, are making an online play too. By merging with Wal-Mart, VUDU will have the means to stay competitive in a market that’s bound to get even more crowded.

What Wal-Mart Gets

With VUDU, Wal-Mart gets a video service with top-notch streaming technology. Recently I had the opportunity to test VUDU alongside CinemaNow and Netflix. VUDU’s picture quality was vastly superior to Netflix’s, and slightly better than CinemaNow’s, even over a poky DSL connection.

Unlike industry-leader Netflix, VUDU can stream movies in 1080p, provided you have at least a 4.5-megabit connection. Of course, you’d probably want a much faster connection, particularly if you’re also using a broadband link for a home network, Internet (VoIP) phone line, and so on. Naturally, VUDU’s competitors will soon offer 1080p content too. (Netflix has a limited amount of content in 720p high-def, but says 1080p support is “not on the books for this year.”

VUDU has licensing agreements with almost every major movie studio, in addition to independent and international distributors. That amounts to about 16,000 movies. But in VUDU, Wal-Mart is also getting something it probably doesn’t want: Porn. VUDU offers the AVN After Dark Channel, which features more than 1,800 adult titles. Certainly, VUDU’s porn-friendly business model won’t mesh with Wal-Mart’s family-friendly image. Bye bye, porn.

Big Box Bonanza

By integrating VUDU software into Blu-ray players, Internet-connected HDTVs, and other media-streaming devices it sells at retail, Wal-Mart has an excellent opportunity to become a major player in the online movie market. (About 50 devices currently support Netflix, and that number could double by year’s end). I suspect Wal-Mart will match or surpass Netflix’s $9-a-month subscription plan, which allows subscribers to watch all the online movies and TV shows they want each month–and rent one DVD at a time.

Certainly, Wal-Mart’s online movie play shows just how hot the video streaming market is becoming. So the next questions are: Who’ll buy Netflix? Recent rumors say Amazon is an interested suitor. And what’s going to happen with YouTube? Google wants to turn its online video service into a money-making enterprise. Well, now may be a good time to get started.

The university has alliances with elite American ones like Duke and the University of Michigan. And it is so rich in science and engineering talent that Microsoft and Intel have moved into a research park directly adjacent to the school.

But Jiaotong, whose sprawling campus here has more than 33,000 students, is facing an unpleasant question: is it a base for sophisticated computer hackers?

Investigators looking into Web attacks on Google and dozens of other American companies last year have traced the intrusions to computers at Jiaotong as well as an obscure vocational school in eastern China, according to people briefed on the case.

Security experts caution that it is hard to trace online attacks and that the digital footprints may be a “false flag,” a kind of decoy intended to throw investigators off track.

But those with knowledge of the investigation say there are reliable clues that suggest the highly sophisticated attacks may have originated at Jiaotong and the more obscure campus, Lanxiang Vocational School in Shandong Province, an institution with ties to the Chinese military.

Last weekend, the two schools strongly denied any knowledge of the attacks, which singled out corporate files and the e-mail accounts of human rights activists.

A spokesman for Jiaotong told local news outlets that school officials were “shocked and indignant” to learn of the allegations. And a Lanxiang spokesman called the reports preposterous.

But analysts say Jiaotong and Lanxiang are certain to come under close scrutiny.

Jiaotong is one of China’s top universities, and one charged with helping transform this country into a science and technology powerhouse.

The school has exchange programs with some of the world’s leading universities. Early this year, Duke said that with the help of Jiaotong, it would build its own campus near Shanghai.

Michael J. Schoenfeld, a spokesman for Duke, said on Friday that the university was troubled by the allegations.

“We’re going to have to explore that with Shanghai Jiaotong and understand the situation,” he said. “It’s a very complex situation.”

One of Jiaotong’s strongest departments is computer science, which has garnered support from some of America’s biggest technology companies, including Cisco Systems. Microsoft has collaborated with Jiaotong on a laboratory for intelligent computing and intelligent systems at the university.

Two weeks ago, Jiaotong students won an international computer programming competition sponsored by I.B.M., known as the Battle of the Brains, beating out Stanford and other elite institutions. It was the third time in the last decade that Jiaotong students had taken the top prize.

Jiaotong is also home to the School of Information Security Engineering, which specializes in Internet security. The school’s dean and chief professor have both worked on technology matters for the People’s Liberation Army, according to the school’s Web site.

The school, which has received financing from a high-level government science and technology project, code-named 863, has also regularly invited world-famous hackers and Web security experts to lecture there.

The latest clues do not answer the question of who was behind the attacks. But it is likely to put added pressure on Beijing to investigate a case that has prompted Google to threaten to pull out of China.

Beijing has not announced an investigation, but Web security experts emphasize that the Chinese government would need to be involved to find the ultimate perpetrators of the attacks.

