AT&T is seeking an injunction to halt Verizon's ads.

AT&T amended its complaint against Verizon Wireless Wednesday night, asking the federal court in Atlanta to issue a restraining order against the rival company. Specifically, AT&T wants the court to prevent Verizon from running with a holiday ad campaign that claims the iPhone is a "misfit" device because of AT&T's proposed poor 3G coverage.

The argument stems from Verizon's use of maps within the commercials, depicting the wireless carrier's coverage across the nation with near inch-by-inch coverage visualized in red. AT&T's map, on the other hand, shows tons of white space, indicating that the company virtually has no coverage nationwide. The maps of course refer to 3G coverage, and AT&T said that they are misleading.

"Verizon makes the misleading statement that it has '5 times more '3G' coverage than AT&T, '" the company stated. "While this statement is literally true based on square miles, it is misleading because the overwhelming majority of the US population lives and works where both Verizon and AT&T have '3G' coverage. Indeed, from a population standpoint, Verizon only has 1.24 times more '3G' coverage than AT&T (285 million people/230 million people)."

According to AppleInsider, AT&T is asking for "treble damages" outside the injunction to stop the ads. AT&T said that Verizon violates 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a) , and that the rival made profits from false and misleading advertisements. AT&T is also seeking attorney's fees.

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Nearly 5 million in the first 24 hours. Insane.

Sooo, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 came out earlier this week and a lot of people were excited about it. How many people? Well, in just the U.S., Canada and UK alone, Activision managed to rake in $310 million in the first day.

The huge cash haul was the result of 4.7 million copies sold on the first day – a staggering number made even more impressive that it doesn't include all other countries that Modern Warfare 2 launched in.

NPD Group figures that 1.2 million of those copies were sold in the UK. Interestingly enough, Activision shipped 3 million copies to the UK in preparation for the launch.

Given how a game is considered successful if it sells over a million copies in a month, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's first day is nothing short of incredible.

Source: Kotaku.

Microsoft has reportedly banned as many as one million users from Xbox Live because of piracy.

A report on InformationWeek claims that the Redmond-based company this week banned a significant number of users from its Xbox Live gaming service due to the company's belief that they modded their consoles to play illegally downloaded games.

IW goes on to cite a Microsoft spokesman who basically says if you've been banned, you only have yourself to blame.

"All consumers should know that piracy is illegal and that modifying their Xbox 360 console to play pirated discs violates the Xbox Live terms of use, will void their warranty, and result in a ban from Xbox Live," Microsoft said in a statement.

The upshot of this is that there are now countless modded consoles for sale on eBay and Craigslist. Did any of you guys get banned? Let us know in the comments below!

NASA is sending a butterfly habitat containing monarch and painted lady adults and larvae to the International Space Station.

The space-traveling insects are part of a project dubbed "Butterflies in Space." Once they arrive at the ISS, K-12 students across America will monitor the CU-Boulder butterfly experiment, studying the effects space travel has on the bugs at the ISS compared to examples reared in their own classrooms.

According to Science Daily, the butterfly payload was designed by BioServe Space Technologies in the University of Colorado at Boulder's aerospace engineering department. The habitat will contain monarch butterflies and painted lady butterfly larvae with enough nectar and other food to support them as they develop.

ScienceDaily cites BioServe Payload Mission Manager Stefanie Countryman as saying the painted lady butterfly larvae will be six days old and the monarch butterflies will be about 10 days old at launch. Transferred from Atlantis to the ISS about two days later, it will take the butterfly larvae about five days to pupate and form a cocoon, and another seven to 10 days to emerge.

Participating classrooms across the country have been provided with kits containing butterfly larvae. Students will monitor the growth rates, feeding, pupation and the emergence of the butterflies, comparing what they see in their own classroom to what they're seeing in the images from the ISS. Images of the ISS habitat will be taken every 15 minutes, downlinked daily and uploaded to the web for students to see.

Read the complete story here.

A boy accused of playing a part in a robbery has been released after his attorney used his Facebook status to prove his innocence.

Rodney Bradford updated his Facebook status on Sunday from his father's apartment in Harlem, New York. The 19-year-old asked where his pancakes were, firing the status update out into the open abyss that is the Internet.

Fast forward a few weeks and Bradford is accused of taking part in a robbery. The New York Times reports that the youth's lawyer, Robert Reuland, told a Brooklyn assistant district attorney about the Facebook status update, which was apparently made at the time of the robbery.

According to the screenshot in the NYT report, Bradford's status update read, "ON THE PHONE WITH THIS FAT CHICK . . . . . WHERER MY I HOP".

The DA subpoenaed Facebook to verify that the update had come from a computer in Bradford's father's apartment block. When Facebook confirmed that the update had indeed come from a computer in an apartment at 71 West 118th Street in Manhattan, the charges were dropped.

Do you think this is a solid alibi or do you think that the DA was too quick to drop the charges? Let us know in the comments below!

A new feature in Google Latitude keeps a history of where you've been.

