Apple CEO Tim Cook has reportedly called recent reports on Apple's attitude toward its supply chain "patently false and offensive" in a new e-mail sent internally to Apple employees. Cook's remarks came the same day The New York Times published a lengthy feature about the "human cost" of our iPads, iPhones, and other gadgets. That report, based on sources and interviews conducted by the Times, made the assertion that many of Apple's executives are willing to look the other way when it comes to unsafe conditions and worker abuse because of the pressure to keep gadget costs down. Apple declined to comment for the Times story.

In Cook's e-mail, which is published in full at 9to5Mac, Cook indirectly referenced the Times report by opening with, "some people are questioning Apple’s values today, and I’d like to address this with you directly." He went on to describe any accident that happens with Apple's suppliers as "deeply troubling," and addressed Apple's employees who work at supplier sites around the world by saying they're "as outraged by this as I am." The remainder of the letter describes Apple's supplier inspection initiatives and its recent relationship with the Fair Labor Association.

"Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us," Cook wrote. "As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It’s not who we are."

The Times report in question is worth reading in full; it's full of quotes sourced from former and current Apple executives about the company's view of supply chain problems in China and elsewhere. The prevailing message appears to be that Apple cares to a certain extent, but can pretend certain reports don't exist until there's a PR disaster to deal with (such as the aluminum dust explosion at a Foxconn plant that killed several workers in 2011). 

It's clear that Cook feels strongly about the new story, and he claims that Apple is committed to improving worker conditions overseas. "What we will not do—and never have done—is stand still or turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain," he wrote. "On this you have my word."

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Despite the controversy over Google's new privacy policy, the company already has you wrapped up into a neat little demographic package, as I was reminded yesterday when looking at my Google account settings. How accurate are Google's guesses? We asked the Ars staff to take a look.

Google attempts to guess your rough age and gender, along with several top categories of interest, based on your interactions with Google products like search. You can view these guesses through your Google account, and opt out of tracking if you like. We found often accurate demographic information, with most males guessed correctly. In our not-so-scientific analysis of reports on Twitter and other sites that have posted about the page, the demographics tend to mistake women for men much more often (I'm pegged as a 25-34 year-old male, as was Jacqui Cheng before she opted out).

With regard to category interests, the demographic profiles easily pick up on things like travel searches. Our own Ryan Paul said Google captured him perfectly, with categories about computers and electronics, video games, and cats. Others are misunderstood souls: senior editor Nate Anderson, for instance, insists he is not into urban and hip hop music—despite its placement at the top of his ad categories.

If you have opted out of ad tracking as per our guide, or if you clear your cookies very often, you may not be able to see how Google envisions you. But if you haven't, feel free to check out your own profile and share its guesses about you in the comments.

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AT&T sold 9.4 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2011, but 7.6 million of which were iPhones, the company reported today. According to those numbers, the iPhone made up a whopping 80 percent of AT&T's smartphone sales for the quarter, and 66 percent of all postpaid phones sold through AT&T. 

These numbers place AT&T as the biggest iPhone retailer, besting Verizon's 4.2 million iPhone activations and constituting over 20 percent of Apple's 37 million sales worldwide last quarter.

The proportion of smartphone sales is surprising, given that worldwide sales of feature phones began to decline only six months ago after growing for two consecutive years. The big quarter for iPhones on AT&T can largely be attributed to the launch of the iPhone 4S, which also helped iOS even up the score with Android in its percentage of sales to recent smartphone acquirers.

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Google announced on Monday that it would be enacting a new privacy policy that, when customers agree to it, will allow the company to collect and store information across all of its services. Not only that, but Google will share information gathered across those services in order to "maintain, protect and improve" the services, but also to target search results and ads for each user. There is no way to opt out of the information-sharing aside from deleting your entire account and saying goodbye to your Gmail, YouTube videos, and Calendar, among other things. Users may feel that this is a backhanded gesture on Google's part, but the new privacy policy may also raise issues with the company's agreement with the FTC.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is building a low-cost Linux computer with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU. The board, which is roughly the size of a pack of playing cards, entered the manufacturing stage last month. There will be two models, priced at $25 and $35, with different specifications.

The board is built around the Broadcom BCM2835 chipset, which is designed to handle intensive multimedia. In a recent interview, Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton claimed that the Broadcom graphics hardware in the Raspberry Pi offers twice the performance of the iPhone 4S GPU and soundly beats NVIDIA's Tegra 2. Upton worked for Broadcom on the team that developed the hardware.

At the SCALE 10x conference this month, developers from the XBMC project demonstrated their software running on a Raspberry Pi board. XBMC is a popular open source media center application that has advanced library management features and support for playing video in numerous formats. The XBMC developers ported the media center to the Raspberry Pi using a developer hardware unit supplied by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

The demo, which can be viewed in a YouTube video, shows that XBMC runs reasonably well on the Raspberry Pi hardware and is relatively responsive. It was able to smoothly play an H.264-encoded 1080p video. Another video that was published this month shows Nokia's open source Qt toolkit running on the Raspberry Pi, demonstrating the use of OpenGL shaders in Qt's declarative QML user interface framework.

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HP has published the code of Enyo, the underlying JavaScript framework of the webOS platform. It is available from a public repository on GitHub and is distributed as open source software under the permissive Apache license. The release of Enyo is the first step in HP's plan to completely open the webOS mobile platform.

The webOS platform is built on top of Linux, but has a proprietary application stack that is made with HTML and JavaScript. HP obtained the platform in its 2010 acquisition of failing device manufacturer Palm. At the time, HP said it intended to ship the webOS software environment on a wide range of products, including tablets, printers, and desktop computers.

Apple released its iPhone 4S without high-speed LTE capabilities amidst a sea of high-profile LTE Android handsets. While technophiles complained about lack of support for the next-generation wireless standard, there are multiple reasons Apple has so far shied away from the technology. Poor battery life and lack of a suitable baseband processor to fit the iPhone's form factor are two reasons that have been cited by Apple in the past. But the company's most recent financial results offer another clear reason: the majority of iPhones sold today are in areas without 4G networks of any kind.

The US has one of the only significant LTE rollouts in the world. A few major cities in Canada, Sweden, and Saudi Arabia account for most of the rest of the global LTE network availability. Nearly all of Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia lack any LTE service outside of tiny test markets.

According to Walter Issacson's authorized biography about former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, one of the things Jobs wanted to "revolutionize" was photography. Jobs believed the iPhone was a vehicle for doing so, but current imaging technologies limit the photographic abilities of smartphones. As detailed in a new book by Fortune's Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple, Jobs may have found the solution he was looking for in a radical imaging technology from Lytro. To that end, Jobs apparently met with Lytro CEO Ren Ng in June 2011 to discuss how Apple might integrate Lytro's light field technology into its products.

One aspect of the iPhone that has received constant improvements over the years is its included camera. The original iPhone had a fixed focus lens and a 2MP sensor, while the iPhone 3G was upgraded with autofocus capabilities and 3MP. The iPhone 4 moved up to 5MP and added an LED flash and 720p video. The iPhone 4S went even further, moving up to 8MP, improving low-light capture, and moving to full 1080p HD.