Even snail mail is getting a tech upgrade. This month TrackingtheWorld, a California-based GPS developer, expects to begin mass-producing Letter Loggers - small GPS-equipped envelope inserts that could help the U.S. Postal Service spot bottlenecks in the system. The insert is durable enough to shoot through sorting machines without crushing the circuits. A high-gain antenna pulls info from a satellite every few minutes and records the letter’s location to a memory card (to prevent interference with other devices, it won’t transmit data in real time). Yet it’s the same size and weight as a few sheets of folded paper.

The technology lets users track a letter’s every move. A vibration- and tilt-sensitive motion detector determines whether the Logger was sitting idle, being sorted, or bumping along in a truck. This data syncs with the GPS locations via Google Earth, allowing officials to spot places where mail lingered too long. The USPS is still weighing the results from last year’s trial run of the technology (in the Denver area), and there are no plans yet for a commercial model. But even if you won’t be able to personally track your Valentine’s cards, it could help ensure that those Luddite love notes arrive on time.

The problem is, a lot of consumers don't know the transition is coming and have never heard about these converter boxes. That's why several officials charged with educating the public about the "digital transition," held a press conference this morning at the Best Buy in Tenleytown to show off the converter boxes and get the word out about their availability.

You can request a $40 coupon to help cover the cost of a converter box at www.dtv2009.gov. Each household can request up to two coupons.

U.S Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said the department has received requests for more than 4.4 million coupons since they became available last month. Starting on Feb. 17, the one-year mark from the transition, consumers can start purchasing the converter boxes at Best Buy, Radio Shack and Wal-Mart. More retailers are expected to carry the boxes shortly thereafter. Thirty-four different converter boxes have been certified to be sold to consumers.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency within the Commerce Department, is responsible for directing the converter box coupon program. The NTIA, as well as the Federal Communications Commission, have been under pressure to do more to educate the public about the transition, so people still using analog television sets--particularly in elderly, low-income and minority communities--won't be left in the dark a year from now.

Industry officials also have a huge stake in the transition. For cable operators, it presents an opportunity to sell cable service to new customers. Broadcasters can now air more programming with better sound and picture quality, and want to make sure they can still reach viewers. And TV manufacturers see a chance to sell more digital TVs.

A new version of Google Apps offers easier setup.

Google is now offering another free version of its online software suite.

Google Apps Team Edition is designed to help employees, students or other groups within an organization, quickly set up a collaborative work group without the IT department. Users can sign up online for the applications and establish access to shared documents by providing the email address of their company or organization.

Google Apps Standard (also free) and Google Apps Premier ($50 per user, per year) require an IT administrator to sign in for the service and set it up for shared use. "We're bringing in the notion of self-service applications," Jeremy Milo, senior marketing manager at Google, told InternetNews.com. "The benefit is you can more easily and quickly collaborate on presentations, calendars items, plan for events and use tools like Google Talk for instant messaging."

If you're trying to edit a CSS stylesheet, it can be very difficult to remember all the style tags and lables without digging through many lines of the stylesheet. It's worse when you're simply trying to customize a stylesheet that wasn't written by you, like customizing pre-built Joomla! templates for example. The answer: Firebug for Mozilla Firefox. Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Here are some images of the addon installed and working while browsing the front page of joelstad.net: 

The addon highlights sections on the webpage itself using the 'inspect' function that allows you to see exactly where syles will start and stop. You can do the reverse as well and select sections of the webpage you are viewing to find the code responsible for setting the style for that particular section. With built in tools like a color display tooltip, search function and seperate window capability, Firebug is a required tool for anybody that has a need to customize and inspect CSS, HTML, JavaScript and more.

You can pick up the Firefox addon here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

ABI Research projects a 75 percent per year growth rate for Linux-based phones.

By 2012, Linux will be running on nearly 31 percent of all smart devices, thanks to a growth rate faster than Windows Mobile and Symbian, according to predictions from a research firm.

Linux smartphones will grow at more than 75 percent per year, according to ABI Research, and will be running on 331 million devices by 2012.

"Serious initiatives from the likes of Intel and Access are gathering pace and momentum, whilst the carrier community continues to identify Linux as one of the few operating systems that it intends to support in its long-term plans," said ABI research director Stuart Carlaw.

