Not wanting to be left out of in the emerging digital reader scene, both BenQ and Fujitsu will release e-book readers of their own and plan to showcase their devices at the IT Month 2009 consumer trade show in Taiwan, which runs from November 28 to January 1, 2010.

BenQ will have on display a 6-inch e-reader with a touchscreen EPD (electrophoretic display) panel. According to news and rumor site DigiTimes, BenQ will release its digital reader in January 2010, and then follow up that launch with more models in April, including a 9-inch reader.

For Fujitsu's part, the company plans to show off its 8-inch FELPia e-book reader, and there's talk that it might release the device in Taiwan sometime in 2010.

It's the Cold War all over again, only this one's taking place in cyberspace. According to a report by security firm McAfee, there are a growing number of governments all around the globe preparing for potential cyber conflicts with other countries, DailyTech reports.

"There are at least five countries known to be arming themselves for this kind of conflict," McAfee Europe analyst Greg Day told the BBC. "To go to physical war requires billions of dollars. To go to cyber war most people can easily find the resources that could be used in these kinds of attacks."

Targets of such attacks are likely to be a nation's infrastructure, and the U.S., which is known to have an operating manual outlining the rules of cyber engagement, is also known to have used hack attacks alongside ground operations during the Iraq war. The UK, Germany, France, China, and North Korea are the five other countries actively developing their own capabilities.

"In physical warfare it's pretty clear who has which weapon and how they are using them," said Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer at Veracode which advises many governments on security. "In the networked world that attribution is incredibly difficult."

Auction site eBay went down for several hours on Saturday, causing sellers to lose sales, as well as potentially selling items for a lower bid than they might have otherwise received had the site remained running. Oops!

eBay says it has since fixed the software SNAFU that caused all the ruckus and promises this was a one-time deal, but that doesn't rectify the situation for sellers who were affected by the outage. To make things right, eBay said it plans on compensating vendors in several different ways.

"To minimize the impact, we'e working to ensure that sellers and buyers whose transactions were affected by the disruptions will be made as whole as possible," said president Lorrie Norrington. "This includes listing fee refunds and protection against negative or neutral buyer feedback as well as detailed seller ratings (DSRs) lower than five starts for impacted sellers, and coupons for buyers of items that were impacted by the disruption."

According to eBay, the surge of holiday shoppers caught the site off guard, which led to the crash.

Want to know what's even better than Ostendo's 43-inch CRVD curved display? Having three of them side-by-side, that's what. It isn't cheap, and at $6,500 each, three of them will run almost $20,000. That's a lot of scratch, but then again, have you seen this video?

According to Ostendo, the curved monitor measures 43 inches and offers an ultra-wide 32:10 aspect ratio, which is 180 percent wider than 16:9 displays and 240 percent wider than 4:3 monitors. It works with existing videocards and doesn't require any special hardware, software, or drivers, other than a graphics card powerful enough to push gaming pixels at a 2880x900 resolution.

Get the full low-down here.

It seems like we're constantly hearing about promising battery technologies that could ultimately lead to longer battery life, more power, and smaller units, but as of yet, that big breakthrough hasn't occurred. Maybe nanotechnology, which is the current hot topic in the battery innovations field, will prove to be different.

Right at this moment, a ton of research is being put into carbon nanotubes (CNTs) for a bunch of uses, including electronics and batteries. Researchers are drawn to CNTs because, according to them, carbon nanotubes are near perfect. That has paved the way for a professor and a UC San Diego graduate student to discover a breakthrough that involves introducing purposeful defects into CNT structures. By doing so, the 'defective' CNTs actually work better for the development of super capacitors, DailyTech reports.

"While batteries have large storage capacity, they take a long time to charge; while electrostatic capacitors can charge quickly but typically have limited capacity. However, super capacitors electrochemical capacitors incorporate the advantages of both," Professor Prabhakar Bandaru said.

The duo also discovered that other methods, such as bombarding CNTs with argon or hydrogen, could also increase or decrease the charge capacity. In the end, the two researchers believe that their discovery could ultimately lead to electronics that charge faster and last longer than what's available today.

Talk of the technology behind the PlayStation 3 console always turns to the Cell processor, an innovative chip architecture which, in the PS3, contains essentially 9 processors on single chip (one PowerPC chip and eight Synergistic Processing Elements, or SPEs). And up until now, there was no reason to believe Sony wouldn't once again go with a Cell processor in its PlayStation 4 console, but there now lingers some doubt if the chip truly is "dead in the water, as David Turek, IBM's VP of Deep Computing, supposedly said.

