Alastair Sweeney’s book BlackBerry Planet, released last year, tells you more than you ever needed to know about Research in Motion and its famous smartphones, but as a relatively new BlackBerry user I figured getting a good backgrounder would be useful.

Here’s a quick rundown of some facts that either were news to me or that I’d forgotten along the way in between RIM’s assorted legal battles and new product launches:

1. The U.S. government uses more than 500,000 BlackBerries.

2. RIM co-CEO and co-founder Mike Lazaridis, taking a page from Bill Gates’ book, dropped out of college before starting the company.

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The timing couldn’t be worse. After reporting its first ever annual loss last year, Toyota announced Tuesday that it will suspend US sales and manufacturing of eight Toyota models to fix faulty gas pedals. The unprecedented move comes days after the unveiling of a Toyota recall list of 2.3 million vehicles.

The decision may have serious consequences for Toyota. It lost $7.1 billion last year, and the Tuesday announcement will hamper its ability to return to profitability through increased sales, as well as potentially dent its reputation as a producer of reliable vehicles.

“It’s a humbling experience for them,” says Jeff Bartlett, Deputy Editor Online for Consumer Reports. “For them to stumble is a bit of a blow to their consumer image and their standing in the industry.”

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From his office job at the Shelby City (Ohio) Wastewater Treatment plant, he was browsing adult Web sites, including one called Adult Friend Finder to meet women. When some of the women asked Wolf for nude pictures, he bought a digital camera, took pictures, and e-mailed them using his work computer.

In a communication with a dominatrix that advertised online, the woman proposed a “no-sex” session for $150, to which Wolf replied that, while he would love to be with her, he could not because he had “a lot of financial issues on my plate,” but that he might contact the woman at some time in the future.

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SAN FRANCISCO, California, USA — Wednesday, January 27, 2010 — As Steve Jobs and Apple prepared to announce their new tablet device, activists opposed to Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) from the group Defective by Design were on hand to draw the media’s attention to the increasing restrictions that Apple is placing on general purpose computers. The group set up “Apple Restriction Zones” along the approaches to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, informing journalists of the rights they would have to give up to Apple before proceeding inside.

DRM is used by Apple to restrict users’ freedom in a variety of ways, including blocking installation of software that comes from anywhere except the official Application Store, and regulating every use of movies downloaded from iTunes. Apple furthermore claims that circumventing these restrictions is a criminal offense, even for purposes that are permitted by copyright law.

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There is something very alluring about a device that Steve Jobs hailed as both “magical” and “revolutionary”–a mix of Disneyland and quantum physics. It makes you want to be the first on your block or among your peers to claim one of the wondrous new iPads as your own.

Steve Jobs said “being in technology for 30-plus years I can attest to the fact that the technology road is bumpy. There is always change and improvement, and there is always someone who bought a product before a particular cutoff date and misses the new price or the new operating system or the new whatever. This is life in the technology lane.”

Of course, he wasn’t referring to the iPad, but his words ring just as true. Jobs said that in 2007 in response to the backlash caused when Apple cut the price of the iPhone by $200 only months after the early adopters forked out $600 to be first in line.

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Google offers Web users a simple trade-off: Let the search giant track a substantial portion of your comings and goings around the Web, and it will offer you a free, superior online experience.

Now an independent security researcher who goes by the name Moxie Marlinspike is making Web users a counter-offer: Take Google’s ( GOOG – news – people ) giveaways and keep your privacy too.

On Tuesday, Marlinspike launched a service he calls Googlesharing, a plug-in for Firefox designed to give users access to Google’s online offerings while cloaking their identity from the company’s data collection tools. By hosting a proxy server with a collection of Google “identities,” the privacy software, which can be accessed at Googlesharing.net, will allow users to temporarily route their traffic through another computer that masks their identity by mixing their online actions with those of other users.

“Each identity looks like a normal user, but everything is mixed up between identities so Google can’t track any individual,” says Marlinspike. That means users can exploit any of Google’s offerings that don’t require logins, such as search, maps or news, without allowing Google to assemble a profile of their activities that can be used for advertising targeting–or, as some users might fear, information that could be subpoenaed by government investigators.

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The launch is a direct response to Google, which in October launched a new version of Google Maps Navigation for version 2.0 of its Android operating system. It combines Google Maps, Street View, voice search and turn-by-turn voice directions.

“With Google’s move to make [advanced navigation] free it was only a question of when Nokia would follow that route as well,” said Paolo Pescatore, analyst at CCS Insight.

The ultimate aim for Nokia is to increase the popularity of navigation and location-aware services on mobile phones, and then use that to support new business models, including ad-based services, according to Pescatore. Nokia stands to lose some revenue, but only a small proportion of its users were paying for more advanced navigation features.

However, it represents a serious blow for navigation companies like Telmap and TomTom, according to CCS Insight.

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