(Photo: Ubergizmo)

An anonymous person who definitely has no vested interest whatsoever in the success of BlackBerry has purchased 1 million BlackBerries just because he's really super into the device, okay?

DVice reports that the anonymous person swooped in and bought 1,000,000 of BlackBerry's newest gadget, the Z10. Perhaps he will melt them down and build himself a dwelling made of toxic metals and Canadian tears. Perhaps he will spend the rest of his life giving away old BlackBerries as presents. ("Ughhhh, Uncle Mike gave me another Z10 for Christmas.") Or perhaps he will store them in a spare closet in his office at BlackBerry.

At this point we're thinking this could totally be written off as a charitable donation.

All trying to impress each other right now.

Once upon a time, status-seekers relied on signifiers like nice watches, swanky automobiles and handbags that cost as much as a car. But according to Quartz, times have changed: Now men and women worldwide think it's their cell phones everyone notices first.

BRB, running to the Apple store.

A company called Vuclip surveyed folks in more than a dozen countries, asking them to reveal “The first thing people notice about me.” 61 percent of men said it was their cell phone. 38 percent of women said the same thing, ranking cell phones first but by a narrower margin.

However, the most dedicated device owners were--surprise, surprise!--teenaged girls. A whopping 82 percent of female respondents under 18 put their cells first. Maybe that's why, as the Pew Institute reports today, more teens than ever own smartphones and use them as their primary means of accessing the Internet.

Clearly, times have changed since those dumb Burberry mini-purses were the ne plus ultra of high school queen bees.

Hope you don't get cancer, CEO guy. (flickr.com/perspective)

Italy's Supreme Court has issued a ruling that could have a ripple effect for cellphone manufacturers all over the world by declaring a "causal link" between an Italian businessman's non-cancerous tumor and his daily cellphone usage.

The businessman, Innocente Marcolini, said he used his cellphone as much as six hours a day for work. Now his face his paralyzed on one side.

Testimony from oncologists and researchers on Mr. Marcolini's behalf might spook even the most hardcore cellphone user:

"They said electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobile and cordless phones can damage cells, making tumours more likely."

One of Mr. Marcolini's experts told a U.K. paper that the court's decision will "open not a road but a motorway to legal actions by victims. We're considering a class action."

Even though the World Health Organization has expressed caution regarding cellphone use, government agencies like Britain's Health Protection Agency are not too concerned, a spokesman telling the Telegraph that the "scientific consensus is that mobile phones do not cause cancer."

We hope that last part is true, because the alternative might see a new rise in Bluetooth headset use, and no one wants that.

(Photo: AFR)

If you're not Beyonce and you're still carrying around a Blackberry, chances are you are over 55, wear a three piece suit to work or--like a family itself--you are desperately beholden to a family plan from which there is no escape.

Where once we touted Blackberry Curves like prized possessions, obsessively BBMing friends and humblebragging about the jitters induced by that phantom blinking red light, we now cluck our tongues in derision at the behind-the-times fogies who dare to wield a device that isn't an iPhone or Android.

Current Blackberry users have one bragging right that they wave like a sad white flag, despite the fact that their phones do not have apps and can barely access the Internet without shutting down: It's that damn QWERTY keyboard. Once ubiquitous in the smartphone market, the physical button keyboard has largely been replaced by touchscreen phones designed to drive people with fat thumbs ever closer to the brink of insanity.

Between insanity and perpetual shame is exactly where Blackberry users hover these days, at least according to the New York Times:

“I’m ashamed of it,” said Ms. Crosby, a Los Angeles sales representative who said she had stopped pulling out her BlackBerry at cocktail parties and conferences. In meetings, she says she hides her BlackBerry beneath her iPad for fear clients will see it and judge her.

“I want to take a bat to it,” Ms. Crosby said, after waiting for her phone’s browser to load for the third minute, only to watch the battery die. “You can’t do anything with it. You’re supposed to, but it’s all a big lie.”

One man, who is of course a "musician" living in Los Angeles, drove the final knife through RIM's cold, money-bleeding heart. “BlackBerry users are like Myspace users,” he told the Times. “They probably still chat on AOL Instant Messenger.”

We thought Blackberry's power ballad, which proved the company and its products were more embarrassing than your Dad, would be the company's ultimate source of shame. Turns out we were wrong.

I can has affordable wireless bill? (Photo: flickr.com/joshsemans)

What's a girl got to do to get some affordable data service around here? Americans are putting more money than ever towards their smartphone bills, and carriers don't seem inclined to cut their rates any time soon. But the Wall Street Journal says one company wants to break the stalemate, with dramatically less expensive 4G offerings. The question is whether they can pull it off.

FreedomPop, which launched today, will offer users five gigabytes of data for $35, and one gig for $10. Compare that to the $80 or so six gigs will run you at Verizon, and suddenly you've got a lot more money for steak dinners.

