Techplore.com

A high school student today filed suit against Amazon.com for pulling George Orwell books off its Kindle electronic reader – destroying the homework he’d already completed. Serious. Amazon deleted “1984″ and “Animal Farm,” saying it mistakenly sold them on Kindle without permission. CEO Jeff Bezos later apologized, conceding the screwup was “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.”

That’s not good enough for Justin D. Gawronski, 17, who bought “1984″ for a summer homework assignment. When Amazon deleted the book from his Kindle, it “rendered the electronic notes he had taken worthless,” says his Chicago attorney in a news release. The class action suit in Seattle’s U.S. District Court seeks to bar Amazon from “improperly accessing people’s Kindles in the future,” and asks for compensation for anyone who lost work product like Gawronski’s. Continue reading…

The best Photoshop interface ever

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OS X continues to fall short of its security reputation

Many Mac owners live under the assumption that their computers will never be attacked.  While that statement may hold some truth — most fail to understand why.  Rather than realizing that the relatively safety is afforded by Apple’s still small market share, they believe that the security is somehow owing to an inherent security superiority in their operating system of choice, OS X, a sentiment echoed in Apple’s sarcasm-laden “Get a Mac” commercials. Continue reading…

Nikon D300s has some important improvement from Nikon D300 to stay competitive in the market. Most of the  improvement are exactly the same as rumored.

Here is the recap on what is improved according to Nikon USA site:

• 7 fps body only, 8 fps with battery grip
• Refined D-Movie function including an external microphone input for clear stereo sound recordings
• Dual card slots for CF/SD memory cards
• Quiet shutter release

What features remain the same

• Multi-CAM 3500DX AF sensor module featuring 51 AF points offers fast, efficient and precise autofocus coverage across the frame
• Large, bright viewfinder with approx. 100% frame coverage and approx. 0.94 magnification
• Nikon’s original DX-format CMOS image sensor; 12.3 effective megapixels
• Magnesium alloy body for light weight and rugged durability Continue reading…

LG today has officially revealed its next Chocolate phone LG BL40. The fourth handset of the Black Label Series boasts a 4.0-inch wide screen high-definition LCD with an 800 by 345 pixel resolution, enable 21:9 aspect ratio support for video viewing. The 4.0-inch display also features a Dual Screen UI that can efficiently display two different types of content simultaneously. Continue reading…

Taiwanese authorities on Thursday fined US computer giant Dell one million Taiwan dollars (30,500 US) for customer rights infringements after it failed to honour an online price offer.

The punishment came after Taipei City Government received more than 1,400 complaints against Dell after it charged customers more than it had advertised on its website.

In the most recent incident, the company’s Latitude E4300 notebook, which usually retails at 60,900 Taiwan dollars, appeared online at less than a third of the price, reportedly prompting bargain-hunters to place up to 100,000 orders.

“Dell was insincere in resolving the disputes and refused to accept the 25-percent-off compensation deal advised by the city government,” said Chen Po-ching, the city’s senior consumer rights official. Continue reading…

We have received numerous reports of excessive FriendFeed posts showing up in Facebook this evening. While we are not 100% sure, it appears to be an issue on Facebook’s end due to ignoring application settings. We have disabled all FriendFeed updates to Facebook until we are sure the problem is resolved. Continue reading…

Nikon has announced the launch of the D3000 digital SLR, joining the DX range of cameras as a new entry-level model.

Aimed at newcomers to the DSLR market, the D3000 is targeting those trading-up from a compact camera, offering Nikon’s a Guide setting on the dial, that like the Canon 500D, will lead amateurs through the settings to help achieve their creative aims.

Around the back you’ll find a 3-inch 230k-dot screen, whilst inside is a 10.2-effective megapixel sensor backed by Nikon’s EXPEED image processing system. Continue reading…

Windows 7 has yet to even be released officially to the general public, and already the dodgy folk on the Internet have fully cracked and activated the Ultimate version, with help from a leaked Lenovo OEM DVD .ISO file.

