µMonitor is a handy iPhone application that allows users to control their uTorrent client on the go. After putting months of hard work into getting the software ready for a public release, the developer Claudio was told by Apple that everything related to BitTorrent has been banned from their App Store.

“We’ve reviewed µMonitor and determined that we cannot post this version of your application to the App Store at this time because this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights. We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store,” Apple wrote to the developer after a 4 month review process.

This is not the first time that Apple has excluded a BitTorrent-related product from its store. In May they also banned an application designed to remotely-control the Transmission BitTorrent client for the same reasons outlined above.

Interestingly Apple has no problem allowing Usenet related applications in their store. myNZB for example is an application that is available from the App Store although it’s similar in functionality to the BitTorrent apps that were rejected.

Despite Apple’s blockade, there is still a way to get µMonitor on your iPhone. Instead of throwing months of hard work overboard, µMonitor’s developer has recently decided to bypass the Apps Store and make the application available to ‘jailbroken’ iPhone users from the Cydia repository.

Thanks to Apple, uTorrent users who want to control their torrent via an iPhone application have no other option than to jailbreak their phone. Detailed instructions on how to get µMonitor working on your phone can be found on Claudio’s website.

via torrentfreak.com

FCC

The Federal Communications Commission has turned up the heat on the wireless industry expanding its probe of mobile phone practices following widespread complaints about a lack of competition, openness and innovation.

The “Notice of Inquiry,” announced during a Thursday agency meeting, expands on open FCC proceedings, including a look into exclusive contracts that lock phones to provider networks, and the anti-competitive blocking of applications and services.

With the new inquests the agency is broadening its investigation into innovation and consumer choice in the wireless marketplace. Issues that will come under consideration in this proceeding will likely include exorbitant text-messaging and termination fees, device and application blocking, and others.

AT&T and Verizon Wireless are the two largest carriers in the marketplace controlling more than 60 percent of mobile phone accounts in the U.S. (continue reading…)

NY Times

The New York Times gets Net Neutrality right again, and again, and again. In their fourth editorial in support of Net Neutrality the newspaper’s editors write:

“A good bill that would guarantee so-called net neutrality has been introduced in the House. Congress should pass it, and the Obama administration should use its considerable power to make net neutrality the law. “

Why? According to the Times, we can’t let Internet service providers prioritize certain content over others.

Allowing these companies to become the Internet’s gatekeepers would undermine the democratic nature of the Web, which has made it such a great engine for free speech and economic growth.

(continue reading…)

A 15-year old Belgian by the name of Salvatore is the latest victim in a series of mysterious iPhone explosions that have captured the attention of France’s and the European Commissions’ consumer affair watchdogs. Details are scarce for the moment, but according to local news reports the teenager was holding his iPhone in his hand, about to make a call, when the device suddenly ‘imploded’. The incident didn’t cause any serious injuries but reportedly gave Salvatore a headache for a couple of days. He has been promised a free replacement unit by Apple but hasn’t yet received a new phone.

There have earlier been numerous reports of exploding iPhone devices in the United States, United Kingdom and France, with most recently about ten cases having emerged in France where the official competition, consumer affairs and fraud watchdog DGCCRF has now launched an investigation to find out whether the popular Apple smartphone could pose a threat to consumers. Apple, which has sold 26 million iPhones and 200 million iPods to date, said it had been informed of the French cases, but would not comment until it had closely examined the damaged phones.

Update: Apple has now said iPhones turned in by customers in France and elsewhere in Europe with shattered screens showed external pressure that would have caused the cracking. More on Bloomberg and Techmeme.

In one instance, a French teenager claimed he was hit in the eye with a glass shard when the screen of his iPhone cracked up. He said he would seek a full refund and file suit for damages. In another case, Apple came under fire for allegedly asking a young British girl’s family to sign a confidentiality agreement (aka a gagging order) before it would agree to refund her.

Earlier this month, Apple reportedly informed the European Commission that it regards all reported iPhone explosion cases as isolated incidents and have no evidence of a general problem. The European Commission, which has stated that the U.S. technology giant has been very cooperative, has asked all 27 EU nations to keep it informed of any problems under the community’s rapid alert system for dangerous consumer products, known as RAPEX.

