The first part of a typical Apple product launch is out of the way now. During the second leg, skeptics will grudgingly make one final attempt at understanding the device just as fanboys get better at pretending that they know pretty much everything they need to know. Both sides can now also factor in the newfangled prospect of making VoIP calls over the iPad's 3G connection when making their case.

Apple today updated the iPhone developer SDK to accommodate VoIP apps. The move was accompanied by the launch of iCall, the first and only VoIP app for the iPhone and iPod touch. The announcement leaves us with one question, though. Will the iPad support VoIP apps out of the box? There is little reason why it shouldn't.

Apple's ban on VoIP functionality riled many feathers while it lasted. The company's refusal to allow Google Voice to run natively on the iPhone wrecked its relationship with Google, which eventually launched a browser-based HTML 5 app to circumvent the ban. Ironically, VoIP functionality comes to the iPhone barely 24 hours after the launch of the web-based Google Voice app.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced on Thursday that 13 more social sites, including those owned by Google, Yahoo, and AOL, have all agreed to purge sex offenders from their sites. The agreement comes just a week after Cuomo announced that Facebook and MySpace had removed over 3.500 New York sex offenders.

"It is no secret that sexual predators abuse social networking websites to find and manipulate victims and to insinuate themselves into their victims' lives," said Cuomo. "e-STOP allows social networking websites to identify these sex predators and help prevent them from harming again."

Cuomo was referring to New York's Electronic Securing and Targeting of Online Predators Act (e-STOP), of which 15 major social networking companies have now agreed to use. The law makes it mandatory for sex offenders to register their email accounts, screen names, and any other online identifiers with the state Division of Criminal Justice Services. That information is then passed along to social networking sites.

We wanted to scream bloody murder when our folks would hide the power adapter for our Atari 2600 after a night-long gaming session. For those of you who have no idea what we're talking about, it's the equivalent to having your DSi yanked from your backpack. But no matter which generation you grew up in, it looks like we all had it easy, at least compared to kids growing up in China. Up until recently, youths diagnosed with Internet addiction were subject to beatings and confinement.

New rules have now banned such unpleasantness following the beating death of a teenager in August, which led to the discovery of abuse at other clinics. That was enough for China to reach a revelation that maybe a different approach was needed.

"Parents and teachers must analyze the causes and not arbitrarily condemn, hit, or scold youths...intervention methods that restrict personal freedom are strictly forbidden and corporal punishment is strictly forbidden," read new regulations posted on the health ministry's website.

According to local press reports, China had up to 10 million teenage Web addicts and at least 400 private Internet rehab centers nationwide in August.

Image Credit: fly4chage.files.wordpress.com

The U.S. Defense Department has decided to cautiously reinstate the use of USB thumb drives and other flash storage-based media. Flash storage -- and devices which use them, including memory sticks, digital cameras, media players, PDAs, and more -- were banned last November after thousands of military computers were infected by various malware, most of which was traced back to thumb drives.

That ban will soon be lifted, at least partially. Robert Carey, chief information officer of the U.S. Navy, said in a blog post that only "authorized individuals" are likely to be given permission to use thumb drives, and even then only for "mission-essential functions." And these won't be personal drives picked up off of Newegg or Best Buy.

"The days of using personally owned flash media or using flash media collected at conferences or trade shows are long gone," Carey said.

Instead, the drives will be "government-owned and procured," and will also contain built-in encryption chips that may require both a password and a fingerprint scan to decrypt the data, among other safeguards that are yet to be worked out.

Image Credit: IronKey

Twitter made an embarrassing mistake this week by suspending security researcher Mikko Hyppönen’s account for allegedly sending direct messages containing phishing URLs. Hyppönen realized Twitter had unexpectedly banned his account without any warning yesterday.  He received a message from them last night with a customer-service-disaster of an explanation:

“I've unsuspended your acct.
You were suspended for using the malware URL rnyspeceDOTcom in DMs.
Be careful!
We scan evrythng for malware.”

It’s all downhill from there.   Hyppönen posted the tweet they are referring to months ago trying to deter users from visiting a particular phishing site.  He took precautions to make sure it was not linkable and even included the warning “don’t go there” in the tweet.  Not only is the post benign but its intent is actually altruistic.

Some of you, we’re sure, are probably exercising your God-given right to boycott Left 4 Dead 2 for whatever reason. Australia, though, totally has us Yanks beat. Over there, no one’s buying the game! Oh, what’s that you say? The game’s been “banned” in good ol’ Oz? That’s why they’re not buying it? Well then, that’s no good at all.

As it turns out, Left 4 Dead 2 was refused classification by Australia’s ratings board, the OFLC. Why? Because it’s too violent, apparently.
 
“The game contains realistic, frenetic and unrelenting violence which is inflicted upon ‘the Infected’ who are living humans infected with a rabies-like virus that causes them to act violently,” reads the OFLC description of the game. “Attacks cause copious amounts of blood spray and splatter, decapitations and limb dismemberment as well as locational damage where contact is made to the enemy which may reveal skeletal bits and gore.” 

As expected, Valve is a bit broken up about the whole mess.
 
“We were surprised to hear of this news yesterday,” Valve’s Doug Lombardi said. “Obviously, everyone at Valve is pretty bummed. It would be a shame if folks in Australia, or anywhere else, are unable to purchase Left 4 Dead 2 because of a ratings issue.”

Bummer indeed, Doug. Guess it’s time to start stuffing those zombies with marzipan and kittens instead of blood and bone. And maybe replace gunfire with the sound of children’s laughter. Yeah, that ought to do it.

Effective immediately, the U.S. Marines have banned Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and all other social media sites from their networks.

According to an official order issued to the Marines, “These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries. The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel… at an elevated risk of compromise.”

The ban is currently slated to last a year, and was drawn up by U.S. Strategic Command due to network security concerns. But, if a Marine is able to provide a “mission critical need,” the sites could be temporarily unblocked. But, other than that, there will be no tweeting from the frontlines.

Image Credit: Wired