Google has told MobileCrunch today that the Android Market has reached a new milestone, 30,000 applications.

The company last reported figures in December of last year, claiming 16,000 apps.

Although they would not include numbers on paid versus free, stat site AndroLib says the ratio is about 39 percent to 61 percent, with free in the clear lead.

In comparison, the Apple app store has about 150,000 apps currently available, with both markets growing very quickly.

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Okay, while the headline may be a bit sensationalist, according to the new 2010 Digital Hate Report, terrorists and racists are increasingly turning to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to lure children.

The report is released annually by the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Tolerance, and it "aims to assist law enforcement, public officials, educators, parents and the news media to better grasp the scope of hate."

2010DHR is based on 11,500 "problematic" sites, forums, Twitter posts and social networks and the report has found that "hate-filled" language is increasing in social networks, as well as offensive and "disturbing" video footage.

More disturbing, was the increase in "how-to" posts for suicide terrorists, including bomb making and laser technology. Terrorists are using social networks to brainwash young children into "hate-filled Islamic fundamentalist zombies," some as young as six years old.

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Sky has purchased 15,000 3D televisions from LG Electronics and plans to install them in pubs around the country to promote its 3D broadcasts. Back in January, Sky broadcast a Barclays Premier League match between Arsenal and Manchester United and held screenings of the event in nine pubs to show off the technology.

The broadcaster is set to launch a 3D service for wide use in the UK in April, while consumer electronics manufacturers are pushing out new 3D flat-panel televisions. The industry hopes that growing interest in 3D movies in theaters will spur interest in 3D TV at home.

Sky hopes that showing football matches and other sports events in pubs in 3D will generate some interest in it. LG also benefits from the deal in that its televisions are being promoted as part of Sky's demonstrations.

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The UK broadcasting regulator has rejected Channel Five's request for capacity on Freeview's Multiplex B. Ofcom was not convinced that Five was fully committed to HD broadcasting. Under the rules, the bandwidth will now be allocated to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Ofcom has to assign Freeview HD capacity to non-commercial broadcasters if the bandwidth is not being used by commercial broadcasters. Five was unable to clearly inform Ofcom of when it will begin broadcasting HD or how it plans to maintain a daytime HD schedule.

Ofcom is believed to have been planning to give the bandwidth to Channel 4 or S4C instead, but both also failed to commit to a service that would meet Ofcom's requirements.

Five will now have to wait until 2012 when Ofcom will again allow commercial broadcasters for pitch for HD capacity.

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Research is showing that action taken by Microsoft and others to tackle the Waledac botnet have been effective. Microsoft's "Operation b49" employed a number of technical measures coupled with court actions to cut off the controllers of the spam-spewing botnet from the 70,000 - 90,000 infected PCs.

"While it is still too early to know the entire scope of this particular takedown's impact, early returns show that Operation b49 has been delivering on the disruption of Waledac and helping to map new territory in the fight against botnets," Microsoft's Jeff Williams said.

He said that data from Microsoft and other security researchers "indicate that our actions have effectively decimated communications within the Waledac bot network." An analysis by the Shadowserver Foundation of honeypot PCs (machines allowed to be infected by researchers to observe their behavior) showed that commands received by the infected machines plummeted.

Additionally, the "honeypot" machines are no longer spewing spam. A firm called Sudosecure has also witnessed a sharp decline in the number of new IP addresses joining the Waledac network.

Waledac is responsible for millions upon millions of spam messages being spread across the Internet. Between December 3 and December 21, Hotmail caught 651 million spam e-mails from the Waledac network destined for users' accounts.

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Microsoft's upcoming update for its web browser, Internet Explorer 9, puts a lot of focus on support for the HTML 5 standards. IE9 is also expected to beef up performance, offloading tasks within the web browser to the graphics processing unit (GPU), or using separate CPU cores for certain elements of web pages if available.

While still easily the world's most used web browser, Internet Explorer has seen its market share drop along with its reputation as rivals such as Mozilla and Google pump out more and more features, support and speed for their web browsers.

The new IE supports CSS3 features such as rounded corners and opacity, while also now supporting SVG even though Microsoft is pushing its own Silverlight platform for rich graphics. At a conference in Las Vegas where IE6 was demoed, Microsoft showed H.264 video running at 720p in the browser, with the support for the video and audio content built-in.

