News archive (2 / 2013)

Pandora has said today that it will limit free mobile users to just 40 hours per month of music.

The move will help the company control rising royalty costs.

In its blog post, the company says the average free listener normally spends 20 hours listening to music throughout the course of the month, and not necessarily on mobile only.

The company adds that only 4 percent of active users ever hit 40 hours per month.

Per-track royalty rates have jumped 9 percent this year, following a trend since 2009. The rates are expected to rise another 16 percent by 2015.

If you hit the 40 hour mark, you can pay $1 for unlimited listening for the rest of the month, or just continue to listen on your PC.

Amazon has announced today that its Cloud Player is headed to the iPad and iPad Mini.

The tablet-optimized app is now available for free in the Apple App Store, allowing users to stream or download the music stored in the Cloud Player account.

Additionally, you will be able to manage and create playlists from the music.

Any song purchased through Amazon can be streamed for free and the first 250 non-Amazon-purchased tracks can be uploaded for free. After that, the cost is $25 for up to 250,000 songs.

The Cloud Player has been available for Android, the Kindle Fire and some other set-top boxes and TVs for some time. The app was made available to the iPhone during the summer last year.

It only lasted a few hours, but eBay has taken down an auction from a seller claiming to have a pair of Google Glass.

The auction went up to $15,900, showing massive demand for the augmented reality glasses that Google recently unveiled.

In the auction, the seller claimed he was able to purchase the glasses through Google's #ifihadglass competition. Unfortunately for the seller, the claim was completely false, as Google will not be letting winners know until mid-March. In fact, the competition only closed today. Winners are also barred from reselling the devices, as per Google's rules.

Here is the cache of the page (including the awfully written description):

Google Glasses ( Project Glass ) #ifihadglass Glasses

Last week, Canonical released their Ubuntu Touch developer preview for Nexus smartphone and tablet owners.

The company has announced today that at least 20 more devices will soon be able to flash the operating system, allowing for a much wider developer base.

Among the new devices are the Motorola XOOM, Sony Xperia S, Sony Xperia T, Samsung Galaxy S III (international, Verizon Wireless, and AT&T), Huawei Ascend G300, Samsung Galaxy S (GT-I9000), Samsung Galaxy S SCL (GT-I90003), Samsung Galaxy Note, Samsung Galaxy Note II, Samsung Galaxy S II (international), HTC One X, HTC One XL, HTC One X+ (multiple versions), Asus Transformer Infinity, LG Optimus 4x HD, Nexus S, Nexus One, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Wi-Fi and the Asus Transformer Pad.

Spotify has given iOS device owners a nice overhaul for their favorite app.

Version 0.6 brings most of the updates Android users have had over the past few months, including the "always-on" Now Playing bottom bar and the navigation sidebar.

Additionally, a few existing bugs have been fixed, such as the lock screen errors.

Full release list:

New: Shiny new interface. You can navigate around the app with a new sidebar. Check it out by swiping left-to-right, or by pressing the ≣ button in the top left of the app.
New: Now Playing bar. You'll always see what you're listening to along the bottom of Spotify. To switch tracks, just swipe along it. Tap or drag to see more information about the current track. Tap the cover art in the extended view to use AirPlay, and disable/enable shuffle and repeat.
New: Track menu. Tap the ... button on any track to see a redesigned context menu.
Fixed: "Track only available online" issues. This would sometimes appear after start-up, or when you'd been offline for a little while. Not any more.
Fixed: Lock screen will now always display the correct track.
Fixed: Shuffle now switches off after you've used "Shuffle Play" on an album or playlist.

PhoneArena has released a demo video showcasing gaming with a Nvidia Tegra 4 processor.

The company is using a reference tablet running the upcoming processing suite, and the site was able to test it at Mobile World Congress.

A few of the games that were pre-loaded were Vampire Hunter and Dead on Arrival 2, both of which are said to have played beautifully.

Nvidia says there are just 5 games that are optimized for the processor, Burn Zombie Burn, Carie: Blood Mansion, CODEX: The Warrior, Dead on Arrival 2, and RU Golf.

Check the video here:

Kim Dotcom has announced that he plans to add an encrypted email service to the newly launched "Mega" file sharing service.

The larger than life Internet rights activist recently announced that the service reached 3 million registered users in just one month of availability, with those users storing 125 million files.

Dotcom says, "it took [US cloud storage company] Dropbox two years to achieve that. We can see really high demand for this storage."

He then mentioned the email service, saying "we're going to extend this to secure email which is fully encrypted so that you won't have to worry that a government or internet service provider will be looking at your email."

Dotcom is still facing charges over Megaupload, which was the largest file sharing site on the planet before it was raided last year and shut down for good.

Earlier this week, HTC America announced that it would settle with the FCC over claims it did not "take adequate steps to eliminate security flaws" that eventually put millions of smartphone owner's data at risk of being stolen.

The FCC had claimed that HTC built millions of phones with security flaws that allowed for third-party applications to "evade Android's permission-based security model." Android, which will always give users notice if data is being revealed to third parties, was prevented from doing so by the flaws built into the HTC smartphones.

FTC officials had strong words for other OEMs that may be considering following in HTC's footsteps.

"To settle the case - the FTC's first against a device manufacturer - HTC has agreed to a far-reaching settlement that imposes a first-of-its-kind remedy: patching vulnerabilities on millions of mobile devices," FTC senior attorney Lesley Fair wrote in the commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection blog.

According to NPD, users of P2P services to download unauthorized music has fallen 17 percent year-over-year in the U.S. as consumers move towards legal alternatives.

Due to the drop, overall volume of illegally downloaded music fell 26 percent, a number that must certainly excite the record labels.

NPD's annual survey showed that piracy as a whole (for music) is falling in nearly every category.

Music files ripped from CDs owned by family/friends/acquaintances dropped by 44 percent, the number of files shared between hard drives fell by 25 percent and the volume of music downloads from cyber lockers fell by 28 percent reads the survey.

For most of those surveyed, the reason given for the slowdown in piracy was the readily available legal alternatives, such as Spotify, that offer unlimited offerings with the ability to search for tracks, new and old.

Today at the Mobile World Congress convention, LG unveiled the "world's smallest" wireless charger, clocking in at just 6.9-cm in diameter.

The device will use the Qi standard seen on rival chargers, and it also uses "electromagnetic induction technology, meaning users will be required to place their mobile device directly on the wireless charger itself in order to replenish the battery," says TH.

Dubbed the WCP-300, the new charger is compatible with standard 5-pin micro-USB chargers, and the company says the LG Nexus 4 and the LG Spectrum 2 can use the charger right out of the box.

"Wireless charging is the holy grail of smartphone user convenience," noted Dr. Jong-seok Park, President and CEO of LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company. "With the WCP-300, LG was able to deliver both portability with top-class charging capabilities in a device no larger than a typical beverage coaster."

According to CEO Kevin Systrom, Instagram has now reached 100 million users.

The number is impressive in its own right, but even more so considering the exec made a similar announcement a year ago boasting 27 million users.

Reads part of the blog post: "Now, nearly two and a half years later, over 100 million people use Instagram every month. It's easy to see this as an accomplishment for a company, but I think the truth is that it's an accomplishment for our community. Now, more than ever, people are capturing the world in real-time using Instagram--sharing images from the farthest corners of the globe. What we see as a result is a world more connected and understood through photographs."

While the company was growing quickly on its own, it surely has had help after being acquired by Facebook for $1 billion last year. Zuckerberg and co. have integrated the service into the News Feed and added some marketing muscle.

Read the rest of the post here: Instagram 100 million

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has signed a bill this week legalizing Internet gambling in the state, making NJ the largest such state to do so.

The bill will be on a 10-year trial basis, and Christie also "raised the taxes on the Atlantic City casinos' online winnings from 10 to 15 percent."

Nevada and Delaware were the only other states to have legalized online betting, but they are notably smaller in population than New Jersey.

"This was a critical decision, and one that I did not make lightly," Christie added. "But with the proper regulatory framework and safeguards that I insisted on including in the bill, I am confident that we are offering a responsible yet exciting option that will make Atlantic City more competitive while also bringing financial benefits to New Jersey as a whole."

The move will bring added revenue to the state, and also (hopefully) attract new gamblers to the physical casinos spread across Atlantic City. Comps such as free hotel rooms, tickets to shows, and meals and drinks can be accrued online and then redeemed in person.

Governor Christies' full speech:

Speaking at the MWC, Google Play VP Jamie Rosenberg explicitly stated that the model of selling hardware through their Play Store is "here to stay."

While that response seems obvious now, there had been internal discussions on whether the company was prepared. The recent Nexus 4 launch was an unmitigated disaster, with servers crashing and errors galore, but other launches, including the Nexus 10 tablet and the Nexus 4 Wireless Charger have been smoother.

"We're getting better at fulfilling demand and kind of operating the store in a way that consumers expect us to," Rosenberg added (via Verge).

The exec went on to say that the Store is "a reliable way for us to get these devices into market in different countries around the world." This is true as the Nexus 4, at the very least, is available to customers in seven different countries while also available in retail stores in the U.S.

While other notable smartphone makers have already signed on, Samsung will be passing on Mozilla's Firefox OS.

Speaking during the Mobile World Congress event, the company noted that it will not be creating a Firefox OS device in the future.

Mozilla has already partnered with LG, Alcatel, ZTE, Huawei, Geeksphone and most recently Sony on the hardware side. On the carrier side, the company has partnered with Latin American giant Telefonica, the U.S.' Sprint, European giant Deutsche Telekom and 14 other smaller carriers.

Each of the upcoming devices will feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and generally include low-end specs aimed at budget-conscious consumers.

The infamous torrent tracker The Pirate Bay will be departing Sweden en route to Norway and Spain.

Sweden's Pirate Party advocate group had been providing bandwidth for the site since 2009, but the group now faces a legal threat from the anti-piracy group Rights Alliance.

For now, Pirate Party operations in Spain and Norway will step in to be local hosts for Internet connectivity.

In their statement, the Norwegian Pirate Bay says it will provide the bandwidth as a "symbolic gesture to support The Pirate Bay...which is a search engine for cultural content." It also added that "non-commercial file sharing does not pose any problem in society."

While the nations do have anti-piracy laws in place, there have so far been no cases to prosecute bandwidth providers.

Sony Mobile has announced it has "ambitions" to release a Firefox OS smartphone in 2014 through carrier Telefonica.

Adds Bob Ishida, head of Sony Mobile Communications' Products Business Group: "Our engineers are now working with Firefox OS Mobile and HTML5, evolving technologies which show great potential. In addition, we continue to work with our operator partners, including Telefónica, on a development project with an ambition to bring a product to market in 2014."

The recently revealed operating system, which will be aimed at the emerging markets, already has partners in Alcatel, ZTE, Geeksphone, LG and Huawei.

Telefonica is one of the largest carriers in Latin America, and Firefox OS phones will be aimed at budget-conscious consumers in those nations.

Blockbuster HBO hit "Game of Thrones" is well known to be the most pirated show on television now.

Director David Petrarca doesn't seem to care, however, downplaying any piracy since he says the show thrives on "cultural buzz."

In 2012, each episode of GoT was illegally downloaded almost 4 million times, making it far and away the most downloaded show on television, even ahead of perennial winners like Dexter.

Petrarca says HBO has 26 million subscribers in the US and 60 million worldwide, leaving plenty of dollars for the content to continue.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has said today that Arrested Development will not be getting a second season with the streaming service.

The exec says the comedy was revived under "unrepeatable circumstances."

Starting next month, Netflix will stream 14 episodes of the cult classic comedy that was cancelled by Fox after three seasons and low viewership in 2006.

"Arrested is a unique property, we don't anticipate being able to do season five, six and seven," Hastings added. "We have less of a stake in it. It is really a fantastic one-off, which is coming together incredibly. I think it will be amazing for us, but think of it as a nonrepeatable amazing, whereas the other thing that we are doing is to trying to figure out a real mechanism where we can build shows and develop franchises over the long term. In that way, Arrested Development is a wildly successful tactic, as opposed to fundamental to the strategy."

That being said, the company hopes to be able to produce future seasons.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has suggested today that the company is working on their lowest priced Lumia device yet.

The company has been rumored to be exiting the high-end smarpthone market dominated by Samsung and Apple to attempt to dominate the low-end and emerging markets as they once did with Symbian.

According to Elop, the new device will be priced even lower than the newly unveiled Lumia 520, which will sell for just €139.

During their event this week, the company launched four new devices, two low-end Lumias and two non-Lumia phones, one that sells for just €15 phone. That mass market device will replace Nokia's 1280, which sold over 100 million units during its lifespan.

So far to date, the Lumia line has sold 14 million units.

Nokia Music will soon be available for Windows 8 and Windows RT, after a few months of availability solely on Windows Phones.

The new app will be designed specifically for Windows tablets, and was unveiled at the MWC event in Spain this week.

Nokia's unlimited streaming service is similar to Pandora in which you can create playlists based on your favorite songs, artists or genres and the service selects similar music.

The service is cheap compared to rivals, at just $4 per month, and subscribers can download offline playlists.

Some screenshots (via Verge):

Microsoft has quietly rolled out its latest Internet Explorer 10 browser for Windows 7 users.

The release preview was made available in mid-November, and the final version is now available to W7 users, which remain the majority of Microsoft's customers.

IE10 had previously only been available to Windows 8 users.

You must have Service Pack 1 installed to be able to download the browser, which is available in 32 and 64-bit variants. Most likely, if you have Windows 7, you have SP1, so that should not be an issue. Auto-updaters will take place for IE users in the coming weeks.

Outside of some aesthetic updates, IE10 also brings better JavaScript performance, integrated spell checking and auto-correct functions, and better support for the new CSS3.

Get it here: IE 10

Rovio's "Angry Birds" cartoon is set to debut on March 16th.

The most popular mobile game of the last few years continues to build its franchise, expanding to TV (kind of) and even sodas.

Dubbed "Angry Birds Toons," the show will look into the characters of Angry Birds, the birds and the pigs and we learn why the pigs are stealing from the birds in the first place.

The cartoon will only be available through the Angry Birds mobile app.

Rovio expects there to be one episode per week for the entire year, as each episode is only 7 minutes long, or so.

Sony has priced their highly anticipated Xperia Tablet Z.

The new Xperia Tablet Z is a full-sized 10.1-inch tablet that is just 6.9mm thick, even thinner than the iPad Mini.

Under the hood, the tablet runs on Android 4.1, features a 1920x1200 resolution, a quad-core 1.5GHz processor, LTE, NFC, and IR blaster and an 8MP "backside-illuminated sensor" camera. It is all powered by a large 6000mAh battery.

Sony also says the device is waterproof and dustproof.

Finally, the company is promoting a new feature it calls "S-Force Front Surround 3D," which supposedly helps convey a feeling of surround sound and spacial movement.

"Xperia Tablet Z sets new standards in entertainment by matching premium specifications and Sony technology with cross-device connectivity and a consistent user-experience," said Kaz Tajima, Corporate Vice President, Head of UX Creative Design and Planning, at Sony Mobile Communications. "Xperia Tablet Z reinforces our intention to be a leading player in the premium Android device market, by building on the principles established by Xperia Z and perfectly optimising them for the tablet form factor."

According to Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida, every PlayStation 4 game will be available for digital download.

"PS4 will be similar to PS Vita in that every game will be available as a digital download, and some will also be available as a disc," said the exec.

More importantly, Yoshida says there is the possibility of a subscription service once there is a large enough PS4 library. "As more and more services and contents become available digitally, we'll have more of an option to create attractive packages. So hypothetically we can look at different models – like a cable TV company. We could have gold, silver or platinum levels of membership, something like that. We can do subscription services when we have more content – especially now that we have the Gaikai technology available. With one subscription you have access to thousands of games – that's our dream."

Samsung has finally announced it will be killing off its Bada operating system, and merging the OS into the newer Tizen, which itself was a merger of existing software.

The company has stated that it will be releasing multiple Tizen phones this year aimed at the low-end market. Additionally, the move is seen as a way for Samsung to break its dependence on Android in the mobile world.

After the two merge, Tizen phones will be able to run apps that were designed for existing Bada phones, such as the Wave.

"Rather than seeing this as a straightforward merger, it's better to view it as a transition to a better service," says Hong Won-pyo, the president of Samsung's Media Solutions Center (via Verge).

Hong says Bada was not a good fit for modern phones, but it appears that Bada and Tizen are close enough in foundation to merge seamlessly.

Asus has unveiled their new Padfone Infinity today, providing a flagship for their smartphone/tablet hybrid series.

As with other PadFones, the Infinity is a smartphone that can turn into a tablet when docked into a station.

The device will ship with Android 4.2 and be powered by a 1.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 quad-core processor with an Adreno 320 GPU. The screen is 5-inches and has a 1080p 1,920 x 1,080 resolution with 441 ppi.

Asus has boasted about the phone's cameras, which are a 2MP front-side camera and a rear LED flash 13MP f/2.0 aperture with lagless shutter speeds. Additionally, "the camera can capture up to 100 sequential photos at 8 frames per second, while simultaneously recording 1080p HD video," says Cnet.

The government of Iceland is drafting plans to ban Internet pornography (and print, as well) in an effort to block children from seeing violent sexual images.

Proposed originally by Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson, the draft has already caused an uproar, as opponents say the move would censor the Web and encourage even more authoritarian regimes.

Advocates feel differently: "When a 12-year-old types 'porn' into Google, he or she is not going to find photos of naked women out on a country field, but very hardcore and brutal violence," says Halla Gunnarsdottir, political adviser to the interior minister. "There are laws in our society. Why should they not apply to the Internet?"

Iceland already has a vaguely worded law that bans pornography in the nation, but the term "pornography" itself is not defined in the law, so it is never enforced. The new law would define pornography as "material with violent or degrading content."

Gunnarsdottir says the committee is still looking into how the ban could be effectively enforced. One possibility is a national filter or a blacklist, while another being discussed is banning paying for porn with Icelandic credit cards.

HP has announced a $169 Android tablet, undercutting rivals and adding its own player in the increasingly saturated small form factor tablet market.

The new Slate 7 will run on Android 4.1, has a dual-core 1.6GHz SoC, and features dual cameras and Beats Audio for better speaker sound.

From the outside, the tablet looks very generic and has a 16x9 display and an ugly large bezel.

HP is the largest PC maker on the planet (for the time being) but PC sales have peaked and the company needs to make up the revenue elsewhere. So far, their expenditures into the mobile space have failed.

Despite the price, the Slate 7 is nothing special, but the company does have an established brand name and a wide distribution network which should help it move units.

The Slate 7 will be available in April.

LG has announced today that it will be purchasing webOS from HP, giving the operating system a new home, again.

The operating system will get a third shot at life in smart TVs, says LG, who will not use it as a mobile OS.

As part of the deal, LG will acquire the source code for WebOS, all related documentation and engineering talent, and any related WebOS Web sites. Additionally, LG gets all HP licenses and any patents HP received from Palm.

HP purchased Palm for over $1 billion, completely mismanaged the operating system, and never released any viable products using the operating system. HP then relegated it to open-source, pretty much leaving it for dead.

"It creates a new path for LG to offer an intuitive user experience and Internet services across a range of consumer electronics devices," added Skott Ahn, president and chief technology officer of LG Electronics Inc.

Samsung has confirmed today that its Galaxy S IV event will indeed be on March 14th.

The flagship device will get its own Unpacked event in New York City, following the footsteps of previous Galaxy phones.

Samsung will livestream the event at 7PM on the day.

There is little known about the device but it expected to have a 5-inch 1080p display, an IR blaster and a new, more powerful GPU.

March 14. Ready 4 the show? #UNPACKED twitter.com/SamsungMobile/...

-- Samsung Mobile (@SamsungMobile) February 25, 2013

HTC America has announced this weekend that it will settle with the FCC over claims it did not "take adequate steps to eliminate security flaws" that eventually put millions of smartphone owner's data at risk of being stolen.

The FCC had claimed that HTC built millions of phones with security flaws that allowed for third-party applications to "evade Android's permission-based security model."

Android, which will always give users notice if data is being revealed to third parties, was prevented from doing so by the flaws built into the HTC smartphones.

As part of the settlement, HTC America will need to patch all existing software holes and create a new "comprehensive security program." For its part, HTC says the majority of its devices have already had the issues addressed. "We're working to roll out the remaining software updates now and recommend customers download them once available," said a spokesman, via Reuters.

In January, it became illegal to unlock your phone in the U.S., unless your carrier authorizes it.

This week, outrage over the new policy has led to over 100,000 signatures on a petition at the White House site, meaning the government must respond to it and "champion a bill that makes unlocking permanently legal."

The policy is a big issue for anyone who wants to use their phone abroad, without needing to go through their U.S.' carrier's expensive roaming and international plans. Additionally, anyone who wants to move to a new GSM carrier in the U.S. (such as T-Mobile to AT&T), will have issues.

All phones purchased after January 26th are affected, so unlocking all your older phones will not be a problem.

Unfortunately for those who signed the petition, the new policy is monitored by the Library of Congress and "the Library of Congress is an independent legislative branch agency, and it is unclear what power President Obama has to reverse its decision, even if he agrees with the petition," says NPR.

Samsung has unveiled their long-rumored Galaxy Note 8.0, a tablet to compete directly with the iPad Mini.

The Note 8.0 has an 8-inch screen, slightly larger than the iPad's 7.9-inch screen, and will include the company's stylus, the S Pen.

