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A potentially serious security breach affecting tens of millions of Facebook users is the latest privacy snafu dogging the world's largest online social network.

Apple has shipped 7.5 million iPads since it launched in April, turning it into the largest player in the tablet computer market. The company grabbed that position in just six months thanks to its focus on a single device and surprising contributions from enterprise sales, Apple executives said on its quarterly conference call to discuss earnings.


Apple sold 4.19 million iPads  in its most recent quarter, and 3.27 million iPads in the quarter before that. About two-thirds of the 100 largest companies in the world on the Fortune 100 list have begun deploying iPads for enterprise use, leading to a lot of growth in the corporate sector that has helped drive iPad sales, said Tim Cook, chief operating officer of Apple. Nearly 85 percent of those companies have also deployed the iPhone for enterprise use, he said.
“I’ve never seen an adoption rate on the enterprise side like this in my life. Enterprise is historically much slower moving on adoption,” he said. “We have built and are building additional capacity to call on businesses, and we’re putting a lot of energy into that — we aren’t treating this lightly or as a hobby.”

It's been widely remarked that The Social Network  isn't about social networking: it's about the genesis of any kind of empire. Maybe so, but whatever his creators' intentions, the Mark Zuckerberg confected by Aaron Sorkin, David Fincher and Jesse Eisenberg can't help taking on an emblematic quality. He seems to manifest in extreme form a reshaping of the human personality that his own invention is helping to bring about.

The question that Facebook chooses to put to us is "What's on your mind?" In the film's first scene, Eisenberg's version of Zuckerberg pours out the contents of his own mind to his girlfriend Erica with zero interest in either her preconceptions or response. She tells him he speaks as if "every thought that tumbles through your head was so clever it would be a crime for it not to be shared". As it happens, Zuckerberg's thoughts are indeed clever. In the world of digital discourse, however, stupid and nasty thoughts are tumbling out of the rest of us with the same lack of concern for those expected to share them.

Qi Lu, president of Microsoft's online services division, headlined the Wednesday press conference at which Microsoft announced a partnership with Facebook to integrate Microsoft's Bing search engine into the world's most popular social network.

Lu's presentation might lead you to believe this was mostly about Bing continuing to nibble away at Google's seemingly unshakeable 60%-plus share of the U.S. search market.

Lu, whom Microsoft lured from a senior post at Yahoo, vowed that Bing integrated into Facebook would " harness and unlock the tremendous potentials of social."

However, this partnership isn't really about Bing vs. Google. It's much more about Facebook hunkering down to repel the ambitious search giant.

Gartner tech industry analyst Ray Valdes points out that Facebook's engineering team was in lockdown mode from mid-August until last week, when the team emerged to unveil an updated Facebook Groups and several other improvements.

This skunkworks output and the Bing partnership stem directly from Facebook CEO's Mark Zuckerberg's concern about Google's relentless and continuing attempts to muscle its way into the social Web, says Valdes, who has recently spoken with Zuckerberg about this.

Lucky for Zuck, Google thus far has stumbled. It's acquisitions of microblogging site Jaiku and mobile social network Dodgeball have gone nowhere. Its ambitious, would-be Facebook-killer initiatives Google Wave and Google Buzz both fizzled -- Buzz spectacularly so. Last month, Google quietly agreed to pay $8.5 million to settle a privacy lawsuit stemming from the February launch of Buzz, the massive social network Google created overnight by automatically including Gmail users' private contacts on public Buzz profiles.

But Google is nothing if not relentless. Its resolve to get a toe hold on Facebook's turf became evident three months ago when Paul Adams, a senior user-experience designer, posted this extensive presentation, which got 300,000 page views on slideshare.net. Adams outlined what he characterized as a glaring weakness in Facebook's architecture: the inability for members to easily create multiple independent groups of friends. The implication: Google is developing a secret project that will exploit this weakness, says Valdes.

Shortly after Adams posted his slides, Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to work seven days a week in the skunkworks, says Valdes. The improvements Facebook announced last week -- and the new Bing partnership -- directly result from the gauntlet thrown down by Adams. Facebook's recent moves should be viewed as pre-emptive strikes to impede the Google juggernaut, he says.

"Facebook's no. 1 threat right now is Google," says Valdes. "So Facebook is trying to align its forces with others, in this case Microsoft, who are also trying to compete against Google."

Google has not been deterred. The search giant has recently "hired a bunch of people, repositioned management and continues to view the social Web as strategically important," says Valdes. "Rumor has it Google will roll out a major new social Web initiative over the next few weeks or months."

Apple tablet which is known to refer to the 16 GB Apple iPad is a feature packed, powerful and performance-oriented equipment. This is a Tablet PC, but many of the functions of the onboard network. The iPad is a kind of revolutionary design, user interface, applications and connectivity.

IPad can be very useful for both professional and personal. It is best suited for those who travel a lot and needs a portable computer, such as the ability of a smaller framework. ....

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Warner Bros on Friday said it abandoned plans to convert the next Harry Potter movie to 3-D, bringing mixed reactions from box office watchers and fans of the multibillion-dollar blockbuster franchise.

The Hollywood studio said it was unable to produce a 3-D version of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I" in time for its release on November 19.

The movie will be presented only in conventional 2-D and in Imax theaters, but the second installment, due to be released in July 2011, is still set to be released in 2-D and 3-D.