The new Chakra Javascript engine compiles in the background on a separate CPU core if it is available on the machine. Microsoft is also including hardware acceleration into the browser to speed up web page rendering. The company calls it "GPU-powered-HTML5" which will greatly improve graphics performance within a browser and improve more normal tasks such as scrolling web pages by handing over processing to the graphics card.

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Microsoft Corp. has been ordered to pay $106 million in damages to a communications company by a jury overseeing a patent infringement lawsuit. The jury found that the Redmond-based software giant had violated two patents held by communications company VirnetX Holding.

The ruling followed a trial lasting a week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. Specifically, $75.75 million was awarded for violation of one of the patents, while $34 million was awarded for the other, bringing the total to $105.75 million.

Microsoft Corp. was disappointed with the ruling, and maintains that it does not violate any patents held by VirnetX Holding. The patents in question cover methods for establishing Virtual Private Networks (VPN).

Microsoft said that it plans to appeal the jury's verdict.

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The Chinese government expects Google.cn to respect the country's rules with regard to censorship even if it plans to quit the country altogether. Shares of Baidu were up 4.8 percent on Monday, while shares of Google fell 3 percent as speculation mounts on Google's likelihood to leave the country.

The search giant announced in January that it would quit China if it had to maintain self-censorship of its search results. The ruling communist party forces search engines to filter out results for certain terms, or certain results that it deems inappropriate for Chinese citizens to see.

Google's threat to leave the country came after it, along with at least 20 other companies, was the target of a cyberattack aimed at stealing Google's Intellectual Property and at the e-mail accounts of Chinese activists.

"On entering the Chinese market in 2007, it clearly stated that it would respect Chinese law," Yao Jian, a spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce, said. "We hope that whether Google Inc continues operating in China or makes other choices, it will respect Chinese legal regulations."

"Even if it pulls out, it should handle things according to the rules and appropriately handle remaining issues," he added. Google entered talks with the Chinese government over the situation, but reports suggest that the company is almost certain to close its Google.cn site and quit the country, which has 384 million Internet users.

A Google spokesperson said that the company was adamant about not accepting self-censorship, but experts doubt the ruling Communist Party is going to compromise on the issue. The question for the Chinese government is what message a Google exit would send to other foreign investors, but Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang played down the significance of that outcome.

"I think this would just be the individual act of one company, and will not affect China's investment environment," Qin told a regular news briefing. "It will not change the fact that most foreign companies, U.S. ones included, have a good business in China and generate large profits."

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Large computer maker Dell has filed suit against five Asian tech companies this week, alleging that all five colluded as a cartel to overcharge for LCD panels.

The suit is against large manufacturers Sharp, Hitachi, Toshiba, Seiko Epson and HannStar Display and was filed in San Francisco.

The complaint notes that Dell is taking action "on behalf of itself and its affiliates to recover for antitrust and other harms arising from billions of dollars of purchases at artificially inflated prices, over several years, of thin film transistor-liquid crystal display panels, or products containing TFT-LCD panels."

Dell goes as far as to say that the LCD price fixing has been in effect since 1996.

In the past, Sharp was accused and pleaded guilty to price fixing, agreeing to pay a $120 million fine.

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VGChartz has posted an interesting and speculative report this week, implying that Microsoft may be creating an Xbox 360 "Slim," a redesign that will shrink the size of the original console and mark the first major complete redesign since the console's launch in 2005.

Microsoft is hiring a new motherboard engineer, one for the 360 development team, with the job ad going up last week.

CEO Steve Ballmer, known for letting speculative comments fly almost every time he speaks, started the rumor mill last week as well, saying new console models would be available in the future with different "form factors."

Here is the full job ad (and let the speculation begin):

Job Category: Hardware Engineering
Location: United States, CA, Mountain View
Job ID: 714897
Product: Xbox Home
Division: Entertainment & Devices Division

Motherboard Design Engineer
Job Description
The Xbox 360 Console development team is seeking qualified candidates for an Electrical Engineer. The responsibilities of this position are focused on specifying, designing (schematic capture, PCB layout, BOM, cost analysis), implementing and verifying the mother-board and other various sub-system boards that make up the XBOX 360 product line. This work includes development of requirements and evaluating different solution for functionality, cost, and risk. The subsystems on the XBOX 360 mother board include (but are not limited to): High speed busses (front side bus, memory bus, PCIe bus, SATA bus, USB bus, I2S, etc.), memory, Ethernet, audio/video, system clocking, power and thermal management, and misc. analog/digital circuitry.
The XBOX 360 Console Development team is responsible for aggressive cost reduction of the console throughout the life of the product as well as expanding the market for the console in derivative products. The position involves working closely with industrial designers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, software engineers, test engineers, component engineers, and program managers.