The quote comes from German webiste Heise Online, which goes on to claim that the planned successor to the current chip, which is slated to have two PowerPC processors and 32 SPEs, is no longer going to be released.

What exactly that means isn't entirely clear at the moment. So far, there's no evidence that IBM is halting development on Cell processors, only that the specifically planned successor has been canned. If we're to take a glass half-full approach, that could mean the PS4 will utilize an even more power Cell processor, though it's far to early to tell.

Talk of Dell releasing a smartphone has been going on for some time now, and come next week, the OEM will finally release its first handset, albeit not in the U.S.

China Mobile was selected as the carrier of Dell's Mini 3i, which the two companies jointly announced will be available by the end of the month in choice of Red Passion or Oiled Bronze.

Coming as no surprise, the Mini 3i will sport Google's open-source Android platform, arguably the hottest OS out there right now, It will be compatible with quad-band GSM/EDGE networks and boast a 3.5-inch touchscreen with a 640x360 resolution, and measure 4.8 by 2.3 by 0.46 inches. By comparison, the iPhone 3GS also sports a 3.5-inch display, but with a 480x320 resolution, and measures 4.4 by 2.4 by 0.48 inches. And at 4.7 ounces, it weighs an ounce more than Dell's Mini 3i.

Other features include GPS navigation, Bluetooth, an a 3MP camera with zoom, auto-focus, flash, video capture, and photo-editing capabilities, eWeek.com reports.

"This signals an important milestone in the long term partnership between China Mobile and Dell," a China Mobile spokesperson said in a statement. "We are excited for Dell to be among the first manufacturers to introduce new technology based on the OPhone platform. We look forward to working the Dell as it brings innovative new products and services to add value to our customers' lives."

China Mobile currently has over 500 million subscribers.

Cisco set out to put defense capabilities of Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO) in the hands (literally) of IT managers, and has done so with the availability of Cisco SIO To Go, an Apple iPhone app.

The software gives IT pros real-time access to various actionable global security information, while also serving up several customization options for security information that could potentially help protect a business network.

Cisco's app includes real-time alerts and threat mitigation solutions from sources that include more than 700,000 globally deployed Cisco secuirty devices. It also includes Cisco IntelliShield, a historical-threat database of 40,000 vulnerabilities and 3,300 IPS signatures, and more than 600 third-party threat intelligence sources capable of tracking more than 500 third-party data feeds and 100 security news feeds 24/7, the company said.

Verizon this week unveiled its Teleheatlh Collaboration Services, which is designed to aid health care organizations in setting up online collaboration environments and let health care professionals collaborate remotely through the Internet with patients and colleagues.

"Health care providers increasingly are tapping the power of IT, and our telehealth solutions offer an effective way to meet a wide range of challenges, including the expansion of access to care, speeding diagnoses, and driving efficiency," Rajeev Kapoor, global managing director for Verizon Connected Healthcare, said in a statement.

Verizon isn't alone in pushing collaboration tools for health care professionals. Cisco in July announced it was joining forces with UnitedHealth Group to create the Connected Care program, which will combine audio and visual technologies with medical information that will benefit both doctor and patient.

According to analyst company Datamonitor, annual spending on telehealth hardware, software, and related services will balloon to $6.1 billion by 2012, eWeek.com reports.

Network specialist Nortel announced on Monday that it has been selected as the high bidder in the auction of nearly all of the optical networking and carrier Ethernet assets of Nortel's Metro Ethernet Networks (MEN) business. Under terms of the deal, Ciena will pay $530 million in cash and issue $239 million in aggregate principal amount of 6 percent Senior Convertible notes due in 2017. All tallied, the deal is worth $769 million.

"These optical and carrier Ethernet assets bring exceptional technologies, talent and scale that will accelerate Ciena’s current strategy to deliver innovative network solutions to customers worldwide," said Gary Smith, Ciena’s CEO and president. "With this combination, we are bringing together complementary technologies in switching and transport to create an innovative powerhouse with the scale to challenge the industry status quo and offer customers a practical path for transitioning to automated, optical Ethernet-based networking."

Ciena has high hopes for its latest acquisition, and not without merit. In 2008, Nortel generated about $1.36 billion in revenue, and $556 million (unaudited) in the first half of 2009.

At least 2,000 Nortel employees will be offered employment to become part of Ciena's global team of network specialists, the company said.

