Earlier this month, Chrysler fired their social media firm New Media Strategies because a tweet was sent out on behalf of the company that said “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f**king [edited] drive.” This tweet was accidentally sent out by 28-year old Ferndale, Michigan resident Scott Bartosiewicz, who used TweetDeck as his default Twitter client.

Paramount PIctures is planning to distribute the movie The Tunnel using the BitTorrent protocol simultaneously to the physical DVD release launch. The movie is based on the real-life set of abandoned tunnels under Sydney, Australia. The real-life network of tunnels in Sydney were originally meant for a rail network, but the construction was discontinued. U.S. General Macarthur ended up using the tunnels during World War II as a base. The movie will be available on BitTorrent starting May 19th. Check out the trailer below:

[image credit: m86security]

The amount of junk e-mail being sent out plummeted today as the result of a coordinated takedown of the Rustock botnet. Rustock is one of the largest spam-generating programs. Rustock generally pushed online pharmacy and male enhancement pills into people’s inboxes. Apparently the servers used for coordinating these spam messages stop operating all at once.

The New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT) is in the top 100 of the most visited websites on the Internet. In an effort to capitalize on that, The NYT announced a new digital subscription plan (also known as a paywall). Starting March 28th, the New York Times will charge $15 per month for those who want to read more than 20 articles per month.

The Prime Minister’s Office in Japan has launched an English-language Twitter account to provide updates to the rest of the world about the earthquake and tsunami situation. The account is known as @JPN_PMO, which will have English translations from the Japanese disaster information account @Kantei_Saigai. [Mashable]

According to consulting firm Gerson Lehrman Group and GizmoFusion, Sprint has finalized an LTE deal with contracts being signed with Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, and Samsung. The LTE service will be rolled out over the next 2-3 years as part of the decommissioning of iDEN on the 800MHz spectrum. It is likely that Sprint is looking to partner with Clearwire or T-Mobile. [GizmoFusion via Engadget]

The iPhone mobile version of Gmail has search, conversation view, stars, labels, etc. Now they have added a new connection checking bar at the bottom that notifies you if an e-mail has been sent or if your phone has a working Internet connection. The connection bar will appear when the web application launches and checks for new mail. It will disappear when the phone is done sending all the messages and is idle. [Gmail Blog]

Jawbone has received a $49 million investment from investment firm Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz have both previously invested in Jawbone as individual investors. Over the past 10 years, Jawbone has raised a total of $100 million. Jawbone has created a headset product and a Jambox wireless speaker box product. Recently they launched a free app called Thoughts, which lets users quickly write messages and send them through e-mail or text message. [AllThingsD]