Microsoft has confirmed that it is purchasing Canesta, a small 3D chip making company that specializes in gesture-recognition tech.

Canesta is best known for chips that, when coupled with digital cameras, give many devices a 3D effect, and a sense of depth perception (as pictured).

The Redmond giant did not disclose how much it paid for the chip maker.

Notably, the 3D tech used in the newly-launched Kinect motion control system was created by Canesta's rival PrimeSense.

"I'm excited to be way out in front and want to push the pedal on that," added CEO Steve Ballmer, when he was asked about company plans to advance gesture technology outside of just Kinect.

Analysts speculate Microsoft will use the Canesta tech to begin equipping PCs, HDTVs and Windows Phone 7 devices with gesture-recognition tech.

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TUAW has posted a picture today that has lead to speculation that Verizon will announce the much-anticipated launch of the CDMA iPhone on November 9th.

Verizon has been adding service staff in the last month, with TUAW speculating that the carrier has doubled its service staff "assigned to handle number porting requests."

There would be little reason for Verizon to add so much staff if not expecting a lot of users to port from other carriers.

The picture shows a training notice sent out to customer service staff describing an upcoming "iconic device" that will go on pre-order starting November 9th.

TUAW does note that the Motorola Droid Pro has been given the same "Iconic Device" tag, so the validity of the rumor is still up in the air.

Could make for an interesting Tuesday.

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Prime Minister of Great Britain, David Cameron, is set to announce big plans for establishing East London as one of the world's great technology centers.

Looking to spur the creation of private sector jobs to make up for public sector losses due to state spending cuts, British Prime Minister David Cameron has identified the tech industries as a safe bet for government backing and investment in the UK.

Later today, he is expected to announce that the likes of Facebook and Google are set to invest in the East London Tech City plan. He wants the area, which include Olympic Park, to give Silicon Valley a run for its money over the coming years.

"Right now, Silicon Valley is the leading place in the world for hi-tech growth and innovation," Cameron will say in a speech to businesses and entrepreneurs. "But there's no reason why it has to be so predominant. Our ambition is to bring together the creativity and energy of Shoreditch and the incredible possibilities of the Olympic Park to help make east London one of the world's great technology centres."

He will report that the response from international technology firms and venture capitalists to the plan has been overwhelming, and announce several firms that have agreed to invest in the area, including Intel, Cisco and BT.

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Following the discovery of viable bomb materials hidden in parcels destined for Chicago, YouTube has decided to remove videos featuring an American-born radical cleric.

Anwar al-Awlaki reportedly appeared in over 700 videos available on the YouTube, the world's largest video hub, which amounted to a total of 3.5 million views. He was recently charged in absentia in Yemen with incitement to kill foreigners after the discovery of U.S.-bound explosives.

Following the developments, YouTube repeatedly received calls from British and American officials requesting that the cleric's videos, which often contained calls for a holy war, be removed from the service. In September 2008, YouTube already changed its policies, banning the upload of videos "that incite others to commit violent acts, videos on activities such as how to make bombs and footage of sniper attacks."

However, YouTube's system depends on users actually reporting videos that do not adhere to the upload guidelines. US Congressman Anthony Weiner, a Democrat from New York, who has dubbed al-Awlaki as the "bin Laden of the Internet," wrote to YouTube requesting that the site move to rid itself of the cleric's message.

"I understand that YouTube is a clearing house for ideas and that your company aims to not infringe on free speech, but al-Awlaki message, promoted via YouTube, has caused violence and is a threat to American security," his letter reads.

"I request that you remove this man and his hateful rhetoric from your website, as he poses a clear and present danger to American citizens."

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Viewsonic has unveiled their new 3DV5 pocket-camcorder this week, giving consumers a chance to record film in 3D without the need for glasses.

The device has a 2.4 inch autosterescopic screen, similar to the one used in the upcoming Nintendo 3DS handheld. The 3DV5 also has an HDMI output for users who want to playback the recordings on 3D HDTVs.

Outside of its 3D aspects, the camcorder is not all that special, costing £150 and bringing just 10MB of internal memory. You will need to purchase an SD card to use the device.

