In yet another interesting move, Google has sold Motorola Mobility to multinational Chinese tech company Lenovo.

The Chinese giant has just acquired Google’s Motorola division for a reported $2.91 billion. This is a marked decrease in value for the beleaguered Motorola, which was purchased by Google in 2011 for $12.5 billion. The division has been a constant drain on Google’s bottom line, losing $248 million in the last quarter alone.

Interestingly, Google will retain ownership of the vast majority of Motorola Mobility’s patent portfolio, leaving Lenovo with about 2,000 patents and the Motorola Mobility brand and trademarks. Lenovo has been muscling it’s way into PC markets in the last decade by buying IBM’s personal computer division and now seems poised to make a foray into the global smartphone market as well. Of note is the fact that Google will also be retaining control of it’s “Skunkworks” division as part of this deal. The deal is still subject to approval by both U.S. and Chinese authorities but it seems that the global smartphone market may be changing.

Lenovo is also a major Windows 8 partner, so it seems likely that the new acquisition will bring us some (hopefully) not dreadful versions of Windows Phone 8.

World of Warcraft is obviously popular, but a new infographic (See Below) reveals that it goes further than that – Azeroth’s population surpasses that of most countries.

Despite its slow decline in active subscribers, World of Warcraft is a pretty darn healthy MMO. Blizzard released an infographic today to celebrate the crossing of a threshold: since its release ten years ago, a whopping 100 million accounts have been created. That includes trial accounts, mind, but there’s no denying it’s an impressive census. In fact, it’s more than twice the entire population of South Korea, as the infographic happily points out.

All in all, Azeroth has a population of about 500 million player characters (an average of five per account, by our math), hailing from 244 countries and territories around the world. 52% of those characters are members of the Alliance, while 47% joined the Horde. Since Pandaren characters start out neutral, there’s also 1% of characters who are still on the fence.

It just goes to show that the glorious Alliance wins because of superior numbers. WOOHOO 😀

World of Warcraft’s economy is still booming as well. Every day sees about 2.8 million trades through the Auction House, which was twice the activity of eBay on Cyber Monday a few years ago. All that trade is handled by just 71 auctioneer NPCs in the game world, who each probably deserve a serious raise.

You can see the full infographic in all its glory over at Battle.net. There’s a lot of big numbers, and they’re well-earned; WoW has been more or less the reigning champion of MMOs for a full decade now. Azeroth still has over 7 million active players as of the last report, and something tells me that its community won’t be leaving it anytime soon.

That is the question Microsoft are now asking all its non-American users, after implementing a new feature that will allow users of Microsoft services who registered as outside the United States to opt to have their data stored only on non-American soil.

Microsoft have become what appears to be the first United States-based company to offer those outside the US the option to store their data off of American soil; and it isn’t too surprising given how vocal they’ve been against lack of user privacy in the United States. They’ve been very unhappy with the revelations given to us thanks to Edward Snowden over the fact that the NSA have been spying on American citizens. They are also unhappy with the fact that their own networks have been used to monitor citizens in countries like Brazil and all over Europe as well. It’s also possible that the move may perhaps have an additional role as a subtle middle-finger to the Syrian Electronic Army, who have repeatedly hacked their American servers in recent months.

So far, Microsoft is the only major company offering explicitly non-US data storage, despite evidence that the NSA has also broken into the private networks of both Google and Yahoo.

While there’s no guarantee the NSA won’t be able to reach servers outside US borders, the move would offer an additional layer of protection, as local law enforcement is likely to respond more aggressively to agents of a foreign country. This of course assumes that Microsoft are serious about their commitment to protect the interests of their customers globally; and not just an act to maintain loyalty with customers outside of the US. There’s also still the unanswered question of what happens when data is transit – data may not be STORED on US servers, but could it still pass through one or more of them when the data is transit – for example, whenever you use a different Microsoft service?

We shall see… soon enough.

