Crazy but true… China’s Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center is offering a monetary reward to online surfers who send in information about pornographic websites. The first person to send in information about a particular website will receive a reward of 1,000 ($146) to 10,000 ($1,460) yuan with the award amount being determined by a committee within the Center. Even though citizens can surmise that the data collected in this government sponsored peep show will be used to censor these websites, the program has been wildly successful. In the first 24 hours of operation, the Centre reportedly received 500 phone call tips and 13,000 online tips. Wow!  To maintain our high moral standards, we will reserve further comment on this one and let you, our readers, engage in a stimulating discussion in the comments below. We know it will be good.

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Here’s a fun but extremely short one for a slow Thursday — ASUS might be on the verge of jumping into the tablet business. According to Digitimes, ASUS is putting the final touches on the Eee Pad, a device that will be blur the traditional lines between PC and MID and feature a touchscreen display between 4 and 7″. And that’s it. Told you it was short.

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Verizon just let us know that an OTA update for the HTC DROID Eris is being pushed to handsets at about midnight this evening. The ROM is 1.16.605.1 and the radio version is 2.32.40.11.09 for those inquiring minds. Just as Motorola’s OTA update worked, the DROID Eris will as well — slowly to a small group of people, then expanding over the coming days. Here’s a brief list of some of the fixes and you can always check the documentation on Verizon’s site.

• While on a call and the device is in screensaver mode, pressing the
• End key now takes the device out of screensaver mode, and a second press will end the call.
• On-call mute and speakerphone icon functionality is enhanced.
• Upgraded functionality after activation eliminates the delay users were experiencing in receiving their first call.
• Device now switches effectively from 1x mode to 3G.
• Device no longer requires users to reselect a default email after power-cycling.
• SMS and MMS messaging delivery is improved.
• Eighty-character MMS/SMS message subject lines are now allowed
• Improved picture messaging functionality allows messages from LG phones to be opened.

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Brian X. Chen (wired.com) reports that Abilene Christian University has just finished the first year of a pilot program in which 1,000 freshman students each received a free iPhone or iPod touch to explore how the always-connected devices ”might revolutionize the classroom experience with a dash of digital interactivity.” Says Bill Rankin, a professor who helped plan the initiative: “I think this is the next platform for education.”

L.M Ericsson Telephone Company unexpectedly announced on Tuesday that it is laying off almost 1,000 employees in its native Sweden due to a 74% drop in net profits one quarter back. Ericsson is reportedly closing operations in the town of Gävle, a design and manufacturing facility that employs 856 people. They’re also slashing almost 9% of the workforce in the Borås facility, laying off 90 of the 1,037 employees. It is not surprising that much of this loss is attributed to falling sales with  its joint venture with Sony. With software problems plaguing Sony Ericsson’s flagship Satio and both the upcoming Sony Ericsson X2 and X10 reportedly not slated for launch until 2010, things might be looking worse before they look better.Read

It has been long argued that the A5/1 encryption standard used to secure GSM traffic from eavesdropping is, in fact, insecure, and California based security firm H4RDW4RE is pioneering an effort to hammer that point home by cracking the encryption scheme. The A5/1 cipher is based on a 64-bit key — each cell phone has a 64-bit secret key which is also known by the connected GSM network. When you initiate a call the GSM network uses the secret key to generate a session key and encrypt your phone call. H4RDW4RE’s approach will be to crack this session key using a compressed and custom version of the A5/1’s 128-petabyte code book. Yikes. The aim of the project is to: take the vast code book and compress it down to around 2 or 3 terabytes of data, organize the data into rainbow tables, have these tables searched by a free P2P open-source program (much like SETI@home) in order to cipher session keys. Session keys will, theoretically, provide the ability to decrypt and listen in on GSM phone calls. H4RDW4RE’s goal is to push GSM vendors to finally admit that the technology is flawed and move to the more secure A5/3  code book, which is a 128-bit cipher, and already used by newer cellular technologies such as UTMS. Pretty powerful way to send a message, it sure does beat a letter writing campaign… Hit up the article for more details about the project.

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Although it’s having a bit of a hard time looking after its own finances, that didn’t stop Nokia from splurging on some gold and subsequently gilding the crap out of one of its most popular phones in the 6700 classic. Come Q1 2010, 370€ ($546 USD) will be the magical amount of money one will have to part with in order to get their hands on the 6700 classic Gold Edition. Of course it might be wise for one to spend the same amount of money on something more capable like a smartphone, but let’s be honest: this is about as close as you’re likely to come to owning something as opulent as one of Snopp Dogg’s pimp chalices. Or one of Pharrell’s toys.

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We’ve all heard the jokes about AT&T’s sub-par performance and how iPhone users are clogging up its network. Dropped calls, missed texts and delayed voicemails have become so common that AT&T even released an iPhone app that allows you to report network issues. The areas that seem to be affected most are densely populated cities — namely San Francisco and New York (in Los Angeles, AT&T service seems to be fine in our experience; it’s heavily populated but not too dense). And guess where the most vocal AT&T users are coming from?

AT&T’s very own Ralph de la Vega says that Manhattan and San Francisco’s Financial District “are performing at levels below our standards.” In our own experiences, it seems much worse than that, but we’re happy to finally hear it being acknowledged and addressed. He also says that these issues are going to get fixed. “In both of those markets, I am very confident that you’re going to see significant progress.” Thanks for finally coming out and openly saying it, AT&T, instead of hiding behind figures like “our network covers 97% of the population.” We’re looking forward to the improvements.Read

We try and steer clear of Apple tablet rumors as best as we can, but the latest is too good to pass up, especially considering that it flies straight in the face of a rumor we ran with nearly one month ago. According to Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner, Apple is almost ready to give its Chinese manufacturing partners the green light to begin mass production of the oft-rumored tablet that is believed to feature a 10.1″ Multi-Touch capacitive display. If all goes well, Reiner believes that the tablet will be available as early as March provided Apple is able to stockpile enough units in order to minimize any potential shortages. So how many units are we talking? Based on an average retail price of $1,000, Reiner predicts Apple could sell as many as 1.5 million tablets in the first quarter. As for content, it’s believed Apple is aggressively going after publishers by offering them the same 30/70 revenue sharing deal as currently exists within Apple’s iTunes App Store. To give you an idea of how attractive the offer will be, Amazon is believed to ask publishers to evenly split revenue on non-exclusive content to its Kindle

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Is Safari beginning to eat away at your patience? Firefox for Mac crashing and burning every time you’re in the middle of some important task? Well, you might want to give Google Chrome for Mac a shot now that it’s officially available for download. announced yesterday, it promises a lot of speed and efficiency, and if you’re a fan of all things Google, your digital life will be complete. Of course, it’s still in beta so it might be pretty rough around the edges and extensions are pretty limited, but these things will be smoothed out over time. It’s also only available for OS X 10.5 or later. Hit the jump for a video demonstration of the new browser.

Thanks, PR!

[Download link]

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