We came across a Japan-only Mobile Phone with odd design. Meet the Heart 401AB a feature phone whose shape matches the name it sports.

As impossible as it might sound these days, the handset you see above can only handle phone calls there's no SMS functionality or internet connectivity on board. Heart 401AB will be available in March on the Japanese carrier Ymobile (which is very close to our own brand name "YouMobile"). The latter utilizes PHS network, which is mostly for voice calls.

The specs of the phone are headed by a 128×36 dot display, phonebook with 100 entries, and support for hands-free handset. Heart 401AB will ship with heart-shaped charger that's as gaudy as the phone itself. In case you still find the device a tad too subtle, a Sailor Moon edition will offer even more visual flare.

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Qualcomm's 2015 roadmap has been leaked, the company is working on improving its Snapdragon processor that will run the best device of 2015. The star of the H2 2015 show is the successor to the current Snapdragon 810 system chip: the Snapdragon 820.

Alleged specifications for the upcoming system chip show two key advancements: a quick transition to 14nm FinFet manufacturing at Samsung and GlobalFoundries fabs, and the roll-out of what seems like the first custom Qualcomm 64-bit CPU cores under the Taipan architecture.

Qualcomm has dominated the market in the past three years with its Snapdragon chips featuring Krait CPU cores found in most major flagships, but the need for a quick transition to 64-bit chips coincided with the end of life for Krait, forcing the company to release the Snapdragon 810 without its own custom core. The Snapdragon 820 is expected to feature an octa-core setup with eight TS2 high-performance cores.

Other Snapdragon 820 features include a new Adreno 530 GPU, support for the faster LPDDR4 RAM, as well as a advanced MDM9X55 LTE-A Cat.10 Qualcomm modem.

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The British company, Hutchison Whampoa, which owns the UK carrier Three "3", is considering a purchase of Telefonica's carrier O2 UK for around 9 billion pounds which is about $13.6 billion, according to a report from The Sunday Times, which also notes that talks are at an early stage, and nothing is yet confirmed.

A deal makes sense for both companies given that Hutchison is looking to expand in Europe, while Telefonica is in need of cash to help pay down its debts. The latter even came close to selling O2 UK to BT last year, but the deal didn't go through as the telecommunications giant eventually agreed to acquire EE.

In addition, Three's acquisition of O2 would also make it the biggest carrier in the UK it is currently the fourth largest network in the country. However, any such deal between the two could cause regulatory concerns as it would bring down the number of major mobile operators in the UK from four to three.

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ThePirateBay website went down on Early December last year, resulting of a police raid on Data center that has all the Pirate website data. Today, ThePirateBat.se official website has put a countdown to the date "February,1st". The website has also added firework animations and a "WeAreTPB" (We are The Pirate Bay) banner, but nothing else appears to be new.

It looks like the Pirate Bay is coming back online on the first day of Next month (Feb,2015)... As per their past history, The Pirate Bay has always managed to jump back into action, since their services are all cloud-based and their database is not in a single location, the timer suggests that the website will bounce back into action next month. We can only wait and watch to find out what will happen on February,1st.

Source (TPB)

Another secret program where the US government compiled and stored mountains of call data was revealed in a filing related to a case alleging a man was attempting to illegally export electronic equipment to Iran.

In the filing, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), stated that it used "administrative subpoenas" to gather meta-data of US-based calls to foreign countries that were determined to have a demonstrated nexus to international drug trafficking and related criminal activities.

As to which foreign countries were on the list was not revealed, but the DEA did grant that Iran was one of those nations. The filing outlines outgoing call activity, but the program also gathered data of incoming calls to the US from foreign exchanges.

The data collection for this program began in the 1990s and was shut down in August 2013, with the DEA saying that it no longer collects bulk records and that the database has since been deleted.

Naturally, civil liberties and privacy advocates are not pleased with the revelation of this news. Patrick Toomey of the ACLU says this activity proves "the government has extended its use of bulk collection far beyond" terrorism and national security investigations.

The DEA embarked on this program following what could be argued as unintended consequences from a laws passed by Congress to empower the agency in the so-called "war on drugs." However, it is being argued that the DEA has pushed the envelope away from what was intended to be "specific, targeted requests for information" and instead turned things into a dragnet of data collection.

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