Mobile phone heads to space

British engineers plan to put a mobile phone in space, according to the BBC.

The team at Surrey Satellite Technology, in Guildford, want to see if the sophisticated capabilities in today's phones will function in the most challenging environment known.

The phone will run on Google's Android operating system, but the exact model has not yet been disclosed. It will be used to control a 30cm-long satellite and take pictures of the Earth during a mission later this year.

Apple has hit the 10 billion mark with its iTunes App Store service, reports V3.co.uk.

A counter on the iTunes site hit the 10 billion mark around 10.30am GMT on Saturday. The identity of the winner was not made immediately available, but will be revealed on the site later. For now, Apple has posted a message reading: "Thank you. Ten billion times."

The company crosses the 10 billion download threshold just two-and-a-half years after the store was formally unveiled for iPhone and iPod Touch users. Since then, the company has added apps for the iPad tablet to the store.

Mozilla has blocked a Skype toolbar add-on for its Firefox browser, after blaming the extension for causing 40 000 crashes last week, states The Register.

The open source outfit said it vastly slowed down Web page-loading times.

The crash-prone add-on downed Firefox 3.6.13 - which is the current stable version of the browser - far too much, said Mozilla.

Iran yesterday unveiled its cyber police unit to confront Internet crimes and counter social networks that spread “espionage and riots”, police chief Esmaeil Ahmadi Moghaddam said, writes AFP.

The country's first Web watchdog team is now operational in the capital, Tehran, while police stations throughout the country would have their cyber units by the end of the Iranian year, on 21 March, he was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA.

Ahmadi Moghaddam said the cyber police would take on anti-revolutionary and dissident groups who used Internet-based social networks in 2009 to trigger protests against the re-election of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.