When the Evernote Market first launched with physical goods such as the Evernote ScanSnap scanner and Jot Script Stylus a lot of folks were doubtful if the company could add the sales of physical goods to its portfolio of digital goods and services. At LeWeb Paris, the numbers presented by Evernote CEO Phil Libin prove that such concerns were unnecessary.

The company initially took a good 16 months in order to reach its first $1 million in sales, but the Evernote Market reached that in just one month. The best sellers in the Evernote Market are currently the designer backpacks, Evernote ScanSnap scanner, and the Jot Script stylus, combining to contribute about 30% of the Evernote Market sales. The Evernote Market itself is responsible for 30% of Evernote’s monthly sales. To give some perspective of the numbers here, before the Evernote Market was launched, Evernote Premium and Evernote Business accounted for 89%and 11% of sales respectively, and they currently contribute to 61% and 9% of sales respectively.

Not bad indeed.

The idea here, he said, is that these different businesses are mutually reenforcing. Indeed, 11% of Market users are not actually Evernote users yet. Users simply refer their friends to the market so they, too, can buy an Evernote backpack. It’s also worth noting that 51% of Market sales for Evernote come from its free users (which make up the vast majority of its users). While the company’s investors often told Libin that having lots of users who used the free service for users without upgrading to the paid version, he believes that the Market now validates this model because these free users are now becoming some the company’s most valuable customers.

Whenver your webcam is active, you’ll see an indicator light, right? Wrong. According to Marcus Thomas, former assistant director of the FBI’s Operational Technology Division in Quantico, the FBI has been able to use emails with malicious links to send malware to their targets.

Once the malware has been deployed, the FBI have the abilty to turn on the target’s webcam without the indicator light coming on. If you think that the government is only using these techniques in order to monitor terrorists, it would be less worrying. The issue is that by now we all know that the government is pretty keen on spying on a lot more than just purported terrorists, and have used questionable methods that forced all the big players in tech to voice out against it.

How would you feel if you knew that the FBI have been quietly watching you through your webcam for a long time?

FBI can spy on you through your webcam without triggering the indicator light… and has had the technology for several years

The FBI has long been able to activate a computer’s camera without triggering the ‘recording light’ to let the owner know the webcam is on, a former assistant director of its tech division has said.

WIRED.com reports that Google and Oracle are back in court after the later appealed against the decision in a previous suit.

The federal court had ruled in favour of Google after Oracle filed a lawsuit against Google claiming infringement of Java-related patents in Android’s APIs.

The judge originally assigned to the case, Judge William Alsup, went so far as to learn the Java programming language to better understand the technical details of the case, and he eventually concluded that APIs could not be copyrighted. He said that the Java APIs were kinda like the method you would use to organize a library of books, saying that you can copyright the content of the books on a shelf, but not the way they are organized.

Oracle disagreed, and filed an appeal in February, arguing that Google’s use of the Java API was akin to copying the chapter titles and topic sentences of a Harry Potter novel verbatim, paraphrasing the rest, and then trying to pass the whole thing off as an original work.

WSJ.com reports that the US House of Representatives has passed a bill targeting patent trolls.

The House adopted an amendment from Rep. Jared Polis (D., Colo.) that would require patent holders to disclose their ultimate parent entity when filing lawsuits, to prevent them from hiding behind shell companies. It also approved an amendment from Mr. Rohrabacher that would preserve companies’ ability to appeal the decisions of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in U.S. district courts.

Opponents of the amendment, including IBM and Microsoft argue that the reform discourages innovation.

It seems that spying doesn’t just live in the real world as governments are now looking to keep tabs on digital worlds too. It could be possible that terrorists or drug dealers are using digital worlds as a meet up point to discuss attacks and potential sales, but if you think about it for the moment, virtual gaming worlds have plenty of Game Masters, which are staff of the company and are basically Gods within the game. With that in mind, it’s pretty safe to assume that if you’re discussing a potential drug deal or terrorist attack, there could be one standing next to your character listening in, without you even knowing.

Let’s not forget that all your chat logs are probably stored on the server, so if governments did subpoena gaming companies, there would probaby be a large trove of incriminating evidence against the person. So if you’re intent on breaking the law, an online gaming world probably isn’t the best place to discuss it.

World of Spycraft: NSA and CIA Spied in Online Games

The spies have created make-believe characters to snoop and to try to recruit informers, while also collecting data and contents of communications between players, according to the documents, disclosed by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. Because militants often rely on features common to video games — fake identities, voice and text chats, a way to conduct financial transactions — American and British intelligence agencies worried that they might be operating there, according to the papers.

If you’re having trouble logging into your iTunes account and noticing an error stating “FATAL::Unable to process your request. Please try again.”, fret not as you’re not the only one experiencing this issue. While Apple hasn’t given any official details on this just yet, the issue does seem to go away over time, possibly indicating that Apple is aware of the issue and is busy fixing it.

iTunes Store Users Being Kicked Out of Accounts with “Fatal” Error

While the first post appeared yesterday around 3 PM, our own account began to be afflicted by the issue last night, when an attempt to redeem a Digital Copy code on our iPad Air threw back the mysterious “FATAL: Unable to process your request” error, prompting us to “please try again.”

Repeated attempts failed, although we were able to redeem the code using our iPhone 5s. However, Thursday morning the apparent glitch also made its way to that device as well as iTunes 11.1.3 on our Mac as well, prompting a password reset that would up having no effect.

The issue appears to be affecting the iTunes Store, App Store, Mac App Store and iBookstore, suggesting that the issue is system-wide, despite Cupertino’s system status web page showing “no reported issues at this time,” with green lights all across Services, Stores and iCloud.