The 3DV5 will record in 720p HD.

Says the company: "Everyone has watched 3D movies at the cinema, and lots of people are considering purchasing a 3D compatible display, whether a TV, monitor or projector. However, there is a lack of available 3D content, and people want to create 3D content that they will be able to watch for years to come."

"The ViewSonic 3DV5 makes it easy for anyone to create future-proof, high quality 3D home movies and also shoot in standard 2D. As well as being easy to use, the camcorder is also excellent value for money, and will make a great gift this Christmas," concluded James Coulson, European product marketing manager, ViewSonic.

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Dell has announced a deal to buy a cloud-computing company after it recently lost a bidding war with Hewlett-Packard for cloud firm 3Par.

Dell has been eager to buy into cloud computing, which allows users to access files, services, software and all kinds of other content remotely using the Internet. All around the world, businesses are turning to the cloud for solutions to cut costs on servers and local software licenses, and all the big tech companies want a piece of the action.

Dell, the world's third largest computer maker, said that Boomi would help businesses reap the full benefits of cloud computing. "Twenty-six years ago we helped accelerate the move to client-server computing," said Steve Felice, president of Dell's consumer and small and medium-sized businesses division.

"Today we'll help drive a similar transformation with customers turning to the cloud to drive costs down and innovation up."

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UK communications regulator Ofcom has threatened two telecom firms over bogus bills they had demanded customers pay up.

TalkTalk and Tiscali were threatened with fines by the regulator after they had billed customers for services that were canceled previously. Over 1,000 consumers contacted Ofcom complaining that they received agressive demands from the two providers for the payment of bills they didn't owe to them.

TalkTalk bought Tiscali last year and has blamed a new billing system that was introduced since for the billing errors. Tiscali customers on seven different billing systems are slowly being integrated with TalkTalk's own customer database.

Ofcom has warned that many thousands more customers may have been billed wrongfully. TalkTalk said this problem should not arise again after it fixed problems with the billing system that will now stop it from producing spurious bills for customers who have left the services.

"TalkTalk Group has co-operated fully with Ofcom's investigation and we apologise for the inconvenience caused to this limited group of former customers," the company said.

Ofcom isn't taking the situation very lightly. It has demanded that TalkTalk first ensures that it does not try again to collect non-existent debts, use any debt collectors in such cases or threaten any legal action against consumers. If former customers have paid up for services they didn't receive, they must be refunded.

If credit ratings agencies were involved in any particular case and a customer has had his/her credit history damaged, then it must be repaired. TalkTalk has until December 2 to comply fully and if it fails to do so, it can be fined as much as 10 percent of its annual turnover.

"Ofcom is determined to stand up for consumers and take action against companies that break the rules," said Ofcom's director of consumer affairs, Claudio Pollack. "Our investigation into TalkTalk and Tiscali UK found that they had billed customers for cancelled services; this is unacceptable which is why we have ordered them to clean up their act or face the consequences."

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Wal-Mart and Vudu have announced this week that all buyers of physical copies of the new release Toy Story 3 from Wal-Mart will receive a free digital copy from Vudu.

The only catch is you will need to purchase the Special Edition 3-Disc Set on either DVD or Blu-ray. Single-disc sets are not included in the promotion.

Buyers can play their Vudu digital copy anywhere with an Internet connection, including via Blu-ray players, the Boxee Box and other set-tops.

The new offer seems to be following a trend started by Amazon last year with the launch of Disc+ which gives users a free digital copy of over 10,000 titles when they are purchased through Amazon.

Wal-Mart acquired Vudu last year.

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The SkyFire browser has been accepted into the iOS App Store today, finally giving million of users a chance to watch Flash videos on their devices.

Skyfire 2.0 will go on sale in the App Store tomorrow morning with a price tag of $2.99.

Lack of Flash has been one of the largest drawbacks of owning an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, especially since over 75 percent of online videos are encoded with the standard.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has made it abundantly clear, however, that native Flash will not be supported on Apple devices, ever, as they kill battery life and generally perform poorly on mobiles.