Resolution is better than that of the iPad Mini, at 1280x800 and under the hood is a 1.6GHz A9 quad-core processor, 2GB RAM, dual cameras 1.3MP/5MP, and either 16GB or 32GB of storage that is expandable with a microSD slot. The device also has an IR blaster and includes "Smart Remote," a Peel-powered app that turns the tablet into an interactive TV remote.

The device will come with Android 4.1.2 and Samsung's own TouchWiz UX overlay. The device will also include HSPA+ or LTE depending on your market, and will be able to make phone calls if your carrier supports it.

The big time Apple fan that started the "Every Apple TV Ad" YouTube channel has expanded, adding a new channel for its late founder Steve Jobs.

Dubbed the "Every Steve Jobs video" channel, there are currently above 150 clips of the Apple founder and CEO.

The site's creator had his reasons for putting the channel this week: "I'm a long time Apple enthusiast and throughout the years have gathered every single Steve Jobs video I could find ... To commemorate Steve Jobs birthday (Feb. 24th) I decided to put all these videos online and make them easily available for all. I believe it's the most complete archive available."

Clips go as far back as Steve's first TV appearance, with a young nervous Jobs claiming he might throw up.

Check the channel here: http://www.youtube.com/EverySteveJobsVideo

Facebook has updated its iOS app this week, adding free VoIP calling for users in the U.S. and Canada.

The social networking giant had been testing the feature through its Messenger iOS app since early January.

Accessing the free calling is simple enough. Tapping a friend's name in the chat menu, and then heading to "info" will show off a new option to make a free call.

For the call to work, both users must have the latest version of Facebook.

The calls work via your existing data plan.

The so-called "six strikes" Internet anti-piracy scheme set to go live tomorrow.

Center for Copyright Information's (CCI) Copyright Alert System is a way to educate accused pirates and eventually punish them if they do not change their ways.

Five ISPs have signed on to be a part of the CAS; Time Warner Cable, Verizon, Cablevision, Comcast and AT&T.

AT&T for example, after numerous warnings, will block subscriber's access to their most frequently visited websites until they complete a course on copyright. Verizon will throttle speeds of repeat pirates and Time Warner Cable will just temporarily shut down your connection. Cablevision and Comcast have not yet revealed their "punishments."

The system will monitor only torrent users, ignoring Newsgroups, P2P and warez downloaders.

Goldman Sachs had some harsh words for the PlayStation 4 and its parent, Sony.

The bank's lead analyst Takashi Watanabe (of Goldman Sachs Japan), says the console could send Sony into a "downward spiral."

"In addition to dedicated consoles, we see little reason for developers to produce top titles for platforms with a low installed base; in turn there is a danger the installed base will not grow because the content lineup is weak," reads Watanabe's note.

Additionally, the analyst says the console's incompatibility with PS3 games is a huge disadvantage.

Outside of those harsh words, he did see some positive, including "the introduction of software development-friendly architecture and easy access to premium games such as Diablo Ⅲ." The analyst also believes the console could be a success if Sony markets it as a home entertainment center rather than a gaming console.

According to a new report from Q&A site FixYa, the iPhone is the most reliable smartphone.

The company "looked at data from 722,558 problem reports listed on the site, and combined that information with market share data from StatCounter to create an ultimate reliability score for each smartphone manufacturer," says Mash.

Apple beat out Samsung, Nokia and Motorola handily.

"Smartphones are consistently being compared on a case-by-case basis, but no one has looked at the overall trends across a manufacturer's entire smartphone line," added FixYa CEO and founder Yaniv Bensadon. "Our newest FixYa report looks at lines like the iPhone, Galaxy, or Lumia, and through a careful analysis of issues versus market share, we've been able to directly compare manufacturers using a reliability score. The result is an accurate and fair method of a scaled approach to fairly compare these top companies to truly see who is the most reliable, and who is barely even competing."

Sony has confirmed; the upcoming PlayStation 4 will not support DualShock 3 controllers.

Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony's Worldwide Studios, says the PlayStation Move will be supported, however.

The move should not be seen as a total surprise, especially since the PS4 does not natively support PS3 games, anyways.

PS Move tech is built into the DualShock 4 controllers and there will be a PS4 Eye for motion gaming.

Sony just recently announced the PS4, showing off some gameplay demos and features. Read more from our launch post here: Sony Announces PS4

Ziff Davis, the recent purchaser of IGN, has announced today that they will be shutting down many of the gaming site's properties.

The new owners will shut down 1UP, UGO and GameSpy and IGN will see layoffs, as well.

Ziff Davis CEO wrote a memo for employees, and leaked by Polygon. "We are focusing on our two flagship brands, IGN and AskMen. Unfortunately, as a result, we have made the decision to close sites and restructure our teams accordingly," reads the memo.

Additionally, the company answered why they are closing the sites down: "Why? Given the state of the market and the economy, it simply wasn't feasible to run multiple sites all focused on video game content," reads an IGN post.

Ziff Davis owned 1UP and UGO until 2009 before selling it to IGN. IGN was just bought out by Ziff last month.

According to a new report, Google is now in talks with the major labels in an effort to launch an unlimited streaming music service.

In the report, it reads, "it is expected that the streaming service will offer a subscription model as well as free unlimited access to songs, supported by advertising, mirroring models adopted by Spotify and Deezer."

The move seems a natural expansion to the company's long-standing music download store in the U.S. and Europe.

As they do with other Google software, the search giant would include the streaming service with its Android phones and tablets, and its Chromebook PCs.

According to CNET, Google's new Google Glass eyewear will be available by the end of the year and cost under $1500 per pair.

The original target had been 2014.

Google also recently announced developer hackathons in both New York and San Francisco for people looking to use Glass in creative ways.

The search giant recently showed a full promotional video of Glass in use. Very early reviews claim the voice control UI still needs work, and Glass is only really functional in areas with fast data connections. The glasses Bluetooth to Android and iOS devices and can use Wi-Fi and 3G/4G from the connected phone, without having its own cellular radio.

Check the video here:

Wikimedia, the parent of the Wikipedia encyclopedia, has revealed plans to offer their 25 million articles via text message.

The plan is to offer the information to users in developing markets where smartphones, and especially Internet connections, are rare.

Users will be able to text the site for specific articles and have it texted back within seconds.

The new initiative will be funded by a $600,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, a large nonprofit media and journalism support organization.

Wikipedia also offers "Wikipedia Zero," a text-only low-bandwidth version of the encyclopedia for those with slower Internet. Launched in 2011, Zero has just been rolled out to 330 million users in Russia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Read more about the initiatives here: The Knight Foundation

Best Buy has confirmed that all Windows 8 touchscreen computers will have a discount, at least for the next two weeks.

Beginning tomorrow, and ending March 9th, the PCs will be priced with a $100 discount.

Notably, it appears that Best Buy will be part of the subsidizing, eating part of the cost of the discount along with Intel, Microsoft and the PC OEMs.

Not included in the discount? The Surface or other Windows tablets.

You can check the list here starting tomorrow: Best Buy

Google has sent out invites for their 2013 I/O conference, which is slated for May 15th-17th this year.

The event will be held at the Moscone Center West in San Francisco and the company says registration will go live on March 13th at 7AM PST.

Prices are on par with last year's, with student pricing locked at $300 and general pricing at $900. The tickets sold out in under 15 minutes last year.

The event will be shared, live, via Google Developers Live and I/O Extended viewing parties, if you cannot secure a ticket in time.

Google has greatly impressed over the last few years with their I/O event, last year unveiling the Google Glass project, the Nexus 7 tablet, Google Now and Android 4.1.

During the console's unveiling earlier this week, Sony announced that the PlayStation 4 would have 4K resolution support.

Today, however, PlayStation Executive Shuhei Yoshida says the PS4 will support 4K for video and photos but not for games.

Additionally, 3D functionality will no longer be a focus for the console.

Says Yoshida: "The PS4 supports 4K output, but only for photos and videos -- not games. PS4 games do not work on 4K." In regards to 3D, "it's not a focus. But it does do it better. The basic capability is higher so more games will run at 1080p at 60 frames so it's an easier and better experience when you watch on 3D TV."

The exec then elaborated on the company's 3D strategy.

"3D was a big thing a couple of years ago -- we made it a big thing because it was lead by the consumer electronics side of Sony and we liked what we could do on PS3 using 3D stereoscopic," Yoshida added. "But now the consumer electronics side of Sony, or all of the companies have shifted focus from 3D TV to something else, so if they're not talking about it, why would we?"

The theft of Apple portable devices has become so widespread in New York City that the NYPD has created a dedicated team to catch the thieves.

All Apple devices, when stolen, are tracked by the police and Apple, who can usually track the location of the device thanks to its IMEI.

"We're looking for ways to find individuals who have stolen Apple products and return the products to their original owners," said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne (via NYP). "It is being done to learn the pattern who is stealing."

Just recently, an iPad was tracked as far as the Dominican Republic and recovered. 74 percent of devices are found within New York City, however, says the police.

With the new dedicated team, the NYPD hopes to recover even more of the devices.

According to multiple reports, Microsoft is preparing to reveal their Xbox successor at an event in April.

Sony recently showed off features and some gameplay demos for its upcoming PlayStation 4, although the company did not unveil the actual hardware itself. The console is set for launch in November.

Giving more credence to the rumor is the fact that Microsoft partner Ustechs has already registered the domain XboxEvent.com. Ustechs has partnered with Microsoft in the past for previous media briefings like last year's E3.

The new Xbox is expected to launch with Kinect 2, a Blu-ray drive, majorly improved specs and improved speech recognition, much like Apple's Siri service. Supposedly, it will support "wake on voice", natural language controls and provide for speech-to-text.

After trying their hand at the high-end smartphone market with little success, sources are claiming that Nokia will get back to its roots and try to dominate the low-end handset market and emerging markets.

The new phones will compete with devices from ZTE and Huawei, which are cheap and run on Android.

Nokia once ruled the smartphone world with its Symbian phones, controlling over 80 percent share. That share has gone to practically zero since the release of the iPhone and the launch of Android.

Last year, the device maker began selling its Windows Phone-based Lumia phones, in an effort to take share away from Apple and Samsung. Sales have been accelerating for their high-end devices, but most of Nokia's revenue still comes from the low-end market.

The sources claim Nokia will introduce a low-end Nokia at next week's Mobile World Congress, for global launch in emerging markets.

In 2011, Orange purchased a 49 percent share of video sharing site Dailymotion for $78 million, with the expectation that they would eventually purchase the rest.

This week, Orange has announced it has spent $80.6 million for the remaining stake, giving the company complete ownership.

The deal closed on January 10th, says Orange's recent quarterly earnings statements.

Dailymotion averages 2.5 billion views per month and 106 million unique visitors, making it one of the most popular video sharing sites on the planet. However, the site pales in comparison to Google's YouTube in regards to traffic. The site is also profitable, mainly thanks to its huge popularity in France, where it is the video sharing site of choice.

Reports indicate that Orange is also looking for an American investor to buy a small stake: "It is clear that to accelerate the development of the company, Dailymotion needs to find a solid strategic partner, probably American, that is capable of opening the doors to the US market. Beyond this, we are very happy with what has been achieved in the past few months (revenue growth of 55% in 2012). Our partnership with Dailymotion is an excellent illustration of the pertinence of our content strategy."

Thanks to Comcast's recent earnings report, we can see that NBCU had to spend $195 million to buy back that half of MSNBC.com that it didn't own.

The "M" in MSNBC was for owner Microsoft, and the site was rebranded to NBCNews.com after the purchase.

In the filing, the company says the final purchase price was $195 million, "net of $100 million of cash and cash equivalents held at MSNBC.com that were acquired in the transaction."

The site is now dedicated to the political-based cable news outlet.

French president François Hollande has announced this week that the government will make a large investment to ensure that every household in France will have high-speed broadband by 2023.

The president expects half of the population to get the Internet by the end of 2017.

"High-speed broadband strengthens [France's] businesses competitiveness and the quality of [its] public services. [It] will bring more fluidity, more simplicity for communications between business, their customers, and the public sector as well," Hollande added.

Altogether, the investment required will be €20 billion, with a mix of public and private funds. Telcos will likely have to give €7 billion to fund the infrastructure in densely populated areas.

An ad hoc public body will be set up to coordinate the investments over the next 10 years.

North Korea will now allow foreigners to use the Internet on their mobile phones, the second time in recent memory that the country has relaxed its normally stringent rules.

Unfortunately, if you are a citizen of the nation, you will not get access to the new mobile Internet service that will be offered by Koryolink.

Koryo is a joint venture between the Korea Post & Telecommunications Corporation and Egypt's Orascom Telecom Media and Technology Holding SAE.

The service will launch by March 1st, and will be 3G, not the newer 4G LTE network seen in the U.S. and other nations.

Until last month, foreigners could not even bring their own cellphones into the country, but that rule was relaxed as long as they use Koryolink SIM cards.

According to new reports, BlackBerry 10 users will not be getting a native Instagram app.

While the large smartphone ecosystem does have native apps for majors like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, Instagram is reaching that level of mainstream and the news, if accurate, is a blow to the fledgling platform.

Say the sources: "There will be no [native] Instagram for BB10 for now. Frankly, I'm not sure there will ever be."

For BB users, the company is simply working on porting its Android version, but that will not offer the same experience as an app built on BlackBerry's "Cascades" SDK.

When asked, BlackBerry had little to say. "We have a strong partnership and are actively engaged around Instagram support for BB10 but we do not have an availability date at this point."

Google has introduced their new 'Pixel' Chromebook today, featuring the "highest resolution screen that's ever been shipped on a laptop."

To that effect, the screen has a 239 ppi, beating out Apple's Retina Display and its 220 ppi.

Google SVP of Chrome and Apps Sundar Pichai says the Pixel will be a reference device for Google's hardware partners and also be aimed at power users.

Under the hood is an Intel Core i5 processor, 4 GB DDR3 RAM, integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000, Dual-band WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0 and a backlit keyboard. The device features a 12.85-inch 2560 x 1700 touch-sensitive Gorilla Glass screen and weighs 3.35 pounds, on par with other Chromebooks.

Last year, Google publicly announced it would be demoting all accused piracy sites in its search rankings.

This week, the RIAA has said the search giant is ineffective at preventing piracy, and the sites are just as easy to find as they ever were.

The RIAA, which is a trade group for the major record labels, initially applauded the decision but now seems to have turned to their usual negativity.

"We have found no evidence that Google's policy has had a demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy," the RIAA added. "These sites consistently appear at the top of Google's search results for popular songs or artists."

For their report, the group searched for Billboard Top 100 hits, such as "Diamond" by Rihanna and "Locked Out of Heaven" by Bruno Mars.

The group tracked sites that Google themselves identify as "serial infringers" in their Copyright Transparency Report, and says that they were still "on page 1" in Google search results "over 98 percent of the time." Google defines a serial ingfringer as a site that is accused multiple times of hosting unauthorized content by copyright holders.

Canonical has released the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview today for smartphones and tablets.

The full launch of the operating system is set for 2014, with the first dedicated devices expected to hit later in 2014.

As you can imagine, the preview is somewhat unstable and is a work in progress.

The Developer Preview will work on Google devices, only, namely the Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10. That being said, you will still need to check compatibility, as some builds of the Nexus devices will not work, notably the Sprint and Verizon models of the Galaxy Nexus.

Canonical says this release is intended for developers, as the voice calling, browser, media player, camera and gallery apps work, but not much else. Ubuntu's voice search tool is also working.

Get the Preview here: Ubuntu Image

Follow the instructions here: Ubuntu Wiki

Apple, with just a few products, managed to account for 20 percent of all 2012 U.S. consumer tech revenue.

The data comes via NPD, which says Apple grew to its current share from a 17.3 percent share in 2011.

Samsung took second place at 9.3 percent, followed by HP at 8.2 percent, Sony at 4.4 percent and Dell at 3 percent. Samsung saw strong growth while everyone else in the top five fell.

Apple and Samsung combined to account for $6.5 billion in increased sales last year while the rest of the industry saw a decline of $9.5 billion combined.

"While sales fell in consumer technology for the second consecutive year, there was an uptick in Q4 which is cause for optimism," added Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD (via AI). "After struggles with declining categories, and increasingly saturated markets over the last few years, fourth quarter's results may be the first sign that even as a mature industry consumer technology can grow again, albeit with a very different dynamic than in previous growth spurts."

Infamous file sharing king Kim Dotcom has boasted about the early stats and milestones for his new Mega adventure.

Dotcom even went as far as to say Mega is a "belief" and "a guardian angel of your rights, freedom, and privacy."

After just one month, the site has hit 3 million users. These users have uploaded 125 million files. The service reached 1 million users in its first 24 hours of availability.

Earlier in the week, Dotcom announced Mega would start accepting Bitcoins as currency and also that mobile apps for Android and iOS were on the way.

France and Spain saw the highest traffic to the service, followed by Brazil, Germany and U.S., adds Dotcom.

Perhaps more importantly than its file sharing capabilities is the cheap pricing for cloud storage. Mega offers the first 50GB for free, matching Box and beating Dropbox, Google Drive and Amazon significantly. Purchasing a £9.99 per month Pro package gets you 500GB of storage and 1TB bandwidth rate. A Tier-2 Pro account for £19.99 gets you 2TB and 4TB of bandwidth. The Tier-3 account, for £29.99 per month, gets you 4TB storage and 8TB bandwidth, huge numbers for the price.

According to the WSJ, Google has developed touchscreen Chromebooks for release later this year.

Chromebooks run on the company's own ChromeOS operating system.

It remains unclear which hardware manufacturer will build the devices or when they will go on sale. Samsung and Acer currently sell Chromebooks and would likely be willing partners.

ChromeOS is different from established operating systems like Windows, Mac and Linux variants because it runs almost exclusively out of the Chrome browser, using Web-based applications. Due to their lower-end specs, Chromebooks sell for between $199 and $249, pressuring prices on traditional laptop makers.

Although Google has long said they do not mind some competition between their own platforms, a touchscreen laptop with ChromeOS would compete with their own Android tablets in many ways.

UK regulator Ofcom has raised over a billion pounds less than it expected to make from its long-awaited 4G auction in the country.

It had forecast a haul of about £3.5 billion, but ended up netting £2.34 billion instead. In 2000, when mobile operators bid on 3G spectrum in the UK, the regulator raised £22 billion. Ofcom chief executive, Ed Richards, said the figure is much lower because we are now in very, very different times.

"What we were trying to do was ensure that a valuable economic resource was brought into productive commercial use," he said.

The winners of the UK's 4G auction were Everything Everywhere; Hutchison 3G UK; Niche Spectrum Ventures, a BT subsidiary; Telefonica (O2); and Vodafone.

The shortfall might cause headaches for Chancellor George Osborne, as he had included £3.5 billion worth of 4G auction receipts in his Autumn statement in December. He had predicted that the UK's budget deficit would fall in 2012-13, but now with a shortfall of over a billion in the 4G auction, all bets are off.

UK pay TV giant BSkyB has extended their movie output deal with Disney, the fourth such renewal since their original deal 24 years ago.

BSkyB will keep "first subscription pay TV rights to Disney films, including Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm releases," and get additional rights on other platforms.

Additionally, the companies will launch a new "Sky Movies Disney" channel which will play both new and classic films in the UK and in Ireland. BSB will allow continue to broadcast Disney Channel, Disney XD and Disney Junior, including their HD versions.

Sky Movies Disney will have first run rights for new films like Wreck-It Ralph, and Pixar's Brave. They will be exclusive, as well, blocking out rivals like Netflix and Amazon's LoveFilm.

Some users of Sony's PlayStation Network got a surprise on Wednesday with a free PSN code for $10.

Sony sent out messages to some of its users giving them a free $10 voucher to use. The gift giving was likely linked to the PlayStation Event that Sony held in New York on Wednesday, where it announced the PlayStation 4 (PS4) console.

"Thank you for being a loyal customer and fan of PlayStation Network," the message reads. "As a token of our appreciation, we've sent you $10.00 to spend on the PlayStayion Store!"

Sony has run promotions in the past where some credit was given back to users for spending in the PlayStation Store, but it usually had those advertised.

The operator of an Italian file sharing website has been filed €6.4 million, or about $8.5 million.

ItalianShare had about 300,000 users and reportedly had 30,000 links to copyrighted material available through file lockets, BitTorrent and eD2K. The site operator, identified only as PG, was arrested in July last year on charged of copyright violations, tax fraud and others.

Italian authorities said that the defendant made €580,000 from advertisements and donations to the site.

He has been fined €6.4 million euros by the Salermo provincial judicial authority, after a case was brought against him by the Finance Guard's local office in Agropoli, which is responsible for investigating cybercrime, financial crime, smuggling, Intellectual property infringement and more.

EA, Warner Bros and Ubisoft have announced they will be partnering to sell games from their respective digital game stores.

Ubisoft has been looking to bring in more publishers to their popular digital service Uplay, which has just under 50 million users.

On the other end, Ubisoft games will now appear in EA's Origin service.

"We have about 15 partners with about 25 to 30 titles that will be available at launch," Stephanie Perotti, Ubisoft's worldwide Uplay director said (via GI).

"We've been working on this for some time. We've been launching our own Uplay shop, and we wanted to make sure we offer a good experience from the start so we had to work on both the technical setup and all the negotiation with partners, and we thought the timing was good after the release of very strong PC titles from Ubisoft but also from partners."

Outside of EA and WB, Ubisoft has also confirmed games from Interactive Entertainment, 1C Company, Interactive, Freebird Games, Iceberg Interactive, Nordic Games, Paradox Interactive, Recoil Games, Robot Entertainment, Telltale Games, and Torn Banner Studios.

