jQuery was first released in 2006. Nearly 5 years later, it’s still going strong – due largely in part to the community that’s been built up around it. This community of developers constantly releases plugins that allow web developers to easily add amazing functionality to their projects.

Continuing our “Best of 2011? series, the focus this week is on jQuery plugins. Over the past eleven months we’ve seen a lot of great new plugins being released, which made choosing our favorites extremely difficult.

The youth is powering our digital age and they will control the future of our web. The position of freelance website designer seems lucrative and very enticing from the get-go. Set your own hours, work on whatever you want, get paid to work from home and learn as you go. What could be better?

Problems begin to arise when freelancers situate themselves in all markets and spread their techniques too thin. There is a subset of jobs in digital design and development which freelancers should focus into. It can provide huge benefits to master single areas in a market so expansive as the web.

Well, the fact is that if Siri is the edge that the iPhone 4S can give to its fans, Apple will probably need to work harder for the iPhone 5, as there are just too many Siri alternatives for Android, and we’re gonna feature 10 of them in this particular post.

The assistants featured here will be able to voice dial, send text and emails, search information on web, update social media status, manage contacts and reminders, check in with Foursquare, find local shops, etc. Oh, one more thing: 9 of them are even free! So choose your favorite today to make your Android become your best assistant!

A new hack delivers the Siri digital assistant to jailbroken iPhone 4 units, but we advise would-be tinkerers to think long and hard before acting on the invasive software surgery. You might think you know your way around an iPhone hack, but this one has trouble written all over it.

This downloadable version of Siri, called H1Siri, is available in the Cydia app store. The language accompanying the 100MB file claims to provide full Siri functionality on GSM or CDMA iPhone 4 units running iOS 5 or 5.0.1. However, this particular exploit seems like bad news for a number of reasons.

RIM can’t catch a break. Not only is the company coping with dismal PlayBook tablet sales, it’s also taking a near half-billion-dollar hit for sitting inventory that must now be sold at rock-bottom prices.

RIM announced on Friday that the company wouldn’t be meeting its financial targets for the year, primarily due to the unsuccessful performance of the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. It pushed 150,000 units this quarter, compared with 250,000 last quarter, and 500,000 in the first quarter of the year.

The latest round of documents published by Wikileaks offers a rare glimpse into the world of surveillance products. The collection—which Wikileaks calls the Spy Files—includes confidential brochures and slide presentations that companies use to market intrusive surveillance tools to governments and law enforcement agencies.

A report that Wikileaks published alongside the documents raises concern about the growing use use of mass surveillance tools that indiscriminately monitor and analyze entire populations. The group also points out that some of products described in the documents are sold to authoritarian regimes, which use them to hunt and track political dissidents.

Google is reportedly creating a service that would offer cheap, fast shipping. Online retailers can’t wait to sign up.

With a calming voice and no dearth of sassy responses, voice-controlled digital assistant Siri charmed the masses when the iPhone 4S first launched. Over the last week, however, it seems as if she’s gone political on us.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have uncovered a variety of vulnerabilities in the standard configurations of popular Android smartphones from Motorola, HTC, and Samsung, finding that they don't properly protect privileged permissions from untrusted applications. In a paper just published by researchers Michael Grace, Yajin Zhou, Zhi Wang, and Xuxian Jiang, the four outlined how the vulnerabilities could be used by an untrusted application to send SMS messages, record conversations, or even wipe all user data from the handset without needing the user's permission.

Microsoft has released the fourth preview of Internet Explorer 10. As is the case with previous Platform Previews, the release is aimed at developers: the new features are important to those creating rich, complex Web applications, but will have less impact on Web users.

However, even Web developers might struggle to get too excited about the latest preview, because they probably won't be able to run it: it only works on the Windows 8 preview release that Microsoft shipped at its BUILD conference in September.

The new features include Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), JavaScript typed arrays and binary file manipulation, and HTML5 video subtitling. Typed arrays and support for binary files enable much better performance for JavaScript applications that handle binary data, such as images and audio.