The band ManaTapu has been chosen to represent Malta in the Hard Rock Rising global competition. Public voting will open on the Hard Rock Malta Facebook page from Monday 22 April at 5pm - Wednesday 1st May at 10pm. Make sure to give them a helping hand by voting for them!

Earlier this year, Hard Rock International called on aspiring musicians around the globe to rock out for a chance at stardom through this year's GO Hard Rock Rising global battle of the bands competition and they responded.

Over 12,000 entries, 390,000 fan votes, and 941 competing bands later, ManaTapu is now one step closer to having their dream come true. Following several battle rounds against some of Malta's other top talent, ManaTapu will now move on to the global voting round and vie for the opportunity of a lifetime - a World Tour in six big cities arranged by Hard Rock International - including a spot on the bill at the Hard Rock Calling Festival in London; an album and music video produced through Hard Rock Records; and new music equipment and gear valued at $10,000!

Now, ManaTapu is calling on Malta fans to show their support. ManaTapu, along with 95 other winning bands from around the world who took the top spot in their respective city, will battle it out during the final online fan vote. Starting from the 22nd of April at 5pm CET, fans will have the opportunity to vote for their favourite band, while downloading free tracks from any band of their choice.

The top 25 bands, as determined by total votes, will move on to the final round, where a panel of music industry professionals; including Steven Van Zandt of the E Street Band, Live Nation Senior Vice President of Music Toby Leighton-Pope, Hard Rock International's Head of Music & Artist Relations, John Kirkpatrick, and Hard Rock Records Co-Heads of A&R, James Buell and Blake Smith will evaluate the bands and select the Grand prize winner and two-runner up bands, that will each receive new music equipment and gear valued at $10,000.

It is very easy to Vote for ManaTapu - Babylon Aside, follow these easy steps:

1. Visit http://www.manatapu.com

OR

1. Visit app:http://www.reverbnation.com/contests/1838/artist/3029323

2. Find ManaTapu (First position)

3. Press the 'Vote' button

4. Click 'Like' if you are asked to

5. Share with friends!

The song is free for anyone who votes!

Manatapu probably the most international band on the island is a new and upcoming local band. With members from Germany, Spain, France, Canada and Malta, this band offers a new sound with influences from different backgrounds.

1. Visit: Download Babylon Aside
2. Like the App's page
3. Download the FREE song - Babylon Aside

It looks like the rumors of a longer iPhone 5 may be true, at least according to leaked case images from this morning.

Several alleged photos from the next iPhone’s rear case hit the web today, somefrom the repair company iFixyouri and 9to5Mac, and others from uBreakiFix.

While the images are somewhat grainy, they look legit enough to warrant our interest, especially since they sport both the longer screen and smaller dock connector of the most reason iPhone 5 rumor. The metal portion of the rear cases also aligns with rumors we’ve been hearing since last year.

9to5Mac claims the Chinese supplier of its image is reliable and is already selling the part. The supplier also claims to have seen at least two other colors for the back plate beyond black and white.

Judging from the images, the next iPhone will likely be thinner (as expected). You can thank the smaller dock connector for that, as it opens up more internal space within the iPhone for Apple to stuff more hardware. 9to5Mac’s source also claims there’s extra space in the back of the case to enhance the phone’s speaker, which will be “louder and of a higher quality” than current iPhone speakers.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane! No, it’s an Apple iTV prototype! A Cult of Mac source claims to have seen the rumored Apple television and says it looks just like the Thunderbolt display, but bigger.

George Clooney and Noah Wylie are reportedly in the frame to portray late Apple founder Steve Jobs.

A movie of Jobs' life is currently in development by Sony, from a script by The Social Network writer Aaron Sorkin, adapted from Walter Isaacson's biography. Now, the two former ER actors are apparently going head to head to play him, according to CNN.

Wylie may have the edge over his bigger-name former co-star, having played Jobs before, in 1999 TV movie Pirates Of Silicon Valley. The film, which portrayed the rivalry between Jobs and Microsoft boss Bill Gates, saw Wylie attend that year’s Macworld Expo with Jobs.

The actor has said of having dinner with Jobs: "He took his napkin and started sketching out the schematics and he passed the napkin around the table. The cheque soon came and we started to get up to leave - and the napkin was just sat there on the table.

