Obama wins 2nd term

U.S. President Barack Obama has won a second term, after being declared the winner in the key battleground state of Ohio late Tuesday.

Obama pulled ahead late after Republican challenger Mitt Romney was ahead in Electoral College votes for much of the night. Romney also had a slight edge in the popular vote.

Obama took the lead late Tuesday after winning California, Pennsylvania, Washington and Minnesota.

“This happened because of you,” Obama tweeted. “Thank you.”

Obama’s headquarters in Chicago erupted in wild cheers after he was declared the winner shortly before 11:30 p.m. ET.

Romney had been ahead for much of the evening, bolstered by wins in Texas, Arizona and North Carolina.

Results posted shortly before 10 p.m. ET gave Obama Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes, shortly after he won Michigan and its 16 electoral votes, as well as New York and its 29 votes and New Jersey’s 14 votes. Romney took Texas as expected and its 38 electoral votes.

Romney attended a last-minute rally in Pennsylvania Tuesday afternoon in what turned out to be a fruitless bid to appeal to undecided voters in the state.

In the U.S., the popular vote does not decide who wins the election. Rather, the winner of each state gets that state’s Electoral College votes, which are assigned based on that state’s representation in Congress. The winner needs 270 electoral votes.

But hours after polls closed, a victor had yet to be declared in major battleground states such as Ohio, Virginia and Florida, which left the outcome unclear for several hours.

Obama will once again face the challenge of leading the country with a divided Congress, as Democrats retained control of the Senate and Republicans maintained their hold over the Hose of Representatives.

Indeed, Obama will be tasked with turning around a sluggish economy and reining in a national debt that tops $16 trillion and a budget deficit that has reached $1 trillion.

When it comes to the issue of most concern to voters, a national exit poll found most said the economy is the top issue facing the nation.

Tuesday’s exit poll of more than 19,000 voters conducted by Edison Research for The Associated Press and the major U.S. networks found that:

    59 per cent of voters chose the economy as the biggest issue facing the country.
    Just under four in 10 voters said unemployment was the biggest economic problem they are facing.
    Four in 10 voters said the economy is improving, while 3 in 10 said it is getting worse.

Developing story…

Siri so far has lost

Google has released its Siri competitor and makes Apple’s application look slow.

Three months ago Google released a demo of its enhanced voice search program for iOS and now it is released for public use. The service mimics some of the functionality that Google has put into its search technology on Jelly Bean running Android devices

It provides quick contextual, spoken result to voice queries and serves up Web searches for everything else. In testing by CNET, Google’s software seems to be somewhat quicker than Apple’s Siri. It even went as far as to show voice transcripts while being spoken. Siri only does so after the user is done talking.

The feature went out on an update, which added support to the iPhone 5. iOS 4.2 or better is needed to use it. Earlier in the year Google said it planned to build some of the same search functionality into its other products like Calander and Drive.

Anonymous hackers claim to leak 28,000 PayPal passwords on global protest day

Paypal hacked by Anonymous as part of our November 5th protest privatepaste.com/e8d3b2b2b1 #5Nov
— Anonymous Press (@AnonymousPress) November 5, 2012

Multiple Anonymous Twitter accounts announced the hack, linking to a set of Private Paste documents containing emails, names, and what appear to be possibly passwords from the payment service’s database. One paste dump states that it has 27,935 entries from “mc_customers” with columns for the passwords (which are coded) and corresponding telephone numbers. Some of the links appear to have been removed at the time of writing, but they were all working at one point.

Update: PayPal’s head of PR has responded on Twitter that the company is investigating the claim, but it has yet to find any evidence of a security breach.

Kim Dotcom: New "Mega" designed to sidestep the American laws

Kim Dotcom, founder of the banned Megaupload filesharing site, has announced a new version called Mega designed to sidestep the American laws under which he is being prosecuted for £175m worth of alleged online piracy, racketeering and money laundering.