At the Sony PlayStation event in New York, it was announced that Diablo III would be made available for the PS3 and PS4.

Diablo III was released last June and is only available for Windows and Mac. That's going to change however, as Blizzard Entertainment's VP of development, Chris Metzen, said that they had teamed up with Sony to take over the world.

He revealed that Diablo III is already running on PS3 hardware, and that it was amazing. He didn't give details about it working on prototype PS4 hardware, but confirmed it would be available for both the PS3 and PS4 soon.

Striking a deal with Blizzard is a big win for Sony, and one can only wonder if it will extend beyond Diablo into other franchises over the lifespan of the PS4.

Sony announced the PS4 on Wednesday.

Sony has officially announced the PlayStation 4 console at an event in New York, confirming many previous rumors and leaks.

Andrew House, CEO and President of Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE), gave some hardware details for the upcoming console. It will use an x86 CPU as a nod to easier development for the console, and will pack 8GB of RAM.

It will include local storage - no information on how much just yet - and has a high performance graphics card with GDDR5 memory. The system allows you to simply Suspend it - mid-gameplay - and Resume it later. The state of your console will be stored in RAM, so you do not need to wait for the console to boot, and then load the game and load your save.. it will just continue from where it left off.

The new DualShock 4 controller has the Share button that we all already knew about, enhanced rumbling, a headphone jack and is tracked by a camera that is still in development. PlayStation Move will be supported on PS4.

Thanks to Gaikai, if you have a PSVita, you will be able to use it for Remote Play from the PS4, and eventually will be able to stream older PlayStation titles to the PS4 from the cloud.

The PlayStation 4 will allow you to play games as you download them, and has dedicated hardware that will handle game updates and other such annoyances in the background. The console makes it easy to connect directly with friends, building social networking right into the experience.

At the PlayStation event, Sony has unleashed some of the details of the PlayStation 4's interaction with the cloud and what it means for gamers.

The PS4 has integrated technology acquired from Gaikai last year, according to Gaikai CEO David Perry. It will allow the PS4 to stream games directly to the PSVita handheld. The functionality was shown streaming Knack to a PSVita.

The PS4 acts as a server, feeding the video footage directly to the handheld console. and the PSVita can be used to remotely control it.

Gaikai will also power a form of backwards compatibility, eventually bringing all older PlayStation titles to the PS4, but not a lot of details were given beyond that promise. Given the CPU differences, and the resources demanding nature of software emulation, it is safe to assume that this kind of streaming will have to be put in place of actual backwards compatibility.

At the PlayStation event, Sony has shown off the DualShock 4 controller, and it looks very familiar if you have been following the leaks and rumors.

As rumored, the DualShock 4 brings social to your hands with a Share button, that makes it easy to capture and share clips of gameplay with friends and the PlayStation community. The DualShock 4 also has the touchpad on the front as previously seen.

Mark Cerny, lead system architect, showed that like the PlayStation Move, the player is identified by a color which is located on top of the controller between the should buttons.

The DualShock 4 is also tracked by a camera that is still under development.

On Tuesday, Google's stock price hit $800 for the first time as confidence in the search and mobile giant is booming.

In 2007, Google stock hit $700 but then joined the rest of the market in a decline during turmoil years after the financial crisis hit. In April 2011, it was decided that Google co-founder Larry Page should take over the role of CEO from Eric Schmidt.

Since then, Google stock has risen around 35 percent, with most of the gains occurring in the past seven months.

Analysts see Google as one of the best position tech companies for the forseeable future. It's Search service continues to dominate in its field, and over 600 million devices now run the Android operating system. It also owns other huge services, like YouTube, which is gaining more confidence from advertisers.

It is also overhauling its ad system to address concerns about the revenue that can generated for mobile ads.

Apple Inc. has pushed out a security update to Mac users after admitting that the company itself has been subject to a hack attempt in recent weeks.

Just as was the case with Twitter and Facebook, Apple employees were targeted using Java security flaws that had previously been unknown. Apple said this week that it had been targeted in recent weeks by hackers of an unknown origin.

"We identified a small number of systems within Apple that were infected and isolated them from our network," the company said.

"There is no evidence that any data left Apple. We are working closely with law enforcement to find the source of the malware."

The Mac update brings the installed version of JRE up to the latest release, which fixes several serious security bugs. Oracle pushed out an update with fixes earlier this month, so Apple's procrastinated response was criticized by Graham Cluley, of Sophos, who said Apple has a history of being a "little laid back on patches."

Google has posted a video to show you how it feels to use its ambitious Glass prototype.

All the footage in the video is actually recorded through Glass. The video shows a variety of different scenarios, including sky diving, a rollercoaster ride, horse riding and more. You interact with Glass by simply instructing it to do something, like "record a video."

It also shows sharing images that you've just taken with contacts, and requesting that it shows you certain types of pictures.

Another part shows how you can ask Glass to translate words for you, and get a response pretty quickly. Glass is still very much a work in progress, but it is headed in the right direction.

Dell Inc. reported an 11 percent fall in revenue and 31 percent drop in net profit in the recent quarter, in what could be its last reported results before it goes private

Its figures were ahead of analysts expectations, but still shows the drop in Dell's consumer business. The company reported an 11 percent drop in revenue to $14.3 billion over the quarter. Net profit dropped 31 percent compared to the same period the previous year, to $530 million.

Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Inc., is proposing a buyout of the company that will take it into private ownership. He is joined by equity firm Silver Lake, and is helped with a 10-figure loan from Microsoft and financing from several major lenders.

The buyout, which would be worth $24.4 billion, is being contested by some Dell shareholders, including its largest independent shareholder, Southeastern Asset Management. Its position is that the figure grossly undervalues the company.

Domains have been registered that indicate Sony is about to reveal something called "PlayStation Cloud".

The domains have been registered by a system administrator for Gaikai, which is a games streaming company that was bought by Sony in 2012 for $380 million. They suggest that an upcoming "PlayStation Cloud" service is to be announced, which would fit with rumors that the PS4 supports game streaming, and may use it to allow PS4 owners to play older PS3 titles.

The domains include playstation-cloud.com, playstation-cloud.org and ps-cloud.net.

Sony is expected to officially announce the PlayStation 4 (PS4) console in New York tomorrow, with rumors suggesting a holiday release for Japan and North America, followed by a Spring 2014 release in Europe.

(via: superannuation)

Apple has released iOS 6.1.2 for iPhones, iPads and iPod touch to fix a couple of bugs reported in iOS 6.1.

It had previously released iOS 6.1.1 just for iPhone 4S users to fix problems with 3G signal, after several carriers told their customers not to update to iOS 6.1 due to several reported issues.

Now Apple has pushed out iOS 6.1.2 for all compatible devices, fixing an issue with Microsoft Exchange servers that caused headaches for corporate network administrators, and also fixing another issue that reportedly caused battery drain.

What is more peculiar is what Apple has not fixed however; iOS 6.1.2 is still vulnerable to a flaw that lets a user easily bypass the lock screen and access some user data, so we guess that we have to wait for Apple to fix that now too.

iOS 6.1.2 is available OTA, or through iTunes, for all compatible devices now.

Less than a week after launching in Europe, Nokia has made its Music+ service available in the U.S.

The new music subscription service is exclusively for users of their Lumia Windows Phone devices. The service will add on to the current free "Mix Radio" service while bringing a number of extras.

New features for paying subscribers:

Unlimited skips. Whether you like to skip from track to track, or just want extra control over what you hear. There's no stopping you with Nokia Music+.

Unlimited downloads. The free service allows you to download up to four Mixes (each of which contains hours of music) and play them without an Internet connection. The paid service removes this limit – you can download a massive supply of offline music you can swap as you wish.

Higher quality. We were surprised by the high quality of streaming music from Nokia Music, even over a 2.5G connection. Nokia Music+ allows you to download music at eight times the existing quality. Plus, you can set rules to only download high quality when you're on WiFi, for example.

With a copy of Gears of War: Judgment leaking over a month earlier than its release date, Microsoft has warned pirates who download and play it.

As with cases of previous leaks, Microsoft has warned Xbox 360/Live users who download and play the recent leak of Gears of War: Judgment, due to be released on March 19.

"We are aware of isolated cases in which Gears of War: Judgment content has been propped on the web and are working closely with our security teams and law enforcement to address the situation immediately," a Microsoft spokesperson told Eurogamer.

"Consumers should be aware that piracy is illegal and we take vigorous action against illegal activity related to our products and services."

Of course, playing a game that is not even out for a month on Xbox Live is just asking to be banned, so that will come as no surprise. Playing pirated copies of games is a violation of the Xbox Live Terms of Use, and will likely get a console banned from Xbox Live for good.

Google has given details about its fight against account hijacking, showing how the company has reduced the amount of accounts stolen by 99.7 percent since a peak in 2011.

Most Google accounts hijacked are compromised because of poor password decision making. Many Internet users tend to use the same password for every service they use, so they can easily remember their login details each time. This presents an obvious problem; only one of those services needs to be hacked to put all of your other accounts at risk.

This is exactly what Google has observed happening in recent years. The spam filter for its service only allows less then 1 percent of spam to get through to inboxes, so spammers changed their habits in recent years.

Compromised databases of passwords and other items are sold in underground markets to spam groups who will then check the passwords against stored e-mail addresses. If successful, the spammers will send more personalized e-mails to contacts.

"We've seen a single attacker using stolen passwords to attempt to break into a million different Google accounts every single day, for weeks at a time," Mike Hearn, Google Security Engineer, wrote. "A different gang attempted sign-ins at a rate of more than 100 accounts per second."

Google is reportedly in talks with payment processors to cut funding to piracy websites in order to make it more difficult for them to operate.

Google has purged millions of links to copyright infringing content that was indexed by its Search engine in recent years. It has also changed its search recommendations to purge some potentially piracy-related suggestions and more.

Now it is reportedly in talks with Visa, Mastercard and Paypal to block such websites from receiving funding.

"Google has never worked harder to tackle piracy online," the company said in a statement. "Last month alone we removed over 14 million links to pirated material. There are also huge and growing opportunities for content creators to make money online, which is why so many have signed up to Google Play and as YouTube partners."

Google has repeatedly argued that authorities should "follow the money" to hurt Internet piracy.

Sony has continued its Evolution of PlayStation series of videos by celebrating the effect the brand has had on gaming since the early 90s.

After previously reminiscing about the original PlayStation console (1995), the PlayStation 2 (2000), the PlayStation 3 (2006) and the portable PlayStation gaming consoles, Sony is now focusing on the impact PlayStation has had on gaming.

It quickly runs through many of the best sellers available since the mid-90s for PlayStation consoles, setting aside the first praise for the Gran Turismo title for the original PlayStation console.

Check it out.

Kim Dotcom has said that his MEGA cloud storage service will expand to other areas where privacy is needed, and that the service will now accept bitcoin.

He revealed the details on Twitter during the weekend. He said that MEGA would take payment in the form of Bitcoin through reseller Bitvoucher, which will be good news for enthusiasts of the central bank-less online currency.

Mega, he said, will also expand into "secure e-mail, chat & voice, video and mobile", and described Mega as "The Privacy Company."

Earlier, he had tweeted that GMail, iCloud and Skype have to provide secret and untraceable NDA backdoors to all of your data, and said you should never host anything on a U.S.-based service, because "the US govt says if you do they can extradite you."

Microsoft is reminding Windows 7 users that support for Windows 7 RTM ends on April 9, 2013, so its time to install the service pack.

Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) was released almost two years ago now, and Microsoft policy is to end support for a Windows product 24 months after the release of a new service pack. So in other words, if you are running Windows 7 RTM (with no service pack), then you will need to install SP1 before April 9 to get continued support for the product.

For those who are updated, there is no need to worry. Windows 7 will continue to be fully supported for a long time, with mainstream support continuing until January 13, 2015, and extended support continuing until January 14, 2020.

Windows 7 Service Pack 1 can be downloaded from Microsoft.com

For the difference between Mainstream Support and Extended Support, view the chart below.

A source has told Kotaku that the PlayStation 4 games console will launch in the United States in November this year, starting at $430.

Two separate models will be available, with a higher end model going for $530. This information fits in with previous rumors about pricing for the console in Japan and in the United Kingdom.

The source also provided Kotaku with another image of the PS4 controller, and revealed that most of the PS4's online features will require a premium subscription - not likely to go down well. PlayStation Plus will apparently be renamed PlayStation World.

One interesting snippet of info suggests that the PS4 can be controlled with a smartphone or tablet PC, and that each PS4 comes with a PlayStation Eye as standard. A feature also described is the ability to allow gamers to watch their friends play games remotely, without having to own the game they are playing.

Sony is expected to announce the PlayStation 4 (PS4) at an event in New York.

Credit: Kotaku

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is hoping to have all six major ISPs in the UK block three more websites it claims are heavily linked to piracy.

The three websites - Fenopy, H33t and Kickass Torrents - would be blocked by BT, Sky, Virgin Media, O2, EE and TalkTalk if the BPI gets its way in a court hearing. BPI argue these sites infringe music label's copyright. They are likely to join Newzbin2 and the Pirate Bay by being blocked in the country.

The Open Rights Group opposes such blocks, giving the following arguments:

• Website blocking is an extreme response. There are growing fears this precedent will make it too easy and quick to block sites. Time needs to be taken to consider the legitimate use of the sites.
• There needs to be a more specific and adequate definition of the precise URL or IP address to be blocked to prevent mistakes.
• Once a site is blocked, its alleged clone sites can also be blocked, but in this case, BPI will be able to practice this without a court order. The decisions would be made between BPI and ISPs and will not be published.
• The blocking of these sites does not come with an expiry date. This indefinite blocking is potentially problematic if the number of sites blocked keep growing, leaving a large number of sites hidden from the public.
• These court hearings between a judge, ISPs and right holders do not sufficiently represent the needs of the user as their voice is not included during the hearing.

Amazon has confirmed that it terminated a contract with a German security firm that was providing protection at its warehouses, after a documentary showed serious abuse of workers.

The documentary aired last week, and prompted the German government to call for an investigation into workers' conditions at German Amazon warehouses. Following the documentary, Amazon said it terminated the contract with Hensel European Security Services (Hess) with immediate effect.

"Amazon has zero-tolerance for discrimination and intimidation and expects the same from every company we work with," a spokesperson said.

The documentary had drawn attention to the clothing worn by the security guards, and their alleged link to the neo-Nazi movement, as well as pointing out that the security firm shares the name "Hess" with Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess. The firm denies suggestions of links to far-right wing politics.

Whether linked or not, the documentary exposed harsh harassment aimed at some workers in the warehouses, particularly those from Poland and Spain.

European Union regulators plan to take action against Google by the summer due to a change in the firm's Privacy Policy last year.

Google moved to pool all user data across multiple services, such as YouTube and GMail, and users had no way to opt out of the change. European regulators warned Google about the change at the time, saying it was a high risk to users' privacy.

Google consolidated around sixty privacy policies across its services into one.

French regulator CNIL spearheaded the opposition to Google's change, and in October European regulators gave Google four months to change its approach to privacy. Now the French regulator has said Google failed to address concerns.

"Google did not provide any precise and effective answers," CNIL said.

"In this context, the EU data protection authorities are committed to act and continue their investigations. Therefore, they propose to set up a working group, led by the CNIL, in order to coordinate their reaction, which should take place before summer."

Google maintains that its privacy policy is in line with European laws, and that it did in fact contact CNIL in January with a list of steps already taken to alleviate concerns.

In another one of its "Evolution of PlayStation" series, Sony has looked back at the PlayStation Portable (PSP) and covers its PSVita handheld.

Having already made videos for the original PlayStation console (1995), the PlayStation 2 (2000) and the PlayStation 3 (2006), Sony has now reminisced about the PlayStation Portable, released starting in 2004.

It touts the PSP's large screen (for a handheld) and its ability to deliver console quality gaming for a handheld device.

As for the PSVita, it focuses more on its social integration and so forth, but clearly the PSVita is an unfinished story.

Check it out.

Earlier today we reported on HTC's launch of the new "One" flagship smartphone, a powerful device with a few notable features including a high ppi display, an "ultrapixel" camera and a built-in IR transmitter.

The company has also introduced a new trade-in program offering $100 to smartphone owners who want to upgrade to the One.

All you have to do is register your email to qualify and then purchase a One when it becomes available.

Afterwards, when you receive the new device you can ship back your old phone along with proof of the new One and get a $100 Visa prepaid card. If your device is not worth $100 elsewhere and you were looking to upgrade this is a good deal, but if you think you can get more than $100 for your phone than it is probably smart to do that.

HTC says the offer is limited and it is unclear when the promotion is over.

If you are interested, check it here: HTC One Trade-In

Just weeks after showing off their new smartphone ready Ubuntu OS, Canonical has unveiled their new tablet interface today.

The OS will be optimized for touch (obviously) and feature edge gesture navigation, removing the need for buttons. The interface is similar to that of Canonical's smartphone OS, including the universal hub and gesture access to "favorites."

Additionally, the company has added a new multitasking mode for its tablet interface called "Side Stage." Windows 8 users should be familiar with Side Stage as it acts just like W8's Snap View, allowing for apps to be used in phone mode in a side window.

The tablets will be share-able, since the OS supports multiple user logins and a full guest mode.

Minimum specs for the tablet OS are a 6-inch screen, an A15 processor, 2GB of RAM, and 8GB internal storage.

Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview will be made available for Google's Nexus 7 and 10 in two days.

Sprint has confirmed it has turned on its LTE network for more major cities this week.

New York City, San Francisco, Washington DC, Jacksonville, Miami and Tampa will now have access to the fast mobile broadband network for their supportive phones.

In January, the company announced 58 other areas would begin getting LTE, as well, and the new cities are in addition. For now, LTE will remain spotty in all areas, until the carrier "achieves a density of sites to indicate that our customers should consistently have a great 4G LTE experience."

For now, customers will be able to test the 4G while the company works on its infrastructure.

Rivals Verizon and AT&T have been blanketing the U.S. with their networks, with full rollouts expected by the end of the year.

The SDK and source code have been made available for Tizen 2.0, codename "Magnolia."

Tizen is notable because it is backed by Intel, and has support from Japanese major carrier DoCoMo and global powerhouse Vodafone. Samsung has already confirmed it will release a couple of Tizen phones for Korea and Japan later this year.

Magnolia includes (via Slash) "a new web framework that provides "state-of-the-art" HTML5/W3C API support. There is a new Web UI framework that includes full-screen and multi-window support. There are APIs for Bluetooth and NFC support as well as access to the core apps like calendar, contacts, gallery, phone, settings, and the video player. There is a native framework supporting full-featured application development. Enhanced Web IDE providing WYSIWYG design environment, and a native IDE that provides a project wizard."

According to a new YouGov survey of 4,169 British adults, it appears Lumia owners are happier with Nokia than Symbian owners ever were.

The survey, completed in December, concluded that Lumia owners are much more likely to recommend their phones to others.

In December 2011, 99 percent of Nokia smartphone owners had Symbian phones, compared to 40 percent being Lumia owners as of December 2012.

42 percent of owners said they would buy a Nokia next time, with 45 percent saying they would recommend the company, the highest numbers in years.

Nvidia's mega-gaming GPU, the Titan, is here.

The processor maker has announced its GeForce GTX Titan, a $1000 beast ready for shipping next week.

Titans feature 2,688 CUDA cores at 837MHz, 6GB of GDDR5 memory and 384-bits of memory bandwidth which allows for high-resolution gaming across multiple monitors with no issue.

Furthermore, the Titan is 3-way SLI capable, in case you have $3000 laying around.

The Titan has "fan control that includes voltage and RPM," and a TDP rating of 250w.

Exactly as been leaked over the last month, HTC used their press event today to unveil the new "One" flagship.

The device has a 4.7-inch LCD with 1080p resolution and a massive pixel density of 468ppi.

Under the hood is a Snapdragon 600 SoC that includes a quad-core processor clocked at 1.7GHz and LTE. The device runs on Android 4.1 with HTC Sense 5, has 2GB RAM, 32 or 64GB internal storage, GPS and GLONASS, NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11ac Wi-Fi and a large 2300mAh battery.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that its new web-based email service Outlook had moved out of beta.

The service will replace Hotmail/Live, and the company has begun migrating users away from its existing services.

Preview versions of Outlook.com went up six months ago and it appears that Microsoft has done sufficient testing.

Microsoft will look to steal users back from Google's Gmail, and Microsoft's director of product management Dharmesh Mehta says the transition will make Outlook one of the largest free email services in the world. "It's a pretty massive bet we've made that Outlook.com is a great choice," Mehta added.

All Hotmail settings, contacts and messages will make the transition and you can continue to use your existing email addresses.

Get started at Outlook.com now.

Nvidia has revealed one of its most powerful chipsets to date, the Tegra 4i.

The chip will be Nvidia's first with integrated LTE, but it loses the ARM Cortex A15 architecture of the Tegra 4.

Tegra 4i chips run on the Cortex A9r4 architecture, have 4 cores (plus the ninja fifth core) and can clock in at 2.3GHz. The chip has 60 GPU cores, less than the 72 of the Tegra 4.

Additionally, the chip supports less RAM and only 1080p resolution than the Tegra 4. We have the full specs below.

Finally, the company also introduced the "Phoenix" dev platform and a new developer phone which includes a 5-inch 1080p display.