"I thought to myself, 'I got to take that napkin', and my hand was on it, but Steve called from the door and asked, 'Noah, you want to share a cab with me?' So I put the napkin down. I could have had an Edison original."

The chip core war continues to heat up. Today Advanced Micro Devices is announcing the release of new server microprocessors with 8 or 12 processors on a single chip. The announcement comes less than two weeks after Intel introduced its first 6-core chips and a day before another major Intel server chip announcement. These announcements are timed so close together it’s like watching a pro tennis match. But AMD argues that its new chips, based on its Magny-Cours code-named design, will beat Intel’s in processing performance and energy efficiency, as well as cost per computing power.

The new chips have 119 percent better performance than AMD’s earlier generation of server chips and use the same amount of power. The chips are officially named the AMD Opteron 6000 series (aimed at the high-end) and the 4000 series (aimed at low-end, energy efficient). The chips will be housed on AMD’s Maranello platform with AMD server chip sets, which are secondary traffic cops in a computer. These Operton chips will be used in high-volume servers, which have two or four chips each. The chips are twice as fast as AMD’s previous line of six-core processors introduced about a year ago.

Gina Longoria, director of product management in AMD’s server and workstation division, said in an interview that AMD’s Magny-Cours chips are designed to be easily integrated into a platform and make much more efficient use of a cheaper form of memory. While Intel tends to change a lot of platform elements with its new chip introductions, AMD tries to keep the platform housing the chips consistent, leading to lower overall costs. AMD is also introducing its Direct Connect Architecture 2.0, which allows a microprocessor to communicate with four other microprocessors simultaneously, instead of the previous three. The DCA 2.0 supports as many as 16 cores together.

An estimated 25 server platforms will be introduced over time. Starting today, new models will be announced from Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Cray, SGI and Dell. Software support is available from Microsoft and VMware. These new chips mean that customers will be able to replace many aging servers with a single Magny-Cours server and get by with better performance, lower power, and lower maintenance costs. The race will continue through next year. By then, the code-named Interlagos chips from AMD will be launched with 12 and 16 cores, while the low-end Valencia will debut with 6 and 8 cores.

What do you get if you rip out the guts of an Acer Aspire Timeline 1810 laptop and replace the CULV processor with a newer, faster, Core i5 chip? Apparently what you get is the Acer Aspire TimelineX 1830T.

It will reprotedly have an 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display and an Intel Core i5-520UM processor with a clock speed that ranges from 1.06GHz to 1.86Hz depending on use. The graphics core has a clock speed of 166MHz to 500MHz and should be able to handle HD video playback, although it may not be powerful enough for some games with 3D graphics.

The rest of the specs are pretty much the same as you’d find from Acer’s existing thin and light notebooks: 802.11b/gn WiFi, HDMI, SPDIF, 3 USB ports, and optional Bluetooth and 3G modems. The battery should be good for about 8 hours.

The only thing that we don’t know yet is the price. Acer will make an official announcement in late March. If Acer can manage to upgrade the processor without dramatically boosting the price of the Aspire Timeline 1810 series, this will be a real winner. 

The Daily Telegraph reports that a new Apple patent has surfaced which could potentially allow the iPhone, or another Apple portable, to act as a sort of electronic key. The potential applications are as limitless as the number of things locked by old-school metal keys. It could be used for cars, offices, homes, or lockers. Basically, anything that could have an electronic receiver mounted to it in place of a metal tumbler-style lock could then use an iPhone as a key.

While Ars Technica notes that "the patent application itself merely describes a unique way of using motion detection to generate an input, such as turning a virtual combination lock-style dial," the patent itself, as reported by the Telegraph, says that the device could be "any suitable electronic device such as a portable media player, personal data assistant or electronic lock" that could open up any number of physical lock types just by communicating wirelessly.

Noted security researcher Ross Anderson and colleagues have published a paper showing how "Chip-and-PIN" (the European system for verifying credit- and debit-card transactions) has been thoroughly broken and cannot be considered secure any longer. We remember hearing rumbles that this attack was possible even as Chip-and-PIN was being rolled out across Europe, but that didn't stop the banks from pushing ahead with it, spending a fortune in the process.

