NYC

AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega just confirmed at the D9 conference today that the carrier is "working on" a shared data plan, but he's not committing to a time frame just yet. He also left no doubts about those plans when pressed further on the question, clearly opening the door to a situation where you could have an iPad, an Atrix 4G, an AT&T netbook and just about anything else all sharing a unified pool of minutes and data. He didn't offer any hints about possible pricing, though, and it certainly sounds like this is something that's still a ways out from actually being launched.

Apple is always filing patents for strange and fantastic things that never seem to find their way into actual products. But an application published today details some interesting tech that we could actually see getting jammed into a future iPhone (for better or worse). By pairing an infrared sensor with the camera already on board, portable devices could receive data from transmitters placed, well, wherever. Beyond simply blasting out text and opening links like a glorified QR code, transmitters could disable certain features, such as the camera, to prevent recording at movie theaters and music venues. If completely shutting off the cam seems a bit heavy-handed, watermarks can also be applied to photos identifying businesses or copyrighted content. Some potential uses are a little less Big Brother, like museums beaming information about exhibits to a user's or launching an audio tour. Obviously third parties would have to get behind the IR push ...

It looks like Sony's long, PSN nightmare is finally coming to an end -- almost. Today, the company announced that it will restore PlayStation Network and Qriocity services in the Americas, Europe andmost of Asia by week's end. The only exceptions are Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan, where users will have to await further details before regaining full access. Speaking to the  Wall Street Journal , spokeswoman Yuki Kobayashi added that Sony is in the process of finalizing an agreement to protect credit card owners in these three countries, where authorities have taken a particularly cautiousapproach to the data breach. This means that the company won't see global restoration by the end of May, as previously hoped, but Kobayashi said the plans were delayed simply because Sony needed more time to fully secure its infrastructure (sound familiar?). PlayStation Blog Wall Street Journal

Good news, Asia -- the PlayStation Network is finally coming back. Today, Sony announced that it will restore its gaming network across the continent, more than a month after falling prey to a crippling data breach. The company's PSN services are already up and running across other parts of the world and, beginning tomorrow, will light up once again in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and even Japan, which had been harboring serious reservations about the network's security. Gamers in South Korea and Hong Kong, meanwhile, will have to wait a little longer before returning to normalcy, though Sony is hoping to completely resolve the issue by the end of the month. The company certainly seems eager to put this saga to bed, and for understandable reasons. The incident has already cost Sony an estimated $171 million in revenue -- not to mention the untold numbers of suddenly wary consumers. Bloomberg

TV viewers are a famously fickle bunch, which tends to drive TV advertisers crazy. The prevalent theory remains that skipping past ads using a pesky DVR is the biggest enemy of marketers, but new research has once again contradicted that received wisdom. The IPG Media Lab in Los Angeles pulled together a representative group of 48 TV and online video viewers and asked them to sit through some programming while equipped with the usual "devices or distractions" that accompany their viewing habits. Central to the study was the measurement of time each person spent facing the screen and how engaged they were with the content. The first thing noted was that 94 percent of TV viewers and 73 percent of online video consumers used some other form of media to augment their visual entertainment. Smartphones were the most common, with 60 percent of test subjects resorting to their handset while gawking at the TV. That's resulted in a mediocre 52 percent attention leve...

Fellow road warriors, we bring you good news: starting today, T-Mobile customers across 55 markets -- including Chicago, Detroit, Honolulu, Pittsburgh, Miami, and many more -- will have immediate access to a faster HSPA+ "4G" network. This means anyone with compatible devices can achieve  theoretical download speeds of up to a whopping 42Mbps, as opposed to just 21Mbps from the good ol' days. But of course, only time will tell whether this upgrade will deliver its promise -- you may recall that evenAT&T's LTE demo last week delivered "realistic" download speeds of up to just 28.9Mbps, when in theory it should be capable of hitting up to 100Mbps. Anyhow, if you want to soldier on and be  a guinea pig  an early adopter, then help yourself to ZTE'sRocket 3.0 USB modem stick starting tomorrow -- the entry price is $99.99 after a $50 mail in rebate, but tied to a two-year broadband plan of 2GB or higher; or you can opt for the contract-free price of ...