(Image via QuickPWN)

via techcrunch.com

Facebook’s Reach Worldwide

Everyone knows that Facebook has become absolutely massive, but it’s easy to lose sight of just how big a number like 250 million is. Buzzpoint, a social media marketing firm based out of Los Angeles, has put together an impressive visualization that shows off just how large Facebook has grown. The company has estimated the current and past Facebook usage statistics using available data and plotted a number of graphs tracking its progress over the last three years.

Among the more interesting stats: as of July 15 2009, Facebook had 250 million active users, which would make it the fourth most popular country in the world. Facebook’s top two traffic contributors are the US (by a large margin) and the UK, but in third is Turkey, which didn’t even have a localized version until last year (though English is fairly common there).

via A Look At Facebook’s Reach Worldwide.

Zipcar

Those living in urban environments probably know all about car-sharing service Zipcar. For the rest of the world, Zipcar made its global splash by demoing its upcoming iPhone app during the keynote at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The impressive demo not only stood out to numerous iPhone-owning Zipcar customers—it generated a flurry of curiosity among the geek crowd about what Zipcar is and how the technology behind the service works. After entertaining a few discussions here at the Orbiting HQ as well as numerous reader questions, we decided to take a peek behind the curtain at Zipcar to learn more about the system, learning that it’s more complex—and cooler—than we originally thought.

via GSM, black boxes, and iPhones: the tech that drives Zipcar – Ars Technica.

The rise of social gaming is happening more quietly than one might think given the statistics. Today we’re hearing about another potential milestone: Facebook (facebook) application FarmVille claims to be the fastest growing social game in history, reaching an impressive 11 million daily users in a little over two months.

To put than in perspective, World of Warcraft is the largest massively multiplayer game that dominates MMO marketshare with at last report 11.5 million active subscribers. Its publisher Blizzard hasn’t revealed any new population statistics since the end of last year, but assures the press that its figures are still growing. It took WoW four years to reach that many subscribers after its launch in late 2004.

Compare that to FarmVille, which only launched June 19 of this year. If its daily active stats are accurate, that would mean FarmVille is close to rivaling industry-leading World of Warcraft’s player numbers in only a little more than two months. Perhaps it has already eclipsed the elephant in the social gaming room if you look at its monthly stats, which boast 30 million active users.

via 11 Million Facebook Users Flock to Virtual Farming Daily.

A recent simplification of Facebook’s user privacy controls wasn’t enough for some policymakers.

On Thursday, in conjunction with the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, Facebook announced a new set of modifications to its user privacy controls as well as its developer API, and the targets of these changes are the thousands of third-party applications built on Facebook’s developer platform. That means there may be major implications for developers–some of whom rely almost exclusively on Facebook activity as a revenue source.

The Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s office released a set of recommendations for Facebook last month, specifically highlighting concerns that third-party applications could access a significant amount of users’ personal data. “It’s clear that privacy issues are top of mind for Facebook, and yet we found serious privacy gaps in the way the site operates,” commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said in a release at the time. (continue reading…)

Mac OS X Snow Leopard

If you’re wondering why there’s all this talk about bits, especially with the upcoming introduction of Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, you’re not alone. Everyone seems to be tossing around the term 64-bit, and it can get confusing. The terms “64-bit processor” and “64-bit operating system” get tossed around quite a bit, but the exact definition isn’t exactly clear. Let’s try to tear apart this mess.

Processor

The processor is the brain of your computer, and best deals with information in chunks which are, as you may have guessed, a certain number of bits in length. Let’s start with a simple example, the 6502 in the first Apple ][ computers. This processor had 8-bit registers, and had a 16 bit memory address space.

This means registers could represent 256 (2^8) values, and there are 64K (2^16) memory locations, each of which holds an 8-bit byte. Fast forward to the latest Core 2 Duo processors, whose registers can represent 2^64 values, and can address up to 2^64 bytes of (virtual) memory. (continue reading…)

Some of the members of this list are heavyweights in their own right you may have heard of. But others are a bit farther off the beaten path, and we encourage you to experiment with a few and let us know what you think.

Are there contenders in this list to subvert the web browsing paradigm? What browser(s) do you use and why? Let us know in the comments!

via 14 Alternative Browsers That Are Not Internet Explorer 6.