Maybe Miley Cyrus was on to something, or perhaps she started a trend. But whatever the reason, Twitter's rapid rise appears to have to turned into a downward tumble, according to data provided to eMarketer by Nielsen.

We're not talking about just a few Twitter users leaving the service. According to Nielsen, traffic to Twitter slid 27.8 percent between September and October, dropping from 26.2 million unique visitors to 18.9 million. Nielsen's numbers were perhaps the most dramatic, but other research firms also noted a decline. According to comScore, unique visitors were down 8.1 percent in October, while Compete noted a more modest 2.1 percent drop.

No matter whose numbers you trust, the drop in traffic is concerning for one of the hottest services on the web. But are they telling the whole story?

"While it's valuable to look at Twitter's web traffic, the true picture won't emerge until all the third-party traffic from mobile phones and API clients is accounted for," wrote senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson on the eMarketer blog.

Is your ultraportable overheating while surfing the web? As odd as it sounds, the culprit could be Firefox rather than a hardware issue. No, really, check out what one of Mozilla's support pages has to say on the matter.

"At times, Firefox may require significant CPU resources in order to download, process, and display web content," Mozilla states in a document titled "Firefox consumes a lot of CPU resources."

As CNet notes, this is a real problem that users are reporting, such as this Dell Mini9 owner. So what's the solution? Short of switching to a different browser, Mozilla recommends downloading and installing the latest version of the Flash plugin, which might help with Flash heavy sites like YouTube, and installing Flashblock, which allows end-users to selectively enable and disable Flash content.

Depending on when and where the high CPU usage kicks in, Mozilla also recommends updating the Adobe Reader plugin, configuring Firefox to open PDF documents outside of Firefox, and installing NoScript.

Have you noticed any unusual CPU activitiy or overheating woes while running Firefox? Hit the jump and let us know. 

We know exactly how popular Twitter has grown, but never did we consider that anyone could be arrested for not using the microblogging service. Apparently that's a real possibility, as teenager singer Justin Bieber and his entourage found out.

Bieber was supposed to appear at the Roosevelt Field mall on Friday, but decided to keep his distance because the crowd was getting a bit too rowdy. When the police showed up, they asked James A. Roppo, a record label exec, to help clear out the crowd by sending a Twitter message, and then arrested him after claiming he didn't cooperate, Newsday reports.

"We asked for his help in getting the crowd to go away by sending out a Twitter message,"  said Kevin Smith, Nassau County Police Det. Lt. "By not cooperating with us we feel he put lives in danger and the public at risk."

In a radio interview, Bieber said the scene was "so crazy" that he couldn't make his way into the building, adding that the authorities had threatened to put in him handcuffs and haul him off to jail.

Roppo could face charges that include criminal nuisance, endangering the welfare of a minor, and obstructing government administration, Smith said.

In a few more days, Black Friday will be here, and if you plan on braving the crowds, that means getting up early (or staying up late) and making a mad dash for the electronics section among a frenzy of shoppers with no qualms about pushing, shoving, and trampling anyone who gets in their way. But should your reach your destination unscathed, you may find that the deals are nothing to get excited over considering stores have already had to mark prices down in the current economic climate, or that quantities are so low that if you're not near the front of the line donning a pair of running shoes, you're going to miss out.

CNNMoney.com reveals that in some cases, stores may stock as little as 3 units of those enticing low-priced electronics advertised in your local flier. Sale items could also be "derivatives" of the real deal, such as a large screen HDTV with lower image quality or a less desirable image contrast.

"It's a sleazy practice," said Craig Johnson, retailing expert and president of retail consulting group Customer Growth Partners. "I am old school. If a retailer is advertising a juicy deal and they are not prepared to have in sufficient quantity, don't advertise it. Or give consumers a raincheck."

Read the full report here.

Engineering eggheads from the University of Cambridge have developed a system called ProFORMA (Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition), which is capable of turning any standard webcam into a pretty powerful 3D scanning tool. A video demonstration shows how it's done, which you can view here.

What's pretty amazing is that the 3D models are constructed in real-time as end-users slowly rotate objects with their hand in front of the webcam. The engineering team says the system works by "calculating the Delaunay tetrahedralisation of a point cloud obtained from online structure from motion estimation, which is then carved using a recursive and probabilistic algorithm to rapidly obtain the surface mesh."

Put more simply, the system generates and displays partial models of an object on the fly, which then allows the user to plan how to manipulate the object to generate additional views. The finished product is a 3D representation of the object that can then be tracked with rapid movements.

