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Actress Jane Lynch, best known as Adidas-lovin’ coach Sue Sylvester on TV’s Glee, has blasted President Barack Obama, branding the nation’s leader “a huge disappointment” for his policies — or lack thereof — on gay rights issues

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In a chat with London’s The Guardian last week, the star spoke out against the Proposition 8 amendment, which banned gay marriage in California. Jane complains that the clause is unconstitutional because the majority should not have the right to vote on the lives of the minority.

“Shouldn’t there be safeguards against the majority voting on the rights of a minority? If people voted on civil rights in the ’60s, it would have never happened. It took somebody like (U.S. President) Lyndon Johnson going, ‘F all of you! I’m going to do this.’ Obama won’t do it. He’s a huge disappointment to me,” Lynch scoffed.

Last week, President Obama appointed a transsexual to senior position at the Department of Commerce.

Does your phone have security flaws? DROID does. Sorry, we couldn’t resist. It looks like a flaw found in the Android 2.0.1 code will allow a user to bypass the lock screen on your beloved Motorola DROID. Now, someone can’t just walk over to your DROID and pop the lock, there is one, fairly large, prerequisite that needs to be fulfilled… your phone needs to be ringing. While your DROID is locked and ringing pressing the “back” key will cause your DROID to present you with the home screen, and from there, you have full access to the phone. Google has stated, “We are aware of the issue and we’re working to deliver a fix to Motorola DROIDs shortly.”

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Oh Nextel. The insults continue. First, your service continues to hemorrhage users, and now you get subjected to phones that look like the Motorola Brute. It’s almost enough to make me feel a little sorry for you.

The Brute i680 is an iDEN compatible, Mil-Spec phone, which explains its striking appearance. It’s actually designed to be resistant to dust, shock, vibration, moisture, solar radiation, and pretty much anything else you can think of to throw at it. Unlike most Nextel phones, it’s also got a few newer features like Bluetooth, and aGPS. If you want one, you can get it now from Sprint for $119.99 on contract.

[via Mobile Burn]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The guy’s a goof but it’s time middleweights start taking Tom Lawlor seriously. "Filthy" Tom took apart Aaron Simpson in the first round but it wasn’t enough to convince the judges who gave the former Arizona State wrestler the split decision win 29-28, 28-29 and 29-28. Cagewriter had it 29-28 for Lawlor while Yahoo! Sports’ Kevin Iole scored it 28-28 with Lawlor grabbing a 10-8 round in the first. 

"Obviously,I’ve got a lot more I need to get better at," said the 35-year-old Simpson. "I think get rocked early, I think having that wrestling background. I mean I wrestled over 1,000 matches in my lfe." 

Lawlor, the reigning king of quirky ring entrances, walked to cage using Hulk Hogan’s music, "I am a Real American" and sported a lovely boa. Once in the cage, he used a counter right to destroy Simpson in the opening stanza. Simpson was lazy with his jab, leaving it out there for too long. Lawlor got him with counter rights throughout the first and second round. It was clear that Simpson couldn’t see the punch coming over the top.

"i’ve sparred soiuthpaws in the past but it was alittle different for me," said Simpson. "It’s one of those difficult things for you."

Lawlor’s pace slowed in the second but he still landed the more significant shots.

Simpson (7-0, 3-0 UFC) did a good job of coming back from the brink in the final round by landing a couple of takedowns. The crowd booed loudly after the decision was announced, then it wwas scolded by UFC color analyst Joe Rogan in the Octagon.

I’ve heard of people making claims about “electromagnetic allergies,” but so far, no one has been able to prove that this is an actual, physical ailment. Still, Santa Fe resident Arthur Firstenberg was forced into homelessness by his neighbor’s gadgets.

In fact, Firstenberg is suing his neighbor for refusing to turn off their cellphone, wifi, computers and other electronics:

Firstenberg “cannot stay in a hotel, because hotels and motels all employ wi-fi connections, which trigger a severe illness,” says the request for a preliminary injunction. “If (Firstenberg) cannot obtain preliminary relief, he will be forced to continue to sleep in his car, enduring winter cold and discomfort, until this case can be heard.” The case has been assigned to state District Judge Daniel Sanchez, who has yet to set a hearing.

