TECHNOLOGY

The ebook reader market is beginning to pick up -- and why not with Amazon and Barnes & Nobile offering good devices and marketing the Holy Hell about them.

Despite a 5% year-on-year dip in the overall market, iPhone shipments soared 13% quarter-on-quarter, with Apple becoming the top mobile device vendor in Australia for the first time, with nearly one third market share, Research firm International Data Corp.'s Q1 2011 Mobile Device Tracker revealed.

With iPhone 5 rumors running rampant it's easy to overlook other Apple rumors mainly the one about the next generation Mac Book Air to come out this summer.

Opera Software co-founder and former CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner announced he is leaving the browser company in one week's time, giving no word as to what his next move will be.

Politicians and celebrities are used to being mocked during late-night talk show monologues or skits.

Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 3 is designed to simplify the process of improving your photos by providing a number of one-click tools that can quickly improve individual photos or entire albums up to scratch.

LulzSec's theft and disclosure of "law enforcement sensitive" documents and personal information from the Arizona Dept. of Public Safety has caused quite an uproar over privacy and security, but it has also provided a glimpse into crime in the American Southwest, where cross-border drug trafficking is a major concern.

That number might not seem like much compared to the gazillion apps at Android Market or Apple's App Store, but those 20,000 apps answer a question on many techies' lips this week: Why didn't Nokia pick MeeGo? Windows Phone Marketplace passed the 20k threshold about a month ago.

I was a late-comer to covering Microsoft's antitrust troubles in the United States.

You can ask the program to automatically optimize your connection, for instance: just click "Auto Optimization", then the Analyze button. Unlike most of the competition, it doesn't just give you some magic "Speedup" button, leaving you with no idea of what the program going to do. Instead you'll see every single recommended change, allowing you to decide exactly which setting should be tweaked, and which you'd like to keep.

Firefox 5 may be short on visible new features, but look under the hood and you'll find plenty of useful tweaks that both cut resource use and improve performance. If you like the browser but would prefer even more speed, though, there is an alternative in Pale Moon 5, which was released today.

Today, quite unexpectedly, LulzSec Security announced its retirement. "This is our final release, as today marks something meaningful to us.

Diesel, the maker of jeans for hot girls, has released an app that allows you to slack off at work without having your boss catch you on Facebook. Diesel's new "Be Stupid at Work app" makes Facebook appear to be an Excel spreadsheet, which means you can update your status and read updates all you want without the guy who shares your cubicle or your boss noticing. Download the app at http://www.bestupidatwork.com/

Telstra, Australia's largest telecommunications company, now offers the possibility to make and receive phone calls with superior sound quality with High Definition Voice.

The United States and North Korea are never in agreement with each other. They are in a dispute about South Korea, Pyongyang's nuclearization and arms proliferation, and many more. There have been tensions between them in the land, sea, and air, and they might as well take their dispute to the Internet.

My overall first impression of Galaxy Tab 10.1 was quiet favorable.

After headline-grabbing hacking exploits against the likes of Sony Corp., the CIA, the U.S. Senate, and FBI partner Infragard, hacking group LulzSec said it won't stop its cyber exploits unless U.S. President Obama does one thing."If President Obama wears a shoe on his head throughout the entirety of his next big speech, we will cease fire on all targets forever," LulzSec said in its Twitter account on Saturday.But apparently, LulzSec is calling it quits, according to a farewell...

Apple's iPhone 5 has generated a lot of rumors and buzz about it from its operating system to what it would look like. For eager fans there's one piece of gossip that has them salivating: that Apple will be announcing the next generation iPhone not at September but in "the beginning or middle of August" according to a Boy Genius Report.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) seems to be the latest victim of a hacking attack.

These days, speculations suggest that the Android Market still has great advantage over the iTunes App Store. Besides the fact that it still has more carrier options, the Android Market provides more free apps with fresh ones coming to the market. Positive reviews on these free apps brought three of them in the spotlight. They are App Backup and Restore, Shaky Tower and Dogfight.

Apple, iPad’s maker, never fails to enthrall its patrons with fantastic innovations in their quest to provide quality gadgets. In lieu with this quest, it has recently created new applications for iPad that more and more people would enjoy its use. Let’s go through them one by one.

Get a chance to watch the anticipated iTunes music fest straight from the comfort of your own home.

Australia's Prime Minister Julia Gillard is celebrating her first year in government with almost 60 percent of citizens wary of extending support to reforms she wanted to undertake specifically a carbon emissions tax deemed unpopular in an economy fueled by the mining sector.

Mozilla and the community of developers behind the SeaMonkey Internet application suite have released the first beta of SeaMonkey 2.2 just over a week after issuing a major update with SeaMonkey 2.1.

Cloud Engines Inc. announced a new aspect to the Pogoplug media server solution, the software-only Pogoplug that gives users mobile access to photos, music, and movies that they have stored on their home computer.

Filesharing software company BitTorrent on Thursday released two new pieces of software: µTorrent 3.0, a new stable release to the popular freeware BitTorrent client, and µChat beta, a new distributed chat app for µTorrent and BitTorrent Chrysalis.

It may be the worst thing to tell a crowd: "put away your cameras." But that is exactly what Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said speaking to a meeting of company employees this week in debuting a "super confidential product:" Nokia's first Windows Phone 7 device.

We already have our top five most embarrassing tweets for the first half of the year.

The Australian government reached a deal yesterday with the nation's two largest telecommunications companies, Telstra and Optus, bringing the government's rollout of the National Broadband Network closer.