Google is in the process of launching retail stores in the U.S., following in the footsteps of rivals Apple and Microsoft.

The stores would showcase Google-branded hardware like the Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 and potentially Chromebooks, as well.

Sources say there is no word on where or when the stores may launch, as the plans are not set in stone.

Apple has long used retail outlets to help sales of its iOS devices, giving would-be buyers a chance to test the devices before buying. Microsoft has begun expanding their retail presence recently thanks to the launch of the Surface and Windows Phone 8.

The sources also claim that Google would not promote Motorola at all in the stores, even though the company acquired Motorola Mobility in 2011. That move makes sense as any favoritism would be seen as an attack on its other Android partners, most notably Samsung.

Eldar Murtazin, well-known for breaking some big news in the past, has said today that March 14th will be a big day for Samsung.

Other sources were quick to confirm that Murtazin was making veiled references to a launch for the Galaxy S IV, among other new phones.

The supposed event will be held in New York City.

Additionally, the design of the model is said to be a "tightly-guarded secret" and "the leap in cool new features from [Galaxy S III] to the next flagship will be bigger" than even the leap was from the S II to the S III.

Save the date for a big announcement - March 14 :) And keep silence ;) HTC will miss HTC One sales again :( Like it was in 2012.

-- Eldar Murtazin (@eldarmurtazin) February 18, 2013

British daily The Times has reported today that the Sony PlayStation 4 will be cheaper on launch than its predecessor.

The paper says the console will launch for about £300. "Industry sources and leaked internal documents suggest that Sony is considering pricing the new device at about £300, more than £100 cheaper than the starting cost of its predecessor," reads the report.

Sony launched the PS3 in 2006 in the UK for £425.

Additionally, the report says Sony will not unveil the new console at this week's PlayStation meeting in NYC, as widely expected. Instead, the company will wait to see Microsoft's Xbox 8 before launching their own.

When it does launch, however, the PS4 will support 4K displays, include cloud streaming and include a touchscreen controller.

LG Display has announced a large investment in the future of OLED.

The company, which released their first large-screen OLED TV in 2012, will invest 706 billion won ($654.8 million) in manufacturing the next-gen displays.

Mass production for the new OLED line will begin in the Q1 2014, says the company.

The company recently announced that its $10,000 55-inch OLED had reached 110 pre-orders, hardly a huge number but still somewhat impressive given the price tag.

Sony has cut the price of its Vita handheld in Japan in an effort to boost sales.

The company's console launched with hype but a high price tag and a lackluster catalog has led to slow sales around the globe.

For now, the company has announced a price drop of the 3G + WiFi model to 19,980 yen ($215 USD), down from 30,000 yen ($325), a large price cut.

The price drop goes into effect on February 28th and could lead to a similar price drop in the U.S.

Sales have been a bust, with Sony selling 7 million consoles compared to initial expectations of 16 million.

Archos has announced it will be introducing three new Android smartphones at next week's Mobile World Congress event in Spain.

The company is best known for its PMPs in the early 2000s and more recently for budget tablets that include hard drives instead of flash memory.

On the low-end, the Archos 35 will include a 3.5-inch display with 320x480 resolution, a 1GHz single-core processor, 512MB RAM and 512MB internal storage. The phone will run on Android 4.0, have dual-SIM support and 3G. The phone will only lighten your wallet by €90 ($121 USD).

The company will then introduce the large-screened 5.2-inch 800x480 Archos 52 Titanium. The device will be underpowered, however and have a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 512MB RAM and 4GB internal storage. There was no word on price.

Finally, the company's flagship is the Archos 48 Platinum. The device has a 4.8-inch IPS with 720p resolution, is powered by a 1.7GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6589 processor, runs on Jelly Bean, has LTE and an FM Radio. The device will go on sale in May for €249 ($330).

According to a new report from mobile app tracking company Flurry Analytics, China is now the world's top smartphone and tablet market.

For the month of January, China had 221 million active smartphones and tablets, just 1 million behind the U.S.

Flurry estimates China will conclude February at 246 million compared to 230 million for the U.S. China is never expected to lose the lead again.

It is important to note that Flurry only includes Android and iOS in the report, which means China was likely well ahead even before this month thanks to other operating systems available.

The UK came in third at 43 million active iOS and Android devices.

According to a new OpenSignal study, Sweden has the world's fastest 4G, on average.

While the U.S. has the widest LTE network, thanks to having three majors each with networks, it only clocked in at 8th for speed.

Sweden's 4G network delivered an average download speed of 22Mbps, beating out Hong Kong at 19.6Mbps, Denmark at 19.1Mbps and Canada at 18Mbps and well ahead of the U.S. at 9.6Mbps.

There were 62 countries with LTE, 21 countries developing LTE, and a global 10.4Mbps average speed. Japan brought up the rear atA 7.1 Mbps.

Concludes the survey: "What is clear is that LTE represents a significant step forward in telecommunications technology. Its dramatic improvement in speed and latency from 3G shows that it has the potential to be as transformative an advancement as the evolution from 2G to 3G. This is especially true in countries that do not have established fixed line internet infrastructure, meaning that broadband internet can be made widely available through cellular connections. LTE will be present in a projected 83 countries within the next two years, which will drive the production of lower-end LTE-compatible smartphones. The arrival of cheap handsets that are able to make use of LTE which will help expedite mass adoption, leading to the potential for dramatically increased broadband penetration in developing countries."

Samsung has announced their new "Rex" line of phones aimed at emerging markets.

The company calls the line "a new series of smart feature phones" and there will be four separate devices with a varying range of specs.

Dubbed the Rex 60, 70, 80 and 90, the phones are all dual-SIM and run on a Java-based OS with Samsung's own TouchWiz UI. The Rex 60 has a resistive touchscreen but the other three have capacitive screens.

"We are committed to developing the best possible mobile solutions to suit all lifestyles and budgets, which is why we are so excited to launch the Rex series across a number of the world's fastest growing markets," added JK Shin, president of the IT & Mobile Communications Division at Samsung.

Each of the phones are expected to sell for between $50 and $100, putting the devices in direct competition with Nokia's Asha phones. Nokia sold 30 million of the phones in 2012, as it remains the top "feature smartphone" maker in the world.

Posterous, the blogging platform founded in 2008 and then acquired by Twitter last year, will be shutting down on April 30th.

The company made the announcement this week via a blog post.

Reads the post:

Posterous launched in 2008. Our mission was to make it easier to share photos and connect with your social networks. Since joining Twitter almost one year ago, we've been able to continue that journey, building features to help you discover and share what's happening in the world – on an even larger scale.

On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit.

Right now and over the next couple months until April 30th, you can download all of your Posterous Spaces including your photos, videos, and documents.

The highly anticipated Samsung Galaxy S IV has had its specs leaked.

Many expect the device to be announced as early as March 15th, for a summer launch in the U.S.

The specs come via South Korean financial services company Mirae Asset Group. The device will have a 5-inch 1920 x 1080 display, run on Android 4.2 and have 2GB of RAM.

Additionally, the device will have a Exynos 5440 quad-core Cortex A15 processor, said to be the fastest on the market.

BitTorrent Inc. has released their new file sharing service SoShare in beta.

What makes SoShare different from rivals is the fact that users can send extremely large files for free, without having to use multiple links or multiple data transfers.

Using the BitTorrent browser plug-in, users can send files up to 1TB large in a single data transfer.

Making the transfer even easier, is the fact that recipients will not even need a registered account to accept files.

All files remain active for 30 days, or less time if you choose so.

Get the beta here: SoShare Beta

According to Education Database Online, 50 percent of all parents joined Facebook not to get back in touch with others, but rather to spy on their kids.

Additionally, 43 percent of parents check their kids' profiles daily, checking status updates and new photos you may have been tagged in.

Mashable has posted a number of great infographics from the source, about parents and Facebook.

Check it here:

Sony has uploaded the third part of its 'Evolution of PlayStation' series, covering the current generation PlayStation 3 console.

The first video released by Sony on the history of PlayStation ahead of the PS4 launch event, covered the beginning of the brand with the 1995 release of the original PlayStation.

Next, the company released a video highlighting the PS2, the best selling home console of all time.

Now, we have the evolution video for the PlayStation 3, released in 2006. The console has sold 75 million units since release, and was the first console to offer Blu-ray support. Additionally, the console offers users free access to online gaming through the PlayStation Network.

Check the video here:

Iceland is mulling blocking 'violent pornography' in the country, setting itself up as a pioneer of state-sponsored censorship of material deemed inappropriate by.. the state?

There's no doubt that Iceland is a progressive country; it has an openly gay prime minister for example, and it also topped the list of the Global Gender Gap Report in 2012 that assesses countries on how well they are dividing their resources and opportunities among their male and female populations, followed by Finland, Norway, Sweden and Ireland.

Now, with a nod toward gender equality, and also toward protecting children from harmful material, there is a serious debate underway in Iceland about blocking 'violent pornography'.

It's not much of a surprise, Iceland already bans the printing and distributing of pornography. It outlawed strip clubs in 2010 and a year earlier, changed the law on prostitution to criminalize the customer, rather than the sex worker.

Now, it is mulling plans to block violent pornography, with proposals to install web filters, block Internet addresses and even criminalize the use of credit cards for pay-per-view pornography.

Iceland's actions will be watched closely by governments around the world, who may favour blocks on some forms of pornographic content. The biggest problem comes with enforcing the block, given that many porn websites may be user-driven, and might host only small amounts of content that could be considered violent. How do you deal with them?

Sony has uploaded the second part of its 'Evolution of PlayStation' series, covering the incredible success of the PlayStation 2 console.

The first video released by Sony on the history of PlayStation ahead of the PS4 launch event, covered the beginning of the brand with the 1995 release of the original PlayStation.

This video covers the world's most successful video games (home) console, the PlayStation 2. It has sold more than 150,000,000 units worldwide, and has a library of more than 10,000 games. You probably have one gathering dust somewhere now, but when it launched in 2000, the PS2 came with the emotion engine providing excellent graphics improvements, and of course a coveted DVD drive, providing far more capacity than the 700MB discs that contained PS1 games.

Supporting playback of DVD-Video was also huge in 2000, and Sony later went on to release the EyeToy add on, and the network adapter that provided online play for compatible titles.

Watch the video of the biggest selling home console of all time.

Apple is reportedly preparing to release iOS 6.1.2 early next week to fix a security flaw that allows an attacker to bypass the pass code easily.

It's not the first that the iPhone has been affected by this flaw, and it could worry some iPhone users who don't want others to be able to get around their pass code and access some limited information.

German site, iFun, is reporting that Apple will release iOS 6.1.2 to fix the flaw early next week. It has previously predicted iOS release dates accurately.

Apple has come under some pressure since iOS 6.1 was released. Besides the security flaw that will be targeted in iOS 6.1.2, it has also had to grapple with battery related bugs, and problems with 3G signals particularly with iPhone 4S handsets.

The iOS 6.1 update also caused problems for corporate networks, clashing with Microsoft Exchange servers.

Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter has said it is very likely that Sony will cut the price of PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles as it unveils the PS4 in New York next week.

Pachter told GamesIndustry International that a cut was likely by February 21, the day after the Sony PS4 event. He predicts a cut to $199 for the console, and that Microsoft will respond with price cuts for the Xbox 360 console before E3.

Sony may decide to cut the PS3 price to keep gamers interested in buying a new PS3 console, even as it starts to court them with the PlayStation 4 (PS4) before it starts to launch - expected this holiday season.

During Black Friday last year, PS3 bundles sold for $199, and now typically sell for $100 more than that.

Social Network giant Facebook has revealed that it was a target in a sophisticated attack using a zero-day exploit that delivered malware to employee's computers.

The social network discovered the problem last month, which had been started when Facebook employees visited a compromised mobile developer website, specially crafted to exploit a previously unknown vulnerability in Oracle's Java browser products.

Facebook made the discovery when a suspicious domain showed up in the corporate DNS logs and was traced back to an employee's laptop. Further investigation found several other compromised devices. When it discovered the source of the problem, Facebook alerted Oracle, which already issued a security update for affected Java products.

The social network made the information public on Friday, and assured users that there is absolutely no evidence that Facebook user data was compromised.

It also said it was not the only firm targeted with this attack by an unknown group, and said it is committed to sharing information about security threats with other major websites, law enforcement and so on.

Sony is rolling out videos of the evolution of its PlayStation products, starting in 1994 and working their way through the history before the PS4 launch event.

The first episode in this "Evolution of PlayStation" series covers the launch of the original PlayStation, from its inception in 1994, to its launch in late 1995. It shows off some of the software that helped the product sell, and will undoubtedly bring back memories for a lot of us.

It would appear that Sony is planning to release a new video every day up to the PS4 launch event on Wednesday, as it takes advantage of the buzz around the upcoming console.

Check out the video of the PlayStation's birth.

Sony will provide backwards compatibility with PlayStation 3 (PS3) games by supporting streaming them to the console, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Last July, Sony acquired Gaikai in a deal worth $380 million, which led to speculation that the PlayStation 3 would be able to stream game demoes and possibly older PS2 games from the service.

According to a WSJ report, Sony has decided to support streaming of PS3 games to the PS4 console, using the technology acquired from Gaikai. This will allow Sony to offer a level of backwards compatibility, rather than having to include extra hardware in the PS4, or work on complicated software emulation.

Sony is expected to highlight the support for streaming when it reveals the PlayStaion 4 (PS4) in New York on Wednesday, February 20.

Nintendo's woes about its slow launch of the Wii U system continued into January, while Microsoft is touting its 25th straight month as the top selling console in America.

According to reports, Nintendo's Wii U only managed about 57,000 sales in the United States in January, down about 38 percent from the original Wii console at the same point of its life. More than 3 million units have been sold so far, with Nintendo expecting to hit 4 million for the current financial year.

Microsoft on the other hand was boasting about its performance in the market. More than 281,000 Xbox 360 consoles were snapped up in the United States in January 2013, compared to 270,000 in January 2012. That marks the 25th straight month that Microsoft topped the charts with the ageing console, which claims about 44 percent of the market.

The Xbox 360 drove $338 million in retail spending during the month, between the consoles themselves and accessories.

Microsoft is to start pushing its Windows Live Messenger users to its Skype service starting on April 8, 2013.

It had already announced plans to bring Windows Live Messenger and Skype together in November last year, and Microsoft accounts can already be used to login to Skype and have contacts transferred Messenger, Hotmail and Outlook.

Starting in April, users of the Windows Live software on Desktops will get notifications to upgrade from Live Messenger to Skype. The service will start the upgrades with its English language clients, and finish up with Brazilian Portuguese on April 30 or later.

Switching from Messenger to Skype adds some advantages for users:

• Instant message conversation history
• The ability to edit and remove instant messages
• Being able to share files and contact information
• Video calling and instant messaging with Facebook friends
• Group video calling

Valve has launched a version of its Steam gaming software for Ubuntu Linux users, initially offering 60 supported titles for the operating system.

Among the games Linux users can get are titles such as Counter Strike and Team Fortress 2. Valve also cut the prices of the PC and Mac versions of games available to Ubuntu users by up to 75 percent, in a sale that will continue until Thursday, February 21.

With a version of Steam being available for Ubuntu, developers might be interested in including it as a supported platform, but its launch may have more to do with Valve's games console that is in development. The console, which brings the Steam experience to TV, is expected to run some form of Linux.

Currently, Steam sells more than 2,000 games that run on Windows operating systems.

There was interesting report out this week on Nokia and its new partner WYSIPS.

WYSIPS is developing solar-charging surfaces that are aimed at smaller devices such as smartphones.

The solar charging supportive screen is integrated into the screen of a phone and extends battery life up to 20 percent, a huge jump for a relatively inexpensive addition to the device.

WMP says the "technology works by placing a membrane composed of semi-cylindrical lenses between the screen itself and the device. Phones can be charged by natural light, but also artificial light as found in offices."

The first Nokia devices to feature the tech could hit the market in the Fall.

A video with better explanation:

According to Jefferies analyst Peter Misek, Samsung is preparing an "enormous" launch for its upcoming Galaxy S IV.

From launch time until the end of the year, the company is planning to build 100 million of the new smartphones, a massive number.

Most expect the Galaxy S IV to at least be unveiled in March or April, if not released then.

"The enormous 100 million S4 build plan (we estimate the S3 sold 60M) is leading some suppliers to say that they will reallocate resources away from Apple," added Misek. "The S3 also had enormous builds and came within 10% of meeting them on an annual basis."

Samsung's new flagship is expected to have a 5-inch SuperAMOLED+ display, an 8-core processor, and enhanced graphics performance.

Sega has unveiled their new "Sega Note" notebooks, a series of laptops designed to look like the company's retro consoles.

There are four covers, a standard blue Sega, followed by Mega Drive, Saturn, Dreamcast.

Each model has different specs, and a different price tag.

The base model has Windows 8, a Pentium R2020M processor, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, a Full HD display and a DVD drive for 97,500 yen ($1050 USD). Moving to the high end model, you get a 2.40GHz Intel Core i7-3630QM Processor, 8GB of DDR3 SDRAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GT650M 1GB graphics card, a 120GB SSD and a Blu-ray writer for the price of 194,250 yen ($2100 USD).

The casual gaming giant Zynga has settled with EA this week, ending their legal issues.

Last year, EA sued Zynga, claiming that Zynga had plagiarized their Sims Social game with the "Ville" series. Zynga counter-sued EA "anticompetitive and unlawful business practices."

"EA and Zynga have resolved their respective claims and have reached a settlement of their litigation in the Northern District of California," reads the quick release. The settlement terms were not disclosed and the suit was thrown out with prejudice, meaning it cannot be brought again.

In their original suit, EA claimed that the Ville series "wilfully and intentionally copied and misappropriated the original and distinctive expressive elements of The Sims Social in a violation of U.S. copyright laws."

Microsoft has launched their Skype Video Messages feature to iOS, Android and Mac.

The company has been working on the update since last year, and even accidentally leaked some features late in 2012.

Video Messages allows Skype users to send up to 3 minutes of video to each other, and can be used online or off.

You can use either the front or rear camera on your Android or iOS device, and the video will be delivered to the chat portion of Skype. For Macs, it is exactly the same except users will have the option to download the message.

When asked about availability for Windows 8, Microsoft says (via Verge): "We're pleased that there's interest for Video Messaging to come to Skype for Windows and Skype for Windows 8. It should be available by the end of April."

The feature is part of Skype Premium. Non-premium members will get 20 free video messages before being asked to upgrade to the $5 per month Premium service.

Earlier this year, a book claimed that Apple would make new employees work on fake projects until they could be trusted to remain loyal.

The book says the new employees are "hired into so-called dummy positions, roles that aren't explained in detail until after they join the company." Others chimed in, claiming friends had worked on fake projects for months before being added to real projects.

Ars dug a little deeper recently, and found that while Apple may be well known for being secretive, they don't waste resources on loyalty tests.

Says one former Apple engineer: "Apple always seemed to be a no-bullshit kind of place when it comes to the seriousness of your work and what you get done. I find it suspect that they'd ever waste their own and the employee's time on something that didn't directly contribute to their bottom line somehow."

Said a current engineer: "I don't really see the need for that kind of stuff because everything is NDAed [governed by a nondisclosure agreement] out the ass. You can be hired for a position where they don't tell you what you're working on beforehand, sure, but if they're choosing to hire you with your skill set, you might be able to hazard a guess on what it's about. It's a lot easier to have someone sign an NDA and then fire them if they violate it."

According to a new SEC filing, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg now owns 29.3 percent of Facebook's Class A shares, more than he owned when the company went public last year.

At IPO time, Zuck owned a 28.2 percent stake. At current market value, the CEO's stake is worth $13.6 billion.

Thanks to stock and option-based compensation, the founder increased his stake over the last year.

Despite having far and away the most votes in the company, Zuckerberg only owns about 20 percent of the company thanks to different types of voting shares.

Facebook has a market value of $67 billion.

The Raspberry Pi foundation has unveiled the new $25 accessory which will allow for 1080p video at 30fps.

Owners of the mini computer will be able to purchase the new accessory, maybe as soon as March, giving even more functionality to the cheap and powerful device.

Reads the post:

Of course, Model A is not the only new bit of hardware we're releasing in 2013. JamesH just sent me these pictures of the forthcoming camera board to whet your appetite. This is the final hardware; we've been working on tuning (Gert tells me that picture quality is "pretty good" at the moment, but we're hoping to get it to "bleedin' marvellous" before we release the hardware), and there is some work to do on the drivers, but everything's looking pretty peachy for the moment. I don't have a release date for you yet, but we're probably at least a month away (and possibly more) from being able to sell these at the moment.

The Computer History Museum has released the source code for Adobe Photoshop 1.0.1, published in 1990.

Writes the historical society: "With the permission of Adobe Systems Inc., the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code to the 1990 version 1.0.1 of Photoshop. All the code is here with the exception of the MacApp applications library that was licensed from Apple. There are 179 files in the zipped folder, comprising about 128,000 lines of mostly uncommented but well-structured code. By line count, about 75% of the code is in Pascal, about 15% is in 68000 assembler language, and the rest is data of various sorts."

The code was written by Photoshop founder Thomas Knoll, who was the only engineer for v1.

If you are interested in the source code, download it from here, along with a history lesson and user guide: Adobe Photoshop 1.0 Source Code

Facebook CMO David Fischer has confirmed; auto-play video ads may be coming to your news feed soon.

While the exec admitted that the ads can be distracting, he says "I believe there are ways we could do it."

