Microsoft apologises for Winehouse tweet

Microsoft apologised for a “tweet” that has been blasted for seeming like a blatant effort to cash in on the death of 27-year-old British singer Amy Winehouse, notes AFP.

“Apologies to everyone if our earlier Amy Winehouse 'download' tweet seemed purely commercially motivated,” Microsoft UK PR said at a “tweetbox360” account at microblogging service Twitter.

Microsoft became a target of online ire over the weekend after the same Twitter account posted an update inviting people to remember Winehouse by buying digital versions of her “Back to Black” album at social.zune.net.

A new survey suggests Apple may have sold its iPhone 5 to more than a third of smartphone consumers before the device is even unveiled, let alone on the market, reports News Factor.com.

The computer giant is widely believed to have an iPhone refresh up its sleeve for later this year, and the survey suggests a large share of consumers are holding off upgrades or new purchases until then.

PriceGrabber's online poll of 2 852 consumers found 35% are planning to grab a new iPhone, with 52% of them indicating they will buy it within the first year of release; 30% plan to get one by the end of 2011; and 14% hope to buy it within the first month. Some 7% will wait online to buy it within the first week.

Hackers have started to release gigabytes of secret documents stolen from an Italian cyber crime unit, says the BBC.

The 8GB of files has allegedly been taken from the network of the Italian CNAIPIC which oversees the country's critical IT infrastructure. In a message announcing the release, the Anonymous hacker group said it received the files from a “source”.

The attack on CNAIPIC is thought to be in retaliation for arrests of Italian members of Anonymous.

Mozilla revealed preliminary plans today to take the Gecko engine that drives its Firefox browser and turn it into an open source operating system that will eventually work on phones and tablets, according to Cnet.

Called Boot to Gecko, it is known that the source code will be released to the public “in real-time,” wrote Andreas Gal, a Mozilla researcher. Gecko is the rendering engine that powers Firefox and the e-mail client Thunderbird.

By contrast, while Google's Android mobile operating system is open source, the main development work on it does not become available until after Google has green-lit its publication - sometimes not until months afterward.