Qualifications:
Minimum BS/MS in Electrical Engineering
Minimum of 4 years experience contributing to the design and production of complex products in the consumer PC or consumer electronic industry.
A solid understanding of core engineering principles, fundamental circuit design, and analytical techniques is required.
Familiarity with PC, embedded system architectures hardware and software, experience with implementation of high speed serial busses (SATA, PCIe, USB) and/or high speed parallel busses such as: memory bus (DDR2, GDDR3, etc.), CPU front side bus, Hyper transport, and/or voltage regulator/power delivery design a plus.
Design for manufacturing and test experience is required.
Strong bench evaluation and in-lab debugging skills are required.
Strong communication skills required. Including the ability to clearly express technical concepts in verbal and written forms.
Must be able to plan work, and work to a plan adapting as necessary in a rapidly evolving environment.
The ability to comprehend and assimilate technical concepts across multiple disciplines is a plus.
Enthusiastic, motivated and self driven.
Domestic and international travel may be required.

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Sony has introduced a new 'Skinny' SDK this past week, one that will give developers a way to create non-game applications and add them to the PlayStation Store, quickly and easily.

The company has described the lightweight 'Skinny' tool as "a simple yet effective means for content holders to put their intellectual property on the PlayStation platforms without software development."

On average, the apps will take one day to create. The software will be mainly used (Sony hopes) to create "strategy guides, game maps, cheats, training manuals, episodic videos, eBooks and eMagazines," and will include a web-based authoring tool and a software client.

It will be available for the PS3 and the PSP.

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Hitwise has posted a very interesting chart today, one that shows that Facebook has become the most popular site (by traffic) in the United States, at least for the week ended March 13th, the first time in years that Google has been unseated for a full week.

Visits to Facebook increased 185 percent for the week year-on-year, while Google only saw 9 percent YoY growth. Combined, FB and Google accounted for a giant 14 percent of all US internet traffic last week.

Facebook was the most visited site on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Day and the weekend of March 7th, but never for a full week.

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Arstechnica has put together an interesting article this week that shows the loyalty (or lack thereof) of current BlackBerry owners.

Citing a Crowd Science survey, Ars says that 2 out of every 5 current BlackBerry owners would switch to an Apple iPhone when their contract was up.

Additionally, 33 percent of current iPhone owners, as well as 16 percent of BlackBerry owners use their devices for "exclusively personal use", not for work. Only 1 percent of iPhone owners use their devices exclusively for business/work and 7 percent of BlackBerry users do the same.

Higher percentages, 66 percent for iPhone owners and 77 percent for BlackBerry users, used their devices for both work and personal reasons.

Finally, the survey showed that 90 percent of both Android and iPhone owners would stick with their current OS/devices when their contracts were up, showing much better loyalty than current RIM users.

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After almost a year's worth of development, we're happy to reveal the new version of our site, dubbed as "v4". Many things have changed since the previous version - most notably the layout itself, but also the code behind the site has went through some major changes.

From now on, all of our various language versions will use the same codebase and same site structure, making further development much, much easier than in the past. Furthermore, launching new language editions of the site will become a breeze compared to the old system where each site was basically a clone of its siblings, but maintained independently.

As always with major upgrades, we are expecting to see weird problems to pop up -- and hope that you'll let us know if you encounter a bug or weird behaviour while browsing through the site. You can contact us by either posting a comment to this news article or by using our feedback form.

Now, let us know your comments about the new design.

-Team AfterDawn

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Showing off the app at the MIX event, Microsoft Windows Phone 7 devices will have a Netflix streaming app (currently in prototype stage) that will allow for movie playback over 3G or Wi-Fi.

The popular Netflix "Watch Instantly" streaming service has over 12,000 movies, TV episodes and documentaries.

There is not much other info on it, but Engadget has a shaky video of the app in action, and it looks pretty good so far:

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