Fischer, speaking at this week's Future Of Media Keynote, says businesses have been asking for ways to include more "attention-grabbing" ads, moving beyond a simple sidebar or news feed text and picture ad.

When asked if the company admired how any other company worked with video ads, he surprisingly gave props to Facebook's biggest competitor, Google. "You know I think YouTube has moved in the right direction by putting more control in the user's hands, with the five-second TrueView thing." TrueView are the ads on YouTube that allow the user to skip after 5 seconds. Businesses only get charged if viewers watch the whole ad.

Fischer was then asked how the ads could be incorporated to the News Feed: "I believe there are ways we could do it. There are ways that could be destructive and distracting to the user experience. But there are ways that could potentially balance user experience with advertiser experience. We haven't put a product out yet because we haven't had one we're comfortable with. But if we could, then we would do it."

Last month, Canonical unveiled details about their upcoming Ubuntu mobile OS, showing off some features running on a Galaxy Nexus handset.

The OS is built on the existing Android kernel and its drivers but will be able to use the "full power of the phone" by not using a Java Virtual Machine. The OS supports ARM and x86 architectures, so phone makers should have little issue adopting it.

Canonical has confirmed today that the first Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview will be made available on February 21st alongside open source code and tools to wipe and flash your device to install the OS.

Additionally, the OS will work on both the Galaxy Nexus and the newer Nexus 4.

When launching the operating system, the Linux maker says Ubuntu will differentiate itself firstly with thumb gestures. Swiping in from the edges of the screen will let users switch apps or use universal search. A quick swipe from the left will bring up a small dock of your most used/favorite apps, while a full swipe from left to right opens a dock showing all your open apps. There will be more gestures added, of course. The home page interface looks to be very different from existing mobile OSs, as well, focusing on our favorites and recently used/added content including music, contacts and apps. Finally, the phone will have universal search and its own Siri-esque voice assistant.

Over the past week, rumors have heated up that Samsung is preparing to launch a Galaxy smartwatch, once again beating Apple to the punch.

Apple has long been rumored to be creating an 'iWatch' with curved glass and a variant of the iOS operating system made popular by the iPhone and iPad. Little is confirmed about the Apple device, however, and there is a good chance it will not be released this year.

A few supposed screenshots of the Galaxy Watches' interface have leaked today, giving a better look into what may be.

As with all rumors, take with a grain of salt, but it certainly would be interesting to see if Samsung gets in the new market.

Google is challenging the inclusion of a YouTube video on a Russian blacklist, meaning it is to be blocked by Internet Service Providers in the country.

The video in question shows a woman using make-up and a razor blade to make it look like she cut her wrist. It was added to a blacklist in Russia, meaning it is to be blocked, on the grounds that it provided instructions for suicide.

Google decided to block the offending clip in Russia, or else it risked having its YouTube service blocked entirely. Now it is appealing the inclusion of the video on the list, using it as a test case to have the regulations of the blacklist clarified.

"We will, at times, restrict content on country-specific domains where a nation's laws require it or if content is found to violate our community guidelines," said a YouTube spokeswoman.

"In this case, we have appealed the decision of Russian Consumer Watchdog because we do not believe that the goal of the law was to limit access to videos that are clearly intended to entertain viewers."

In Russia, regulators can add content to the blacklist if it includes material about suicide, drugs or child sex abuse.

Adobe is investigating reports that there is a vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat XI being exploited in the wild.

The software giant put a notice on its Security Incident and Response Team blog explaining that it was investigating reports that a security problem with the latest Adobe Reader and Acrobat XI (11.0.1) was being exploited in the wild.

This means that a security flaw that Adobe is unaware of is being used by attackers to target users of the Adobe products, though the blog post is shy on details.

"Adobe is aware of a report of a vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat XI (11.0.1) and earlier versions being exploited in the wild. We are currently investigating this report and assessing the risk to our customers. We will provide an update as soon as we have more information. Please continue monitoring the Adobe PSIRT blog for the latest information."

A picture of an alleged early prototype of a PS4 controller containing what appears to be a touchpad has leaked ahead of the PlayStation event.

It had been rumoured in the previous week that the new PlayStation 4 controller would have a touchpad (or touchscreen?) on the front. Now an image has been posted online by Destructoid that allegedly shows an early prototype of a PS4 controller with what appears to be a touchpad.

The controller is wired to what appears to be a development kit. Destructoid cites multiple sources in confirming that it is indeed an early prototype of a PS4 controller.

Sony is set to hold a PlayStation event in New York next Wednesday, February 20, where it is expected to unveul the next PlayStation console.

Gartner research is indicating that the sale of mobile phones worldwide declined by 1.7 percent during 2012.

The research stated tough economic conditions had been partially responsible for the drop. During 2012, over 1.75 billion mobile handsets had been bought, a reduction of 1.7 percent over the previous year.

The biggest drop came from feature phones - low-end devices that do not contain smartphone functionality. In total, 264.4 million feature phones were sold in the busy fourth quarter, a drop of a huge 19.3 percent over the period of the previous year.

Smartphones on the other hand saw a 38.3 percent rise during the same period. Apple and Samsung clearly dominated the market with a 52 percent combined share, while Gartner noted that no other manufacturer was firmly in third spot.

"Their direct competitors, including those with comparable products, struggle to achieve the same brand appreciation among consumers," said principal research analyst Anshul Gupta.

LG Electronics Inc has said that it has received more than 100 pre-orders for its 55-inch OLED television, due to start selling in South Korea.

It will go on sale next Monday, coming to the market before rivals, albeit at a very high cost. Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) televisions promise lower power consumption and sharper contrast than LCD screens, and are widely tipped to be the successor to LCD TVs.

LG Electronics, the world's No.2 manufacturer of televisions behind South Korean rival Samsung, aimed to get to market for a 55-inch OLED display before its rivals. Samsung has yet to announce when it will start producing of OLED flat screens.

This year, LG is hoping to boost TV shipments by 15 percent, after poor performance in its TV business during the vital fourth quarter of 2012.

Apple will challenge a ruling in Brazil this week that found the iPad-maker does not have exclusive rights to the "iPhone" trademark in the country.

The ruling found that Gradiente Eletronica SA had exclusive rights to use the iPhone trademark in relation to mobile handsets - while Apple is still free to use it in software or any other area. In fact, Apple can go ahead and market iPhones in Brazil all it wants, but Gradiente would be able to sue it for exclusive rights any time.

Gradiente applied for the iPhone trademark in 2000, and it was awarded to the firm in 2008.

Due to Apple's complaint to regulator, Inpi, Gradiente will have to prove that it used the iPhone trademark before January 2013, as Brazilian regulation states that brands in brazil must be developed within five years of gaining approval.

The Android-running iPhone Neo One (pictured) was launched in December 2012, so proving the use of the brand name should not be difficult.

Europol leads charge against cybercriminals who profited from distributing ransomware to victim's computers, forcing them to hand over money.

It worked with Spanish police to dismantle the operation, which affected at least tens of thousands of computer users in Europe.

The ransomware would present itself on screen and attempt to emotionally blackmail, or scare the user into handing over a fee. For example, it would asset that the PC had been used to view images of child sex abuse, and demand that a €100 fine be paid immediately as a settlement.

Even if users were completely sure that their computers were never used for such illicit activity, ransomware can make using a computer incredibly difficult.

Operation Ransom resulted in 11 arrests – the first was a 27-year-old Russian, responsible for the creation, development and international distribution of the various versions of the malware. He was arrested in the United Arab Emirates and is currently awaiting extradition to Spain.

Furthermore, one of the criminal network's largest financial cells in the Costa del Sol was dismantled. Spanish Police also arrested another 10 individuals linked to the financial cell: six Russians, two Ukrainians and two Georgians.

An Egyptian regulator has appealed against an order to block the YouTube website in the country, saying that the block is not enforceable without serious economic costs.

The National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority is objecting to a court ordered block on YouTube over the availability of, "Innocent of Muslims" a movie trailer deemed blasphemous for portraying the Islamic prophet as a stupid, sexual deviant.

"The National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority has presented an appeal to halt implementation of the verdict," a statement read. "The government cannot carry out the contents of the verdict within Egypt's borders."

It warned that it was technically impossible to shut down YouTube in the country without harming Google's Search business, and so risking economic damage. It also noted that the video itself is already blocked in Egypt.

"Blocking YouTube would affect the search engine of Google, of which Egypt is the second biggest user in the Middle East," the statement said, also going on to say that only the United States can block YouTube.

iFixit has performed a teardown on the new Microsoft Surface Pro and found that the tablet is one of the least repairable devices they have ever worked with.

The company gave the tablet a repairability rating of 1/10, the lowest possible score. In fact, the score was even lower than the rating the Windows RT-based Surface before it and Apple's iPad, which is a long-time low score receiver.

Starting with the display, iFixit says the screen is held together "by a metric duckload of adhesive" and required a heat gun and "guitar picks" just to pry it. The battery is also so strongly glued in place that iFixit says you need to replace the back cover entirely if you ever take it out.

More importantly for those looking to get into the hardware, "four cables surround the inside perimeter of the display, so you will cut one of them unless you're extremely careful."

The Surface Pro also has 90 screws, with 29 holding down just two metal side plates.

Microsoft is pushing out updates to address issues with the Surface RT tablet, fixing problems with Wi-Fi and improving performance.

The company is addressing some problems the reliability of Wi-Fi in the first tablet it has ever released, and is also pushing out some more updates to improve the performance.

Moderator Jordana_S gave the details to a questioner on a Microsoft Support forum thread.

Hi there Wesley P.

That is a great question, which I am happy to address. The February update, which will be available later today, includes improved Surface Wi-Fi reliability, connectivity in various scenarios, and performance improvements:

• This release will address several 'Limited' Wi-Fi connections issues.
• Contains driver updates improving performance with Windows, Volume and Power buttons

I hope this is helpful, please let me know if you have any further questions.

GameStop chief financial officer Rob Lloyd has said that around 60 percent of customers would not buy a games console that will block used games from booting.

Lloyd was speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference yesterday when he made his remarks. He also put the "problem" of used game sales into perspective.

"It's really only about 4 percent of our used game sales are games that were games released in the last 60 days," Lloyd said.

"So it does not have a big impact on the sale of new product. So that's why publishers understand how important the preowned business is to them. Sony has said publicly that they don't intend to block used games in their next console. Microsoft has refused to or has not commented on the rumors that have hit the marketplace."

Lloyd said that GameStop has shared internal research with platform holders that indicate a high percentage would snub consoles with such limitations.

"I think it's approximately 60 percent of the customers who have said they wouldn't buy a new console if it didn't play preowned games," he said.

Apple does not have exclusive rights to the 'iPhone' trademark in Brazil, it has been ruled.

Gradiente Eletronica registered the iPhone trademark over 12 years ago, and currently sells its own iPhone Neo One in Brazil - running Android.

Apple had argued that it should be granted exclusive rights to the iPhone trademark because Gradiente never released an iPhone device until December 2012. Apple can still sell its iPhone models in Brazil, but now Gradiente has the option to sue for exclusivity.

Apple can also use the iPhone trademark for products other than mobile handsets, and is expected to appeal the decision.

Gradiente's iPhone sells for 599 reals - about $196 - and runs Android 2.3. Check it out at gradiente.com.br

Apple has made some changes to its line of MacBook products, beefing up specs and/or cutting the price of models.

Sales of Apple's MacBook products have been lower than expected, leading some analysts to question whether Apple's own iPad product is harming sales of its high-end notebooks.

Today, Apple has made some changes to bump the disappointing sales. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display now starts at $1,499 for 128GB of flash, and $1,699 for a new 2.6 GHz processor and 256GB of flash.

The 15-ince MacBook Pro with Retina display now features a 2.4GHz quad-core processor, while the top-end 15-inch notebook now comes with a 2.7GHz quad-core processor and 16GB of memory. Apple also announced that the 13-inch MacBook Air with 256GB of flash has a new price of $1,399.

The updated MacBook Pro with Retina display and MacBook Air models are available today through the Apple Online Store, Apple's Retailer Stores and authorized re-sellers.

Phony Pirate Bay has real copies of pages, style sheets.

Finnish anti piracy group, TTVK, has uploaded a fake Finnish language copy of the Pirate Bay at piraattilahti.fi (literally translates as Pirate Bay). The page has been translated to Finnish, as well as the logo, which shows a pirate ship sinking.

Clicking on any of the links just brings you to an anti-piracy message, linking you to an external source.

What's amusing about the phony page is it copies certain elements 1:1 from the Pirate Bay website in order to dupe Finnish Internet users into believing they are using a localized version of the popular site. The style sheet used by the mock site even starts with the comment, "The Pirate Bay - main style sheet for thepiratebay.se." (See Below)

LG has unveiled three new smartphones today, part of their L Series II lineup.

The Optimus L7 II, Optimus L5 II and Optimus L3 II will build upon the company's original L Series, as they "embody the beauty of the first L Series but with a more refined touch." Each will include new design elements, dubbed Seamless Layout, Laser Cut Contour, Radiant Rear Design and Smart LED Lighting.

Featuring a 4.3-inch IPS WVGA display, the L7 II is the most high-end of the group. The device has a dual-core 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor (MSM8225), runs on 768MB RAM, has 4GB internal storage, dual cameras 3MP/8MP and a 2,460 mAh battery. The phone runs on Android 4.1 and is available as a dual-SIM version.

The L5 II has a 4-inch WVGA display and a 1,700 mAh battery, but other details are unknown. The L3 II has a small 3.2-inch QVGA IPS display and 1,540 mAh battery.

Microsoft has released some new data figures related to their Xbox 360 console.

As of this week, Xbox 360 sales have surpassed 76 million units. Kinect sales have now reached 24 million, as the motion controller remains popular.

Additionally, the company says Xbox Live now has 46 million paying subscribers.

The Xbox remains the most popular console in the U.S., outselling the PS3 and even the newer Wii U.

Says the company: "2012 also marked the Xbox's biggest year for entertainment and games usage. Users enjoyed more than 18 billion hours of entertainment in 2012, with entertainment app usage growing 57 percent year over year globally. Last year in the United States, Xbox LIVE Gold members averaged 87 hours per month on Xbox, an increase of 10 percent year over year."

Microsoft has confirmed today that retailers will be receiving more Surface Pro tablet stock by the weekend.

The 128GB model sold out online within hours of launch.

Panos Panay, Microsoft's Surface team head, says new stock will reach Microsoft Stores, Best Buy and Staples by Saturday. 64GB models should be back in stock earlier.

"There continues to be great demand. We're working hard to restock so we can reach as many customers as soon as possible," Panay added.

The Pro costs $900 for 64GB models and $1000 for 128GB models.

Sony has patented an updated Vita handheld.

The new portable could include an HDMI and a USB port, which would certainly be upgrades to the console.

It appears that the company filed the application last year, but the patents were published this month.

Sony has never noted that they plan to introduce any kind of video output options for the Vita, but that could change for the future.

The electronics company has a PlayStation event on February 20th in which it is expected to unveil the PlayStation 4 (Orbis). The company could potentially also unveil a Vita successor, if there is one to unveil.

Comcast has announced today that it will be purchasing the remaining 49 percent of NBCUniversal that it does not own.

The massive cable company will purchase the stake from GE for $16.7 billion, giving it 100 percent ownership of the film and television company.

In 2011, Comcast purchased the majority stake from GE for $13.75 billion after 16 months of regulatory hurdles.

Additionally, the cable co. is purchasing NBCU's floors at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in NYC for $1.4 billion.

Comcast had the right to buy the remaining stake starting in July 2014, but decided the price was right today. "Our belief is that we would have paid more later," added Comcast's CEO.

The evad3rs team has released an update for its evasi0n iOS 6.x jailbreak tool in order to add support for iOS 6.1.1 on iPhone 4S handsets.

At the time of writing, iOS 6.1.1 is only available officially for the iPhone 4S. It was released early by Apple after reports of bugs with iOS 6.1 that seemed to affect iPhone 4S handsets more than other devices. Vodafone in the UK and 3 in Austria had encouraged users to hold off iOS 6.1, but Vodafone then encouraged its iPhone 4S users to get the iOS 6.1.1 when it became available.

The updated evasi0n v1.3 now adds support for the iPhone 4S model, which is not much of a surprise as it had already been confirmed that the bugs exploited by evasiOn in iOS 6.0-6.1 were unfixed when Apple pushed out iOS 6.1.1 to developers to test.

In the week or so that evasi0n has been out, more than 7 million devices - including iPhone 5 and iPad mini - have been jailbroken, allowing for non-approved apps and code to run on the devices.

Apple warns users about the dangers of jailbreaking, including security risks of running unapproved code and the loss of warranty for jailbreaking a device.

The much-anticipated HTC M7 is said to be launching with a rebranded name, the "HTC One."

HTC has used the One title in most of its previous devices, which were launched at last year's Mobile World Congress.

The device will be the first to feature HTC's own Sense 5 overlay, as well as new "ultrapixel" camera technology. The ultrapixel tech has multiple different sensors (all at around 4MP) that take simultaneous photos and recreate the best parts of each, for added clarity and colors.

Leaked specs for the phone are that it will have a quad-core Qualcomm APQ8064 processor, a 4.7-inch 1920x1080 display with 468 ppi, 32GB of internal storage (no microSD slot), LTE and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

Vertu's latest luxury smartphone comes with a hefty $10,000 price tag, and it doesn't even support 4G networks.

The Android-running Vertu Ti starts around US$10,000, but cost double that based on which model you choose, and it doesn't even support 4G networks. For Vertu though, it is not about being at the bleeding edge of technology, it is about craftsmanship and making a device that isn't a disposable product.

The Ti sports a titanium frame and 3.7-inch sapphire screen, and weighs about 180g.

Vertu Ti is powered by Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, and features a 1.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 SoC, 64GB storage. Other features include an 8MP rear camera with auto focus and twin LED flash, a 1.3MP front facing Skype compliant camera and secure near field communication technology.

Until recently, Vertu was owned by Nokia. It targets only the very high end of the market with its products, with approximately 360,000 owners of Vertu devices after ten years in business.

Hackers managed to breach the Emergency Alert System to broadcast a message about Zombie attacked on a TV station in Montana.

CBS affiliate KRTV in Montana had its regular programming interrupted with an audio message warning viewers about an ongoing Zombie attack, telling them that the bodies of the dead have risen from their graves and are attacking the living.

KRTV published a response to the message explaining that the message was the result of the hack, but didn't even mention the topic of the alert.

The full message read out during the broadcast (see video) is as follows:

"Civil authorities in your area have reported that the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living. Follow the messages onscreen that will be updated as information becomes available. Do not attempt to apprehend or approach these bodies as they are considered extremely dangerous.

"I repeat, civil authorities in your area have reported that the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living. Do not attempt to apprehend or approach these bodies as they are considered extremely dangerous.

Most likely in an effort to appeal to younger viewers, the White House has released a short trailer for tonight's State of the Union address featuring dubstep music.

The electronic music has become more famous in recent years thanks to mainstream names like Skrillex.

Tonight's speech begins at 9PM and can be seen on all major networks.

If you are viewing from the White House website or on a mobile device, you will be able to see an "enhanced version" of the speech that includes interactive charts and graphs.

Here is the trailer:

Microsoft and Apple are investigating an issue with iOS 6.1 devices and Exchange E-mail Servers, as Microsoft offers workaround advice.

The problem arises when a user syncs a mailbox by using an iOS 6.1-based device, prompting excessive logging and resource usage with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Client Access server (CAS). It can cause memory and CPU usage to increase significantly, impacting performance.

IT administrators have already reportedly been blocking iOS 6.1 devices from syncing, and now Microsoft is presenting this as a workaround until it, and Apple, can find a solution for the issue.

"You can block iOS 6.1 users by using the Exchange Server 2010 Allow/Block/Quarantine feature," a Microsoft advisory on the issue reads.

Microsoft also details a couple of other options to work around the problem before it is fixed.

iOS 6.1 has been the root of several different problems since its launch in late January. Users reported that they had decreased battery life after updating, which is a common complaint when a new iOS iteration is put out. Then there were reported of intermittent 3G signal issues, which were later confirmed by multiple mobile service providers in Europe.

Intel Media VP Erik Huggers has confirmed that the chipmaker will enter into the growing and competitive Internet TV space with a new service, set to launch this year.

Huggers said that hundreds of Intel's employees are testing out a set-top box that the company will bring to the market as part of its service. Intel Media is currently in ongoing negotiations with content providers.

It joins Google, Amazon and Apple in their quest to shake up the $100 billion cable TV ecosystem, taking advantage of changing habits of consumers.

"We have been working for (the past) year to set up Intel media, a new group focused on developing an Internet platform," Huggers said at the AllThingsDigital "Dive into Media" conference.

"It's not a value play, it's a quality play where we'll create a superior experience for the end user."

Huggers once worked for the BBC, and launched the iPlayer for the British corporation in 2007.

As well as providing on-demand content, Intel wants to step ahead of the competition and offer live programming too, whilst also making its system smarter. For example, Intel's STB will include a camera that can filter content for a specific users, and also target ads more effectively.

The government of Myanmar denied today that they were behind attempts on hacking emails of journalists around the world.

Google had warned that the country may have been behind the "state-sponsored attacks" on local and international reporters. There were 12 attacks last week, where the journalists received messages from Google when they logged into Gmail that hackers "may be attempting to compromise your account or your computer."

The search giant regularly sends out those warnings when someone tries to log in to your account from a place that is outside your normal habits. For example, if you normally log in from New York, and there is a log in attempt from Myanmar, you are likely to receive the warning.

