Hasta La Gadget!

New smartphones are faster and nicer, so people use them more often and pull more data, right? That’s the official T-Mobile stance regarding their move to axe their 200MB data plan, according to a leaked internal document. That means the last sub-$20, cheap data plan is now off the table. AT&T and Verizon still offer 300MB shared data plans, but there’s no more single-person light data plans. Existing T-Mobile customers are grandfathered, but the smallest plan someone signing up for a new T-Mobile account can buy is 2GB for $20. But the real bargain for T-Mobile subscribers is the very Sprint-like unlimited data plan for $90 with unlimited talk and text.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Walmart leaks out T-Mobile smartphone pricing details, Isis mobile wallet to debut in Google Play come 22nd of October according to leaked T-Mobile screenshot,

Validity Sensors, the San Jose-based maker of fingerprint scanning sensors and authentication technology, announced today that it has closed $10 million of a $20 million series E financing round. (It will close the second half in the next month.) The investment was led by TeleSoft Partners, with participation from Validity’s previous investors, including Crossslink Capital, Panorama Capital, Qualcomm Ventures and Venture Tech Associates. The round brings Validity’s total funding to $78.6 million.

While there are tons of security apps and password lockers that help keep mobile devices, computers and sensitive digital info secure, the prevailing form of authentication still comes in the form of good ole passwords and PINs. Of course, most people use the same password for multiple different accounts, or have a tendency to forget the complex ones login pages ask them to create.

As we’ve all learned, these forms of authentication are difficult to remember, ineffective and fairly easy to hack. With the exploding growth of mobile payment transactions and cloud-based services, new (or better) forms of security are needed to protect our data both in the cloud and on the go, especially considering the expected growth of mobile payments — and how frequently we’ll be using our phones to pay bills, receive coupons and coupons and location based offers etc in the next few years. That’s where Validity Sensors wants to enter the picture.

Validity and companies like it believe that, even with advances in multi-factor authentication technology (facial, voice, etc.), fingerprints are still the best and simplest way to verify identity. The company has developed fingerprint sensor tech that enables authentication, device login, access to digital and mobile wallets, password management, app launching and so on — for smartphones, tablets and notebooks.

In the future, this tech will move to allowing content control for home media usage and home automation and monitoring, and really access control to a wide range of things (namely robot butlers). Collectively, all these apps need a simple way to securely authenticate the user’s identity — that isn’t going away any time soon.

The company’s mobile fingerprint solution provides handset designers with a solution that can identify users, protect mobile payments and launch (and log user into) email, social networks, shopping and banking — just by swiping their finger. Partners can then integrate Validity’s technology in under-glass solutions or add it to home and power buttons on mobile devices and notebooks. Currently, Validity’s solutions support Android and Windows operating systems.

Since launching its products in 2008, Validity has shipped more than 30 million sensors to OEMs, focusing initially on PCs. More recently, it has turned its attention to the smartphone and tablet markets, and its new $20 million round will be used to support that push.

Another few potential up-sides for Validity? In May, the company nabbed the former head of PayPal’s mobile ecosystem, Sebastian Taveau, making him CTO.

Secondly, in July, Apple bought its largest competitor, AuthenTec, for $356 million. Among other things, AuthenTec is known for making fingerprint sensor chips that are embedded in computing devices to enhance security and identification — sounds familiar, right? Apple’s acquisition came about a month after the company had signed a deal with Samsung to become its security and device management partner for its Android devices.

By pushing more aggressively into the mobile space and bringing on capital from strategic, mobile and software investors, Validity is hoping for comparable outcome.

If there’s one word you don’t usually picture when you think about Daleks, it’s “cute”. But these plush Daleks are the cutest Daleks I’ve ever laid eyes on.

They’re made by crafter Fassbaby out of 100% acrylic baby yarn (sounds cruel),  stuffed with fiber fill, and are safe for infants who don’t know how evil a these cyborgs can truly be. They come in a variety of soft and soothing colors, and are just the thing to keep future Time Lords on their toes. Also, these are the only Daleks I know with jingly-jangly, timey-wimey bells inside of them.

You can find the Dalek plushies over on Etsy for $18 to $25(USD) each, depending on size. Grab ‘em up before Davros rises from the ashes of the Crucible, and commands them to exterminate us all.

The Center for Copyright Information (CCI) will officially begin cracking down on illegal downloading and other various acts of online piracy by rolling out its Copyright Alert System (CAS) sometime in the next few weeks. The CAS will be used to deliver copyright infringement notices to internet service providers from content owners who detect users that are illegally downloading copyrighted material.

The notices from CAS will be just that: a notice, and it will be up to internet service providers to take further action on offenders. This includes punishments, which could range from throttling download speeds to terminating internet services entirely, depending on the ISP. However, offenders can request a review of their network activity by paying a $35 billing fee. If the offender is found not guilty, the $35 will be refunded.

The Center for Copyright Information has partnered with several major ISPs, including AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon. Each ISP will use their own version of the CAS. In general, though, the system will detect illegal downloading by using a mix of humans and automated processes provided by MarkMonitor.

The CCI noted that they won’t have the ability to obtain personal information from the data they collect, and the overall goal of the CAS is to simply inform users rather than punish them. The CCI says that the system is designed to make users “aware of activity that has occurred using their Internet accounts, educate them on how they can prevent such activity from happening again, and provide information about the growing number of ways to access digital content legally.”

[via Ars Technica]

Copyright Alert System rolling out this fall is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

With a single statement that’s no more than three sentences long, AT&T has given what essentially amounts to a fair warning to U.S. regulators that they will not have an easy time approving of Softbank’s acquisition of Sprint. Having failed at their own acquisition of T-Mobile in the USA earlier this year, it would appear that AT&T isn’t going to let the Japanese carrier Softbank work with Sprint without letting them know they’re watching them closely. With what AT&T says here, a clear message is sent directly to the FCC saying how the USA doesn’t take kindly to outsiders buying up their market – so to speak.

The statement is not an objection to what Softbank and Sprint are doing – and yet is really, really is. Have a peek at what AT&T says to the groups and the regulators that will be in charge of approving (or denying) the deal in the long run. Notice how simple – and yet powerful – each carefully constructed statement is.

“Softbank’s acquisition of Sprint and the control it gains over Clearwire will give one of Japan’s largest wireless companies control of significantly more U.S. wireless spectrum than any other company. We expect that fact and others will be fully explored in the regulatory review process. This is one more example of a very dynamic and competitive U.S. wireless marketplace, which is an important fact for U.S. regulators to recognize.” – AT&T vice president Brad Burns

The deal earlier this year which would have at AT&T purchasing T-Mobile and its spectrum from German company Deutsche Telekom was shut down due to a wide variety of reasons, not least of all because regulators saw the deal as a sort of monopoly – you can own too much, in other words. Here AT&T doesn’t want to let a deal go through that would sneak up and bite them from behind, especially since it mirrors their own situation so closely.

There will be a set of debates surrounding the regulation of this sale for certain, with both the USA and Japan needing to approve such a massive deal as the majority purchase of Sprint by Softbank here in 2012. Likely we will not see a conclusion to this situation before the end of the year – or if we do, it’ll be an end indeed, rather than a go-ahead.

AT&T carefully objects to Softbank’s Sprint deal is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.