Skyfire gets around this ban by taking Flash video, renders and translates it to HTML5 and redisplays it, showing users a thumbnail they can click to play the video.

"We will attack those pesky blue Flash error messages," added CEO Jeffrey Glueck.

It is important to note, also, that over 50 percent of videos online are also encoded with HTML5.

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Samsung certain likes to be the first a lot, like when it had the first DivX-certified handset, and now the company has done it again.

With the Wi-Fi Alliance just starting to certify Wi-Fi Direct devices last week, Samsung's GT-I9000 handset has already been listed on the Wi-Fi Alliance website as Wi-Fi Direct certified. A lot of modern-era Wi-Fi devices are capable of becoming Wi-Fi Direct certified, most likely through system updates as there is no hardware change in the protocol.

That is likely how the Samsung handset will become Direct-capable, a firmware update of some sort.

Wi-Fi Direct allows compatible devices to communicate with each other using Wi-Fi but without the need for a wireless access point or wireless router. This functionality could be added to a lot of existing smartphones on the market with system updates if the manufacturers follow Samsung's lead.

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A security firm researching the safety of the mobile Android operating system has discovered a long list of security bugs, with at least some being thought of as a serious risk.

In a report, security firm Coverity claims to have identified several hundred bugs in the Android operating system. The researchers scoured over 60 million lines of open source code in their Coverity Scan Open Source Integrity Report, including the Android OS source used with the HTC Droid Incredible.

In total, 359 bugs were discovered by the team, with 88 of them categorized as being a "high risk". Coverity praised Android for having a lower density of bugs per thousand lines of code than average open source software, but said it had a higher bug density than the Linux kernel. Some of the bugs, it argues, should have been caught before release.

All Android distributions are different in some way or another, but it is thought that most Froyo-based Android phones will be vulnerable to the discovered bugs.

Google has responded by preparing over-the-air fixes that it says will be delivered by January at least. The availability of over-the-air fixes is a huge plus for the Android operating system all by itself. Coverity will not disclose details on the vulnerabilities it discovered until patches are available and are being delivered.

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A previously unknown Internet Explorer bug has been used in target attacked online, security researchers warned today.

An unidentified website has been breached by the unknown attackers, who injected code that can exploit a flaw in the Internet Explorer browser. The perpetrators sent e-mails to selected individuals who were part of targeted organizations, luring them to the hacked webpage.

If the user was running Internet Explorer 6, or Internet Explorer 7, they may have been infected with a backdoor trojan. No user intervention would have been required for the malware to be delivered if the flaw was exploted successfully. Internet Explorer 8 "might" be technically vulnerable to the flaw, but the browser's built-in Data Execution Protection (DEP) would cause the webpage to crash instead.

"Looking at the log files from this exploited server we know that the malware author had targeted more than a few organizations," Symantec reported. "The files on this server had been accessed by people in lots of organizations in multiple industries across the globe."

The flaw lies in IE's handing of Cascading Style Sheets. The browser under-allocates memory, allowing data to be overwritten in memory vtable pointers. This can allow an attacker to inject code and execute it.

Microsoft has not said when a patch will be made available for the flaw but it is not likely to be released out of cycle due to it being ineffective with Internet Explorer 8. For those running IE6 or IE7 who cannot update for any particular reason, there is always the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) provided by Microsoft to help IT Professionals protect systems from common threats. EMET works by applying security mitigation technologies to arbitrary applications to block against exploitation through common attack vectors.

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As reported during the weekend, the Supreme Court started examining legislation from California that would make the sale of violent video games to minors illegal.

The Schwarzenegger vs EMA case landed in the highest court in the United States and the reaction of the court can only fairly be described as very critical. Justice Antonin Scalia in particular had a lot of questions to ask the California attorney general, who was arguing for the law previously declared unconstitutional by a lower court.

"I am concerned with the First Amendment, which says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech," Scalia said. "It was always understood that the freedom of speech did not include obscenity. It has never been understood that the freedom of speech did not include portrayals of violence. You are asking us to create a whole new prohibition. What's next after violence? Drinking? Movies that show drinking? Smoking?"

