Bharara.

A former marketing executive at AT&T pled guilty to insider trading charges after providing sales data for the Apple iPhone and RIM's Blackberry to a so-called expert network, said U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in a statement.

Alnoor Ebrahim, 57, of Alpharetta, Georgia, pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud. According to a press release, Mr. Ebrahim was paid more than $180,000 between 2008 and 2010 for providing nonpublic information on handset sales to investors. The charge carries a maximum sentence of five years.

The guilty plea comes after Mr. Bharara's office obtained a guilty verdict in the insider trading trial of Rajat Gupta, the former McKinsey & Co. chief executive charged with passing corporate secrets to now-imprisoned hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam.

Mr. Ebrahim's guilty plea marks the government's 63rd insider trading conviction since October 2009.

Updated to correct the number of insider trading convictions obtained by the government in recent years.

Byrdie Bell at Charlotte Ronson's winter 2012/13 runway show. (Owen Hoffmann for Patrick McMullan)

You might catch her sipping a cocktail during Miami Art Basel or front row at Charlotte Ronson, but the girl works too! Miss Bell has been featured in several, well-received independent films—and her modeling career is nothing to scoff at either! That svelte physique and those jutting collar bones have been snapped in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, L'Official and V Magazine. The Observer just had to know what this blonde bombshell was up to for fashion week:

You’re surrounded by stylists, editors, celebs, publicists—the works! Who has your dream job this week?
The show DJs and music curators. Working with a designer to put together a seventeen-minute set that enhances the theme and atmosphere of the collection, seems like it would be a lot of fun!

Does it get exhausting? Do you have to bail on the fun sometimes?The energy surrounding fashion week is infectious and exciting. It can feel overwhelming, so I try not to look at it as an entire week. I make sure to take days off and do nothing fashion-related and avoid doing something at night if I have done something involved during the day.

What are your five must-have fashion week commodities?
SmartWater, sunglasses, Lumene 5 minute SOS Cream, my BlackBerry and ballet flats.

Now you’re still modeling, will you be working at all this week?
Everything in the industry seems to shut down in order to focus on the shows. I had a shoot scheduled for Thursday and one pending, but the first has been rescheduled and other postponed due to fashion week craziness.

I hear rumors about some fun nightlife plans? What will be the best after-party?
My agency ONE Management always throws the best parties. Tonight they are hosting one at Electric Room with Vs. magazine that I’m excited for.

If you could co-host a fantasy fashion week event, what would it be?
I’ve had dreams about designing a collection with the late Michael Jackson. There are so many creative avenues outside of music that I wish we had gotten to see him explore. Obviously he’d have to do a private show at the after party!

I’ve since tried erotic G-chatting and sexy Skyperbation, and I once put the kink back in Kinko’s by photocopying and faxing a smooshed boob to a young man I fancied in college. I even lost one of my virginities (never mind which one) to a Second Life avatar named LycheeNut, who looked like one of Santa’s elves but with bat wings.

Come to think of it, I still get sort of turned on by green boots.

Sadly, ’Nut and I lost touch when I left my laptop in a taxi. (But, baby, if you’re out there, holler!)

Naturally, I hopped on the sexting bandwagon before it had a name, much less made the front page of The New York Times. As my duly elected representative from the state of New York amply demonstrated last month, the practice is more about photos than text, and as a result, I’ve probably spent more time toying with the tilt of a full-length mirror—believe me, it’s all in the angles—than I should admit.

Of course, said representative also amply demonstrated that the sending of such messages poses certain dangers, even with judicious cropping, reminding me that basically every sext I’ve ever sent is probably sitting somewhere out there on a guy’s phone (maybe all of his friends’ phones, too) waiting for an opportune moment to destroy me.

So when I discovered BlackBerry Voice Notes (Apple has a similar app called Voice Memos), which lets you record and send brief audio messages via text or email, I immediately recognized the copious erotic possibilities, as well as the professional risks. But I didn’t actually explore them in earnest until late last year, when I found myself entangled with young man (let’s call him Dre) who early on in our dalliance acknowledged a fondness for vocal cues.

