This Sunday's News of the World will be the last ever. The massive-circulation newspaper is deeply embroiled in phone hacking and police bribery allegations. It has been printed for over 150 years. Despite its recent reputation for shag-n-tell stories about footballers it has a past history of decent investigative journalism. The Reg was tipped off by an insider and received this statement from the press office: News International today announces that this Sunday, 10 July 2011, will be the last issue of the News of the World. Making the announcement to staff, James Murdoch, deputy chief operating officer at News Corporation and chairman at News International, said: I have important things to say about the News of the World and the steps we are taking to address the very serious problems that have occurred. It is only right that you as colleagues at News International are first to hear what I have to say and that you hear it directly from me. So thank you very much for coming here and listening.

I admit it: I’m not a fan of Facebook. This week, with the emergence of Google+, I’ve been starry-eyed at the possibility of a new social media delivery system that allows me to do all the stuff I wanted to but couldn’t on Facebook. And while I’d like to talk about Google+, that’s just not what this post is about. Nope. This is about my dad, Facebook and healing in the age of social media. In brief: My dad was born in 1952. He first heard the opening riff of the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” over a little battery-operated radio sometime in 1964, and soon after picked up a guitar and adopted a mop-top. He’s never been the same. In a nutshell: My dad’s a musician, a devoted Christian, an avid fisherman, an amateur lepidopterist and an amazing father. He’s been ill for the better part of my life with a disease called hypersensitivity vasculitis, plus rheumatoid arthritis for good measure. And then there’s the major heart problems. Starting around his 30th birthday, Dad fell ill with a series of odd symptoms, from painful joints to burning rashes. For years his doctors tried to find an answer. He’s tried every regimen and medicine known to man and has managed. As with many diseases — this one striking roughly one in a million — doctors aren’t exactly scrambling to make advances or spend grants on research.

Wired 

Microsoft is reportedly demanding $15 per Android handset sold by Samsung - and has other Android handset makers in its sights as it tries to extract the maximum value from the patents that it owns which it can argue cover mobile. Previously it has reportedly got HTC to pay around $5 per handset, and earlier this week it announced that Wistron had "signed a patent agreement" for its "tablets, mobile phones, e-readers and other consumer devices running the Android or Chrome platform". Fabulous quote: "We are pleased that Wistron is taking advantage of our industrywide licensing program, established to help companies address Android's IP issues," said Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft. Yes, certainly glad.

 

Communications regulator Ofcom has revealed that it is considering using the airwaves vacated by FM to provide rural broadband services. The move would be an extension of trials already taking place using similar ‘white space’ left from TV spectrum in the Scottish Isle of Bute and around Cambridge. The Government has repeatedly declined to set a date for radio switchover from FM to digital, so Ofcom’s suggestions may not be taken up by providers for decades. White space, however, is attractive because it is not allocated to another purpose and is therefore free. It is available in both high and low frequency ranges, with the latter being particularly useful in buildings where other signals struggle to penetrate. Ofcom's chief executive Ed Richards said: "Spectrum is a resource that is in huge demand, fuelled by the recent explosion in smart phones and other wireless technologies.We need to start thinking more creatively about how it is used."

The Telegraph 

 

Nintendo has been struck with a lawsuit by an intellectual property owner which claims to hold the rights to viewing glasses-free stereoscopic images. The IP owner, Tomita Technologies, founded by ex-Sony staffer Seijiro Tomita, reckonsNintendo's 3DS infringes on one of its patents, Patent Arcade reports. Tomita claims to have up to 70 patents to its name, and more than 100 patent applications in flight. The patent in question is 7,417,664 - aka the '664 patent' - which describes a "stereoscopic image picking up and display system based upon optical axes cross-point information" [sic]. The patent may be a confusing read, but it definitely seems similar. Originally filed in March 2003, the patent was eventually granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office in August 2008. While it has yet to fully detail how Nintendo has violated its patent, Tomita has requested the company cease production of 3DS tech and compensate it accordingly for the damage it believes Nintendo has done to it, and for its legal fees.