Google announced today that it has added new features to its Latitude location mapping and tracking service that will keep track of where users have been. Additionally, it will even alert users to friends (or enemies) who are in the vicinity. Called the Google Location History and Google Location Alerts, these feature will store, manage, and view the user's past Latitude locations while relaying the info to friends.

While this history keeping-feature sounds somewhat creepy and an invasion of privacy, apparently Latitude users have requested such a feature. Once Google Location History gathers information, it conveniently relays it back to whomever via a visual plot on Google Maps, showing exactly where the user has been.

"Whether you're taking a road trip across the country, backpacking across Europe, or just going out for a night on the town, it's fascinating to look back at where you went, and for how long you stayed," Google said.

Google's Latitude is a free service introduced back in February. Users can selectively reveal their locations to friends in real-time. The new alert feature actually learns from location tracks so that it doesn't repeatedly send text message in typical locations (like home, work).

The MPAA shut down a town's WiFi thanks to one downloader.

If you think the music industry and Hollywood aren't serious about cracking down on pirates, then think again. Recently the city of Coshocton, Ohio felt the Motion Picture Association of America's (MPAA) wrath after one local citizen decided to download a copyrighted movie. The MPAA tracked the downloaded and had the town's municipal WIFI terminated.

“It’s unfortunate that one person ruins it for those who use the service legitimately,” said Commissioner Gary Fisher. According to the Coshocton Tribune, Sony Pictures Entertainment was the company responsible for finding the breach, and promptly notified the county's ISP, OneCommunity. The county's free wireless Internet was originally launched five years ago, and spanned the block surrounding the County Courthouse.

Elizabeth Kaltman, vice president of corporate communications with the Motion Picture Association of America, said that illegal downloads would be prosecuted as a civil case, and could cost the offender huge fines up to $150,000 per offense. But determining who actually downloaded the movie is somewhat of a problem, as hundreds of people use the offending IP address.

Currently it doesn't seem that the WiFi connection will return online. IT director Mike LaVigne discovered a program that could prevent illegal downloads in the future, however the country doesn't have the funds in the budget, initially costing $4,900 and an additional $900 per year to maintain the filter.

GameStop is gearing up for the digital age, easing into the business by offering digital game downloads.

Gamers knew this would eventually happen: GameStop will soon sell digital game downloads along with the physical, packaged games located in-store. The new program, which will start testing next year according to Reuters, aims to provide additional content rather than full-blown titles for now. However the company's move into digital distribution will undoubtedly pave the way for full games when the market is ripe for the picking.

"A large market for full game downloads is not imminent, (but) the add-on downloadable market will grow," GameStop Chief Operating Officer Paul Raines said at the BMO Capital Management Digital Entertainment conference.

The plan described by Reuters paints a picture of the gamer learning about new downloadable content. Apparently the gamer can purchase the "upgrade" and then retrieve the content online when returning home. That may be the case, but a better scenario depicting gamers purchasing the content from GameStop's online store makes more sense.

Currently it's not known exactly what GameStop will offer that doesn't already exist on Microsoft's Xbox Live, Sony's PlayStation Network, or various websites offering content for hot PC games. The report states that GameStop will work in conjunction with Microsoft and Sony networks. We're betting that there will be GameStop exclusives thrown into the mix somewhere.

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Researchers are working on shape-shifting robots that may appear before 2020.

Researchers at both Intel and Carnegie Mellon University believe that real-world transformers are in the near future, or rather, are closer to reality. In fact, Intel's chief technology officer said last year that the gap between human and artificial intelligence should close by the year 2050. For now however, humans will only need to worry about robots that can take different shapes.

Computerworld reports that scientists are using distributed computing and robotics to make the shape-shifting machines. The "transformers" consist of millions of millimeter-sized robots, enabled through electromagnetic forces and software that allows them to form into various shapes. The researchers call its collective not the Borg, but "programmable matter" called Claytronics; the individual robots are Catoms.

"It's been pretty hard but we've made a lot of progress," said Jason Campbell, a senior staff research scientist at Intel's research lab in Pittsburgh. "Optimistically, we could see this in three to five years. It will take us longer.... We're not there yet, but we see a path."

Campbell said that each Catom will have its own processor. The overall collective can be programmed to work together like a swarm of bees. Currently the researchers are working on a way to program the "programmable matter" on a whole rather than by individual Catom.

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Palm's newest WebOS handset, the Palm Pixi has been spotted at Walmart.

It's pegged as the poor man's Pre, the Pixi doesn't have the same slide out QWERTY keyboard as the Pre, but it is both thinner and lighter than the Palm's first WebOS phone. It packs 8 GB of storage onboard, a 2 megapixel camera with flash, a full QWERTY keyboard, a 320 x 400 capacitive display that measures in at around 2.6-inches, a removable 1150mAh battery and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Scheduled for launch this upcoming Sunday, Precentral sources say the device was sporting a $400 price tag but wasn't actually in the Walmart system yet. On contract with Sprint, the device is going to cost $100.

Willing to pay the extra $300 to get it off contract? Let us know in the comments below!

(Image via Pre Central)