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The digital music space is flourishing, yet at the same time, it remains fractured by a multitude of separate services and apps.

It's a problem that hacktivist collective Anonymous blames on the dominance that major labels still exert over the industry. The solution, the group says, is what it calls a "fault-tolerant and open platform for social music."

Some of us have had to deal with losing our cell phones but Symantec decided to do some actual research to find out what the finders of these phones actually ended up doing. They literally dropped the 50 smartphones in five different cities: New York City; Washington D.C.; Los Angeles; San Francisco; and Ottawa, Canada. They were left in high traffic public places such as elevators, malls, food courts (as shown above), and public transit stops. All but two of them were accessed by the folks who found them, and only half made any attempt to return them.

First there was linking President Bush with the words "miserable failure" on Google. Then last year Rick Santorum fell victim to another Google hack. This week it is Mitt Romney and the escapades of his long-distance car journey with his dog strapped on his car's roof that has gotten the Internets in a twist. Try Googling (or Binging) just Romney and look carefully at the results, you will see one link that is out of place. Sorry, we aren't going to show it here.

That the music industry has radically changed in the last decade is a serious understatement. Technology has altered everything from the creation of music to its distribution, upending retailers, studios and business models across the industry. But it's not all bad news. Music isn't dying so much as evolving, and the landscape is already beginning to look quite different.

Not long ago, the professional music industry involved a complex but fixed set of players: artists, labels, managers, promoters and the like. Many of these roles have changed, but none have disappeared. They're joined by a new set of participants: tech giants, streaming services, social music startups and, perhaps most crucially, developers.

"I'm not sure if we're the only two on right now or not," says a voice with an American accent. The voice belongs to a man who identifies himself as Bruce, likely an FBI agent, who had just joined a conference call with other law enforcement officials based in the UK.

The irony of hearing Bruce utter those words at the beginning of the call is that, no, they were not the only people listening in. Somehow, members of Anonymous managed to tap into the call, record it and then post it online for all to hear. The subject of the conversation? Tracking and arresting online activists and hackers, such as those who secretly associate with Anonymous.

The first untethered jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 dropped two weeks ago, much to the excitement of the hundreds of thousands of people who rushed to download it.

Despite its recent growth in popularity, jailbreaking is still not a mainstream activity among iPhone and iPad owners generally. It's more for the tinkering type and those who want to customize their device's functionality and UI design. Whether it's done to download unauthorized (yet often quite useful) apps from Cydia or customize the look and feel of the OS, there are a lot of reasons why people jailbreak their devices. For iPhone 4S owners, that list is made all the more compelling by one thing: hacking Siri.

Take two open source projects, do a little creative hacking and ingenuity and what do you get? The Android-Kinect project. An engineer that goes by the name DDRBoxman hacked a Galaxy Nexus smartphone with his a projector, a PC and Microsoft's Kinect API and was able to use "touch" based gestures to control the user interface by interacting with the projection. Everybody has been waiting for The user experience brought to us by the film Minority Report. Well, this engineer might have brought us closer than any other hack before.

Whether or not jailbreaking or rooting one's smartphone is a legal act isn't something most of us in the U.S. have had to think about for some time. That's because, in 2010, the U.S. Copyright Office declared that jailbreaking devices is not a violation of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Fine, said Apple, but it will still void your warranty and we bet it will screw up your phone.

Despite the company's official disapproval, jailbreaking iOS is still big among a certain subset of users, as evidenced by the popularity of the A5 Absinthe tool that was released last Friday. But should people in the jailbreak community continue to rest easy, assured that freeing their devices will forever remain legal? Probably not.

Owners of Apple's newest mobile gadgets can now break their devices free from the confines of the company's restrictions. The iPhone 4S and iPad 2 can be jailbroken without being tethered to a computer for the first time thanks to a new tool called Absinthe A5.

Last month, hackers released a jailbreak for iOS 5 that covered all compatible devices except for those with an A5 processor. That meant that iPhone 4S and iPad 2 owners were out of luck if they wanted an untethered jailbreak solution. Today that changes, thanks to the efforts of the Chronic Dev Team and other developers in the jailbreaking community.

Hackers may have made off with data from as many as 24 million customers from online retailer Zappos.com, the company reported on its blog and in an email sent to employees Sunday night.

Anticipating a flood of customer inquiries, Zappos said it was turning off its customer phone system and only responding to inquires sent by email. In its message, the company emphasized that the database that stores customer credit card and payment info was not accessed.