The Pakistan Government on Sunday blocked the social networking website Twitter because of material that it considered offensive to Islam. Pakistan Telecommunications Authority chairman Mohammad Yaseen said the social networking website was blocked Sunday because Twitter refused to remove material related to a competition on Facebook to post images of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. Many Muslims regard depictions of the prophet, even favorable ones, as blasphemous. The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Yaseen, as saying that Facebook has agreed to address Pakistan’s concerns, but added that officials [...]

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Here’s a quick rundown of the specifications of the freshly announced Samsung Galaxy S3. We’ll update this post as we get more information! The device actually represents a perfect blend of the HTC One X and the Galaxy S2. It feels absolutely incredible in the hand, and is very well balanced. We will update this piece as soon as we have our high-res shots and video uploaded. Specs 136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6mm 133 grams Display: 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED (1280×720) Pentile (no Plus) Processor: Exynos 4 Quad @ 1.4Ghz for HSPA version 1GB of RAM Rear Camera: 8MP Autofocus, Flash, Zero Lag Shutter BSI [...]

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  ImageWould you look at that? NVIDIA hinted it would be coming today, and it looks like the tease is living up to the hype. The company stormed into the weekend at its Shanghai Game Festival by unleashing its latest offering, the GeForce GTX 690 — and oh yeah, it’s packing two 28nm Kepler GPUs! Trumping the recently released GTX 680 as the “worlds fastest graphics card,” it’s loaded with a whopping 3,072 Cuda cores. The outer frame is made from trivalent chromium-plated aluminum, while you’ll find thixomolded magnesium alloy around the fan for vibration [...]

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ASUS’s G-series has been warming the laps of gamers for a while, whether it’s the smart G74 or the elder statesman G73JH. The newest splinter of the G-team, however, is the G55 line. Right now, it’s the G55VW-DS71 that’s just had its specifications splayed out for all to see. It’ll be a quad-core i7-3610QM Ivy Bridge chip calling the shots, with a 2GB NVIDIA GTX 660M providing graphical backup. A solid 12GB of DDR3, 1,333MHz RAM and a 750GB HDD will come with the configuration mentioned here. There are two drive bays, though, so you can set it up to your liking, and [...]

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How’s this for some big news on an otherwise slow Monday? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has let slip that his company plans to buy popular photo-sharing app Instagram (pending all of the standard regulatory approvals, naturally). According to a report from All Things D‘s Kara Swisher, Facebook will pick up the social app, which got its own long-awaited Android version, for a cool $1 billion in cash and shares. Ole Zuck confirmed the news on his personal blog, adding that the deal won’t affect Instagram’s integration with competing social networks: We think the fact that [...]

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Instagram has been around since 2010, available only to iOS devices. Android users have been waiting patiently, with repeated promises of an Android version arriving soon. While we knew the Android version of Instagram was coming sooner rather than later, with the release being teased just last month at South by Southwest Interactive, the exact release date wasn’t clear. Well, the day has finally arrived. With more than 430,000 Android users on the waiting list, Instagram is now available in Google Play. The app carries with it the same features (except tilt-shift/blur) and a similar user [...]

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Evidently tired of smooth running graphics, lightning fast processing and bags and bags of available memory, programmer Dmitry Grinberg decided to go back to computing basics. And then some. As Linux was developed on a 32-bit machine with 1MB of RAM, this has always been considered the minimum system requirements to run the open source OS. Dmitry, however, put this theory to test, building a barebones set-up with just an 8-bit RISC microcontroller at its heart. Running at a somewhat sedentary 6.5KHz, with only 16KB of SRAM and 128KB of flash storage, these are specs that make most phones look like [...]

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Here’s how Facebook is supposed to work: When you don’t want to be someone’s friend anymore, you unfriend them. Or, if you just want to keep certain things private, you can adjust their access settings. The ability to back out of a friendship is as vital online as it is off, which is why this is worrying: British security researchers Shah Mahmood and Yvo Desmedt have found a simple way to create un-unfriendable zombie accounts (via the Arxiv blog). Here’s how it works: 1. Make a new account Using an existing account works too, but the trick requires near-constant deactivation. 2. [...]

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Retailer Game, owner of the Game and Gamestation chains has entered administration. The chain has 1,270 outlets in Europe and Australia and rumors have circulated for months concerning unrest at the highest levels of the business. It was unable to agree deals with publishers Capcom and Electronic Arts for the latest titles, meaning it had to turn away customers looking to buy Mass Effect 3 during its blockbuster opening weekend. After the board informed shareholders that “it’s uncertain any of the solutions [...] being explored by the board will be successful,” the company’s [...]

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An unnamed Samsung exec hinted to the Korea Times that its upcoming flagship, the Galaxy S III, will include a next-gen quad-core Exynos chip that will incorporate LTE and WCDMA radios. Of course, such a revelation shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise since both its predecessors were built around home grown silicon… at least originally. According to the source, Sammy is trying to become more self reliant and distance itself from Qualcomm which has provided single-chip solutions for a number of the manufacturer’s high-end handsets. The new AP appears to be the 32nm slab of [...]

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