There are, however, a couple of bumps in the road to adoption.

Besides the clunky $99 case you're required to buy and the currently limited availability, there's a major sticking point in the fact that the service is data only. That means no phone calls and no text messages, unless you cobble together a solution with Skype or something similar. (Indeed, the cofounder of Skype was an early funder. We see what you did there, Mr. Zennstrom.)

That might deter many of you from wholly cutting ties with your current carrier. Others, however, will likely be delighted to have a semi-plausible excuse for never answering another phone call.

FreedomPop's biggest challenge, however, might be sheer American laziness. One analyst compared smartphone service to one's choice of bank:

 "The guy next to me might be offering a lower-cost checking account, but am I really going to switch the whole banking relationship where my whole family is? The unwinding of that process is not easy."

Apparently we love convenience more than we love dinners out, which is saying something.

Hard to go wrong betting on a huge, sick loft. (Photo: Airbnb screencap)

According to reports, Airbnb is raising a new round. The Valuation? Try "'north of a billion' between $2 billion and $3 billion." It's amazing what you can do with srs bsns revenues. [TechCrunch]

If this list ranking top 50 venture-backed startups is any indication, it's enterprise companies' time to shine. [Wall Street Journal]

Don't look now, but the maps app in iOS 6 isn't the only thing looking a little half-baked: "Burning question I have to ask: what is up with Apple’s Passbook app?" [GigaOm]

Sure, they might give you text neck, but mental health pros are increasingly using smartphones apps as a way to supplement treatment for conditions like OCD. [CNN]

It was reportedly conflict over turn-by-turn directions that prompted Apple to strike out on its own and create a new map app. [AllThingsD]

Expensive. (Wikipedia)

Americans' smartphone bills are looking pretty onerous these days. How bad has it gotten? According to the Wall Street Journal, people are cutting back on dinners out and other such vices in order to sustain their ravenous Netflixing of Homeland episodes while waiting at the dentist's office. And with carriers pushing back on unlimited data plans, matters are only getting worse.

According to the Journal, telephone spending per year is up $116 since 2007, whereas entertainment spending dropped $126 and eating out fell $48 (with no adjustments made for inflation). Also noted: people are spending less on landlines, so that's an even bigger chunk of paychecks than it looks like.

And yet, those bills are only going upward. An example of the industry consensus:

"Speed entices more usage," Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said at an investor conference last week, according to a transcript. "The more data they consume, the more they will have to buy."

In fact, let's quantify that real quick:

Streaming 30 minutes of video per day over a 4G connection and doing nothing else on her phone would cost Ms. Tuers roughly $120 a month on one of Verizon's new data plans, according to the carrier's website.

Unfortunately for the carriers, it's not like consumers can just walk outside and pluck a few Benjamins off the old money tree.

Ravi Borgaonkar demonstrating Galaxy handset flaws. (Screengrab)

During a recent security conference in South America, a Berlin-based researcher revealed that Samsung has a major problem with its iPhone challengers, the Galaxy 3 and Galaxy S2 smartphones.

Both can easily be remotely wiped by code embedded in a web page.

Ravi Borgaonkar found that the Galaxy's "service loading" feature, its method of communicating with application servers, can be exploited with just one line of code tucked away in a web page's HTML. If the attack is successful, the malicious code reverts the phones to their factory settings. Worse still, once the attack begins, the phone's user can't do a thing about it.

That's bad enough. There's also this:

Alongside web pages, the code can also be embedded in malicious text messages, or triggered by a QR code or NFC tag.

Security researchers are pressing Samsung to patch the problem because as DigitalSpy reports, experts say this is a "major security vulnerability."

Mr. Borgaonkar, who reportedly wondered aloud what Samsung's engineers were smoking when they created the vulnerable system, demonstrates how it works in the video below.

Viewers may need headphones to hear Mr. Borgaonkar clearly, but the shocked audience reaction at 2:10, when he uses a link from a tweet to demonstrate how quickly a malicious web page can reset the phone, is unmistakable.

Detail from photo of Charles Manson

True Crime Diary is a great true crime blog run by writer Michelle McNamara. Ms. McNamara doesn't update her blog daily, but when she does, the product is often an insightful and thought-provoking long read. That's true of this entry posted yesterday, "#bloodbath: how social media might have changed one of history's most infamous crime sprees."

The crime spree in question: the horrific murders committed by the followers of maniac Charles Manson during the Summer of '69. Using facts from the case, Ms. McNamara posits an alternate timeline in which smartphones and Twitter were as ubiquitous then as they are now. She paints a brief portrait of how tech might have altered the course of the Manson Family's rampage, beginning the night Manson followers slaughtered actress Sharon Tate and several guests at Ms. Tate's secluded Hollywood home:

Timothy Ireland was one of the five counselors supervising the Westlake camp-out. At approximately 12:40 a.m. he heard a male voice from what seemed a long distance away, to the north or northeast.