Google raised a few eyebrows when it purchased a Finnish paper mill back in 2009 -- what, the world, wondered, would the king of cloud services want with reams of tree guts? Space for a data center, of course -- and a seawater-cooled one at that. Google's Joe Kava told  GigaOm  that, when it launches in the fall, the center's temperature will be regulated by a quarter-mile of seawater tunnels inherited from the building's past tenants. One of the hardest parts of getting the system up and running has apparently been figuring out a way to clean corrosion from salt water without taking the system offline. Google's also working to limit the center's impact on the surrounding ecosystem, making sure that the water itself is cooled down before being pumped back out. Between this and those wind-powered data centers, it looks like Captain Planet's always got a cushy IT gig at Google to fall back on, should he ever fall on hard times. GigaOm

As rumored, T-Mobile overhauled its individual and family plans today and simplified your options to just three tiers of voice service. Individuals can choose between 500, 1,000 or unlimited minutes, with unlimited text messaging adding $10 and data add-ons ranging from $10 for 200MB to $60 for 10GB. Family plans come in 1,000, 2,000 and unlimited minute varieties while the sharable data and text services cost twice as much as their individual counterparts. There are some odd restrictions, such as the inability to add texting or data to the mid-tier plans and no choice for unlimited voice service without SMS tacked on. We do, however, like the overage-free data options that simply drop to 2G speeds when you reach your plan's threshold instead of shocking you with huge fees at the end of the month. We can also confirm that restocking fees have been bumped from $10 regardless of device to $50 for smartphones, $75 for tablets, and $25 for USB modems and "basic phone devices....

It's the  security  nightmare that just won't end, and right now there's got to be plenty of Sony executives beginning to wish someone would pinch them already. After taking quite a PR and financial beating over the PSN breach, now the Greek site of Sony BMG has been hacked and the account info of thousands of users has been posted online. According to the Sophos blog  Naked Security , the attack does not appear to have been particularly sophisticated and was carried out using an automated SQL injection tool that demands more patience than skill. While the data dump reveals the usernames, real names, and email addresses of registered SonyMusic.gr customers, other fields (including passwords and telephone numbers) are either empty or contain fake data -- suggesting the hack was not entirely successful. Here's hoping Sony takes this as an opportunity to seriously baton down those security hatches. Naked Security

Remember that pair of 100 terabit-per-second connections we told you about earlier this moth? Impressive? Sure, but not entirely practical thanks to the massive banks of lasers (370 to be exact) that guzzled several kilowatts of electricity. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany haven't hit 100Tbps yet, but they were able push 26Tbps using just one, lonely laser. The new single-laser fiber-optic speed record was set using a technique called fast Fourier transform that pulses light at an incredibly high rate with data encoded in 325 distinct colors across the spectrum. A detector at the receiving end is able to distinguish between the various colored data streams, based on tiny differences in arrival time, and recombine them into a high-speed torrent of ones and zeros. The scientists behind the project believe that, eventually, the technology could make its way into commercial use and be integrated into silicon chips. Now, someone needs to hurry up an...

KPN set off some alarms in Holland last month when it announced a plan to start charging customers separate fees for using VoIP, streaming video, and sending instant messages. But, the question remained: how exactly would it keep mobile data users honest? The answer turns out to be deep packet inspection, which examines network traffic to identify what you're sending and where it's going. It's been suspected that the secret ingredient in KNP's service-throttling sauce was DPI, but it was finally confirmed in a presentation to investors recently. In fact, Mark Fisher, the director of KPN Mobile, bragged that it was the "very first" provider to be "able to identify by deep packet inspection what is actually the destination as data packages go along." Predictably, privacy and net neutrality advocates are up in arms, with some claiming it is a violation of the Dutch Data Protection Act. We just hope someone nips this in the bud soon -- we don't need...

36 OEMs, 215 carriers, 450,000 Android developers all over the world, Google wants to say "thank you!" Android has recently crossed its 100 millionth activation milestone, and is also growing at its fastest pace yet: 400,000 devices activated each and every day. There are now 200,000 Android applications in the Market, which have accumulated a total of 4.5 billion installs, at a rate which Google actually says is  accelerating . These figures have all been cited as a way to illustrate Google's mobile momentum, which is evidently not even thinking about slowing down.

Smartphones are getting kind of popular nowadays, in case you hadn't noticed. The latest figures from IDC show a 79.7 percent expansion of the global smartphone market between this time last year and today, which has resulted in 99.6 million such devices being shipped in Q1 of 2011. That growth has mostly been driven by Samsung, which has more than quadrupled its output to 10.8 million shipments in the quarter, and HTC, whose growth has been almost as impressive. The other big gainer is Apple, with 10 million more iPhones shipped, but the truth is that all the top five vendors are showing double-digit growth. In spite of Nokia losing a big chunk of market share and RIM being demoted from second to third in the ranking, both of those old guard manufacturers improved on their quarterly totals. IDC puts this strength in demand down to the relatively unsaturated smartphone marketplace, and believes there's "ample room for several suppliers to comfortably co-exist," befor...