Scalia also took issue with the use of the term "deviant violent videogames" used by proponents of the law. "As opposed to what? A normal violent videogame?" asked Scalia. "Some of the Grimm's fairy tales are quite grim, to tell you the truth... Are you going to ban them too?" he added.

President Obama's Supreme Court picks, Justice Elana Kagan and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, also pressured California attorney general, Zackery Morazzimi. "One of the studies, the Anderson study, says that the effect of violence is the same for a Bugs Bunny episode as it is for a violent video. So can the legislature now, because it has that study, outlaw Bugs Bunny?" Sotomayor said.

Kagan pressed Morazzimi for any studies that show content in games is more harmful to minors than films. In response, Morazzimi cited research carried out by Douglas Gentile that was presented as evidence in the case, but considering Gentile is a campaigner against videogames, blaming them for addiction and aggressive behavior in players, and also the recipient of criticism for the methodology he uses for his research, it's likely the court won't put much weight behind it.

The Justices did also question EMA attorney Paul Smith too, referring to some controversial title such as 2003's Postal 2. Smith argued that gaming is a relatively new medium, and historically a new medium is always met with overreaction. "We have a history in this country of new media coming along and people vastly overreacting to them, thinking the sky is falling, our children are all going to be turned into criminals," he said.

Justice Alito then pressed him whether his argument was that there was nothing at all a state could do to prevent a minor from getting access to violent games, while Chief Justice John Robbers argued that any 13 year old could bypass parental restrictions in about five minutes.

Still, the court was easily unimpressed at best with the case being presented by California. At one stage, Kagan asked if it would make a difference if a game portrayed a "Vulcan being maimed" as opposed to a human. Apparently yes, it would make a difference because, "the act is only directed towards the range of options that are able to be inflicted on a human being."

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UK Information Commissioner Christopher Graham has revealed in a statement that Google Inc. broke UK laws by intercepting payload data from wireless networks while photographic UK streets.

Google recently admitted that regulators around the world found passwords and entire e-mails in the payload data it accidentally retrieved from wireless networks. Investigations are ongoing in Italy, France, Germany, Spain and Canada over the privacy breach.

"There was a significant breach of the Data Protection Act when Google Street View cars collected payload data as part of their wi-fi mapping exercise in the UK." Graham said in a statement.

"The Commissioner has rejected calls for a monetary penalty to be imposed but is well placed to take further regulatory action if the undertaking is not fully complied with." The ICO is requiring Google to destroy the data collected in the UK when it becomes legally possible to do so.

Google's Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer apologized to UK Internet users for the mistake. "We are profoundly sorry for mistakenly collecting payload data in the UK from unencrypted wireless networks," he said. "We did not want this data, have never used any of it in our products or services, and have sought to delete it as quickly as possible."

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Just days after it was widely reported that Turkey had ended a two year ban on YouTube in the country, it now seems likely that Turkish Internet users will be blocked from accessing the site again.

Access to YouTube had been blocked since May 2008 until just a few days ago due to videos uploaded by users deemed to be offensive to Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. On Saturday, a court in Ankara lifted the ban when the video disappeared from the site.

YouTube was quick to point out that it had not removed the video at Turkey's request. Instead, a German firm had utilized Google tools that are provided to tackle copyright infringement on the website to get it automatically removed. The video has now appeared once again on the popular video sharing website because the company found the copyright claim to be bogus.

A Turkish court has now ruled that the ban should be re-instated, but not because of the original "insulting" videos. This time, the Turkish authorities are mad about a video which allegedly shows the former chairman of the opposition, Deniz Baykal, in a bedroom with a female aide.

Telecommunications Board spokeswoman Guleser Aykara said that the board was notified of the court ruling on Tuesday and that it would make a decision by Thursday on whether or not to implement the ban. "We will first check if the undesirable content still remains on the website," Aykara told Reuters.

"YouTube could restrict access to prevent Turkish users from watching the videos, but may keep it accessible to other users. YouTube may not reply or may decline our demand, in which case access will be banned once again."

Turkey is a European Union candidate country and is risking its possible membership of the bloc by restricting Internet freedom. The country has blocked access to as many as 5,000 websites.

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