Myanmar presidential spokesman Ye Htut says Google should identify the attackers "because the vague reference to state-sponsored attackers hurts the image of the government."

"There is no state-sponsored attack on individual accounts. That's not a policy of our government," added Ye Htut.

Myanmar had long been considered one of the most censored countries on the planet, with journalists being wire tapped and put under state surveillance. Independent newspapers could not even publish daily without approval. In the last two years, however, nearly all of those practices have been abolished.

Google has made the aptly named Nexus 4 Wireless Charger available to fans of the new flagship.

The device is available through the Google Play Store, and ships "within a week."

For $60 (before tax and shipping), users receive the nice looking orb, which is Qi inductive. "Its angled surface provides easy visibility of your phone while charging. This elegant device was designed specifically for your Nexus 4 -- no clunky add-ons or accessories needed," says Google.

When docked, the phone will reveal the battery power, and weather, news and sports. Google says it takes a bit over 3 hours to fully charge the device with the charger.

Check it here: Nexus 4 Wireless Charger

Pelosi wants comprehensive gun violence debate that is based on evidence, and not anecdote.

The House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi (D), was speaking on Fox News Sunday on the issue of gun violence in America. Interviewer Chris Wallace brought up the role of video games and asked Pelosi why she doesn't get her Hollywood friends to "stop the video games."

"I understand what you're saying. I'm a mother, I'm a grandmother," Pelosi said. "The evidence says, in Japan for example, they have the most violent games and the lowest mortality from guns. I don't know what the explanation is for that, except that they might have good gun laws."

She criticized Wallace for sticking to only one part of the issue of gun violence. While she said that further examination of video games is needed, it must be in the context of a larger comprehensive look at the gun issue and based on evidence.

"I think we have to do it all. We have to take a look at these games are," Pelosi said.

"I don't think we should do anything anecdotally. We have a saying here: the plural of anecdote is not data. And so we want to know: what is the evidence? What will really make a difference here? And I think it has to be comprehensive."

Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, hit Reddit today to answer some questions.

Before he even started the AMA, he posted a short animated video answering the the most popular questions being posed to him. The first question in the video is, "How much money is in your wallet?," followed by, "Can I have a million dollars?," and of course, "Which would you rather fight: 100 duck-sized horses, or one horse-sized duck?" (Video below).

In the AMA he got into more interesting stuff however, like when he was asked about any products he regretted not launching with Microsoft:

"We had a rich database as the client/cloud store that was part of a Windows release that was before its time. This is an idea that will remerge since your cloud store will be rich with schema rather than just a bunch of files and the client will be a partial replica of it with rich schema understanding."

Apple is going to rush out the iOS 6.1.1 update to fix bugs in iOS 6.1, according to a report from German site iFun.

Apple released the iOS 6.1 update late in January and quickly started to receive complaints about decreased battery life and problems with 3G signal. Such complaints arise after almost every iOS update, but in this case it has gotten to a point where wireless carriers have told users - particularly iPhone 4S owners - not to install the iOS 6.1 update if they already haven't.

Vodafone in the UK even suggested that a number of iOS 6.1-running iPhone 4S handsets in the same area could cause 3G congestion and affect non-iPhone users too. It pointed the finger of blame at Apple, and assured customers that the company is working on a fix for the 3G connectivity problems.

3 in Austria also warned iPhone 4S users to hold off the iOS 6.1 update last week.

Facebook sued over its 'Like' button.

The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in Virginia by global law firm Fish & Richardson, on behalf of Rembrandt Social Media. The lawsuit involves two patents originally issues to "Jos" van der Meer, who is now deceased.

Rembrandt now owns patents that va Der Meer used in constructing a social network called Surfbook. He died in 2004, the same year that Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg. Rembrandt alleges that Facebook, and another firm called Add This, has used two patents without permission.

"We believe Rembrandt's patents represent an important foundation of social media as we know it, and we expect a judge and jury to reach the same conclusion based on the evidence," said attorney Tom Melsheimer, counsel for Rembrandt and managing principal of Fish & Richardson's Dallas office.

Google ran an ad for the popular Nexus 4 smartphone during the Grammys, featuring its Google Now service, widely seen as a Siri competitor.

The ad shows Nexus 4 users in different cities around the world, using their device for a variety of tasks. While the smartphone is popular, Google clearly wanted to advertise Google Now by showing off its useful features in different contexts.

Two girls use it to help them to get translations to communicate with locals overseas, while another couple use to it help locate a suitable restaurant. A mother checks Google Now for a weather update and tells her son its snowing, which he then tells his Dad who is away on business, through video.

Check it out if you didn't watch the Grammy awards.

Microsoft shows off its Surface Pro tablet running Windows 8 in a new ad featuring beatboxing and break dancing, but some customers would like to know where they are.

The Surface Pro commercial really emphasizes the pen input on the tablet, when a bunch of Surface users break into a choreographed session of dancing and beatboxing, solidifying the ad in the realm of pure cheese. See it below.

As enthusiastic as Microsoft appear to be about the Surface Pro launch, they can't seem to keep up with demand, either because they genuinely screwed up the launch or because they are trying some silly marketing trick to get "sold out" headlines.

"I really wanted the Surface Pro 128. I went to 4 stores...but like most others I was completely let down by the lack of inventory. It reeks of incompetence at best or a poor marketing ploy at worst," user ARigs, said on Microsoft's official Surface blog.

Others were just as annoyed, checking multiple locations and not being able to get their hands on a precious Surface Pro. They aren't cheap either, remember the 64GB Pro will set you back $899, while one packing 128GB stretches to $999.

Mobile service provider Solavei brings BlackBerry 10-equipped BlackBerry Z10 smartphone to the United States a month early, but it will cost you almost a thousand dollars.

It is listed on GSM Nation - Solavei's retail partner - for a whopping $999.00. The smartphone is slated to launch in the United States in mid-March, but for those who can't wait that long and don't care about the lack of a subsidy, Solavei comes to the rescue.

Solavei is a contract-free mobile service provider that piggy backs on T-Mobile's national network, offering customers an unlimited voice, SMS and data plan for $49 per month, and provides financial incentives for signing other people up to the service.

It does not spend much money on advertising - relying instead on encouraging customers to recruit - and it will not provide similarly generous subsidies that major carriers in the U.S. do (typically coupled with a long-term contract.)

The BlackBerry Z10 is already available in the United Kingdom and in Canada, and was technically due to hit the U.S. market next month.

"We believe in giving our members access to the latest phones and wireless capabilities," said Ryan Wuerch, founder and CEO of Solavei.

President Obama to follow VP Joe Biden by hosting Google+ Hangout.

The President will deliver his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress and the American people on Tuesday evening, continuing a 200 year tradition. Ex Presidents and their staff would typically then be grilled about the speech for a few days afterwards by the media, and the Obama administration will be no different.

On Thursday however, President Obama will subject himself to questions in a Google+ Hangout session at 4:50pm ET. Like VP Biden's Hangout, the President will be joined by a group of people who regularly discuss important issues of the day online. Americans will also be able to submit questions or thoughts to the President by going to the White House YouTube channel and submitting a questions (text or video).

You have until 11:59 p.m. ET on Wednesday, February 13.

The President's State of the Union address will also be broadcast live on YouTube, from 9pm ET, as will the response from the Republican Party via Senator Marco Rubio.

Tech giants summoned to answer Australian Federal Government's questions on prices.

Australians are paying more than Americans for tech products and software, and the Australian parliament wants to know why. It has summoned Apple Inc, Microsoft Inc and Adobe Systems Inc to answer questions about prices in the country before a committee on March 22, 2013.

Leading the charge for answers from the tech giants is Labour representative for Chifley, Western Sydney, Ed Husic, who said it should not have come to a subpoena. He had previously raised questions about the amount of corporate tax paid by Apple in Australia, generating UAD$6 billion in revenue and paying only UAD$40 million in tax.

Now he wants to know why Australians pay so much more for hardware and software than their United States counterparts, despite a stronger Australian dollar. For example, Apple's 16GB iPad (WiFi model) sells in Australia for AUD$539, compared to US$499 in the United States. It is a similar story for Microsoft's software products, such as Office, which sell for a considerable mark-up over U.S. prices.

In May 2012, a committee was setup to probe the higher prices, and all three tech firms were invited to participate. Of course, none of them did, and reportedly blamed each other for not showing up.

Samsung and EA have teamed up in an effort to bring new developers to Samsung's apps store, which has lagged behind that of rivals.

The company will offer financial incentives never before seen, in an effort to expand its library of games. Independent developers will keep 100 percent revenue for the first six months, compared to the 70 percent they normally keep when writing for platforms like iOS, Android or Windows 8. After the 6 months, Samsung will take 10 percent for the next six months. In year two, Samsung will take 20 percent. In the third year, the company will take the 30 percent share seen by rival app stores.

Launching on March 4th, the program will be aimed at smaller indie devs.

"Samsung is selling more phones than ever and content and hardware, they always go hand in hand," adds EA, which will be spearheading the deal. The new program is also non-exclusive, so companies can feel free to publish games to all available platforms. They can also bring existing titles to Samsung Apps.

evasi0n updates as 7 million devices already jailbroken.

The tool was released earlier in the week to jailbreak iOS 6 devices - iPhone (incl. iPhone 5), iPad, iPad mini and iPod touch - and has since now had two subsequent updates. The first, addressed an issue with the Weather app and long reboots, while another update (v1.2) disables OTA updates since they don't work jailbreak devices.

In the first four days since the jailbreak was released, it had been run on over 7 million devices, according to Cydia founder Jay Freeman.

If you are considering running the jailbreak on your phone/ipad, make sure that you get the latest version of the tool. The homepage for the tool is evasi0n.com.

Kim Dotcom will be paying out to hackers.

He offered hackers up to €10,000 per successful hack or exposure of security vulnerabilities with his new MEGA service. The actual amount paid out will depend on the severity rating of the security issue that is identified by the contestant.

There are six "severity class" vulnerabilities that hackers can aim at, with low impact or "purely theoretical scenarios" being at one end of the spectrum - class I - and more serious exploitable cryptographic design flaws at the other end - class VI.

The results show that so far, seven flaws have been identified with the MEGA service's security. They include two Class I flaws, one Class II flaws, three Class III flaws and one Class IV flaws. There were no Class V or VI flaws.

Here are the details...

More and more full movies show up on YouTube.

Despite YouTube allowing media companies to weed out copyright infringing content on the service, using Content ID, users are still uploading full length movies from studios including Walt Disney and Sony. Combined, these movies have racked up hundreds of millions of views on the service.

"We are aware of the issue and are concerned about it," Howard Gantman, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America, told the Wall Street Journal.

"Our member companies have raised the issue with YouTube and hope they will work cooperatively with us to fix it."

A YouTube spokesman told the WSJ that the service has invested heavily in copyright and content management tools to give rights holders control of their content. Over 4,000 media companies use Content ID, which has identified more than 200 million infringing videos since it appeared in 2007.

Twitter has raised the prices of its "promoted trends."

Buying a trend will now cost advertisers $200,000 per day, up from $150,000 in 2012. The service has been increasing prices as Twitter grows, and the original price in 2010 was $80,000 per day.

Promoted trends allows an advertiser to create its own hash tag or message at the top of the current "trends" list found on Twitter's home page and the main page of most Twitter mobile apps.

To give the advertiser their money's worth, there is only one promoted message per day, per country.

Major companies have cited successes using the service, although at $200,000, marketing teams may have to re-examine the figures.

According to the New York Times, Apple is indeed working on the long-rumored "iWatch."

The smart watch will use curved glass to bend around user's wrists and to give it better viewing angles.

Unfortunately, the report has little details on any features, nor does it have a timetable for any release. The watch has been media rumor for at least two years now.

Reads the paper: "In its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., Apple is experimenting with wristwatch-like devices made of curved glass, according to people familiar with the company's explorations, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because they are not allowed to publicly discuss unreleased products. Such a watch would operate Apple's iOS platform, two people said, and stand apart from competitors based on the company's understanding of how such glass can curve around the human body."

The watch will most likely be an "experiment" for the company, just like its Apple TV set-top box has been since its launch. The gadget will work similarly to other smart watches like the Pebble and Nike's new offerings, which allow users to quickly check emails and messages without needing to take their phones out.

Cook didn't want to start legal fight with Samsung.

Apple CEO Tim Cook did not have an appetite for a legal fight with Samsung after the South Korean firm released its first Galaxy-branded smartphones. He felt that Samsung was a critical supplier of components for Apple's products, and that a legal dispute would be damaging.

The late Steve Jobs saw it differently, however. He felt that Samsung was using its position as a main supplier to Apple as an advantage, making its products very similar in design to Apple's and betting that Apple wouldn't resort to litigation.

After Samsung's release of the Galaxy Tab in 2011, Steve Jobs accused Samsung of outright stealing from Apple, as he had also deemed Google's Android OS a "stolen product."

After Apple filed a lawsuit in 2011, a patent war emerged between the two companies, spilling into Europe, Australia and to Asia.

One collector is using eBay to sell one of the largest and most complete video game collections in the world.

Such a collection will set you back $550,000, as of now, and there currently is one bidder.

Reads the description:

After a life spent collecting video games I decide to sell off my entire collection.

I just have too much things and the space to store them is finished long ago... also I realized that if I want to play at least half of my games, I should live two or three entire human life...

Just to give an idea of the huge amount of items present in my collection, I spent the last two months of my life taking pictures and making lists, working about eight hours a day just in order to make an inventory and to figure out what I have. Even now after all the time spent checking things I'm not sure to have included all in the lists. Due to the sheer amount of items is even difficult to present it, and I don't really know were to start... so I try to do my best even if I'm sure I might forget something.

Instead to pick up some favorite consoles and maybe try to complete all the games related, I choose to collect most systems possible with the most representative and rare games for each console. This collection is the story of the videogames from A to Z, from the game & watch and old pong systems to the actual generation of PS3 and XBOX360.

According to a new report from anti-virus firm AVG, young children have begun writing malicious code to hack accounts of friends and others.

The code is aimed at stealing virtual currency from others on gaming sites and social networks. Many games (especially those on Facebook) now sell virtual currency, which can be used to purchase upgrades in the game, such as weapons or new characters.

AVG says the children, that are as young as 11, must be educated on the rights and wrongs of coding.

"As more schools are educating people for programming in this early stage, before they are adults and understand the impact of what they're doing, this will continue to grow," added Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CTO at AVG.

Most of the "amateur" code was written using basic languages such as Visual Basic and C# and included errors that made it easy to reverse engineer and find the original source of the code. Adult coders would not have made such mistakes, says AVG.

One such example was a "cheat program" for Runescape. The program promised free currency (gold) but instead stole log-in details. The code was sloppy, however. "We found that the malware was trying to steal the data from people and send it to a specific email address. The malware author included in that code the exact email address and password and additional information - more experienced hackers would never put these type of details in malware." The email was that of an 11-year-old in Canada. Researchers were able to use the code to even discover where the child lived, and what phone he used.

The Internet was up in arms earlier this week when Microsoft announced that its 128GB Surface Pro only had 83GB of actual usable space.

It appears, however, the Microsoft understated their own estimate, due to a difference between their production and final shipping units.

In reality, the tablet will have 89.7GB of free space, a figure that is not significantly higher but is certainly an upgrade.

Says Verge: "A source inside Microsoft tells me the employee who confirmed the numbers did so using pre-production machines that contained different disk images and debug code that is different from final shipping units that will be on sale beginning this weekend."

The same deal is existent for the 64GB model, which will actually ship with 29GB of usable space, compared to Microsoft's own 23GB estimate.

John Carmack, the lead developer behind legendary games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, has raised questions on whether it is worth it for studios to port their games to the Linux operating system.

Carmack, during his time at Id Software and later, has always supported Linux but says that porting most games is "not commercially viable."

"The conventional wisdom is that native Linux games are not a good market. Id Software tested the conventional wisdom twice, with Quake Arena and Quake Live. The conventional wisdom proved correct. Arguments can be made that neither one was an optimal test case, but they were honest tries," added the developer.

Instead of full ports, Carmack says Windows emulation would be a better choice. More specifically, the developer suggests that WINE be better developed. "I truly do feel that emulation of some sort is a proper technical direction for gaming on Linux. It is obviously pragmatic in the range of possible support, but it shouldn't have the technical stigma that it does."

Asus will be debuting a 7-inch Fonepad at the upcoming Mobile World Congress event this month, say sources.

A couple of leaked photos show the Fonepad featuring an aluminum back and an Intel Inside badge on the back.

The sources seem to have a full spec list, as well: "1.2GHz Intel Atom Z2420 processor, PowerVR SGX540 graphics, and 1GB of RAM. Its 7-inch screen will be of the IPS LCD kind and will sport a resolution of 1280 by 800 pixels. A couple of cameras will be on board as well – a 3.2MP on the back and a 1.2MP front-facing snapper. The internal 4,270mAh battery should last through 9.5 hours of continuous use."

Perhaps most notably, the tablet will have voice calling capability, although it is unclear how. The device will be priced at $200.

According to sources, Guerrilla Games is already developing 'Killzone 4' for launch this year on the PlayStation 4.

The game could be unveiled this month after Sony's PlayStation event on February 20th, in which the company is expected to finally give more details about the upcoming console.

Killzone 3 was released for the PS3 in February 2011 and is one of the best-selling games in the console's history. Guerrilla shipped Killzone: Mercenary most recently in September, but for the handheld PlayStation Vita.

Reports had claimed that KZ3 senior producer Steven Ter Heide will be the game director for KZ4.

The studio did not comment.

According to the latest Canalys figures, tablets accounted for 46 percent of all PC shipments in the Q4 2012, huge news for the devices that really did not exist before the 2010 launch of the iPad.

Overall, there were 134 million units shipped, 46.2 million of which qualified as tablets. Tablet shipments grew 75 percent year-over-year.

Apple controlled the lion's share, shipping 27 million iPads. The new iPad Mini accounted for just over half of all iPad shipments. However, Apple fell below 50 percent tablet share for the year for the first time ever, says the report.

"Apple timed the launch of the iPad Mini well," added Canalys research analyst, Pin-Chen Tang. "Its success proves there is a clear demand for pads with smaller screens at a more affordable price. Without the launch, Apple would surely have lost more ground to its competitors."

Samsung moved 7.6 million tablets, and Amazon shipped 4.6 million units. Google's Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets (built by Asus and Samsung), shipped 2.6 million units during the quarter. Microsoft's Windows RT-based Surface shipped just 720,000 units. Canalys says Microsoft has failed with the tablet, "The outlook for Windows RT appears bleak. Hardware OEMs are ignoring it due, in part, to a pricing strategy that does not align with the economics of the pad market."

Security firm hacked because it wasn't running its own software.

Bit9, a company that provides security solutions to customers, said it was hacked and a number of its customers were targeted with malware. It admitted that it could have avoided the hack if it had implemented its own software properly on its network.

Bit9 is a "white listing" service provider with customers that range from government agencies to financial firms. White listing protects systems from being attacked by only allowing software from trusted vendors.

The hackers breached a system that Bit9 uses to digital sign its software so that its customers know its safe to run on their systems. They then signed malware using Bit9's digital signature and pushed it out to several of its customers.

"Due to an operational oversight within Bit9, we failed to install our own product on a handful of computers within our network," Chief Executive Patrick Morley wrote.

"As a result, a malicious third party was able to illegally gain temporary access to one of our digital code-signing certificates that they then used to illegitimately sign malware."

Amazon looking at second hand e-books, audio sales?

The Internet giant has been granted a patent that covers a secondary market where used digital content, such as e-books and audio, is sold. The content is stored in a user's personalized data store.

The ability to re-sell digital content is a hot topic at the moment, and one likely to be met with nothing but resistance from content providers. Amazon's business model however, does have a large focus on the sale of used goods like books and games, and therefore it is not much of a surprise that it would be interested in innovating for digital items.

ReDigi.com is an attempt to provide a market place for pew-owned digital music, but it is currently involved in a lawsuit brought by Capital Records. It wants to expand into e-books and has responded positively to the news of the Amazon patent.

"The Amazon patent is further proof that the secondary market is the future of the digital space and that there is no turning back," ReDigi is quoted to commented by PublishersWeekly.

BBC Trust backs iPlayer trial.

The BBC will make TV programmes available on the iPlayer before they broadcast on TV, after the BBC Trust approved a year long trial. Broadband customers in the UK will be able to watch content on the services' iPlayer before it is scheduled to be broadcast on TV, across all genres.

In 2012, the BBC iPlayer served more than a billion videos and radio streams to Internet users. Around 2 percent of all BBC viewers watch its programming solely via the Internet.

BBC's iPlayer is available across platforms, such as games consoles and mobile devices, and while the license-payer funded service dwarves the private competition, services like Netflix can benefit in the long run to more consumer adopting of Internet streaming as opposed to TV viewing.

The BBC has not yet decided exactly which programmes will be available on iPlayer first.

Apple to beef up iPhone line in 2013, rumor says.

Chinese mobile phone information site Laoyaoba.com is reporting that Apple will release an iPhone 5S and iPhone 6 later this year. The source (translated by BrightWire) is providing the information after apparently spotting the new models at Apple suppliers in the country.

The report suggests that the iPhone 6' display has grown to 5 inches, and is lighter and thinner, though you would expect as much in a new Apple product anyway.

