If you’re into iPhone gimmicks and unsupported Apple applications, DevTeam released PwnageTool 2.2 to help you jailbreak the latest 2.2 iPhone software update available from Apple since Friday.

Two free software tools are available from the DevTeam to help you jailbreak your iPhone, namely QuickPwn and PwnageTool. However, only the latter preserves the iPhone’s baseband firmware, giving you the maximum chance for any upcoming software unlock. As usual, using just the iTunes update method will lock back any previously jailbroken iPhone.

Loss-making Lycos Europe plans to sell some of its assets and close the rest after failing to find an investor, the company said on Wednesday.

Lycos Europe — which provides Internet search, Web hosting, email, social networking and online shopping tools — said its management and supervisory boards had concluded that the best available option was to seek the sale of its domains, its Danish portal and shopping activities.

Lycos Europe, which had a staff of 694 at the end of September, almost two-thirds of whom were employed in Germany, said it will close its Web hosting and portal business.

The rest of Lycos, still one of the world’s top Internet portals, is owned by South Korean Internet company Daum Communications.

Want to optimize your looks without radically altering them? An Israeli team of computer scientists may have the answer.

They have developed a computer software model based on the innate preferences that studies show we have for human faces.

“This technology could become a product where for example there’s a web service where people upload their photographs and have them enhanced or beautified by our software,” said Professor Dani Lischinksi of Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Studies show that eyes a certain shape and distance apart, nose a certain length, lips a certain curve, increase the probability that we will find one face more attractive than another.

“We were able to fit a mathematical model to this set of data that we’ve gathered, namely the images that we showed to people and their responses in terms of the beauty scores that they chose to give to each image,” said Lischinksi.

The team then applied the model to modify images so as to make them appear more attractive. They are now exploring a variety of potential commercial applications for the software, Lischinski said.

Social networking company Facebook recently held acquisition talks with Twitter, the micro-blogging company, the Financial Times said.

The negotiations, put a valuation of as much as $500 million on Twitter, which has become one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched start-ups, the paper said.

The talks, which were first reported by the AllThingsD blog, were confirmed to the paper by two people familiar with the situation.

Facebook offered to pay for the acquisition in stock, the paper said, citing a person close to the situation.

Blockbuster Inc on Monday said it would roll out a new digital media player that brings fewer, but more recent titles from the Internet to consumers’ televisions than a six-month old offering from rival Netflix Inc.

The MediaPoint player by broadband device maker 2Wire allows Blockbuster customers to download high-definition quality movies to their TVs via broadband lines for $1.99 apiece, after an initial $99 for the box and 25 films.

Consumers have 30 days to watch a film once it is downloaded to the set-top box, and must finish watching it within 24 hours of pushing the “play” button.