The flaw is that when you put a card into a terminal, a negotiation takes place about how the cardholder should be authenticated: using a PIN, using a signature or not at all. This particular subprotocol is not authenticated, so you can trick the card into thinking it's doing a chip-and-signature transaction while the terminal thinks it's chip-and-PIN. The upshot is that you can buy stuff using a stolen card and a PIN of 0000 (or anything you want). This was tried, on camera, using various journalists' cards. The transactions went through fine and the receipts say "Verified by PIN".

It's no surprise to us or bankers that this attack works offline (when the merchant cannot contact the bank)..

But the real shocker is that it works online too: even when the bank authorisation system has all the transaction data sent back to it for verification. The reason why it works can be quite subtle and convoluted: bank authorisation systems are complex beasts, including cryptographic checks, account checks, database checks, and interfaces with fraud detection systems which might apply a points-scoring system to the output of all the above. In theory all the data you need to spot the wedge attack will be present, but in practice? And most of all, how can you spot it if you're not even looking? The banks didn't even realise they needed to check. 

Steve Jobs held a town hall meeting with Apple employees late last week following the iPad launch. Wired reports on what was said at the meeting by Steve Jobs. Two of the biggest topics included Google and Adobe.

On Google, Jobs confirms the much-reported competition between the two companies.

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.

As for Adobe, Jobs said they are lazy and Jobs blames Adobe for a buggy implementation of Flash on the Mac as one of the reasons they won't support it.

About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.

Those are the main points covered by Wired's article. Many of the details of the Wired report line up, so we believe it likely to be accurate. Some additional key points that we learned:

- Apple will deliver aggressive updates to iPhone that Android/Google won't be able to keep up with
- iPad is up there with the iPhone and Mac as the most important products Jobs has been a part of
- Regarding the Lala acquisition, Apple was interested in bringing those people into the iTunes team
- Next iPhone coming is an A+ update
- New Macs for 2010 are going to take Apple to the next level
- Blu-Ray software is a mess, and Apple will wait until sales really start to take off before implementing it.

Apple's January event is slated for the 26th. The firm is believed to have rented out the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco to unveil a "major" product on January 26th. It would also have access to the small theater for "several days," most likely for Steve Jobs or other Apple executives to conduct final rehearsals in advance of the actual presentation. Traditionally, Apple has used the Yerba Buena Center for media-oriented rollouts such as iPod and iTunes updates.

What would be introduced isn't directly provided by the source for the Financial Times, but it comes after a flurry of rumors in the past day of Apple unveiling its tablet the same month. One of these expressed a strong level of confidence that it will actually involve a 7-inch screen rather than the 10-inch model supposed by many.

It's increasingly suspected that the tablet's larger screen area will be used not just for upsized iPhone apps but as a key delivery vehicle for Apple's media strategy, such as possible iTunes TV subscriptions or tablet-oriented versions of books and magazines.

Apple tablet speculation heated up in Wednesday, sparked by an analyst's report which said that the long-awaited e-book reader and Web browsing device was likely to arrive in the spring of 2010.

In a note to clients, Oppenheimer tech analyst Yair Reiner quoted supply-chain contacts as saying that Apple appeared to be preparing to begin production of as many as 1 million units a month. Assuming there were no production problems, at that rate Apple would have the inventory it needs to launch the device by March or April.

Other tidbits from Reiner's prognostications include the information the Apple's tablet will have a 10.1-inch diagonal screen. The display is said to use the same type of LCD technology as the iPhone, rather than the higher quality, but more expensive, OLED display.

In addition, Apple is believed to be planning to offer e-book publishers friendlier terms for offering their wares through iTunes than they currently get from Amazon. Apple would offer a 30/70 revenue split, with 70% going to publishers, without exclusivity, according to Reiner. Amazon offers the same split, but with exclusivity rights.

As a matter of company policy, Apple doesn't discuss future product plans. However, most industry watchers believe the company will release a so-called "iPad" tablet.

Amazon's Kindle is the online retailer's hottest selling product, and Barnes & Noble, which announced its Nook e-reader in October, won't be able to fill all its current orders until mid January. Forrester Research estimates sales of e-readers next year will reach 10 million units in the United States.