Only an hour ago, users in Europe, the U.S., Canada, India and beyond all reported suddenly being unable to access their GMail (or Google Mail) accounts in what appeared to be a widespread outage. Google’s App Status Dashboard was originally unaware of the issue, but at around 7:20pm GMT the service updated to show downtime for GMail and Google+, though further details of the downtime are still unknown.

The error being seen by most users at the moment is a 500 Internal Server Error. These errors, as the name suggests, always tend to be a minor issue on the server (in this case, Google’s) – although it says nothing about what the problem actually is – and are usually temporary. Judging by the response on Twitter, however, the problem is currently affecting a huge number of users both on GMail and Google+. The latter also affects Youtube Comment boxes under the new system now in force there, which means those aren’t loading at all on videos, as well as Hangouts across the web and mobile. GMail users report their issue affects not just web access, but also other clients trying to download GMail via both POP and IMAP.

As of an update released just before this article published here on S.FM, many users state their services have returned; though others still state they are unable to get in; and those who HAVE gotten access to their email back are continuing to report intermittent problems. Nevertheless, it looks likely all issues will be resolved shortly; and we await Google’s response on what happened if any is delivered.

It has to be said, for a service supposedly designed around private communications, SnapChat is looking decidedly bad at protecting people’s privacy. Designed as a tool to keep text and picture communication private by deleting messages from a user’s phone up to ten seconds after it’s viewed, users of SnapChat who value the service for its discreet, secret nature have often found themselves bitten in the ass with privacy-compromising bugs: First was the hack that SnapChat first denied, then later had to admit WAS a problem, whereby all but the last two digits of the phone number of all SnapChat users could be determined. This directly lead to a second problem whereby it was possible for people to determine you had SnapChat installed even if you didn’t know the other party, forcing SnapChat to add a user-enabled “delist” option. That’s without mentioning the controversial “second look” feature, recently added, that will allow one message per day to be viewed a second time at the recipent’s request.

Apparently to try to encourage use of the system by legitimate users – and to curb the use of the service by automated services (“robots”) to send spam to its users – Snapchat recently implemented a new verification system giving a simple test for its users to complete to verify they are human. The system takes the form of a visual identification test – users will be shown a grid of icons, each containing a white shape, some of which will be the iconic “ghost” shape that SnapChat uses in its logo; and just have to select the ones with the “ghost” in.

Now, visual tests to prevent bots are nothing new – Microsoft’s own KittenAuth system is another such example. KittenAuth combines pictures of cats with those of dogs and other furry animals; and asks users to simply pick out all the cats from a randomly-generated selection. The reason KittenAuth works, but SnapChat’s “Human Test” doesn’t, is cats have hundreds of breeds and thousands of colour variations, leading to a whole variety of different looks. We humans are very good at recognising cats as cats no matter how different they look, but computers are not as intelligent at grouping together similar things when they look very different.

SnapChat’s “Ghost” logo, however, is always a certain shape, size and colour, making it instantly very recognisable and the perfect thing for a “robot” to look for. To prove it, Georgia Institute of Technology student Steven Hickson spent less than 30 minutes and 100 lines of code to create a bot to do just that. Steven’s proof of concept script compares the colour, pattern and distance between points of the white object in each icon on SnapChat’s randomised authentication screen and works out from these which match a “ghost” and which do not, with extremely high accuracy. For the more technically minded, an detailed explanation of the bot and its source code can be found on Steven’s Blogspot.

For those of you who prefer a simpler explanation of why this Account Verification is just another example of SnapChat not even trying: Pattern Recognition is a function of computing that has been possible now for many years, even decades; and is used for such things as working out the sounds to be made when a piece of music is played on a CD or MP3 file, to creating 3D models that can be used in architectural designs or sent to a 3D printer to make toys, tools and even food out of. As for colours, even popular artwork creation programs like Photoshop and GIMP have a “Select by Colour” option that can pick out parts of an image with the same or similar colour as what it’s told to look for. So when a system designed to fool computers and let in humans can fail by the most simplest of computing abilities today… one has to wonder whether SnapChat give a damn about keeping their service secure and keeping spam out at all; and every user should question their faith in such a company who are quickly building up a sizeable list of negligent practices.