“The U.S. would not be able to trace this” back to the source, said O. Sami Saydjari, the founder of the Cyber Defense Agency, a private Web security firm based in Wisconsin. “We cannot trace it beyond borders. We’d need the cooperation of the Chinese.”

Xiao Qiang, an expert on Chinese Internet censorship and control, says Jiaotong is studying not just Web security but also how to filter content that the government may deem unhealthy.

“Computer security may sound neutral, but in China, it also includes content, including content the government doesn’t like and wants to get rid of,” he says.

Scott J. Henderson, the author of “The Dark Visitor: Inside the World of Chinese Hackers,” said that in 2007, a prominent Chinese hacker with ties to China’s Ministry of Security also lectured at Jiaotong.

“He gave a lecture called ‘Hacking in a Nutshell,’ ” said Mr. Henderson, whose research was partly financed by the American military.

In a statement on Sunday, Microsoft said it could not comment on reports that some hacking had been traced to Jiaotong.

But the statement also said: “We condemn cyberattacks and industrial espionage no matter who is ultimately responsible. We hope officials will conduct a full investigation and cooperate fully with international authorities to get to the bottom of this situation.”

Google and other companies that were victims of the attacks have declined to comment.

Investigators are also looking into whether some of the intrusions originated at Lanxiang Vocational School, in the city of Jinan.

Lanxiang, which has 30,000 students studying trades like cosmetology and welding, was founded in 1984 by a former military officer on land donated by the military, according to Jinan’s propaganda department.

On its Web site, the school records visits to the campus by military officers and boasts of sending “a large batch of graduates to the army” and says “those graduates become the backbone of the army.”

Graduates of the school’s computer science department are recruited by the local military garrison each year, according to the school’s dean, Mr. Shao, who would give only his last name.

School officials also insist that Lanxiang students are not capable of sophisticated hacking.

“It’s impossible for our students to hack Google and other U.S. companies,” Mr. Shao said in a telephone interview. “They are just high school graduates and not at an advanced level.”

Little information is publicly available about the school’s computer science department. But the school says its computer laboratory is so enormous that it was once listed in the Guinness World Records book.

Bao Beibei and Chen Xiaoduan contributed research.

The shuttle’s on-time arrival took some by surprise. All day, forecasters said rain and clouds probably would scuttle any touchdown attempts. But the rain stayed away and the sky cleared just in time.

“It’s great to be home. It was a great adventure,” commander George Zamka said after the shuttle rolled to a stop on the 3-mile-long runway, awash in xenon lights.

During their mission — which spanned two weeks and 5.7 million miles — the astronauts delivered and installed a new space station room, Tranquility, and a big bay window with sweeping views of the Earth.

Upon touchdown, Mission Control immediately relayed congratulations to Zamka and his crew for connecting Tranquility and opening up those new “windows to the world.”

“Welcome home,” Mission Control radioed.

This was the 23rd space shuttle landing in darkness, out of 130 flights. The last time was in 2008, by Endeavour as well.

Tranquility already is serving as a base for life-support equipment, as well as a gym and restroom. It also holds the seven-windowed dome, quite possibly the most anticipated addition ever made to a spacecraft.

The 10 men and one woman on the shuttle-station complex couldn’t get enough of the views out those windows, once the shutters were raised last week.

In fact, at least one of the space station residents, Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, watched Endeavour’s atmospheric re-entry from the new dome. “The view was definitely out-of-the-world,” he wrote in a Twitter update.

The two new compartments were supplied by the European Space Agency at a cost of more than $400 million. Their addition brought the 11-year-old space station to 98 percent completion.
All that’s left now are four shuttle flights to stock the space station with more experiments, spare parts and supplies. Discovery will make the next trip in early April.

As for Endeavour, this was its next-to-last mission. It’s supposed to return to orbit, one last time, at the end of July.

NASA plans on wrapping up the shuttle program this fall, after which the space station will be supplied by craft from Russia, Europe and Japan. Astronauts will be hitching rides exclusively on Russian Soyuz capsules, while cargo will arrive on unmanned carriers. The Obama Administration is proposing that commercial rocket companies take a crack at the U.S. ferry side of it, once the three remaining shuttles are retired.

As if to signal the end, Endeavour had no returning space station crew on board.

Over at the space station, meanwhile, computer trouble triggered temporary communication blackouts Sunday.

The station’s three command and control computers kept malfunctioning throughout the morning, disrupting communication between the crew and Mission Control. Until full contact was restored in late afternoon, the five astronauts had to make do without e-mail and their Internet Protocol phone.

Flight controllers suspect the trouble may be related to computer software in Europe’s Columbus laboratory.

To make up for all the inconvenience, Mission Control is giving the crew Wednesday off.