Whether true or not, Apple is being urged to work on a larger iPhone as Samsung has seen success with the bigger Galaxy Note device. It is speculated that Apple would simply stretch out the 640x1136 resolution used by the iPhone 5 to fit a 5-inch display, which would hurt pixel density but would be easier for developers already working on apps for iPhone 5.

Apple is last man standing in DoJ case.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) had previously settled an anti-trust case with four of five book publishers alleged to have conspired with Apple Inc. to fix prices of e-books. The DoJ sued Apple and the five publishers - Macmillan, Hachette Book Group Inc., HarperCollins Publishers L.L.C., Penguin Group (USA) Inc. and Simon & Schuster Inc. - for damaging the emerging market with its conspiracy, and costing consumers millions of dollars more.

On Friday, the DoJ and Macmillan filed a settlement in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, which is pending approval. If it is approved by the court, then only Apple will be left in the Justice Department's war path.

The case was filed in April last year, and alleged that Apple Inc. and the publishers conspired to eliminate competition in the free market by forcing e-book retailers to keep prices of the most sought after e-books higher than they would otherwise be.

The DoJ said that one of the publishers' CEO's had remarked that e-books were being sold at a "wretched $9.99 price point." When you have a lot of e-book retailers, they will naturally look to provide the best prices for the content to keep customers coming back, and with the e-book market growing all the time, such competition is vital for consumers to feel comfortable adapting.

Hardware not the main selling point, SCE official says.

According to a Nikkei report (translated by Engadget), Sony will not push its new PS4 console by focusing on its hardware specs, but rather on its playing options and home entertainment abilities.

The Japanese daily cites an unnamed Sony Computer Entertainment executive as saying that the PS4's selling point will be how it opens up new styles of play, and that the company could push the new console as a home entertainment nerve center.

The official cited the console's ability to connect and share with mobile devices, which he(?) identified as the rival that is taking gamers away from traditional gaming.

It has been rumoured that the PS4 controller comes with a dedicated "share" button, with speculation on its functionality including sharing with mobile devices.

The PS4 is expected to be unveiled in ten days time, February 20.

Ouya release pattern will follow mobile devices.

Ouya will take advantage of the annual decrease in the price of components in order to launch a new iteration of the Android-driven console every year, according to Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman.

The Ouya packs a ARM Cortex-A9 Quad-Core 1.7GHz processor, Nvidia Tegra 3 SoC, 1GB of RAM and 8GB internal flash memory. It's OS is based on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and it has its own tailored Ouya store for applications and games. Ouya will be compatible with the OnLive video game service too. It will cost $99.99 at retail.

"As it relates to iterating the console and refreshes, our strategy is very much similar to the mobile strategy. There will be a new Ouya every year," Uhrman told Joystiq.

"There will be an Ouya 2 and an Ouya 3. We'll take advantage of faster, better processors, take advantage of prices falling. So if we can get more than 8GB of Flash in our box, we will. And in so doing, make sure that all games are backwards compatible."

When it launches, Tegra 3 will be around a year old, with Tegra 4 on the horizon, but Uhrman points out that since Ouya is not a mobile device, there will be no need to balance power for battery life, so it will easily be the "best Tegra 3 device on the market."

Vodafone and 3 Austria warn against iOS 6.1.

The warnings come amidst some complaints from iPhone 4S users who have updated to iOS 6.1. Vodafone in the UK is urging iPhone 4S users to refrain from updating to iOS 6.1 - released in January - until Apple has released a fix for the problem.

In Austria, the 3 network has also reportedly warned its iPhone 4S users against the update.

"The update of the iPhone 4S on iOS 6.1 can currently cause connectivity problems. We responded quickly and are working with Apple on a solution to the problem," 3 in Austria has warned customers.

"For this reason, we recommend not to install the update for the time being. We will inform you immediately if there is a solution. Your 3 ServiceTeam."

In the UK, Vodafone contacted its iPhone 4S users via SMS, as shown below.

'Innocence of Muslims' leads to YouTube block.

The 13 minute thoroughly-unentertaining train wreck of a "movie trailer" has actually led to an Egyptian court blocking the entire YouTube service for a month. The video - which claims to be a trailer for a longer movie - is fairly pathetic, but so is the Egyptian court's response to it.

In the Muslim world, depicting the Islamic prophet in any media is often considered blasphemous on its own, so a video depicting him as a sexual deviant and an idiot was always likely to get a response, especially when coupled with the provocative spew of its creator when he spoke to the media.

Regardless, blocking an entire service over one really stupid video is simply unbelievable, even if it is just for a month. YouTube is a public forum, it's a market place of content containing everything from brilliant educational videos, to great ideas, to downright junk. Trust me, even the most hardened person could find something that would annoy them or even anger them on YouTube.

That is the reality of free speech and free expression. When you decide to silence somebody because you don't like what they are saying, you are not only depriving them of their right to speak, you are depriving yourself of your right to hear what they have to say, regardless of how ridiculous or provocative it might be. If you don't want to listen to it, then walk away, it's really that simple. You don't have to watch videos on YouTube.

Dell founder makes commitment to customers.

With Dell Inc. currently facing a potential $24.4 billion buyout to take it into private ownership, Michael Dell has written an open letter to customers. While the deal has already attracted some disapproval from shareholders, Michael Dell and equity firm Silver Lake appear poised to take control of the company.

Here is the open letter from the CEO:

To Our Customers,
The agreement to take Dell private represents an exciting new chapter for our company and for you, our customers.

As always, our unwavering focus is on delivering a fantastic customer experience and creating value for your organization. We believe that our proposed new ownership will provide long-term support to help Dell innovate, invest for growth and accelerate our transformation strategy. We'll have the flexibility to continue organic and inorganic investment and drive industry-leading innovation.
We've made solid progress over the past few years. Our leadership and our strategic execution have been consistent, as we've built a comprehensive portfolio to help you succeed. Secure, easy to manage, end-to-end solutions from the cloud to the data center to devices remain at the core of our value proposition to you.

The Microsoft Surface Pro has sold out at multiple retailers during this weekend's launch.

The 128GB version of the tablet has sold out at Microsoft, Best Buy and Staples, although the 64GB model remains available through Microsoft.

Although the news can possibly be attributed to low supply, Microsoft must be happy that its $999 tablet has already sold out, just hours into launch. The smaller capacity model sells for $899.

Reports have claimed Microsoft only has an initial shipment volume of one million Surface Pro, far less than the 4 million they allegedly had for the cheaper but less useful Surface RT.

Says the company: "Customer response to the launch of Surface Pro has been amazing. We're working with our retail partners who are currently out of stock of the 128GB Surface Pro to replenish supplies as quickly as possible. Our priority is to ensure that every customer gets their new Surface Pro as soon as possible."

According to a new report, Apple has poached an OLED expert from LG.

The report says Apple has hired James (Jueng-Gil) Lee, previously of Samsung, Cambridge Display Technology and most recently LG.

LG has him listed as a Research Fellow for the company's OLED Development Center. Lee's recent project was to help build a printed AMOLED television.

Of course, if the hire is confirmed, it still does not mean that Apple is working on any HDTV, although it certainly leads some credence. Apple may also be looking to be less dependent on third parties for display panels.

AOL reported its Q4 quarterly earnings this morning, and Dan Frommer put together some charts with the most interesting facts form the report.

The company saw its first revenue growth since 2005, but it's becoming increasingly clear that the company makes no money outside of its "old services," most notably dial-up.

AOL still has 2.8 million dial-up subscribers, down from a peak of 27 million in 2002. The company only lost 100,000 subscribers during the quarter, lower than average.

Nearly all of the company's profits come from dial-up, AOL mail, AIM, etc., even though the division accounts for under 40 percent of revenue.

AOL's "Brand Group," which includes content providers like Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Engadget, accounts for almost the same amount of revenue as the services group, but brings in very minuscule profits.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt has filed plans to sell 42 percent of his shares in the company, valued at $2.5 billion at today's prices.

The exec has 7.6 million shares, and will sell 3.2 million. The company's shares trade at all-time highs, at around $785.

Schmidt currently owns 8.2 percent of the company's voting power due to his Class B shares and their enhanced voting rights.

Reads the SEC filing:

On November 15, 2012, Eric E. Schmidt, Google's Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors, adopted a stock trading plan in accordance with the guidelines specified in Rule 10b5-1 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and Google's Policy Against Insider Trading. In February 2013, sales of Eric's Google stock may commence under this trading plan.

The pre-arranged trading plan was adopted in order to allow Eric to sell a portion of his Google stock as part of his long-term strategy for individual asset diversification and liquidity. The stock transactions pursuant to this trading plan will be disclosed publicly through Form 4 and Form 144 filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Using this trading plan, Eric can diversify his investment portfolio and can spread stock trades out over a period of one year to reduce market impact.

Apple co-founder Steve 'Woz' Wozniak had some words for his former company.

Speaking to a German publication, the Woz admitted that the company has fallen somewhat behind in its bid to remain the top smartphone maker in the world.

I am proud that we have such loyal fans. But this loyalty is not given, the needs with the best products are always kept alive and confirmed. Currently we are in my opinion in the smartphone business with the features somewhat behind. Others have caught up. Samsung is a great competitor. But precisely because they are currently making great products.

According to a former exec, Microsoft had strongly considered buying Sega before deciding to build the Xbox console by itself.

Joachim Kempin,the former vice president of Windows Sales at Microsoft, had this to say: "There were three companies at that point in time, I think this was [Sony,] Sega and Nintendo. There was always talk maybe we buy Sega or something like that; that never materialized. We were actually able to license them what they call Windows CE, the younger brother of Windows, to run on their system and make that their platform [for the Dreamcast]."

Kempin spent 20 years at the company, and says former CEO Bill Gates got into the hardware business just to stop Sony from dominating the market.

In regards to Sega, Kempin adds "[Gates] didn't think that Sega had enough muscle to eventually stop Sony so we did our own Xbox thing."

Sega sold 10.6 million Dreamcast in three years, compared to 24 million Xboxs sold before Microsoft released the Xbox 360.

According to smartphone insurance site MobileInsurance.co.uk, 23 percent of all iPhones have cracked or smashed screens.

Owners were asked whether their display is currently cracked, smashed or broken.

Most of the owners spent a long time with the broken screen, with the average length being 6 months.

30 percent said they were not insured, 30 percent said they could not afford to fix it and 40 percent were okay with living with the damage, most likely because of one of the first two questions.

A full 31 percent said they would never fix their iPhone or wait until their next upgrade.

Although rates have dropped, Panda Labs is reporting that one third of all PCs are infected with malware.

32 percent of users the security firm researched had some form of malware on their computers in 2012, down from 38 percent in 2011.

China led the way, with 54 percent of systems infected. South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey and Honduras rounded out the top five.

One type of attack was most popular; trojans. 76 percent of all attacks were trojans during the year, up from 66 percent in 2011: "It seems that cyber criminals have managed to infect more computers with Trojans this year than in previous years. One of the reasons for this growth is the increased use of exploit kits such as Black Hole, which are capable of exploiting multiple system vulnerabilities to infect computers automatically without user intervention."

Android devices also remained a top target for attackers, "Android is potentially exposed to far more security risks than its biggest competitor (iPhone and its iOS), as it allows users to get their apps from anywhere they want," Panda added. "However, using the official Android marketplace is no security guarantee either, as it has also been targeted by cyber crooks luring users into installing Trojans disguised as legitimate apps."

Adobe issues important fixes.

It has had to address two zero-day vulnerabilities that are being exploited in the wild. One (CVE-2013-0633) is being exploited in the wild in targeted attacks designed to trick the user into opening a Microsoft Word document delivered as an email attachment which contains malicious Flash (SWF) content.

The other serious flaw (CVE-2013-0634) is being exploited in the wild in attacks delivered via malicious Flash (SWF) content hosted on websites that target Flash Player in Firefox or Safari on the Macintosh platform, as well as attacks designed to trick Windows users into opening a Microsoft Word document delivered as an email attachment which contains malicious Flash (SWF) content.

Affected software versions include...

• Adobe Flash Player 11.5.502.146 and earlier versions for Windows and Macintosh
• Adobe Flash Player 11.2.202.261 and earlier versions for Linux
• Adobe Flash Player 11.1.115.36 and earlier versions for Android 4.x
• Adobe Flash Player 11.1.111.31 and earlier versions for Android 3.x and 2.x

Nintendo has announced a new Deluxe Wii U bundle for North America.

The bundle will come with a 32GB Deluxe console, ZombiU, a black Pro controller and a download code for Nintendo Land.

Launching February 17th in the U.S.and Canada, the bundle will cost $390.

Furthermore, the bundle will include "a ZombiU artwork booklet and "never-before-seen" developer commentary."

If you were to purchase everything separately, the components would cost $450, making the bundle a good deal if you were on the fence with the console and are interested in ZombiU.

Microsoft targets some critical flaws.

It will roll out fixes as it always does; on Patch Tuesday, the second Tuesday of every month. The February 2013 bundle targets flaws in the Windows Operating Systems, Internet Explorer and Exchange. All in all, 57 security issues will be addressed on Patch Tuesday.

The company will push out at least 12 updates to address the flaws - five of which come with a rating of critical. Security updates with this rating suggest that the flaws could be exploited to run arbitrary code on a victims PC if they, for example, visit a specially crafted webpage to exploit them.

Every version of Internet Explorer from IE6 needs to be patched, while flaws in the Windows operating system are considered critical only for versions below Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008.

Users should not procrastinate when it comes to Microsoft's monthly patches. While the second Tuesday of every month has become known as "Patch Tuesday", there is a lesser known monthly special day, known by some as "Exploit Wednesday".

Malware writers and others dissect the updates pushed out on Patch Tuesday and develop exploits as quickly as they can against the vulnerabilities, hoping to catch out users who procrastinate when it comes to keeping updated.

Wii U sales hit 3 million worldwide.

That isn't enough to satisfy Activision CEO Robert Kotick however (and not Nintendo either), who said that the publisher is "somewhat disappointed" with the start the Wii U has had.

He made his comments when responding to a question during a post-earnings financial call on Thursday. The question concerned the sales of Activision's Skylanders series on the Wii U.

Kotick said that with the lower-than-expected sales - combined with the target audience of 6-11 year olds for the Skylanders series - it is "something we are concerned about."

Still, it is not all bad news at all for Activision, who reported $4.86 billion in revenue for 2012, with profit at $1.1 billion.

Spotify has proudly announced today the beta launch of their Windows Phone 8 app.

The company says the app will work for all WP8 devices, most notably the Lumia 920.

Features:

Search, browse & play our catalogue of millions of tracks
Explore & play your friends' playlists, top artists and tracks
Stream over WiFi or 2.5/3G - all your existing playlists are available
Offline playlists - play your music without an internet connection
On-the-fly sync - every track you add to a playlist appears on mobile and computer
What's New view
Receive music from friends via the inbox
Starred tracks - tag all your favorites into a special list
As with all of our mobile apps, a Premium subscription is required to use the service.

Lithium-Ion burns in pocket.

South Korean media is reporting the case of a man who suffered burns when the lithium-ion battery from a Galaxy Note 'exploded' and caught fire in his pocket.

The battery was not in the Samsung device at the time, according to the Bupyeong Fire Station in Incheon city. South Korean media reported that the battery actually exploded, but the officials did not confirm that was the case.

The man, who was not identified, suffered second degree burns and a one inch wound on his thigh from the incident on Saturday night.

Samsung has said there is no investigation planned, according to the Associated Press.

Lithium-Ion batteries are in millions of different kinds of devices all over the world, and every now and then we hear cases of them overheating and burning. They are at the center of the current problems with the Boeing 787 dreamliner aircraft, for example.

Given the amount of L-Ion batteries in constant use, the number of these incidents is extremely low, and may often come down to the batteries being damaged, such as the case of the iPhone that started burning after an Australian flight landed a while back. In that case, a bad repair of the iPhone was to blame.

Nearly a month after Electronic Arts released their alpha version of Origin for Mac, the publisher has announced a full launch.

Origin is the company's digital distribution platform.

One of the main features of the new release is dual-platform play. Users can purchase a title via a Mac or a Windows machine, and as long as it is available for both platforms, you can play it from both.

Just like the Windows version, cloud storage for game saves is included, along with most other features from the original.

There are numerous Mac titles available.

Dell's largest independent investor wants a higher offer.

Southeastern Asset Management is opposing the buyout of Dell Inc. by founder and CEO Michael Dell, and equity firm Silver Lake. Earlier this week, the Dell board settled on a deal of $13.65 a share for the company, which Michael Dell wants to take into private ownership.

In order for the buyout to get shareholder approval, it requires that a majority of shares held by investors other than Michael Dell must be in favor when a vote is taken.

With Southeastern's objections, shareholders accounting for 11 percent of shares (not held by Michael Dell) are now against the deal.

Southeastern says it values Dell at $24.00 per share, and said the deal is bad for shareholders as they could have made more from alternative scenarios. It gave an example of breaking up Dell Inc. and selling its units separately.

"Selling multiple business units to strategic buyers could easily exceed $13.65 per share," it said.

Update address bugs with weather, reboot.

Some users who opted to jailbreak their iOS 6.0-6.1 devices using the evasi0n jailbreak tool from evad3rs this week were reporting a couple of problems afterwards.

Some users complained of issues with the iOS Weather app, where it would crash spontaneously. Another problem came when rebooting the device, with users reporting long time for the reboot process to complete.

Evad3rs quickly moved to provide fixes for the problems, and have now also updated the original jailbreak - evasi0n v1.1 - so that the bugs will be fixed on devices that are jailbroken from now on.

You can get evasi0n v1.1 from here.

Or you can visit the evasi0n homepage at: evasi0n.com

For those of you who have already used evasi0n and just want to fix the bugs without redoing the process, then you can do it right from your device. Just follow these instructions.

• Turn on your device and look for the Cydia app, launch it. Don't worry if you get a Preparing Filesystem message which hangs there for a while before going back to the lock screen - simply go back and run Cydia again and it'll be fine.
• When Cydia launches, tap Changes at the bottom of the app.
• There should be two "Available Upgrades", evasi0n 6.0-6.1 Untether and UIKit Tools.
• Install evasi0n 6.0-6.1 Untether by tapping it, then "Modify", tap "Upgrade" and then "Confirm" it.
• Do the same to install the UIKit Tools update
• REBOOT THE DEVICE right away.

Are you getting...SCROOGLED????

Microsoft is attacking Google's GMail service in a new video and pile of information on its SCROOGLED website. This time Microsoft is warning you that GMail pries through your most personal e-mails in order to target advertisements at you.

The video shows Eric Schmidt at the end saying; "There's what I call the creepy line: the Google policy about a lot of these things is to get right up to the creepy line but not cross it."

The website urges you to sign a petition telling Google to stop going through your email to sell ads.

Oh, and of course, it points out that Outlook.com would never do such a bad thing!

Check it out at scroogled.com

Pirate Bay docu posted online for free.

The new documentary, TPB AFK, is premièring at the Berlin International Film Festival. It follows the Pirate Bay's founders around and documents their fight with Swedish authorities, and the U.S. Government.

It covers their eventual arrest and subsequent conviction for copyright violations whilst operating the notorious BiTorrent outfit.

Film Director, Simon Klose, has is sharing three copies of the movie through the Pirate Bay itself. It is available in 480p, 720p or 1080p. If you would prefer to support the filmmakers for making the documentary, you can buy it here.

Don't want to take the time to download it? No problem, just watch it here.

Bush' e-mail account hacked.

A hacker has stolen personal e-mails and photographs belonging to the 41st US President, George HW Bush, according to a spokesman for the Bush family.

"We do not comment on matters under criminal investigation," Jim McGrath told the Houston Chronicle.

The hacker is said to have broken into several accounts of the Bush family. One of the photographs stolen from the accounts is of the former President in a hospital bed, as he was being treated for a bronchitis-related cough.

Another shows his son, 43rd President George W Bush, posing beside a cardboard cut-out of himself with a moustache drawn on it, while other show painting by him.

Speaking with the Smoking Gun, the hacker said he had taken "a lot of stuff" including "interesting mails" about the former president's time in hospital.

The e-mails reportedly include a note sent by President Barack Obama to George HW Bush while he was in hospital.

FBI on the case.

The Federal Reserve said that it was still in the process of determining exactly what information had been leaked in the hack of an internal website. Hackers breached the security of the Emergency Communication System (ECS) using a flaw in webserver software. After the hack, activist group Anonymous claimed to have leaked information on 4,000 bank executives.

"We are in the process of a comprehensive assessment to determine what information might have been obtained in this incident," said Federal Reserve spokesman Jim Strader.

"We remain confident that this incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve."

The FBI has launched a criminal probe into the breach, which was an embarrassment for the central bank as it is expected to provide high levels of information security.

The website that was breached is used for banks to communicate with the central bank during a natural disaster.

Did Japanese newspaper suggest $400 price tag on Sony's upcoming console?

The reports swirling around suggest that Japanese newspaper, Asahi News, priced the PS4 console at $400. However, as Kotaku pointed out, the report only stated that the console was expected to sell for more than ¥40,000, which converts to about $427.

The PS3, when it launched, cost ¥60,000 in Japan, and $499-$599 in the United States based on the HDD space. Heading into the holiday season - when the PS4 is expected to ship in North America - with a price tag of $400 would be very interesting, but that's not what the Japanese report said.

Instead, it seems to have just been speculation that was lost in translation and became just another leaked detail about the PS4.

We are unlikely to know what the PS4 will cost for some time yet, even if most details are given at the event on February 20, as there is a big difference between producing early development models, and producing for the mass market.

