Boot up: spam kingpin mugged, smartphones in Africa, coding kids and more

A man on the phone at an internet cafe in Nairobi, Kenya. Smartphone next time? Photograph: Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty images

A burst of 9 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Go on, enjoy the schadenfreude.

Rom Miller: "When it comes to greenfield economies, the fastest way to the Internet is via a cellphone. It's a lot more affordable for a country with little infrastructure to put up some cell towers, and the phones are cheaper than PCs, laptops, and tablets for individual citizens. "That's why it's so interesting that Safaricom, a Kenyan ISP that reportedly has over 17m customers, has decided to get into the low-end smartphone business. And over 350,000 Kenyans have reportedly bought the cheap phones. "The phone itself is the Huawei IDEOS. Click through and have a look. This is not half bad for the money. It runs Android 2.2 and includes WiFi, a camera, and, of course, access to the Android app store. "I can't say how well the smartphone works or how responsive it is. When the Website itself claims 'higher overall performance compared with previous releases,' you can infer that it might not be the highest-quality phone on the planet, but it's not supposed to be."

Interesting roundup of languages to let your ...eight-year-old upwards?.. teach themselves with. (Perhaps with a little help.)

Arik Hesseldahl: " Thus our range is somewhere in the neighborhood of $140 million to $300 million spent on hardware alone, depending on how many units ordered." Where the units ordered are reckoned to be between 500,000 and 1m.

Google+ does browser security the right way: no sniffing, HTTPS only, no framing. Facebook? Not so much.

Jack Schofield again, interesting in retrospect: "Was it a good idea for Hewlett-Packard, the world's biggest computer company, to buy Palm – which now specialises in mobile phones – for $1.2bn?
"The initial response from analysts has been as mixed as you'd expect – see the comments from Forrester, Gartner, IDC, Informa, and Ovum below – but almost everything depends on what HP intends to do with its new company."

Jack Schofield (formerly of The Guardian) thinks Samsung is the only likely buyer because it's so big and would want a big PC division: "Although it hasn't been widely discussed in the west, it looks as though HP has been talking to Samsung for many months. For example, the Taiwan-based Want China Times ran a story in March, Samsung's planned acquisition of HP sparks market concern, which said that 'rumors that HP would sell its PC business have been circulating in the market for some time now.' It adds: 'there are also reports that HP has talked with Hon Hai [Foxconn] and Chinese high-tech giant Lenovo to explore the possibility of a deal.'"
Makes a lot of sense, apart from the penultimate sentence, which says "PSG could be Samsung's Trojan horse in the US market, enabling the innovative giant to take the battle to Apple." Er, what battle, exactly? Mac buyers aren't likely to be tempted by Samsung/HP Windows PCs.

Which is why you should not upgrade to PHP 5.3.7 (or downgrade if you have). Perhaps a new function in 5.3.8, regressiontest() ?

Ryan Block turns out to have been prescient about Colligan shrugging off the threat from the iPhone - two months before it was made visible outside Apple: "No, the iPhone will have its own set of annoying issues, but believe you us, Ed, Apple will 'just walk in', so you'd better have a few and-one-more-thing-s up those sleeves of yours if you're thinking about stopping a mass defection."

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