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The rumors have been confirmed, Google's Motorola Mobility is indeed acquiring the facial recognition technology company Viewdle.

"Motorola Mobility today announced that it has acquired Viewdle, a leading imaging & gesture recognition company," a Motorola spokesperson told TechCrunch today. "Motorola and Viewdle have an existing commercial agreement and have been collaborating for some time. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed."

Microsoft’s Bing team is taking advantage of Apple’s map app misery to make a push for Redmond's own cartographic efforts.

In a cheeky blog post, Microsoft invites iPhone 5 users to use Bing Maps to get around instead of Apple’s own shoddy substitute for Google Maps. The blog is titled Just Got a New Phone? Time to Download the Bing App, and avoids explicitly naming the iPhone 5, which launched last week, while making its point clear. Microsoft says:

After nine months of deliberations and some changes on Google's side, the Norwegian Data Protection Authority lifted a ban on the use of Google Apps by municipalities. However, the decision does not give city authorities carte blanche to use all cloud services, according to the Norwegian Data Protection Commissioner.

The use of Google Apps was banned in January by the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, which is known to keep a short leash on use of technology from U.S. IT companies, because the cloud application was violating Norwegian privacy law.

At a signing ceremony at the Google headquarters on Tuesday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law state legislation that officially makes the Golden State the second in the nation to legalize and regulate autonomous cars.

Google, of course, has already developed a fleet of a dozen cars (mostly modified Toyota Priuses) and has already logged over 300,000 miles of autonomous driving on state roads.

At a time when the Apple Maps and Google Maps brouhaha is being discussed by everyone everywhere, one iOS hacker offers a glimpse at a temporary solution. While iOS 6 users wait for either Apple to hire engineers to fix all the issues, for Google to stop focusing just on Android and save the day, or for Microsoft to wake up and smell the coffee, Ryan Petrich has a video that shows Google Maps running on iOS 6.

Using a pair of zero day vulnerabilities, a team of security researchers from U.K.-based MWR Labs hacked into a Samsung Galaxy S3 phone running Android 4.0.4 by beaming an exploit via NFC (Near Field Communications).

The team -- Tyrone Erasmus, Jacques Louw, Jon Butler and Nils (yes, that Nils) -- carted off a $30,000 cash prize as part of the EuSecWest mobile Pwn2Own hacker contest.

While a huge percentage of Africa's more than 1 billion residents have cell phones, far fewer have access to e-mail. Google is trying to change that.

According to the Associated Press, the Web giant is embarking on an ambitious endeavor that will let people receive e-mails via text messages. In effect, Google will be giving people access to the Internet with feature handsets. Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya are the first countries to get the service.

Wired writer Mat Honan fell victim to a brutal hack over the weekend. Through misplaced ingenuity and a smidgen of social engineering, hackers gained access to his iCloud account and wiped his iPhone, iPad, and Mac drives clean. The actual attack involved breaking into Honan’s Amazon account, and then using information found there to break into his iCloud account. Things only got worse from there.

Over half of Android devices are vulnerable to known security flaws that can be exploited by malicious applications to gain complete access to the operating system and the data stored on it, according to a report from mobile security firm Duo Security.

This conclusion is based on scans performed during the last couple of months with X-Ray, a free Android vulnerability assessment tool developed by Duo Security. X-Ray scans devices for known privilege escalation vulnerabilities that exist in various versions of the mobile operating system.

Google has finally added support for the DNT (Do Not Track) header to their latest developer build of Chrome. The modification is likely to make it into an official release of Google's popular web browser before the end of the year.

Do Not Track is a feature that allows users to express a simple yes or no preference about being tracked online.