Widespread MobileMe Outage Knocks Apple Services Offline

Widespread outages affected Apple's MobileMe services Thursday evening and Friday morning -- including the company's Mail service, me.com web apps, and the "find my phone" feature -- knocking features offline and leaving users scrambling to stay in touch on the web.

The outage lasted only an hour and occurred overnight, according to Apple's status history page. Service has been completely restored, the company claims.

Some users reported continuing outages and troubles well into Friday morning, however.

The popular Apple rumor blog MacRumors reported the issue Thursday night, noting that the MobileMe status page warned that as many as 75 percent of users were unable to access email using the service.

The outage comes ahead of reports that Apple will officially launch its iCloud services at an iPhone event on Tuesday, Oct. 4, where the gadget company is expected to announce the latest version of the popular iPhone. The iCloud services will replace the MobileMe services, which will no longer be available as a paid sync service, Apple has said.

The MobileMe service will be turned off on June 30, 2012.

The event next week follows what analysts say has been a blowout quarter for Apple's iPhone 4.

The device, which was released in June of last year, has been a hit with consumers despite initial customer complaints that the device's antenna was prone to malfunctioning when held a certain way.

Overall, the iPhone has helped to drive Apple's revenue and profit growth to record levels and has become the best-selling smartphone in the world.

Cellphone Carriers Keep Personal Data Up to 7 Years, Report Says

A document obtained by the ACLU shows for the first time how the four largest cellphone companies in the U.S. treat data about their subscribers' calls, text messages, Web surfing and approximate locations.

The one-page document from the Justice Department's cybercrime division shows, for instance, that Verizon Wireless keeps, for a year, information about which cell towers subscriber phones connect to. That data that can be used to figure out where the phone has been, down to the level of a neighborhood. AT&T has kept the same data continuously since July 2008.

The sheet is a guide for law enforcement, which can request the information from the carriers through legal channels. The North Carolina section of the American Civil Liberties Union obtained it through a Freedom of Information Act request, the ACLU said. Wired.com reported earlier about the document, which is dated Aug. 2010.

The document was released by the ACLU Wednesday, but has been hiding in plain sight on the website of the Vermont public defender's office. It can be found there through a Google search, but only if the searcher knows the exact title of the document.

A few data points from the sheet were known outside law enforcement circles, but wireless carriers have not been open about their policies. They aren't required to keep the data, and they keep the same information for varying lengths of time. Some don't keep data at all that other companies store. For instance, it says T-Mobile USA doesn't keep any information on Web browsing activity. Verizon, on the other hand, keeps some information for up to a year that can be used to ascertain if a particular phone visited a particular Web site.

According to the sheet, Sprint Nextel Corp.'s Virgin Mobile brand keeps the text content of text messages for three months. Verizon keeps it for three to five days. None of the other carriers keep texts at all, but they keep records of who texted whom for more than a year.

The document says AT&T keeps for five to seven years a record of who text messages whom -- and when, but not the content of the messages. Virgin Mobile only keeps that data for two to three months.

The carriers don't have recordings of calls, but keep information about calls that are made and received for at least a year.

The ACLU said it believes people have a right to know how long phone companies keep records of their activities.

Although the sheet is dated August 2010, Tom Slovenski, a private investigator specializing in cellphone data, said it is still accurate.

Sprint spokesman Jason Gertzen said he couldn't comment on the specific figures in the sheet. Normally, he said, a subpoena, court order, or customer consent form from a recognized law enforcement agency is necessary for the carrier to hand out data. However, Sprint also responds to emergency requests, as in missing persons cases, if the police can document their need, he said.

Department of Justice spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said cellphone records can be crucial for all kinds of criminal and national security investigations. For example, they can be used to figure out with whom a known violent criminal is conspiring.

A bill in Congress would force wired Internet service providers to keep records of the network addresses assigned to each subscriber for 18 months. That would help investigators link online activity to specific homes. But the bill doesn't apply to wireless links. A series of such bills have been proposed over the years, but haven't passed.

World's First Google Store Opens in London

When Google opened its first physical shop you might have expected a song and dance. Instead the arrival of Google’s “Chrome Zone” in central London has happened so quietly you almost wouldn’t notice it had happened.

The London Evening Standard reports: “The world’s first “Google store” opened not in California but in the less glamorous setting of PC World in Tottenham Court Road at 9 a.m. local-time.”

The 285 sq. ft. pop-up “shop within a shop”, which only sells Google’s Chromebook laptop and a few accessories such as headphones, will run for three months up to Christmas.

The report continues: “A second pop-up store will open at Lakeside shopping centre in Essex on Oct. 7 and more pilot shops are planned around the world in the coming months. A spokeswoman said: ‘We’ve put a lot of effort into making it feel welcoming, homely and, dare I say it, Googley.’”

The news has been picked up, perhaps not surprisingly given the publication’s proximity to Google’s worldwide headquarters, by the San Francisco Chronicle, which talks about Google’s retail plans being just an experiment, for now. But this is exactly how Microsoft got into the retail game a few years ago: by creating “Microsoft stores” within big outlets like Circuit City, Best Buy, and–yes–PC World in 2008. It learned what it needed to know.

