Hasta La Gadget!

Infamous media giant Walt Disney has announced that effective immediately, it has elected Twitter chairman and Square CEO Jack Dorsey as an independent director on its board. The seat Dorsey occupies now once belonged to a former chief technology officer of Cisco, Judith L. Estrin, who served on Disney’s board for 15 years, the maximum number of years for which one member can occupy the seat. Dorsey will stand for election when Walt Disney’s board meets for its annual meeting on March 18, next year.

Disney chairman and chief executive officer Robert A. Iger said that Jack Dorsey happens to be a “talented entrepreneur” and that the prespective he brings to the company’s board is extremely valuable, given the fact that Disney’s strategic priorities include making use of the latest technologies to better reach out to its customers. Dorsey is well known for his role at Twitter, which included posting the world’s first tweet back in March 2006. Until 2008, he was the president and CEO of Twitter, before becoming the chairman. He has also spearheaded the development and growth of Square, a popular commerce company founded in 2009. In a statement, Dorsey said that he is “honored and humbled” to join the “timeliness” company’s board.

Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey Joins Walt Disney’s Board original content from Ubergizmo.

Most major OEMs host their annual conferences which are attended by a wide variety of people, including developers, analysts, journalists and more. Apple hosts the Worldwide Developers Conference whereas Google hosts the I/O every year. BlackBerry, the once iconic Canadian smartphone manufacturer, has hosted its own annual event since 2012 under different monikers, most recently under the BlackBerry Live branding. The company has confirmed that it will not host BlackBerry Live 2014. Instead, BlackBerry says, it will continue to host smaller and targeted events in various regions around the world next year.

The decision to cancel BlackBerry Live 2014 certainly deals a blow to the company’s device plans. They have always served as the perfect platforms for building hype about an upcoming device. It goes without saying that the company has suffered monumental losses due to deteriorating performance of its hardware division. It also clears the air about the direction that BlackBerry is going to take under new CEO John Chen, which seems to be moving away from devices and focusing on its core strengths that lie in security and enterprise solutions. BlackBerry isn’t shutting down its hardware division immediately, it probably can’t afford to right now, but it has made some changes. Foxconn has been brought onboard as partner for developing low-end devices, whereas the folks back at Waterloo are going to focus exclusively on high-end devices that are favored by its loyal user base as well as enterprise customers.

BlackBerry Live 2014 Bites The Dust original content from Ubergizmo.

At the moment the NSA is getting a lot of flak from people all over the world, not just US citizens, over its spying program that was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Not only did we find out that the NSA is spying on its own citizens, but now according to the latest reports, it seems that one of the reasons the NSA is able to gather data is because they could have been paying off security firms to insert code into their software that would make it easier for the NSA to access. This is the latest accusation in which it claims that the NSA paid off security company, RSA, about $10 million to sell encryption software that would be vulnerable to surveillance.

While this has been suspected before and mentioned by Snowden, this report by Reuters would make it the first where an actual company has been named, along with possible monetary compensation at the same time. RSA claims that they were unaware of the NSA’s backdoor capabilities, with the company releasing a statement that says, “RSA always acts in the best interest of its customers and under no circumstances does RSA design or enable any back doors in our products […] Decisions about the features and functionality of RSA products are our own.” It was recently that the top executives from tech companies such as Apple, Google, and Yahoo met with President Obama to discuss NSA reforms.

NSA Reportedly Paid Software Encryption $10m To Make Their Software More Vulnerable original content from Ubergizmo.

It was rumored recently that Sprint is interested in acquiring T-Mobile, having Magenta’s user base and infrastructure onboard would allow Sprint to launch a much more effective competition against rivals Verizon and AT&T. While AT&T pursued its own buyout bid for T-Mobile, it could get through due to regulatory concerns. It remains to be seen how far Sprint is able to go in this rumored bid for T-Mobile, but apparently its Chairman, who also happens to be the CEO of Softbank which purchased Sprint, is meeting to banks to advise and finance the T-Mobile acquisition.

Masayoshi Son, the gentleman we’re talking about in this article, has discussed financing with banks like Mizuho, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase and Credit Suisse Group, people “familiar with the matter” tell Bloomberg. These are the very same financial institutions that advised and financed SoftBank’s buyout of Sprint. Apparently the chairman and CEO is looking to raise $20 billion, and take control of T-Mobile by paying cash for the 67 percent stake in Magenta that’s owned by Deutsche Telekom. According to the report, while Deutsche Telekom and Sprint haven’t sat down as yet, apparently the former is willing to sell its stake for around $16 billion. According to the sources, discussions with the banks are in initial stages, but so far it appears that financing is available for this deal.

Sprint Chairman Approaching Banks To Secure Funding For T-Mobile Acquisition original content from Ubergizmo.

Well, well, what do we have here? Apparently, a major archive of British websites is now live and kicking, but it has yet to be online. This particular project can be accessed only in person assuming you plant your backside in one of the British Isles’ six biggest libraries, where there will be corresponding terminals in those libraries to help you out. This particular effort is made possible after 10 years of legal wrangling between the British Library and publishers. No thanks to the restrictions which were imposed by the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003, this translates to the fact that the archive can only be accessed as long as you are physically in library reading rooms.

The British Library, however, offers a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel, touting that there has been some “discussions into the possibility that the Act might be changed in future so that the archived copies of websites might be made available via the web. Making archived copies of material available online, and also allowing it to be indexed by search engines, could potentially affect the volume of web user traffic to the rights owner’s live website and harm their business model.” This project, first launched in April this year, will comprise of the whole UK web domain, and this includes blogs, public tweets and Facebook pages.

UK Web Archive Is Now Live original content from Ubergizmo.