Screen Capture

Dotcom on Thursday announced the new online storage service, saying it would give users direct control – and responsibility – over their files. The site has previously been referred to as Megabox in a teaser video.

Dotcom said Mega would launch in January 2013, just before he is scheduled to face a New Zealand extradition hearing brought on by the United States where he and other Megaupload operators face prosecution.

The site would not use US-based hosting companies as partners in order to avoid being shut down by US authorities, Dotcom said.

The US government alleges that Megaupload, once one of the world's most popular websites, was directly responsible for illegally uploaded content on the site and that it netted $175m from unlawful activities.

"The new Mega will not be threatened by US prosecutors," Dotcom said, adding that he was confident Mega would avoid violating US law.

"The new Mega avoids any dealings with US hosters, US domains and US backbone providers and has changed the way it operates to avoid another takedown."

Social Media and Osama Bin Ladens Death

When history looks back on the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, its primary focus will likely be on the American decision to send special forces into Pakistan to attack Bin Laden’s complex. As the first few books on the subject start to hit the shelves though, it is becoming clear that the role of tech and social media will be remembered as a prominent part of the story as well.

In a conversation with Voted Up, Mark Bowden, the author a new book about the Bin Laden raid called The Finish, explained that his retelling would not be complete without the inclusion of the role played by Silicon Valley based tech companies and Twitter.

Bowden, also the author of Black Hawk Down, said the Pentagon’s decision to contract with a number of tech companies was a major factor in the successful raid. Those companies, including Palantir, a startup founded in 2004 which specializes in multi-platform data analysis, enabled the Pentagon to store and catalog every grain of data it had on the people it was tracking.

The iPad Mini Arrives

The iPad Mini is here.

At an invitation only event in San Jose this morning, Apple unveiled the eagerly anticipated device, just as AllThingsD said it would back in August.

The device is largely as the rumors and speculation the past few months have described it: The iPad, miniaturized. The iPad Mini features a 7.9 display with 1024×768 resolution that makes it 35 percent larger than the displays of 7-inch tablets, like the Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7. It has a 7.2 mm thick aluminum chassis (as thin as pencil) that weighs as much as a pad of paper and is easily held in one hand, and it comes in black and white.

Driving the Mini is Apple’s A5 chip. It comes with its own Smart Cover and includes a FaceTime front camera and 5 megapixel back camera, LTE wireless, faster Wi-Fi, the Lightning connector and 10 hour battery life.

Prices start at $329 for 16GB, Wi-Fi version. Pre-ordering starts Friday, with the Wi-Fi models expected to start shipping Nov. 2 and the cellular models two weeks after that.

As VP Phil Schiller noted this morning, “The iPad Mini is every inch an iPad.”

Can RIM "Blackberry" Survive?

Research In Motion’s BlackBerry not that long ago was the dominant smartphone platform. Due to its incompetent management all too easily waving off the iPhone threat, which along with Android went on to slaughter the BlackBerry in the consumer space, RIM has now sought a retreat in big corporations and government agencies – its only remaining strongholds.

The problem is, the enterprise market is now dropping BlackBerries in droves and governments around the world are following suit. The latest example: both the U.S. Immigration and Customer Enforcement agency and government consultant Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. are dropping a total of nearly 50,000 BlackBerry handsets in favor of iPhones and devices powered by Google’s Android software…

Reuters reports that the U.S. Immigration and Customer Enforcement agency will not re-new its contract with RIM. Instead, its 17,600 employees are all getting iPhones and Androids in a deal worth an estimated $2.1 million:

    The agency said it has relied on RIM for eight years but that RIM’s technology “can no longer meet the mobile technology needs of the agency”.
Ouch!

    It also said that it had analyzed Apple’s iOS-based devices and Google’s Android operating system and concluded that for the near term Apple’s iPhone services offer the best technology for the agency because of Apple’s tight controls of the hardware platform and operating system.