Symbian won't be too pleased with the figures, as it claims to currently have 72 percent of the smartphone market. However, Symbian's figures are very regional: it has around 90 percent of the Europe and "rest of the world" sectors, but it hasn't cracked the U.S. (it has less than ten percent there) and is only around 65 percent of the market in China and Japan, according toCanalys figuresthat Symbian quotes.

Over at the #iphone channel at irc.osx86.hu, the thoroughly awesome NerveGas has figured out how to enable ssh on the iPhone without using restore mode. The secret lies in overwriting an existing binary and plist to trick the iPhone into calling chmod on the Dropbear ssh server and making it executable.

At this time, NerveGas has used Nightwatch's compiler to create iPhone-compatible versions of curl and ps as well as a number of other useful Unix utilities. (He's working on grep, as I write).

So what does this mean? Well, once you've got ssh installed on your iPhone and active, you can access your iPhone from a shell on your Mac. You can send and retrieve files using scp or sftp. And you can use the compilation toolchain to build other Unix utils or even your own software. It's just a short matter of time until perl and other command-line utilities are iPhone-ready.

A team of computer security consultants say they have found a flaw in Apple’s wildly popular iPhone that allows them to take control of the device.

The researchers, working for Independent Security Evaluators, a company that tests its clients’ computer security by hacking it, said that they could take control of iPhones through a WiFi connection or by tricking users into going to a Web site that contains malicious code. The hack, the first reported, allowed them to tap the wealth of personal information the phones contain.

Although Apple built considerable security measures into its device, said Charles A. Miller, the principal security analyst for the firm, “Once you did manage to find a hole, you were in complete control.” The firm, based in Baltimore, alerted Apple about the vulnerability this week and recommended a software patch that could solve the problem.

A spokeswoman for Apple, Lynn Fox, said, “Apple takes security very seriously and has a great track record of addressing potential vulnerabilities before they can affect users.”

“We’re looking into the report submitted by I.S.E. and always welcome feedback on how to improve our security,” she said.

There is no evidence that this flaw had been exploited or that users had been affected.

Dr. Miller, a former employee of the National Security Agency who has a doctorate in computer science, demonstrated the hack to a reporter by using his iPhone’s Web browser to visit a Web site of his own design.

Once he was there, the site injected a bit of code into the iPhone that then took over the phone. The phone promptly followed instructions to transmit a set of files to the attacking computer that included recent text messages — including one that had been sent to the reporter’s cellphone moments before — as well as telephone contacts and e-mail addresses.

“We can get any file we want,” he said. Potentially, he added, the attack could be used to program the phone to make calls, running up large bills or even turning it into a portable bugging device.

Redmond (WA) – Less than a year from his previously announced departure from the company he co-founded, the Bill Gates today outlined his vision and opportunities for Microsoft.

According to Gates, there are currently six trends, which will be determining Microsoft and its product strategy for the years to come. In a rather unusual way, he mentioned the dramatic changes in the way the hardware engines that will be fueling new applications are engineered.

The fact that performance advances have shifted from a pure increase of clock speed to increased parallelism was described by Gates as a “challenge”. He believes that “parallel execution will be the primary way silicon power will be delivered” down the road and not so much the fact that there is more clock speed available. According to Gates, microprocessors will get to 10 GHz, “but not much further” (…) “even 5 to 6 years out.”

Silicon Integrated System (SiS) has announced that the SiS671-based Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) 671T-M motherboard has entered mass production.

The ECS 671T-M motherboard adopts the SiS671 chipset which supports Intel Core 2 Duo/ Pentium D/ Pentium 4/ Celeron D processors and supports DDR2 667/533 memory up to 4GB. SiS's HyperStreaming technology manages data flow between the northbridge and southbridge, from peripherals to core logic chipsets, and to the FSB, memory and graphics interface, the company detailed. The Mirage 3 graphics engine is integrated into the SiS671 chipset to support 2D and 3D playback. The SiS671 chipset also provides one PCI Express x16 slot, noted SiS.

The SiS968 southbridge is paired with the SiS671 to strengthen the ECS 671T-M motherboard, said SiS.