In spite of my experience with sexting, talking dirty out loud was new territory for me, and I found it somewhat absurd initially. But after a little practice, I began to enjoy it. Before long I grew to think of myself as the Len Berman of our late-night sporting events, whispering a play-by-play into Dre’s ear that couldn’t have been any more exciting if I’d whipped out a vuvuzela.

Once I saw the sexual potential of calling an audible, I became determined to apply the latest technology to the task, especially since Dre and I saw each other only once a week or so.

With dick pics in the news, Voice Notes seemed like a safer way to flirt from afar. You see, since speech recognition is still a tricky science (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to phone my friend Gino via voice-activated speed dial and called my “gyno” instead), I figured it must be tougher to get caught by voice than by likeness.

Sending a Voice Note is a bit like leaving a voicemail, but not exactly. For one thing, you don’t need to wait for a mood-killing robot to tell you when to speak or to press 1 for further options and what to do after some beep. And because they appear as texts with attachments, they don’t require users to dial a number to retrieve them.

I hit record.

“You’ve been a baaaaaad boy, haven’t you, Mister?” I said.

I played it back.

Delete.

The possibility of hearing myself meant that I could craft the perfect self-presentation, get the intonation just right and choose my words carefully. It also meant I sort of had to.

I tried again. “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi? Ce soir?”

Delete!

“I’m soooo hot and wet,” I tried again, dissolving into a series of moans and little whimpers. I sounded like a dying giraffe.

I then tried a straightforward approach. “I have a confession to make. When you called me before, you inadvertently interrupted my afternoon self-pleasuring session … ”

Ew. Self-pleasuring? Session??

Too clinical. This was tougher than I’d expected. It was like moaning into an abyss. It would be so much simpler to improvise with the other party physically present, when everything was reciprocal and I could absorb my partner’s cues.

I grabbed a notepad.

Eventually, I succeeded in recounting an intimate anecdote in an octave that sounded appropriately sultry, if a little contrived, and sent my message. I knew it might be a while before Dre was able to open it since he was at work, but my phone rang almost immediately.

It was my dad.

“Sweetie,” he said. “I received the audio file you sent me.”

A moment passed.

“Sweetheart, are you there?” he asked.

“Dad. I … I really messed up.”

“I can’t seem to get the damned thing open! Do I click somewhere? Can you just tell me your news over the phone?”

“Oh, nothing major. Just wanted to say hi!”

I hung up and went to resend the message, but not without quadruple-checking the “to” field.

Forty-five minutes later, I received a reply from Dre. It showed up as a little microphone icon.

I hit play.

“I want to take my tongue and slowly work it down your chest and midsection … ” Dre said. Hmm. “Midsection”? But okay. I knew what he meant.

He went on to describe in graphic detail various things he would like to do with, for and to me. It was hot.

Before I could reply, Dre texted: “This is fun!”

And it was. Until the next day, that is, when the little jerk went all Beavis on me, sending me a voice note that sounded remarkably like … was it? Yes, yes it was. A fart.

I was speechless.

Naturally, I’m saving the file … just in case he runs for office.

editorial@observer.com

Today Dell announced that it will be moving its 25,000 employees from Blackberries to its own Dell Venue Pro - a phone running the new Windows Phone 7 operating system.

(The move by Dell stings, but its probably the only way that company can sell a smartphone these days...)

The more troubling problem for RIM is that this is part of larger trend. Once considered the high end of mobile, RIM has been surpassed in the era of the app.

In recent months it has been reported that major institutional clients like Bank of America, Citigroup, UBS and JP Morgan Chase are considering switching their staff from RIM to iPhone and Android.

Unless RIM can produce a sexy smartphone and bulk up its offering of apps, it will never have the appeal of iPhone or Android. And companies like switching from RIM corporate accounts to employees personal smartphones because it saves them money.

A major security breach on Android or iPhone might help RIM to retain its business, as security has always been one of their selling points. In fact, the best move might be a compromise, with RIM switching to Android, but retaining many of its proprietary security features.

Key to the Playbook's success will be the health of its app ecosystem. Consumers want to buy devices that offer them a wealth of exciting apps. Android and Apple have achieved that, but so far RIM has not.