A few months later, Microsoft opened its prototype Retail Experience Center to journalists. In February 2009, Microsoft announced it would open its own line of stores. Now, it’s approaching a dozen. It plans to build 75 of them by 2014.

Italian Court Acquits, Frees Amanda Knox

An Italian appeals court Monday overturned American student Amanda Knox's conviction in the murder and rape of a fellow student, freeing her from prison and allowing her to the United States.

Knox collapsed in tears after the verdict was read. Her co-defendant, Raffaele Sollecito, also was cleared of killing 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in 2007.

The court, however, upheld Knox's slander conviction for accusing bar owner Diya "Patrick" Lumumba of carrying out the killing. The sentence was set at three years, or time served, since Knox has been in prison since Nov. 6, 2007.

The Kercher family looked on grimly as the verdict was read after 11 hours of deliberations by the eight-member jury. Outside the courthouse, some of the hundreds of observers shouted, "Shame, shame!"

Yet inside the frescoed courtroom, Knox's parents, who have regularly traveled from their home in Seattle to Perugia to visit the 24-year-old over the past four years, hugged their lawyers and cried with joy.

"We've been waiting for this for four years," said one of Sollecito's lawyers, Giulia Bongiorno.

Hours later, Knox again was a free woman.

Corrado Maria Daclon, the secretary general of a foundation that has championed Knox's cause, said Knox told him as she left prison that she just "wanted to go home, reconnect with her family, take possession of her life and win back her happiness."

Daclon was in the car with Knox as she left Perugia's Campanne. Italian lawmaker Rocco Girlanda, who is close to the American, says she and her family will leave Italy on Tuesday aboard a commercial flight from Rome.

Prosecutors can appeal the acquittal to Italy's highest court. There was no word late Monday if they planned to do so.

Earlier Monday, Knox delivered a tearful 10-minute address in Italian to the packed courtroom asking them to allow her to return to the U.S. and saying she did not kill her British roommate.

"I did not kill. I did not rape. I did not steal. I wasn't there," Knox said.

"I've lost a friend in the worst, most brutal, most inexplicable way possible," she said of the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old Briton who shared an apartment with Knox when they were both students in Perugia. "I'm paying with my life for things that I didn't do."

Knox and Sollecito, Knox's former boyfriend from Italy, were convicted in 2009 of sexually assaulting and murdering Kercher, who was stabbed to death in her bedroom. Knox was sentenced to 26 years in prison, Sollecito to 25. They both deny wrongdoing.

"I never hurt anyone, never in my life," Sollecito said Monday in his own speech to the jury.

Hundreds of eager observers gathered outside the courthouse ahead of the highly anticipated announcement, joining television vans that have been camped out for more than a week. One hundred reporters were being allowed into the subterranean courtroom.

Observers lined the street leading to the courthouse, taking pictures as the two vans carrying Knox and Sollecito from the prison to the court passed by.

Kercher's mother, sister and a brother traveled to Perugia for the verdict. They had expressed worry over the possibility of an acquittal but told reporters as deliberations were under way that they hoped the jury would do the right thing and not be influenced by the media's focus on the case.

"As long as they decide today based purely on the information available to them and they don't look into the media hype, I think justice will be found," the victim's sister, Stephanie Kercher, told reporters. She said the family was satisfied with the original verdicts.

She lamented that Meredith had been "most forgotten" in the media circus surrounding the case, with news photos more frequently showing Knox and Sollecito than "Mez" -- the victim's nickname. "It's very difficult to keep her memory alive in all of this," she said.

The family, however, said it could understand the Knox family's media campaign.

"They fully believe in her innocence. You can't blame them for that," said Lyle Kercher, the victim's brother. "But it's obviously hard for us."

As the verdict was broadcast live, hundreds of reporters and camera crews filled the underground, frescoed courtroom before Knox's address, while police outside cordoned off the entrance to the tribunal.

The trial has captivated audiences worldwide: Knox and Sollecito had been convicted of murdering Meredith in what the lower court said had begun as a drug-fueled sexual assault.

Also convicted in separate proceedings was Rudy Hermann Guede, a small-time drug dealer and drifter who spent most of his life in Italy after arriving here from his native Ivory Coast. Guede was convicted in a separate fast-track procedure and saw his sentence cut to 16 years in his final appeal.

Lawyers for Knox and Sollecito believe Guede was the sole killer, but the prosecution and a lawyer for the Kercher family say that bruises and a lack of defensive wounds on Kercher's body prove that there was more than one aggressor holding her into submission.

Knox said she had nothing more than a passing acquaintance with Guede, who played basketball at a court near the house, and didn't even know his name. Sollecito, who addressed the court before Knox, told jurors that he did not know Guede at all.

Sollecito was anxious as he addressed the court, shifting as he spoke and stopping to sip water. He said prior to the Nov. 1, 2007 murder was a happy time for him, he was close to defending his thesis to graduate from university and had just met Knox.

The weekend Kercher was murdered was the first the pair planned to spend together "in tenderness and cuddles," he said.

At the end of his 17-minute address, Sollecito took off a white rubber bracelet emblazoned with "Free Amanda and Raffaele" that he said he has been wearing for four years.

"I have never taken it off. Many emotions are concentrated in this bracelet," he said. "Now I want to pay homage to the court. The moment to take it off has arrived."