Happy Monday!
With the release date of the iPhone 4 fast approaching we've found some data that shows that unless you start camping now (seriously, right now) you might not be able to waltz in to your local Radio Shack or Best Buy to pick up a new handset come Thursday. As if that news isn't horrific enough, there are studies being done to ascertain whether multi-touch gestures can cause musculoskeletal disorders and there's a little more light being shed on exactly what Google's Street View brigade picked up when they were "marking Wi-Fi hotspots" across the world.
iPhone 4 Pre-Orders
The elusive white iPhone 4 is still hiding somewhere, but its sibling is coming to stores near you this Thursday.
Or is it?
iClarified reports that Best Buys across the nation have orders in for units ranging from 10-70 per store. Other rumors circulating state that Best Buy won't have any units at all available on the 24th and that Radio Shack has been allotted only 100,000 units for all of its 4,500 retail locations country-wide. Guess if you want an Apple product you've got to go to Apple's house!
One Texas man has done that already, in fact, and is camping outside of the highland Park Apple Store in Dallas Texas...that video is a little over two minutes long but here's the basic info: he's been first in line for the last two iPhones, he's all set up with his tent and victuals and he's got the crazy eyes. Watch it, just for the crazy eyes.
Musculo-What?
American's sedentary lifestyle has reached a new high (or low) when a study into the physical stress of multi-touch gestures is launched...our fingers are in constant danger of overwork from tapping, swiping and pinching according to Arizona State University, and we must be vigilant!
Seriously, the team is looking into the possible stresses on our systems inflicted by mobile devices and is going to fit folks with "electromyography equipment to measure muscle forces and with cyber gloves to record their hand movements while they interact with multi-touch systems," and then develop "biomechanical models that show how much stress is created by certain gestures." They'll send the info back to the producers of the devices so they can consider the data when designing the next big thing.
It's the ergonomics of multi-touch, no? Kind of cool.
Google's Latest Faux Pas
We all remember the swift uproar the world put up when Google was accused of snatching private info on their panoramic picture party across the globe, but with all the Apple excitement it seems to have fallen by the wayside. Today will see the end of that! France's National Commission on Computing and Liberty has obtained the data Google picked up and the news, folks, is Not Good.
Not only did they snatch much more than "fragments" of personal web traffic, they intercepted and stored data ranging from emails to passwords; even the content of emails were grabbed and stored. France is the first country to receive the data from Google and we imagine this is going to turn into a PR nightmare, as it should.
Encrypt your networks. 'Cause sometimes, generally good companies do generally rotten things!
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Till tomorrow, Newsies...
