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Kik is an in instant messaging service, much like RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). Just like BBM, Kik Messenger also has little indicators that shows when a message has been sent, delivered, read, and even when a user is typing a message. With 2.5 million users after only a month in existence, Kik certainly presents a credible threat to BBM if it continues to gain users at such a rapid pace.

It looks like RIM just upped the ante on Kik. On Nov 30, lawyers for Research in Motion filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Kik in Canada’s Federal Court in Toronto, in court file T-1996-10. I haven’t read the Statement of Claim outlining RIM’s allegations against Kik yet, but I suspect that the patent at issue covers a messaging platform that provides sent, delivered, read, and typing indicators.

Suing your most popular app makers… yeah, RIM, you just increased the odds I will ever develop a blackberry app… NOT.

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International scandals—such as the one precipitated by this week’s WikiLeaks cable dump—serve us by illustrating how our governments work. Better than any civics textbook, revisionist history, political speech, bumper sticker, or five-part investigative series, an international scandal unmasks presidents and kings, military commanders and buck privates, cabinet secretaries and diplomats, corporate leaders and bankers, and arms-makers and arms-merchants as the bunglers, liars, and double-dealers they are.

Information conduits like Julian Assange shock us out of that complacency. Oh, sure, he’s a pompous egomaniac sporting a series of bad haircuts and grandiose tendencies. And he often acts without completely thinking through every repercussion of his actions. But if you want to dismiss him just because he’s a seething jerk, there are about 2,000 journalists I’d like you to meet.

The idea of WikiLeaks is scarier than anything the organization has leaked or anything Assange has done because it restores our distrust in the institutions that control our lives. It reminds people that at any given time, a criminal dossier worth exposing is squirreled away in a database someplace in the Pentagon or at Foggy Bottom. Assange’s next stop appears to be Wall Street. According to the New York Times‘DealBook, WikiLeaks has targeted Bank of America Assange foreshadowed this scoop by tellingComputerworld in 2009 of the five gigabytes of data he’d acquired from a B of A executive’s hard drive; this month he told Forbes of an “ecosystem of corruption” he hopes to uncover. Today, he reiterated his intention to take on banks in an interview with Time.

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The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission plans to announce Wednesday a controversial proposal that would prohibit Internet providers from favoring or discriminating against any traffic that goes over their networks.

He would do so, however, without resorting to the more drastic step of changing the way the FCC regulates broadband providers, a move that would have more clearly asserted the government’s authority over Internet access.

In a statement provided to reporters in advance of Wednesday’s announcement, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said he thinks he has "a sound legal basis" to pursue so-called net-neutrality rules that would prevent companies such as Verizon, Comcast and AT&T from blocking or serving up some Web sites faster and at better quality than others.

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Remember when Oliver Kreylos impressed and shocked us by showing that a single Microsoft Kinect could create some remarkably stout 3D video? He’s back at it again, this time blowing minds and demonstrating that two Kinects can be paired and their output meshed — one basically filling in the gaps of the other. He found that the two do create some interference, the dotted IR pattern of one causing some holes and blotches in the other, but when the two are combined they basically help each other out and the results are quite impressive. As you can see in the video after the break, Oliver is able to rotate the camera perspective and basically film himself from a new camera angle that exists somewhere in between the position of the two Kinects, and do-so in real-time. Sure, the quality leaves a lot to be desired, but still. Wow.

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A researcher from a Dutch university is warning that Facebook’s ‘Like This’ button is watching your every move.

Arnold Roosendaal, who is a doctoral candidate at the Tilburg University for Law, Technology and Society, warns that Facebook is tracking and tracing everyone, whether they use the social networking site or not.

Roosendaal says that Facebook’s tentacles reach way beyond the confines of its own web sites and subscriber base because more and more third party sites are using the ‘Like This’ button and Facebook Connect.

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For governments it is apparently quite easy to take over the DNS entries of domains, not least because several top level domains are managed by US-based corporations such as VeriSign, who work closely together with the US Department of Commerce. According to some, this setup is a threat to the open internet.

To limit the power governments have over domain names, a group of enthusiasts has started working on a revolutionary system that can not be influenced by a government institution, or taken down by pulling the plug on a central server. Instead, it is distributed by the people, with help from a BitTorrent-based application that people install on their computer.

According to the project’s website, the goal is to “create an application that runs as a service and hooks into the hosts DNS system to catch all requests to the .p2p TLD while passing all other request cleanly through. Requests for the .p2p TLD will be redirected to a locally hosted DNS database.”

“By creating a .p2p TLD that is totally decentralized and that does not rely on ICANN or any ISP’s DNS service, and by having this application mimic force-encrypted BitTorrent traffic, there will be a way to start combating DNS level based censoring like the new US proposals as well as those systems in use in countries around the world including China and Iran amongst others.”

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In an ideal world, your XXXXXXX would run like a dream forever. This being real life, we can’t always expect that sort of robust performance out of our XXXXXXX. Things can happen that slow your XXXXXXX and damage the experience. Maybe you install a lot of applications, and some of them are acting a little mischievous, or maybe something has just gone wrong deep down in the system where you have little chance of fixing it. At times like this, you could agonize over tweaks and possible fixes, or you could spend time uninstalling different combinations of applications. But maybe wiping the XXXXXXX clean and starting over is the best overall option sometimes.