I’m not saying that this guy isn’t suffering and that wifi allergies aren’t real (I’m only insinuating that it isn’t real—big difference), but it’s some bullshit to tell a neighbor that they can’t have any electronics working in their own home. Wear a tinfoil hat or get some damn electromagnetic field-blocking paint. [TMC via DSL Reports Image via Flickr]

The FCC  has recently passed another unknown  Motorola phone with T-Mobile AWS 3G bands ( 1700/2100 ). Is this possibly the Sholes Tablet?  I sure hope so! The specs to the phone includes:

• Quadband GSM/EDGE 850, 900, 1800 and 1900
• HSDPA/HSUPA up to 10.2 Mbps
• Standalone GPS
• Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR
• WiFi b/g
• Battery model BP6X / SNN5843A / 1390 mAH

Any ideas on what this could be?

Source: FCC via BoyGeniusReport

Filed under: Found Footage, iPhone

What other recent TV show (Big Bang Theory aside) has given geeks as much cred as Chuck? The hourlong spy-dramedy returned with first-run episodes this week, but promptly threw a wet blanket on our enjoyment by… well, just look. No matter what Andy Ihnatko’s experiments demonstrated, I don’t think a pile of white rice is going to fix this.

Past episodes of Chuck have featured an all-knowing classic Mac, a thinly veiled dig at our favorite iCEO and a weaponized G5 tower, much to our delight. We’ve been loyal fans, NBC, but we must protest the wanton cruelty shown to an innocent smartphone in this scene: it’s brutal, it’s damp, and it will not stand.

TUAWFound Footage: That sinking, gonna-need-a-new-phone feeling originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience this weekend that the world has changed, that it’s become more public and less private, and that the controversial new default and permanent settings reflect how the site would work if he were to create it today. Not everyone agrees with his move and its justification.

Has society become less private or is it Facebook that’s pushing people in that direction? Is privacy online just an illusion anyway? Below are some thoughts, based primarily on the pro-privacy reactions to Zuckerberg’s statements from many of our readers this weekend. Though there is a lot to be said for analysis of public data (more on that later), I believe that Facebook is making a big mistake by moving away from its origins based on privacy for user data.

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In Facebook’s early days, and for the vast majority of the site’s life, its primary differentiator was that your user data was only visible to other users that you approved friend requests from. As of mid-December, Facebook users were no longer allowed to hide from the web-at-large some information including their profile photos, list of friends and interests in the form of fan pages they followed. Text, photo and video updates shared on the site have always been by default private (friends only) but if you’d never changed your privacy settings before last month, then Facebook suggested you switch them to make those updates publicly visible to everyone. That became the new default.

Here are three reasons why making some of this data public by requirement and some public by default is the wrong thing to do and why society is not in fact changing the way that Zuckerberg claims it is.

Evolving Preferences Don’t Justify Elimination of Choice

Mark Zuckerberg might be right, people probably are becoming more comfortable telling the world at large about more and different parts of their lives. Why does that mean it’s ok to take away peoples’ choices and force them to make public some of their information all the time? That just doesn’t make sense.

Privacy is a fundamental human right and while that may seem less true when we’re operating on corporate turf like Facebook, Facebook used to be based on privacy. Why give it up so easily? (Isn’t it a cause for concern that so much of our civic interaction now goes on through this and other corporate channels?)

It’s very hard to believe that the hundreds of millions of mainstream Facebook users are wanting to throw their privacy out the window – and if Facebook believes they are, why not as them clearly?

Privacy Doesn’t Just Mean Secrecy

This Summer we wrote about the academic research of University of Massachusetts-Amherst Legal Studies student Chris Peterson, who argues that an accurate and contemporary understanding of privacy is based more on the integrity of context than on absolute secrecy. Peterson tackles the contemporary reality of privacy on Facebook in a very readable draft thesis paper titled Saving Face: The Privacy Architecture of Facebook (PDF).

Peterson argues that the idea that anything published ought to be understood as intended for public distribution is an antiquated understanding from the era when publishing was expensive and required a lot of effort. The opposite is true today, it’s free and easy to publish – so information at different levels of appropriateness for public eyes is being published. Why not support that?

Instead of what Facebook is doing, Peterson says that a more appropriate understanding of privacy today is based on context. We expect our communication to go on in an appropriate context (no drinking in church or praying in the bar) and we expect to understand how our communication will be distributed.

If a college friend took photos of you drinking in a bar and showed them off to people in church, you might feel your privacy has been violated in both appropriateness and distribution. The bar is a public place, though, and not completely secret. Thus the need for a more sophisticated understanding of privacy that is more than mere secrecy.

By pushing your personal information and conversation through activity updates fully into the public, Facebook is eliminating any integrity of context that these conversations would naturally have. Posted updates can be directed only to limited lists of Facebook contacts, like college buddies or work friends, but that option is buried under more public default options and much of a user’s activity on the site is not subject to that kind of option.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used to say that people would share more information if they felt comfortable knowing that it would only be visible to people they trusted. He told me in an interview two years ago that users who wanted to couldn’t take their data off of the site because privacy control “is the vector around which Facebook operates.” Now apparently, he’s changed his mind. This weekend I argued that his justification for the new stance is not credible.

Many People Need Control Over Personal Information

Do people no longer need to keep access to some of their personal information online limited just to trusted friends? Facebook seems to be arguing that they don’t.

There is a long list of people who clearly do, though, including: people who’ve escaped abusive relationships, people with marginalized religious or sexual preferences, people who fear losing their jobs or who’ve been pushed around by bullies throughout their lives. That list adds up to a very large portion of the world, in fact. The group of Ivy League elites who run Facebook might think there’s no reason to be able to control access to their personal information, but many of them are less socially vulnerable and have less need to control their personal information.

Consider this comment left by one of our readers in response to Zuckerberg’s statement. “As a person who is being stalked for being an innocent bystander in a child custody case, I can tell you that losing my choices over what is searchable or not is huge. I have nothing to hide nor be ashamed of but the loss of choice for my privacy has hit home in a poignant manner.”

Stories like that are far more common than you might think and removing user control over what’s public removes the ability for millions of people to safely participate on Facebook.

More than millions, tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world have reason to limit visibility of their personal information from the web but still want to be able to share that information with trusted contacts. Facebook became a huge success on that premise and ought to be able to continue to thrive without doing a 180 degree turn on privacy.

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Electronic Arts said today that it expects its revenues and earnings to be below its previous financial guidance.

Eric Brown, chief financial officer of EA, said in a conference call that the company’s fiscal third quarter will be short of internal expectations and consensus estimates because of a soft December for EA in Europe and a shift to lower-margin distribution titles in North America. Overall, Brown said the overall packaged good sector is likely to be flat or down in the fiscal year that ends March 31, 2011. The latter prediction surprised some analysts on the call.

EA said sell-through and reorders were below expectations. Digital games, such as online-based titles, were above expectations but not enough to make up for a shortfall in Europe in packaged good sales. EA now expects non-GAAP results of $1.33 billion to $1.35 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of 29 cents to 33 cents. The shift from packaged goods sold at retail to digital games played online has been very fast and dynamic, said John Riccitiello, chief executive of EA, on the conference call.

“What we have is a two-year turnaround that is taking longer” because of the dynamism in the sector, Riccitiello added.

He acknowledged that EA’s forecasts were so far off in 2009 that the company is planning for a more conservative view of the overall sector. Riccitiello said EA has a massively multiplayer online game planned for the spring of 2011 that should make a big difference in its earnings, but EA is excluding that revenue from its FY11 plan for now.

For the fiscal year, EA expects non-GAAP results of $4.125 billion to $4.2 billion in revenue and EPS of 40 cents to 50 cents a share. In the current fourth fiscal quarter, EA is launching Mass Effect 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Dante’s Inferno, Army of Two: The 40th Day, and Command and Conquer 4.

Riccitiello said the rest of the year will include a “great new version of Medal of Honor,” a “revitalized” Need For Speed in fiscal 2011, “The Sims on console, Dead Space 2, FIFA in a World Cup year” and Crysis.

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Popular ebook community Wattpad today announced an undisclosed amount of angel funding from various private investors. Wattpad, the self proclaimed “YouTube for ebooks + MySpace for writers”, is a social platform where readers and writers can connect by sharing their writing or reviews on ebooks.

The platform is completely community driven, users upload and share all content. For writers, Wattpad is especially enticing as it allows for them to easily share their writings and gain feedback and suggestions.

The company notes that all content can be accessed in several ways, including Wattpad’s website (www.wattpad.com), mobile site (m.wattpad.com) or through the Wattpad application supported on all mobile devices including Apple iPhone, Google Android, RIM BlackBerry, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG and more.

Currently, Wattpad can account for over 25,000 monthly uploads from its ebook library and proclaims that “billions of pages will be read by its community on the web and mobile devices.”

Funding will be used to continue growth in the new year around their mobile and ebook sectors as well as expand on engineering, marketing and business development.

The company didn’t disclose the amount of funding. The round was lead by Harvey Beck and Alan Levine, former co-CEOs of ICOM and Bert Amato, co-founder of Delrina.