Electronic mischief-making has come into its own this year. Between WikiLeaks, Anonymous and more recently LulzSec, hacking cults are becoming high-profile irritants.But Peter Fein, the human face of Telecomix and currently spreading the word about their work, doesn't seem too bothered by his "hacker" label when I meet him at Sheffield Doc Fest, where he was invited to sit on a panel called the Revolution will be Tweeted. "We're kind of like an inverse Anonymous," Fein said. "We operate in a very similar way to Anonymous not just IRC [Internet Relay Chat – online, open forums where users can meet to chat] but also the non-hierarchical structure. Except they break things and we build them. "I guess you could say it's guerrilla informational warfare. I can just tell you my experience of what happened, and why – I'm not an official spokesman, we just don't have those. I'm not sure what to call us – are we hacktivists? Hacker is such a loaded term … what we're doing is clearly different than LulzSec is doing."

The Guardian 

 

While the news will prompt an uncomprehending look from 99 per cent of Brits, the few remaining fans of Sony's MiniDisc format will mourn the MD Walkman's passing when production ceases in September. Last year, Sony canned production of cassette Walkman players. The MD Walkman was launched in Japan in 1992, and that's one of the few places where you can still buy a player outside of eBay. But not enough folk are doing so, and Sony is knocking MiniDIsc Walkman production on the head, Japan's Nikkei newspaper claims today. MiniDisc was one of a number of formats launched to supersede the compact cassette, DAT and DCC among them. Only MiniDisc prospered as an audio format. DCC was quickly killed. DAT found a home not in audio but as a data back-up medium.

It can be difficult to know where to turn to find new music these days. With seemingly more music being made than ever, it can be easy to lose track. If you grew up reading the ‘inkies’, listening to John Peel and hunting through the racks at your High Street record shop and now don’t know where to turn, here are some ten suggestions - split into five categories - for how the internet can help you to find new music. The best way to find music you like has always been recommendations. In the past, those recommendations would have come from friends, your cool older brother/cousin or John Peel. Now, the internet can help too.Last.fm is a website that quietly tracks what you’re listening to and builds personalised charts to satisfy your inner Nick Hornby. After it has built up a sense of your taste it can make recommendations. If you connect with your friends then it will make recommendations based on what they are listening to as well. A simpler approach is to use something like iTunes Genius. As well as making playlists based on your music library, Genius will also scan your library and deliver recommendations based on your collection.

The Telegraph 

It's happening. The music streaming service that has won over the collective heart of Europe is finallymaking the puddle jump that we've been waiting for. Spotify just threw up a US landing spot, inviting eager Americans to jump in line for a table at the party. Meanwhile, we just received confirmation on our own end that things are finalizing for testing here in the States, and we'll be sure to report back just as soon as our credentials clear. We should note, however, that there's still no definitive time table to report, but it's fairly obvious that those final record deals are close enough to done to call this thing a victory. Now, the real question: are you signing up in the source link below, or are any of those other guys still tugging at your heartstrings?

Engadget 

 

It isn’t often that you hear about a stolen laptop being returned to its rightful owner — but still, that’s not really news. Toss in a police raid in Argentina and the recovery of about a $1 million in counterfeit U.S. bills — now you have a story. It certainly isn’t a story that Gleb Budman, the co-founder of the automated backup service Backblaze, could have possibly imagined might some day be one of his company’s success stories. Not that they weren’t already doing just fine. “We’ve already had a couple of people recover their stolen laptops,” Budman told Wired.com. “But I did not expect this to come out of it. This was lucky on all fronts.” That’s putting it mildly. But the upside of the Law of Unintended Consequence is that this sort of thing is going to happen more often in our increasingly connected digital universe. Backblaze, which costs $5 a month or $50 a year for unlimited backup of hard drives and external drives, works through software on a user’s computer that continually backs up data to Backblaze’s custom data center. Customers can use the service to recover deleted versions of files (say, for example, you edit a photo and then save it over the old one) or to restore data in the case of a hard-drive failure or theft.