President Barack Obama has announced a plan will provide over $1 billion in an effort towards installing broadband Internet across the United States. Approximately $800 million of that will be from tax-payer stimulus package money. This money comes from the total $7.2 billion that came from the stimulus package (money well spent). Is it just more »

According to a new bill that describes the internet (in its entirety) as a U.S. “national asset,” President Barack Obama could possibly have powers to seize control and/or shut down the internet. But don’t start worrying yet; this plan is only to give the president such immense powers only in times of national emergency. Who more »

Just several days ago, the Peek was being offered for $299 with lifetime service. In efforts to commemorate the historical inauguration of President Barack Obama, the Peek has been put on sale again, not with lifetime service, but with an interesting twist. The first part of the deal is that if you live anywhere in more »

The most obvious course of action is to simply shred these devices at Inauguration time to ensure that they will never again work properly. And to mark this historic event, Maryland-based data destructors DataKillers has offered to shred Obama’s BlackBerry for free.

Verizon Wireless has suspended several employees it says accessed call records belonging to a now inactive phone owned by President-Elect Barack Obama. The employees will not be paid during their suspension and are under investigation.

“We apologize to President-elect Obama and will work to keep the trust our customers place in us every day,” according to a statement attributed to Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam. “Those who have accessed the account improperly and without legitimate business justification will face appropriate disciplinary action.”

Sources say the phone in question has been inactive for several months. More after the break.

Barack Obama’s election as the 44th president of the United States has spawned a new malware attack. Scammers wasted no time sending out e-mails with links to a video of the victory speech he gave the night of the election. The link takes the user to a site called America.gov, and like many malicious spams before it, produces a pop up claiming Adobe Flash must be updated in order for the video to run. The download is, of course, malware which steals personal info and sends it to a host machine run by the scammers.

Another version of the attack claims to come from a Spanish news site and has a video actually embedded in the e-mail. Clicking on it prompts a download called “BarackObama.exe” and if run it sets up a direct link between the PC and the scammers. Experts are particularly worried about this variation as it is not detected by anti-virus software.

Sure, we don’t typically cover politics on Gadgetell. But when a candidate clearly comes into our territory, it’s fair-game. Senator Barack Obama’s campaign has announced plans to announce his vice presidential running-mate before the Democratic National Convention. So that means they’ll go on the news and announce it there, right? Wrong. The campaign is currently collecting cell phone numbers via their website, and will send out a massive text message to subscribers announcing their selection.

There is one image from Barack Obama’s standing-room-only political rallies that I haven’t seen yet in the ubiquitous campaign coverage. Maybe I missed it, but I doubt that the sight of thousands of people holding up their cell phones and punching in a five-digit text code so his campaign would know how to contact them would have escaped me.

Then again, it’s wasn’t Obama Girl, which may explain why it flew under the cable news radar.

That image speaks volumes about the innovative nature of Obama’s techno-candidacy. It’s included in one of two very good stories in the June issue of Atlantic Monthly which can be read online: “The Amazing Money Machine” by Joshua Green and Marc Armbinder’s “HisSpace.” Green’s piece throws a spotlight on the Silicon Valley insiders who led Obama’s record-breaking online fund-raising initiative and their novel use of technologies ranging from social networking to ringtones. “HisSpace” advances the story by picturing an Obama presidency based on the candidate’s campaign platform: