Regardless of RIM’s multiple financial and leadership issues, as well as the Blackberry’s fading popularity with consumers, there is some good news for the company. Sales to U.S. federal agencies are on the rise, and the BlackBerry is the unofficial smart phone of White House personnel.

Sales in the U.S. (which is RIM’s biggest market) fell 57% last quarter, in part because of the growing popularity of iPhones and Android phones.

Scott Totzke, senior vice president of BlackBerry security, said recently that “compared to the enterprise over the last year and a half or so, the federal business on whole is up. The employee base is shrinking, so if we’re looking at a market with fewer employees and our install base is stable to slightly up, that would seem to indicate that we have an increasing market share.”

RIM fell 0.7% to $12.67 in New York trading on April 5. The stock has lost 77% in the past year.

Apple, the largest and most powerful tech company in the world, has released numbers that reveal the company has sold more than 3 million iPads during the first weekend of its availability.

That number is a record for opening weekend iPad sales, and the tech giant said in a statement that it had also set a single-day record for iPad sales when it was made available on March 16.

The third-generation iPad features a Retina display, iSight camera, a more powerful processing chip and support for 4G LTE wireless networks.

You may have never heard Gioachino Rossini’s name before, but you have almost certainly heard his composition of The Barber of Seville; even Bugs Bunny has an adaptation of it.

The Italian composer would have been 220-years-old today and Google’s Doodle is honoring him with a leap year opera doodle. That’s right, it is February 29th today, a leap year so even though 220 years have passed, this is only the 53rd time Rossini’s birthday actual birthday has passed.

Leap years are every four years because we add a day to keep our calendar in sync. We count 365 days a year (except leap years with 357) because it takes the Earth roughly 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes and 16 seconds to orbit the sun.

Google’s first leap year doodle was in 2004 when they displayed one frog leaping over another. Their doodles have continued to be more and more elaborate since then.

You can see all the Google Doodles here.

Google changed the ‘tone’ of their logo Wednesday, ah, get it?

Okay, aside from bad jokes, Google is celebrating the 155th birthday of German physicist, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, by changing their logo to a frequency wave (you know, tone, derived from one frequency or a very small number of related frequencies… forget it).

The work of Hertz during his short life (he passed away at the age of only 36) is all around us, literally. His work helped pave the way for radio, television and WiFi.

At the time Hertz didn’t realize the importance of his work on the photoelectric effect and said that “it’s of no use whatsoever.”

“This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right — we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there.”

Thirty-six years after his death, Hertz was honored by the International Electrotechnical Commission and to be named as the standard unit of measurement.

Hertz died in 1894 in Bonn, Germany.

More Google Doodle

Last month Google celebrated Charles Dickens 200th birthday with their Google Doodle. They also did a Valentine’s Day video.

You can check out all of the Google Doodles here.

Seventeen days to go still before the real information will be released the specs for the new iPad. Until then, the rumor mill is in full swing.

The above photo, taken by Sas126 and posted to the Chinese website, Weiphone, indicates that the new iPad 3 chipset will include the A5X chip, not the rumored power hungry quad-core A6.

The photos shows a stamp of 1146 which represents the date it was supposedly manufactured; the 46th week of last year or somewhere around November 14-20, 2011.

The iPad 3 is rumored to also have an 8MP camera and a 9.7-inch 2048×1536 pixel display.

The former telecommunications giant, Nortel, has been allegedly hacked since 2000 by Chinese hackers according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

For more than a decade China-based cyber-spies have had access to documents, project plans, email addresses and, according to a former Nortel employee who initiated an internal investigation of the hacks, Brian Shields, basically anything they wanted to get their hands on. Claiming Nortel did nothing to take the attacks seriously.

Shields told the Wall Street Journal: “They had plenty of time. All they had to do was figure out what they wanted,” adding that they “had access to everything”.

The hackers were able to strategically place spyware like trojan horses so deeply into Nortel employee’s computers that they were missed by any type of spyware detection.

Nortel, which is now in the process of liquidating all it’s assets after filing for bankruptcy, can’t guarantee that some of the computers sold to companies like Ciena Corp, Ericsson, Avaya Inc. and Genband Corp. are not still infected.

How Suspected China-Based Attacks Happened

According to the report, the Chinese hackers obtained usernames and passwords of seven Nortel executives included a former chief executive of the company.

Once the hackers had these credentials they were able to penetrate Nortel’s internal systems freely and plant spyware as they pleased, ensuring access to all communication and documents.

China Denies Allegations

Since these initial reports of where the attacks originated from are to be considered speculation, it is understandable that the Chinese government is claiming that these reports are “irresponsible”.

It is common practice for hackers to compromise then proxy from other computers and servers from around the world to avoid their source IP address being detected.

A Sophos senior technology consultant, Graham Cluley, explained on his blog, “Yes, the data might have been transmitted to an IP address based in Shanghai, but it is possible that a computer in Shanghai has been compromised by.. say.. a remote hacker in Belgium.

“It’s all too easy to point a finger, but it’s dangerous to keep doing so without proof.”