You've already seen Android activations mapped around the globe over time, now how about some Google search volumes? Using WebGL and different color crayons for each language, the coders at Mountain View have put together the above Search Globe, which presents a single day's worth of Google queries in a beautiful, skyscraper-infused visualization. Jacking yourself into the source link below (your browser  can  handle WebGL, right?) will let you twist and turn the model world for a closer exploration of global Google use. And if you get tired of that, there's an alternative map showing world populations over 1990s -- that's available at the second link. The Official Google Blog Google Data Arts (Search) ,  (Population)

NVIDIA may be kicking all kinds of tail on the mobile front with its ubiquitous Tegra 2 chipset, but back on its home turf of laptop and desktop graphics, things aren't looking so hot. The latest figures from Jon Peddie Research show that the GPU giant has lost 2.5 percentage points of its market share and now accounts for exactly a fifth of graphics chips sold on x86 devices. That's a hefty drop from last year's 28.4 percent slice, and looks to have been driven primarily by sales of cheaper integrated GPUs, such as those found inside Intel's Clarkdale, Arrandale, and most recently, Sandy Bridge processors. AMD's introduction of Fusion APUs that combine general and graphics processing into one has also boosted its fortunes, resulting in 13.3 percent growth in sales relative to the previous quarter and a 15.4 percent increase year-on-year. Of course, the real profits are to be made in the discrete graphics card market, where NVIDIA remains highly competitive, but lo...

We've heard Sony explain itself at length regarding the gigantic PlayStation Network breach, but this might be the most useful version of the story yet -- it's the one that Sony's Kaz Hirai is forwarding to US Congress members concerned about your personal information. The official  PlayStation.Blog  has the full English document up on Flickr for your perusal, and we'll warn you it's much the same tale -- Sony says all 77 million PSN and Qriocity accounts have had information stolen, but the company's still not sure exactly which pieces have gone missing, whether credit card numbers are compromised or not, or who could be behind the hack. Sony does say, however, that it had 12.3 million credit card numbers on file, and 5.6 million of them from the US, and that investigators found a file on one of the servers named "Anonymous" with the words "We are Legion" inside it. Hard to draw many conclusions from that. Update : Anonymous has apparentl...

Stolen Camera Finder is a site that promises to find missing cameras, as long as they've been stolen by cooperative criminals. All you have to do is drag and drop a JPG photo taken with your lost camera, and Stolen Camera Finder will hunt for any matches on the web, using the image's EXIF data. To find matches, the site consults a database of photos posted on Flickr and elsewhere, though, without only one million images to its name, this database is still very much a work-in-progress (the tests we conducted came up dry). It's a nifty idea, but one that would probably pay dividends only under certain circumstances. For instance, the thief would have to take pictures with the camera (rather than selling it) and post the images online without wiping the EXIF data. In other words, he'd have to be someone willing to steal a camera  purely  for the sake of sharing undoctored self-shots on Flickr. We're not sure those people exist. Wired Stolen Camera Finder

Tomorrow is May 2nd, 2011, and you know what that means -- tomorrow is the day that AT&T will impose data caps on DSL and U-Verse Internet, and begin tallying up overage fees. At least, that was the plan on March 18th -- when the company formally announced 150GB DSL and 250GB U-Verse caps -- but even if you're a paying customer who chows down several hundred gigabytes in a month, you may not have to worry about paying extra right away. AT&T specified that folks like yourself will have access to an online tool to self-police your usage  before  the company even begins to calculate the cost of your formerly all-you-can-eat bandwidth buffet, and as you can see in the picture above, the tool isn't quite ready for public consumption across the entire country. Scoot on over to our source link, enter your AT&T ID, and if you see the same, perhaps you won't have to cancel your 700-hour Star Trek marathonquite yet. AT&T My Usage

What happened to the HTC Trophy, long overdue on Verizon 3G? How about the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, mysteriously missing a Verizon release date long before Japan's catastrophe? Will Verizon commit to carrying the BlackBerry PlayBook this year? Just how much will LTE data cost for the Xoom and its tablet friends? We may finally have some of the answers, thanks to Verizon's fancy new online catalog. RIM's tablet, the PlayStation Phone and the HTC Trophy are all listed as "coming soon," and that's not all -- both the BlackBerry Bold 9650, Curve 3G 9330 and the Droid 2 Global are all "while supplies last," suggestingsuccessors may be inbound. Meanwhile, tablet LTE data plans look like they're going to cost the same as 3G ones -- $20 for 1GB, $35 for 3GB, $50 for 5GB and $80 for $10GB as usual. LTE netbooks will only be able to take advantage of the two highest-priced plans, but there are a pair of them on the way, including the 11.6-inch...

Even a woman with a 40 Gbps internet connection might feel a twinge of jealousy at this news -- Japan has successfully tested  two   separate 100 terabit per second data links that use a single optical fiber to carry their loads.  New Scientist  reports that NEC scholars stuffed the light from 370 lasers into 165 kilometers of fiber to achieve a speed of 101.7 Tbps, while NICT researchers set a new record of 109 Tbps using a special fiber with seven cores to manage the trick. We imagine that Alcatel-Lucent and NTTaren't sitting still. Not that we really care who has the fastest fiber... just so long as one end leads to our house. New Scientist