ProFORMA Homepage

It didn't take long for hackers to take advantage of a potentially dangerous exploit affecting jailbroken iPhones. The vulnerability first gained notoriety earlier this month when a hacker from the Netherlands took control of modified iPhones and sent the owners an SMS requesting a fee for instructions on how to protect thier device. He later backed down and posted the fix for free, but by then, the cat was out of the bag.

Fast forward a few weeks and we now have the first malicious worm making the rounds on jailbroken iPhones and iPod touch devices. According to reports, the worm uses command--and-control like a traditional PC botnet. it configures two startup scripts, one of which is used to execute the malicious worm during boot, and the other to make a connection to a Lithuanian server in order to upload stolen data and hand over control to the bot master.

The worm works by changing the root password from the default of "alpnie" that Apple put in place in the factory firmware. It attacks IP ranges from a wider range of ISPs, including UPC, Optus, and T-Mobile.

The recommended fix is to restore jailbroken iPhones to the current Apple-supplied firmware.

Remember when Juliet told Romeo that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet? We suppose the opposite must also be true, and America Online, whether abbreviated AOL or Aol, is still, after all, America Online.

The ISP on Sunday previewed its new brand identity, which it describes as a simple, confident logotype. The full identity won't be fully unveiled until December 10, when AOL common stock begins trading on the NYSE.

"Our new identity is uniquely dynamic," said Tim Armstrong, CEO of Aol. "Our business is focused on creating world-class experiences for consumers and AOL is centered on creative and talented people -- employees, partners, and advertisers. We have a clear strategy that we are passionate about and we plan on standing behind the AOL brand we take the company into the next decade."

Judging by the all-caps used throughout the press release, the new Aol branding looks to apply only to the company's "ever changing" logos, which were developed by branding outfit Wolff Olins.

We've been seeing signs of a market shift for some time now, and by the second quarter of 2010, global DDR3 shipments will finally surpass DDR2 for the first time, says market research firm iSuppli.

According to iSuppli, DDR3 is on pace to claim 50.9 percent of the market in Q2 2010, barely edging out DDR2. But what's most impressive is that DDR3's market share sat at only 14.2 percent in Q2 2009, and just 1 percent in Q2 2008.

"DDR3 is 50 percent faster than today's dominant DRAM technology, DDR2, while using about 30 percent less power," said Mike Howard, senior DRAM analyst for iSuppli. "For PC users across the board, this means faster performance. For notebook users, it can result in longer battery life."

Claiming a little over half of the market will be just the beginning, and iSuppli forecasts DDR3 will account for 71 percent of all DRAM by the end of next year.

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. Both Intel and AMD fully embrace the DDR3 standard, and while DDR2 used to enjoy a pricing advantage, that gap recently closed all but completely.

Living up to a promise made several weeks ago, the Roku Channel Store is now open. Unfortunately, rumors that the open platform for delivering content to Roku boxes would include support for Hulu turned to out to be false, at least so far. According to an article in Playboy magazine, "Hulu support is coming," but the video site wasn't among the first ten channels released, which includes Pandora, Facebook Photos, Revision3, Mediafly, TWiT, blip.tv, Flickr, FrameChannel, Motionbox, and MobileTribe.

"The Roku Channel Store turns the Roku player into the world's first open platform designed specifically for the TV," Anthony Wood, founder and CEO of Roku, said in a statement. "Now content producers and distributors -- from single person shops to billion dollar corporations -- can deliver their content directly to consumers without having to go exclusively through cable operators, satellite networks, or TV affiliates."

Roku said a free SDK is available upon request, which would allow developers to add to the Store's selection. As for the Channel Store itself, it's also free and is being distributed through automatic upgrades within the next couple of weeks. No Roku owners will be left out in the cold, as the Channel Store works on all Roku devices, the company said.

Internet Explorer users who have yet to upgrade to IE8 should take note. According to security firm Symantec, there's a pretty nasty Zero Day exploit that affects both IE6 and IE7.

"The exploit currently exhibits signs of poor reliability, but we expect that a fully-functional reliable exploit will be available in the near future," Symantec explained in a blog post. "When this happens, attackers will have the abilty to insert the exploit in websites infecting potential visitors."

Symantec said the attack requires JavaScript and recommends that users disable it. The security firm also suggested potentially affected users limit web surfing to only trusted sites until Microsoft releases a fix.