“Oh, God, no, please don’t! Oh, God, no, don’t, don’t, don’t…”

The scream lasted for about 10 seconds before coming to an abrupt end, followed by a silence that suggested that somewhere out there a man begging to be spared had not.

Ireland was disturbed. Unsure what to do, he took out his cell phone and accessed his Twitter account.

@timireleand: "Someone screaming just now around Cielo in B. Canyon. Anyone? #freakedout"

Ms. McNamara briefly stretches this alternate history to include other witnesses who heard evidence of what was happening at the Tate residence. She imagines a Twitter dialogue in which they put together sounds of screaming and gunshots and decide it might be a good idea to call the cops.

Of course, Twitter and mobile Internet access were actually decades away at the time, and the witnesses had no way of putting their heads together. Ms. McNamara suggests that if tech had been 40 years in advance of where it really was in 1969, the first Manson murders might have been a worldwide story within hours.

If that's not enough of a counterfactual for you, Ms. McNamara also goes on to theorize that today's technology might have stopped Charles Manson's rise to infamy before it began.

She paints a portrait of the psychopathic loser's web presence--as well as the presence of the web--being Manson's greatest weakness as he attempts to recruit an insecure female follower:

Today Manson, a mediocre troubadour whose inability to break through consumed him, would probably post his songs to MySpace. He would track the number of listeners obsessively. When he meets a lonely, deeply insecure young woman at a random gathering in Manhattan Beach she warms to his gaze. She listens attentively as he rambles about his music. During an interruption in their conversation she sneaks into the bathroom and whips out her phone. She looks him up. His profile is disjointed and strewn with mistakes. That stirring stare is less stirring on the screen. Hardly anyone at all has listened to his songs.

Still, it’s attention, what she craves, and she intends to make her way through the party back to him. But a ping alerts her to a Facebook update from an old friend. A calendar reminder pops up about an upcoming Meetup gathering. A group in the dining room is forming around a laptop, watching a YouTube clip, and their laughter is intoxicating.

Could the constant distractions of social media, so often the subject of pearl-twisting and hand-wringing today, have helped reveal the true emptiness at the center of a glib monster like Manson? It's a provocative thought.

Betabeat contacted Michelle McNamara for further comment. She said that in part she wanted to examine how social media can affect reportage of unfolding crime dramas. She cited an arson rampage that struck Los Angeles in January. Twitter updates during that crime spree were "effective and mesmerizing," she said, "all these voices chiming in with reports and pictures."

Ms. McNamara told Betabeat that she later re-read Vincent Bugliosi's account of the Manson crimes, Helter Skelter, and that she'd "forgotten what a load of horse shit [Manson] fed his followers."

Manson, she said, used his physical presence to keep followers in line, and she "started thinking about how he'd fare in today's Twitter's world" in addition to wondering how word the Manson Family crimes might "be disseminated in real time today."

Betabeat asked Ms. McNamara if she thought a new-school Manson could leverage the same social networking tools to draw people into his psychopathic web. Ms. McNamara said she thought it would tough "for a malevolent but charismatic figure to reign through social media" now.

"Because not only are we deeply distracted with content overload," she said, "we also have many ways to unmask people, from digging up their embarrassing past to uploading their old ridiculous videos, which can quickly reduce their standing among glassy-eyed devotees."

Ms. McNamara also told Betabeat that she's "bullish about the use of Twitter in crime-solving in the future."

"I think law enforcement is just starting to recognize the potential there," she said, "Yes, boots on the ground are always necessary, but hashtags are quick and can result an amazing amount of information in very little time."

As we were preparing this post, an unfolding hostage situation in a Pittsburgh office building proved Ms. McNamara's points regarding crime and social media: as of 1:30 Friday afternoon, 22-year-old Klein Michael Thaxton was holding a hostage at gunpoint on the 16th floor of Three Gateway Center. He has apparently been updating his Facebook page throughout the situation.

The cops will help you find it.

The New York City Police want to help you find your lost or stolen iPhone, which is nice! That's why the NYPD will implement something called Operation ID, beginning Friday, September 21st--not coincidentally the date the iPhone 5 goes on sale. The police will be on point for that, too:

"On Friday, officers will be stationed at 21 stores throughout the city, including six Apple, as well as seven Verizon and eight AT&T stores as part of Operation ID.

"The program is free to the public. Officers will register the serial number of the electronic device along with the owner's name and contact information. Items can also be engraved with a unique serial number."

The police will be glad to assist with registering any electronic device, not just the iPhone--you can do this at any precinct through a crime prevention officer. They also recommend iPhone owners use "Find My iPhone" as well.

Operation ID has been in place in one form for a while, but Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in a statement quoted by the Associated Press that "theft of Apple phones and other hand-held devices drove the spike in robberies and larceny" in 2012, hence the new effort to raise awareness among smartphone owners.