The news comes from various Chinese forums who state that you can already pass Windows Genuine Advantage validation offline, OEM style. 

The leaked .ISO was originally posted on a Chinese forum, which was then downloaded in order for people to get hold of the boot.wim, and in turn retrieving the OEM-SLP key, plus the OEM activation certificate. Microsoft uses the same digitally signed OEM certificate, which has an .xrm-ms extension, as that in Windows Vista. Another point to note is that the key is a master one, which can be used to activate other OEM branded installations, like ones from Dell, HP or indeed Lenovo. Continue reading…

It’s a long weekend and you’re happy because you’ll get to spend the next three days with your family. You left the office in an excited mood but as the cab was approaching home, you suddenly realized that you forgot to shut down the Office PC. Oops!

It’s a sinking feeling because there’re so many confidential documents on the computer and since most of your trusted colleagues have also left for the day, there’s no point calling them for help.

So what do you do? Drive back to Office? Well that’s not required – just take out your cell phone or switch on the laptop at home, send an email (or an SMS or a tweet) and that will instantly lock your Office workstation. And if you share the same computer with multiple people, you can use another email command to remotely log off or even shut down the computer from anywhere in the world. Continue reading…

If there are multiple Google AdSense ad units on a web page, it is generally assumed that the top ad unit (the one which appears first in the HTML source code) will serve the highest paying CPC ads. Well, that may be true most of the times but not always. Let’s understand why.

But before you dive into the example below, please watch this excellent video by Dr Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, as he explains how an ad auction works and what factors determine the position of AdSense ads on a web page for a given keyword.

The Google AdWords system assigns a “Quality Score” to every advertiser who is participating in the ad auction and this score is determined by the quality of the advertiser’s website, the historical CTR of his ads on Google and a couple of other factors. Continue reading…

TomTom refuses to rest on its market-share laurels, and so we have another iteration of the best-selling and award-winning Go range. This 740 is the middle of three x40 versions, and gets UK and European maps. The 540 has UK maps, with the option to pick-and-mix European maps at extra cost. The range-topping 940 adds North American maps for the more serious globe-trotter.

Real-time traffic updates
The LIVE in the name refers to a SIM card built into the device that offers up some new functionality – real-time connection to TomTom’s new HD Traffic, as well as safety camera updates, Google Local Search services, such as added POIs and fuel prices. These services are free for three months from purchase, and £7.99 a month thereafter. Continue reading…

Samsung on Monday announced it will soon bring out its own e-book reader, the 5-inch SNE-50K, in its home market of South Korea. Users can also make notes on the device, unlike competing e-book readers from Amazon and Sony. While content will not be downloaded wirelessly straight to the device, it can be transferred from a PC, originating from a local bookstore chain. Other than the 5-inch screen and its 600×800 resolution, there is 512MB of onboard storage, slotting it between the Kindle and Reader in terms of space. Continue reading…

Back at the end of 2007 I had seen a company called Fusion-IO, which was producing hard drives that ran on your PCI-Express slots. It was a pretty cool idea then, but unfortunately their offering was really salty, and aimed primarily at enterprise customers. Well since one of the co-founders is a hardcore gamer, they decided to branch out and try to bring the same incredible performance to a new crowd. Continue reading…

Preliminary sales numbers are in and Wii Sports Resort is a huge hit.

The first big Wii game of 2009 was released over the weekend in Europe and America and VGChartz brings you our preliminary sales figures for the game.

Wii Sports Resort has already sold nearly 1.5 million copes worldwide according to our preliminary figures and like Wii Fit, Wii Play and Mario Kart Wii is expected to be a strong seller for the remainder of the year. Hardware sales saw a small bump with the release of Wii Sports Resort, but with the game expected to sell primarily to existing Wii owners (at least in the short term) then the effect is expected to be more long-term. Continue reading…