RIM seems to be aiming for two constituencies, which only occasionally overlap: gamers and the corporate crowd that has long been the bread and butter of the company's phone biz. The device appears to have the hardware to make it a strong platform for PC games. But it's hard to say what exactly defines this tablet as "professional," except maybe that it integrates with the more secure encryption the company's phones are known for.

Then again, it's hard to say what made the iPad "magical," except for the fact that so many people seem compelled to purchase one by some otherworldy force.

According to Carney, Credit Suisse is working letting its bankers use iPhones, Bank of America has begun phasing in the touch-screen smartphones and Wall Street law firm Skadden Arps lets its lawyers expense their iPhones. According to Carney, prospective hires at big banks used to wave their BlackBerries around to show that they would readily glom onto firm culture. Nowadays, though, there's no iPhone stigma.

Carney's report follows a Bloomberg story that said JP Morgan Chase and UBS may allow their employees to access corporate email via iPhone.

JP Morgan and UBS together have more than 280,000 employees. But what's at stake may be larger than that: The BlackBerry may soon be usurped as the standard-issue tool for people who need to be constantly sending and receiving emails. And that's on top of a recent analyst designation of the BlackBerry as "yesterday's phone," a stock price that's fallen 35 percent so far this year and a ban on the device by Saudi Arabia.

Is it possible Jamie Dimon simply got tired of playing Brickbreaker?

Shares of Research In Motion aren't taking the news well. They're down 2.7 percent at $43.82 in late morning trading.

Tamim wouldn't elaborate about why he thinks the U.S. would want to spy on an ally. Barring any last-minute reprieve like the one Blackberry won from India over similar restrictions in August, the UAE will shut off all Blackberry Internet-related services on October 11th, leaving a reported half-million users in the virtual dark.

[Reuters]

View slideshow >

USER-FRIENDLINESS
Any idiot can use an iPhone—and we know, because we’ve seen it happen. BlackBerry gets a few points for most models’ physical QWERTY keyboards, which are less prone to typos than iPhone’s virtual keys; but Apple controls for this problem with text-correction software, and its completely intuitive touch-screen operation wins the category.
Advantage: iPhone

DURABILITY
iPhones crack when they’re dropped, unless you invest in bulky shells and cases; by contrast, as Wired’s GeekDad blog has pointed out, BlackBerrys still work after being run over by a full-size pickup truck.
Advantage: BlackBerry

BELLS AND WHISTLES
iPhone wins for both built-in features and apps. In addition to the 3GS’s built-in video camera, GPS, Wi-Fi, music and video player, YouTube connectivity and quick Internet browsing, the iTunes App store offers tens of thousands of applications. BlackBerry App World pales in comparison.
Advantage: iPhone

OPTIONS
BlackBerry’s online store currently offers 21 models, with a range of prices and features; iPhone buyers can pick only between 3G and 3GS. BlackBerry is also supported by 45 carriers in the U.S.—iPhone is currently only available on drop-heavy AT&T.
Advantage: BlackBerry

CELEBRITY USERS
As we know all too well, Tiger Woods’ iPhone has gotten him into trouble; but Uma Thurman, Ryan Reynolds, Nicole Kidman, Emma Watson and Michelle Williams have fared better with theirs. There doesn’t seem to be much family loyalty: Miley Cyrus is a devoted BlackBerry user, while brother Trace carries an iPhone; Jake Gyllenhaal uses an iPhone, while Maggie sports the BlackBerry; Beyoncé is a BlackBerry devotee, while sister Solange is an iPhone girl. Many celebs also prefer not to choose: Cameron Diaz, Taylor Swift, Lindsay Lohan, Adriana Lima and Vanessa Hudgens have all been spotted with both devices.
Advantage: Draw (If it seems like everyone in Hollywood, from Amanda Seyfried to Zac Efron, is glued to a BlackBerry, that’s because BlackBerrys are frequently given gratis to celebs; in the past five years, the phone has been on offer in gift bags at the Oscars, the AMAs, the Golden Globes and the Grammys. Apple’s sole spokesmodel is Justin Long.)