The dog days of summer have arrived. June 21st marked the first official day of summer, when the Earth’s semi-axis in the Northern Hemisphere reached its maximum incline tilt of 23° 26′ towards the sun – the Summer Solstice. With the basketball season over now, the only thing to keep us sports fans occupied is baseball, beer, and barbecues – but hey, I’m not complaining about that. So take a break from counting down the minutes until your weekend starts and let’s reflect on what’s happened over the last month in the tech world.

The Downfall of Research in Motion

Oh, how the mighty have fallen! The former king of the smartphone industry, RIM, is dying at a rapid rate… and employees and stockholders alike are making it known to the world. Yesterday, a high-level RIM employee sent an anonymous open letter to the RIM Senior Management Team that ripped the company apart. RIM, on the defensive, responded by issuing its own statement to the public concerning the letter. In the end though, Research in Motion is freefalling and investors are clamoring for a top-down restructuring of the company, but really, can anyone save BlackBerry?

The Future of Apple

OS X Lion is nearing a public launch for July, after Apple “seeded the golden master version of OS X Lion to developers” earlier today. “OS X Lion brings many innovations from iOS including home screens (called Launchpad in Lion), autosaving, full screen application interfaces, and auto resume in apps. This is in addition to native support for the Mac App Store, Mission Control, an all new email client, built-in FaceTime, and interface and feature  improvements through out the operating system. Lion also includes AirDrop file sharing, multi-user remote computer access, and Find my Mac (through iCloud).” – Source: 9to5Mac

Apple has done significantly well this quarter, and it is estimated that users of the iOS platform alone generates roughly $150 of revenue a year per account (not including the cost of the actual iOS device). The iPhone, however, has a ton of competition these days and the biggest threat may be the Samsung Galaxy S II – the follow-up to one of the most popular Android phones, the Galaxy S.

“LulzSec” Hackers: Attacking the Internet

After hacking the CIA, PBS, and numerous other web sites, it looks like LulzSec’s run of terror has finally come to an end. The group announced on multiple web sites that it would be disbanding on Monday, but did not provide any particular reason for the decision. For 50 days LulzSec hacked and terrorized corporations and governments for the sake of humor, and hopefully this is the last we hear of their exploits.

Photo by DrCrawford via DeviantArt

British police announced that they arrested a 19-year-old in Essex, outside London, in possible connection with the hacking of Sony, the CIA, and the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency. The joint operation between the Scotland Yard and the FBI “follows an investigation into network intrusions and distributed denial of service attacks against a number of international business and intelligence agencies by what is believed to be the same hacking group. Searches at a residential address in Wickford, Essex, following the arrest last night have led to the examination of a significant amount of material,? said a Scotland Yard spokesman. In Britain, it is illegal to name suspects who have been arrested but the spokesman said that the arrested man’s computers will also be examined for activities linked between the suspect and LulzSec.

London’s Metropolitan Police said the man is being interrogated in a London police station, and it is suspected that he is in violation of the British Computer Misuse Act and Fraud Act. A related article on Wired.com says, “The Guardian identified the suspect as Ryan Cleary of Wickford, Essex. In May, the griefer group Anonymous ? now a LulzSec ally ? outed Cleary as a Anonymous member called ‘viraL’ who’d attempted an internal coup in an Anonymous chat room. Phone calls to Cleary’s last known number went directly to voice mail Tuesday.” The alleged suspect, Ryan Cleary is said to have been “responsible for running one of the IRC servers used by AnonOps, a faction of the Anonymous group that co-ordinated attacks on both perceived ‘enemies’ of WikiLeaks and various Middle Eastern governments, until an acrimonious split last month. Subsequently, he is believed to have been a member of Lulz Security, responsible for running that group’s IRC server.” LulzSec has denied that the arrested suspect is their proposed ringleader by posting the message in the image above on their Twitter site, which has over 230,000 followers.

This is just the beginning, as LulzSec has teamed up with another major hacking Group, Anonymous, who together have declared a cyber war against government and security agencies around the world.

Photo by Stan Schroeder via Mashable