Nortel Did Nothing To Stop or Disclose Attacks

In 2004 the breach was noticed when a Nortel employee noticed an usual set of documents was being downloaded by a senior executive that denied having made the downloads.

According to Shields, the network was “soft and gooey,” making it easy for hackers to navigate Nortel’s internal network once the initial breach had been made. Without multiple layers of defense within a network security experts have always known there is nothing to stop hackers once they’ve penetrated a network’s perimeter.

The reports show that Nortel did nothing to discover the level in which their computers and products had been compromised over their six month investigation. “Nothing from a security standpoint” had been done besides resetting of passwords the Journal said.

Shields confirmed that Nortel computers continued to send files and data to the same Shanghai-based IP addresses six months after the first discovery of the spyware.

The telecommunications giant could not confirm, nor made any effort to determine whether or not their products were still infected before liquidating them.

Nortel is not responding to any requests for comment at this time.

In a move heavily criticized by proponents of internet privacy, the Harper Conservative majority has introduced the so called “Online Surveillance Bill” to the House of Commons. Harper claims that the bill is to protect children from internet predators, but the tenets of the bill seem far more underhanded when examined closely.

The bill (details below from CBC) contains provisions that would:

Require telecommunications and internet providers to give subscriber data to police and national security agencies without a warrant, including names, unlisted phone numbers and IP addresses.
Force internet providers and other makers of technology to provide a “back door” to make communications accessible to police.
Allow police to get warrants to obtain information transmitted over the internet and data related to its transmission, including locations of individuals and transactions.
Allow courts to compel other parties to preserve electronic evidence.

Open Media, a lobby group for an open internet, said the bill is “opening the door to needless invasions of privacy for law-abiding Canadians.”

The RCMP has decided to back the bill, claiming that they “believe the police need modern tools and resources to respond to the evolving nature of national and transnational crime, including terrorism.” For those keeping track, similar wording was used in the drafting of the American Patriot Act – a heavily criticized bill that allowed government and military spying on American citizens.

Rogers Communications is stepping outside of the mobile box, providing it’s customers with their new One Number service which allows voice and SMS to any personal computer under their single phone number.

Rogers announced on Monday that they have partnered with Vancouver’s CounterPath to use fixed / mobile convergence (FMC) which allows a customer to create and manage their contact list which are automatically synced between their PC’s and mobile phone.

This means that users can send texts or call Canadian numbers from a computer without affecting their wireless plans. The service even allows customers to transfer calls from their mobile phone over to their computers; start a conversation while out running errands during peak hours and then complete the conversation when they arrive home to save air time on their mobile package.

Free calls to any Canadian number from a computer anywhere in the world or video chat with other Rogers One Number customers.

Rogers Communications’ partner, CounterPath, launched in 2002 with mere three employees and has grown to 100 employees that develop of softphone (voice-over-ip) technology. In 2011 the company won TMC’s Internet Telephony Product of the Year award with the release of new softphone apps for iPhone, iPads and Android devices.

There are many services that provide VOIP services including skype and Google phone but the advantage of using your mobile number when placing calls is a strong advantage for the communication company.

Apple announced Monday that the Fair Labor Association will be conducting inspections in China, including Foxconn, at the request of Apple. The request after a series of fatalities and suicides over the past few years.

Foxconn is China’s largest private sector employer, employing more than a million people worldwide.

Apple has been in the spotlight since the New York Times cited dangers at their suppliers’ factories. They reported that in May an explosion at a plant in Chengdu killed two workers.

After many suicides Foxconn’s Shenzhen factory installed suicide nets to living-quarters, raised wages and shortened working hours.

Tim Cook, Apple chief executive, said: “Workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment.”

Adding: “Which is why we’ve asked the FLA to independently assess the performance of our largest suppliers.

“The inspections now under way are unprecedented in the electronics industry, both in scale and scope, and we appreciate the FLA agreeing to take the unusual step of identifying the factories in their reports.”

Since posting their first-quarter earnings, Apple’s stock (AAPL) has climbed 11 of the past 14 days and finally broke through the $500 barrier. At 10a.m. EST in New York, Apple sat at $500.60 per share.

It shows the perseverance of the late Steve Jobs and the amazing turnabout that Apple was capable of. Apple faced bankruptcy in 1997 when shares were as low as $3.19. Now over $500-a-share and worth $460 billion, Apple reported record profits, up 118%, over the last three months of 2011. Pushing sales year-over-year for the same three months from 2010 to 2011 up to $13.06 billion, the fourth-biggest profits in US corporate history.

The stock has been climbing steadily since the news and rumors of the iPad 3 release in early March.

Only Google (GOOG) at $612.23 and Priceline (PCLN) at 564.55 cost more per share according to bloomber.com.

Timothy Ghriskey, who owns Apple and oversees $2 billion as chief investment officer of Solaris Group LLC said: “It reminds us all of the amazing transformation of Apple over the past eight years. We think the stock has higher to go, $600 is next,” he said. “It’s still an inexpensive stock for a company that is executing at the very highest level and continues to innovate.”