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If you thought RIM had completely run out of ways to mildly remix its existing portrait QWERTY formula, think again — the transition from trackball to optical pad has opened up a whole new world of exciting opportunities, and it looks like the venerable Curve 8900 might be the next model to get the refresh. BerryReview appears to have scored a shot of the alleged 8910 in its most natural environment — a desk calendar — preserving the Curve series’ typical broken-up keyboard style (as opposed to the connected keys you see in the Bold line). Otherwise we don’t really know much, but naturally, the new model is said to be running BlackBerry OS 5.0 under the hood (in other words, it’ll look pretty much like every other BlackBerry you’ve used in recent memory). More on this puppy as we get it.

BlackBerry Curve 8910 in the wild? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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EXTENSION ON LOGO CONTEST!

Some of you asked for an extension on the deadline in the comments or via email, so we’ve reassessed things and managed to squeeze out a little more time for you design hopefuls. So instead of the original January 14 deadline date, we’ve pushed the deadline to January 16! Hopefully, the extra time will allow more breathing room for maximum creativity!

So the new deadline is:

JANUARY 16th at 8:00 PM (EST)

For further instructions, including design direction, please see below. Thanks!

_____________________________________

If you missed out on the past DroidDog or BBerryDog logo contests, we feel you. (We really do.) So here’s another chance to show off those design muscles. The winner gets his or her work shown on the new TodaysiPhone.com website and the top prize of $250!

You’ve already helped us pick out a name for our new iPhone network site. Soon after, TodaysiPhone.com was born. Then we asked for contributors, and content creators from our community have come out in droves. Now, we’re tapping the PhoneDog talent bank one more time!

So here we go again…

The TodaysiPhone Logo Contest

We’ve learned a lot from our previous logo contests, so here are some rules designed to keep things orderly and fair.

LOGO CONTEST RULES
1. The logo should include the words “Today’s iPhone” or “TodaysiPhone.com.” It’s also fine to play with the acronym “TiP” (capital “T,” little “i,” capital “P”), but the title or URL should also be included. 
2. From the submitted entries, we’ll choose the 10 logos that best capture the spirit of Today’s iPhone.
3. We’ll post the top 10 logos on PhoneDog, so the community can vote for their favorites.
4. The three logos with the most votes move to the last round — editors’ critique and final selection.**
5. Finally, the editorial team will choose the winning logo, and the designer will receive $250 via Paypal.

**Similar logos from the same designer that have minor changes in color or font will not be considered separate entries. If, however, we’re interested in a particular design, we may request these types of changes to the final submission.

Here are the few minor restrictions that we have in regards to the logo itself:

• We reserve the right to modify the color scheme or font of the logo after the contest has been completed
• We’ll narrow down the entries to 10, which will be posted on the website for community voting 
• The image should look good in a 200 x 110 pixel space and be white around the edges. We’ll also need to be able to blow it up for marketing purposes, so it needs to look equally great at higher resolutions.  Vector, high-resolution .jpg, .tif, or something else — it’s up to you.
• Send as many as you want of your own original designs.***

***Multiple entries from a single contestant — as long as they are separate distinct designs — are permissible, which means one individual could have multiple entries in the voting poll. But the community votes on the logos, not the designer.

TO ENTER
Email [email protected] only. If you link to images in the comments section, but don’t email to this address, your submission will NOT be considered. (If you’re looking for group feedback, however, feel free to post below and ask for other readers’ opinions.)
•Include your email address, name, and PhoneDog username (if applicable).

Questions? Those are definitely welcome in the comments section below. This way, responses will benefit everyone in the PD community.

The contest ends on January 16th, 2010 at 8:00 PM EST.

Thank you, and good luck! We can’t wait to see your submissions!

_________________________________________

WANT AN ADVANTAGE FOR THE CONTEST?
Here’s a helpful hint.

DESIGN DIRECTION
Good designers know they can’t create good work in a vacuum, so here is some direction and background info on Today’s iPhone. Interpret this into your custom design:

Thanks to Apple’s enormous popularity, iPhone and iPod Touch owners aren’t easy to classify. They’re not lumped in as tech fans or phone nerds; they come in lots of different flavors — the hot rock singer who uses music apps, your kid brother with a knack for jailbreaking, and the neighbor who organizes her whole family with the productivity apps. They are moms, musicians, photographers, business people, students and everyone in between.

Good luck!

(For more info on TodaysiPhone.com as we approach the launch, follow me by clicking @PhonedogAdriana)