Sony drops PS Vita sales expectations by 3 million units.

The company had initially estimated that it would sell 16 million PS Vita and PSP units (it combines both handhelds' figures) during this Fiscal Year, which ends March 31, before cutting its estimates not long after to 12 million.

In November, it dropped its expectations again, down to 10 million. Sony just reported a 15 percent drop in year-on-year revenue for the third quarter of FY 2012. Poor sales in its gaming division had a lot to do with its performance.

Now Sony only expects to sell 7 million PS Vita's and PSP's during the fiscal year ending March 31, less than half of its initial forecast.

Still, Sony has acknowledged the subpar start for its latest handheld device already, and pledged to meet the challenge with new software.

Sony will hold an event on February 20, where it is widely expected to unveil the PlayStation 4 (PS4) to the world.

New Xbox is chatty, apparently.

Microsoft's next Xbox console will come with improved speech recognition, much like Apple's Siri service, according to a report by The Verge.

It cites sources familiar with Microsoft's Xbox plans in reporting that the next Xbox will have greatly improved speech recognition functions compared to Xbox 360 + Kinect. It will support "wake on voice", natural language controls and provide for speech-to-text.

Users will be able to ask the Xbox console questions - like what games their friends are currently playing - and the Xbox will give answers. The Xbox can also be told to play certain movies, which will resume from where they left off.

Skype is also expected to be woven into the next Xbox console, which is expected to be shown off at E3 this year and ship in major markets before year's end.

BlackBerry to quit Japan.

According to a report from the Nikkei business daily, BlackBerry will soon cease selling smartphones in the Japanese market entirely. The Canadian smartphone-maker - which just officially changes its name to BlackBerry with the launch of BB10 - cannot justify the cost associated with providing an operating system that accommodates the Japanese language.

BlackBerry has had a difficult time all over in the past few years, but its performance in Japan is mind-numbing. According to the report, BlackBerry has witnessed its market share in the country decline to just 0.3 percent, from 5 percent.

As for owners and customers of BlackBerry products in Japan, the company will continue to provide support, according to the report.

GameStop cites surveys of its customers.

The game retailer - which makes around half of its profits from selling pre-owned games - has warned that its customers might decide not to buy a next generation games console if it blocks playing pre-owned titles.

GameStop spokesman, Matt Hodges, pointed to surveys of members of the chain's PowerUp Rewards loyalty program, which boasts about 21 million members in the United States, that suggest they would be reluctant to spend their money on such restrictive platforms. PowerUp members were responsible for about 75 percent of all GameStop's sales in the United States last year.

"We know the desire to purchase a next-generation console would be significantly diminished if new consoles were to prohibit playing pre-owned games, limit portability or not play new physical games," Hodges told Bloomberg.

Following a report this week suggesting that Microsoft's next Xbox console would not allow pre-owned games to be played (with physical discs coming with one-time activation codes), shares of GameStop dropped 6 percent to $52.50.

Calls inspired by Icelandic block of violent material.

Finnish Minister for Justice, Anna-Maja Henriksson (pictured), is backing extending Finland's current pornography censorship to move beyond child pornography. Under current Finnish law, the NBI (National Bureau of Investigation) maintains a blocklist of foreign sourced child pornography websites, as it cannot take direct action against them.

Specifically, the Minister eyes expanding the list to involve websites that include pornographic material showing animals, and "violent porn."

The idea does not have unanimous support even within the Finnish government, however. Finland's Interior Minister, Päivi Räsänen, doubts the need to expand pornographic censorship at all. Indeed, even Finland's own child pornography blocklist has, in the past, included websites that had nothing to do with such vile content.

Still, child pornography blocklists are a reality that even many of the most vocal opponents of censorship accept as reasonable, and justified. The spreading of material that documents the sexual abuse of children prolongs one of the most abhorrent crimes, and re-victimizes the child every time it occurs.

Xbox was all about hurting Sony.

Joachim Kempin used to be VP for Windows sales at Microsoft, and has since gone on to write a book about his experiences with the software giant. He recently gave an interview for IGN, in which he was asked for details on Microsoft's motivation to launch a dedicated games console in late 2001.

"The main reason was to stop Sony," he said, explaining that Sony and Microsoft did not have a very comfortable relationship, but asserting that this wasn't Microsoft's intention.

"Sony was always very arm's length with Microsoft. Yeah, they bought Windows for their PCs but when you really take a hard look at that, they were never Microsoft's friend. And Microsoft in a way wanted them to be a friend because they knew they had a lot of things we could have co-operated on because they are, in a way, an entertainment company, you know?" Kempin added.

Microsoft, Symantec and U.S. marshals take down C&C servers.

Technicians and U.S federal marshals served warrants at data centers in Weehawken, New Jersey, and Manassas, Virginia, on Wednesday, taking aim at servers that send commands to zombies that were zapped into the Bamital botnet. They seized control of one server at the New Jersey location, and persuaded the Virginia data center to contact its parent company in Holland to take down another, according to Retuers.

Richard Boscovich, assistant general counsel with Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, told the Reuters news agency that they had a high degree of confidence that the operation has brought down the whole crime operation.

The problem did not end there for infected machines however, as the Bamital botnet was used to redirect web searches as part of an advertisements scam. That meant that infected machines - estimated between 300,000 and 1,000,000 - could no longer use web services.

To alert those users of their PC's infection, they will now be redirected by different servers to information explaining their situation, and how to fix it.

USITC judge sets date for final ruling.

In October 2012, the International Trade Commission (ITC) said Apple infringed on four Samsung patents in several smartphones, but that decision is being reviewed following petitions by both companies.

Administrative Law Judge Thomas B. Pender entered a scheduling order setting Aug 1, as a target final decision date, according to Florian Mueller's Foss Patents blog.

The case was filed by Apple with the ITC in July 2011, and is separate from the case filed by Samsung against Apple in August 2011. The South Korean consumer electronics giant initially alleged that Apple infringed 5 patents in its products, but has since withdrawn one.

The ITC has the power to impose an import ban on products. It is unknown what affect an ITC final ruling imposing a ban on infringing Samsung products would have, given that Samsung has already made modifications based on the ITC, and other, findings.

YouTube investment would value Vevo at $50 million.

If the negotiations are successful, Google will own around 10 percent of the music video service. The deal then, would value Vevo somewhere near half a billion dollars, according to sources cited by Bloomberg, who remain anonymous as the negotiations are not public.

Vevo was formed by Universal Music and Sony Music Entertainment. It has a contract with YouTube - owned by Google - to list Vevo music videos on the popular video hub.

Vevo counted 51.6 million unique U.S. viewers in December, according to data from ComScore. YouTube recorded about 181.7 million.

"While we don't comment on individual negotiations, we always hope to renew our relationships with valuable partners so we can continue to provide YouTube users with the best possible music experience," Chris Dale, spokesman for Google, said in a statement to Bloomberg.

Valve has announced today that popular director J.J. Abrams will be working with the company to possibly create a Portal or Half-Life movie in the future.

Abram's production studio Bad Robot has signed on to work on both movies and games.

"There's an idea we have for a game that we'd like to work with Valve on," said Abrams.

The announcement came after a joint keynote by Abrams and Newell called "Storytelling Across Platforms: Who Benefits Most, the Audience or the Player?"

"Movies let you experience moments that you might not think are the point, but really are everything," Abrams said during the keynote.

Dell has announced this week that they have updated their popular XPS 13 ultrabook line to include new models with full 1080p displays.

The original XPS 13 sold for $1000 and included a 720p display, a i5 processor, 4GB RAM and a 128GB SSD. The new, updated model will sell for $1400 and include an updated i5, double the RAM and double the SSD space along with the Full HD screen.

"The new 1080p display contains almost 2x the pixels of a typical 720p display, and the difference is noticeable," said Dell chief blogger Lionel Menchaca. "Everything looks sharper, whether you are viewing high resolution images, watching 1080p video or even reading text on an eBook or a web page. More pixels also means you'll have more screen real estate, so you will see more of that spreadsheet (see image below) or that you'll be able to see more detail in a high resolution image than you would compared to a typical notebook screen."

Qualcomm CMO Anand Chandrasekher has bashed rival chipmaker Nvidia's Tegra processors.

Tegra 3 quad-core processors power most of 2012's most popular Android tablets.

The exec says he believes Qualcomm's own upcoming 600 and 800 processors will blow the Tegra series out of the water, and dominate the market.

On the smartphone side, the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 series is completely dominant, thanks to its great power performance and smart battery performance.

"Snapdragon S4 Pro is better, faster than the commercially shipping Tegra 3...On benchmarks published by Anantech, S4 Pro is twice as fast as the fastest Tegra processor commercially available. Nvidia just launched their Tegra 4 – not sure when those will be in the market on a commercial basis, but we believe our Snapdragon 600 outperforms Nvidia's Tegra 4. And we believe our Snapdragon 800 completely outstrips it and puts a new benchmark in place," says Chandrasekher.

The exec then went for the throat: "So, we clean Tegra 4's clock. There's nothing in Tegra 4 that we looked at and that looks interesting. Tegra 4, frankly, looks a lot like what we already have in S4 Pro... Yes, they [Nvidia] had the perception [of superior graphics] help[ing] them for some time, and that helped them for some tablet wins. I think that would change. The world is increasingly becoming aware that what we have in CPUs and graphics is beyond what anybody has. So usually, that technical awareness happens at the OEMs, and that takes a while for products to emerge...Empirically, we completely beat them on graphics performance!"

German downloads 25 billionth song.

The song itself was "Monkey Drums" (Goksel Vancin Remix) by Chase Buch. Phillip Lüpke, the downloader from Germany, will be rewarded a $10,000 iTunes gift card.

"We are grateful to our users whose passion for music over the past 10 years has made iTunes the number one music retailer in the world," said Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet Software and Services.

"Averaging over 15,000 songs downloaded per minute, the iTunes Store connects music fans with their favorite artists, including global sensations like Adele and Coldplay and new artists like The Lumineers, on a scale we never imagined possible."

iTunes is available in 119 countries, and packs more than 26 million songs.

No used games on next Xbox?

A report from Edge Online, citing sources with first hand experience of Microsoft's next generation Xbox console, suggests that the anticipated console will not allow used games. Even though games will be sold in physical form, they will come with activation codes that are useless beyond the initial user.

The report also says that the new Xbox will require a constant Internet connection to function, with a huge Xbox Live overhaul to be a core part of the system.

Games sold in physical form will be on 50GB Blu-ray discs, according to the report.

Edge also reported that the sources confirmed the rumoured specs for the next Xbox, including an AMD octo-core 1.6GHz CPU, a D3D11.x 800MHz graphics solution and 8GB of DDR3 RAM. What storage capacity the device will ship with has not been decided yet.

A new, more responsive Kinect, is also rumoured to be on the way.

Samsung Galaxy S IV to be unveiled next month, report says.

SamMobile cites a "trusted insider" in reporting that Samsung will officially announce the Galaxy S IV on March 15, but conceded that the location is still unknown. It also says that the Galaxy S IV will go on sale starting the second week of April.

It reports that the smartphone will launch in Europe and Asia first during April, then to North America, Australia and Africa between May and June.

The rumoured specs for the Galaxy S IV are an Exynos 5 Octa (8-Core) CPU, Mali-T658 (8-Core) GPU, 4.99″ Super AMOLED Full HD Resolution Display and 2GB of RAM, with a rear facing 13 megapixel camera capable of shooting in 1080p at 30fps, and a front facing 2 megapixel camera. It will run Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean out of the box.

(Pic Source: SamMobile)

Kaspersky releases fix for update error.

An update for a Kaspersky anti-virus product knocked thousands of Windows XP users offline, and even blocked some users from accessing internal company networks. Kaspersky became aware of the issue very quickly and had a fix at hand within two hours.

As a workaround at first Kaspersky said affected users needed to disable the product or roll back the update.

The Russian security firm then issued a statement, apologizing for any inconvenience caused by the database update error.

From users' reports of the problem, it would appear that the update altered the database to block access to port 80, the default port used by web servers to listen for client (browser) requests.

Oops.

Chinese still at it, media giant says.

Rupert Murdoch took to twitter to inform everyone that news of hacks at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post had not deterred the attackers from continuing their actions.

He tweeted that the "Chinese still hacking us, or were over the weekend."

China has denied any involvement in attacks against Western media outlets, and has said allegations against it are "irresponsible." It claims to also be the victim of frequent cyber attacks, and that such actions are not tolerated in the country.

This week, the U.S.-China Business Council urged the two countries to cooperate to tackle the growing problem, or risk causing serious damage to their trade relationship.

Chinese still hacking us, or were over weekend.

-- Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) February 6, 2013

Project SHIELD streams Borderlands 2 from PC.

As part of a "PC Mondays" series, Nvidia has uploaded a video showing its Project SHIELD device playing Borderland 2, with graphics settings "cranked all the way up with full 60fps performance."

Of course, the device itself isn't doing all the Borderlands 2 crunching, it is streaming the game from a GeForce GTX 680-enabled PC that's right across the room.

The video lets you take a peek at the interface of Project SHIELD and get a look at the latency (or apparent lack thereof) while it is streaming Borderlands 2.

Project SHIELD was one of the more unexpected revelations from CES.

Fed confirms hack.

The U.S. Federal Reserve has confirmed that an internal website was breached and some personal information was stolen. The central bank said that the hack was limited to the internal website, and did not affect any critical systems or functions of the organization.

The attackers - widely reported to be Anonymous - exploited a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product to retrieve information on up to 4,000 bank executives from around the United States.

"Some registrants also included optional information consisting of home phone and personal email. Despite claims to the contrary, passwords were not compromised," the Fed said, though it denied that any passwords had been exposed.

The internal website appears to be part of an emergency response system for cases of a natural disaster. For example, if a bank was damaged in a storm or a flood, this is the system that executives could use to keep the Fed posted on conditions. Combined, the data would give the Federal Reserve a view of the overall impact on the U.S. banking system.

YouTube removes North Korean propaganda.

We covered the posting of the very strange video from North Korea just yesterday, pointing out that the propaganda piece had used Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 in order to depict a burning U.S. city and American flag.

Now it appears that Activision didn't find the use of its blockbuster video game in this fashion very tasteful, and had it removed from a North Korean YouTube channel for copyright violations. It would appear the channel operators then completely removed the video afterwards.

Still, it is not completely gone from YouTube, so if you missed the complete train wreck, then here it is...

Google did not mislead, court says.

Australia's High Court has ruled that Google Inc. is not responsible for the messages conveyed by paid advertisers on its web services. The case was brought against Google by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).

The watchdog accused Google of misleading, and of deceptive conduct with its paid advertisements. Its case was based on advertisements shown on search results for Honda Australia, which would include ads for CarSales, a rival of Honda in the country. The suggesting, according to the group, was that CarSales was linked to Honda. An Australian Federal Court had ruled against Google and ordered it to take measures accordingly.

This week, the Australian High Court overruled the Federal Court's decision, finding that Google did not create the sponsored links and content, and was not responsible for the message they portrayed.

"Ordinary and reasonable users of the Google search engine would have understood that the representations conveyed by the sponsored links were those of the advertisers, and would not have concluded that Google adopted or endorsed the representations," the court said.

Total spend down 9 percent.

The figures come from the NPD Group, showing a a 9 percent fall in games spending in the United States in 2012. The drop was driven largely by a drop in total physical software sales (which included all new, used and rental spending), accounting for $8.8 billion during the year, compared to $11.25 billion in 2011 (down 21 percent).

It wasn't all bad news however, as digital spending jumped 16 percent to $5.92 billion, up from $5.09 billion in 2011.

"When including all other forms of content spending outside of new physical games, the 2012 U.S. games market was more than twice as large as the total spending on new physical games alone," NPD analyst Liam Callahan said in a statement.

"There were divergent trends when looking at content spending in 2012 as a whole, with a decrease of 21 percent in spending on physical content while digital content spending grew 16 percent; both formats combined for a total decline of 9 percent for the year."

More: NPD

Video shows WebRTC promise.

Mozilla and Google have made further strides in WebRTC development, making it possible for Chrome and Firefox browsers to support video calls without a plugin. WebRTC (Real Time Communication) is a new set of technologies that brings clear crisp voice, sharp high-definition (HD) video and low-delay communication to the web browser.

Chrome and Firefox can now communicate by using standard technologies such as the Opus and VP8 codecs for audio and video, DTLS-SRTP for encryption, and ICE for networking.

Here is a video showing the first such video chat between Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer, Todd Simpson, and Google's Director of Product Management, Hugh Finnan.

Rockstar sets some fans straight.

The GTA-maker recently announced a 4 month delay for the eagerly anticipated Grand Theft Auto V title, due in September 2013. There were many questions about the delay with some theories ranging from finance issues to a sign of next generation console launches.

While that is to be expected, Rockstar Games seemed to be annoyed enough by some of the feedback it received on its own website that it posted a message warning users that, "general rules of common courtesy, decency and behavior as listed above the Comment Box still apply here, therefore anyone continuing to post abusive comments will have their privileges suspended."

Then the message singled out users who were alleging that all is not as it seems...

"To those of you saying or seeing various conspiracy theories about there being some other ulterior motive for this delay, rest assured that they're all nonsense – literally the only reason we've delayed the release is because we want the game to be as good as it needs to be.

"Operation Decoy File"

Users of domestic P2P networks in Japan may download certain files thinking they are pirated content, but instead receiving a threatening anti-piracy message. A translation of the message has been provided by RocketNews24.

"A Warning from the Organisation to Raise Awareness of Copyright. Files with the same name as this contain content which is in violation of copyright when distributed over P2P networks such as Winny or Share.

Knowingly downloading and of course uploading files that are protected by copyright law without the consent of the owner over the internet is illegal copyright infringement. Please stop immediately.

Also, from 1 October 2012, downloading content which is known to be available for sale is punishable by a maximum 2-year prison sentence and/or 2,000,000 yen [£13,770] fine.

Our copyright organisation is working to eliminate copyright infringement by file sharing software. In addition to consulting the police to obtain the disclosure of user's identities, we want to focus on user education."

Amazon has launched their own virtual currency, dubbed Amazon Coins.

The currency can be used for in-app purchases and app purchases for Kindle Fire owners.

Set to launch in May, Amazon will give away millions of free Amazon coins. Users will be able to pay with either their credit cards or with coins.

Amazon says developers who already have their app in the Amazon Appstore do not need to do anything to add the Coin payment option.

"Developers continue to report higher conversion rates on Amazon compared to other platforms," said Paul Ryder, Vice President of Apps and Games for Amazon. "Now we have another new way to help developers reach even more of our millions of customers. Amazon Coins gives customers an easy way to spend money on developers' apps on Kindle Fire in the Amazon Appstore--and we're giving customers tens of millions of dollars in Amazon Coins to get started. Developers who aren't yet in the Amazon Appstore will want to make sure their apps have been submitted and approved by April 25 so they're ready for customers to start spending their Amazon Coins."

According to multiple analyst notes, the new BlackBerry Z10 is off to a hotter start than expected, even moving units faster than the Nokia Lumia 920 did.

Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu says retail checks show enthusiasm for the new phone: "We have grown more confident in the likely success of the BlackBerry 10 launch, supported by low channel inventories, strong operator support and material pent-up demand. Initial feedback we have received from distributors on the first days of sales is particularly positive."

Barclays' Jeff Kvaal, did retail channel checks in the UK and had a similar outlook, "Our recent store checks suggest that initial sales of the BlackBerry Z10 are off to a solid, if not healthy start in the U.K. We believe this is a function of strong sell-through versus limited sell-in. We believe BlackBerry's Z10 is off to a better start than the Lumia 920. The solid initial demand is a positive step in our view, despite the number of challenges that remain."

According to sources familiar with the ruling, Brazil's Institute of Intellectual Property has voted to strip Apple of the "iPhone" trademark in the nation.

A local company that registered the name in 2000 will be granted the trademark.

Gradiente Eletronica SA, a Brazilian consumer electronics maker, registered the name, "iphone" (with no caps), seven years before Apple introduced the phone.

The Institute will officially announce the decision on February 13th, say the sources. Apple will then be free to appeal, which they most certainly will.

Gradiente, which is now IGB Electronica, recently released their own line of Android phones, dubbed the "iphone."

This week, About.me, the online personal portal site, announced that it had purchased itself back from AOL, which had bought them in 2011.

About.me lets users create a "digital business card" that links to their sites around Web like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and any other business or personal link.

Co-founder Tony Conrad says he was able to buy the site back for "a fraction" of the cost that it sold for, which was rumored to be as high as $40 million. Conrad says the company can better thrive in an "autonomous" setting, "I think we can build it so much faster, and so much better, by making it independent again. There's no obvious leverage in being part of the AOL media network, and there's no synergy and integration."

Conrad and other co-founder Ryan Freitas will regain full control of the service when the deal closes. AOL will keep an 8 percent stake.

About.me had mostly fallen off the map after being acquired, with AOL still struggling to find their place in the world.

Xbox 360 scores console exclusive.

The Major Nelson blog announced the deal that will bring Redbox Instant by Verizon to the Xbox 360 console in the "very near future." Redbox Instant is currently in beta, and anyone who already is a beta participant will automatically get an email with a unique code to access the app on Xbox 360 in the coming days.

Those who are interested in joining the beta, apply at: redboxinstant

A Redbox Instant subscription package, priced at $8 per month for DVD or $9 per month for Blu-ray, combines four one-night credits for the latest movie releases at Redbox kiosks with access to a great catalogue of popular movies available for unlimited streaming.

Xbox 360 owners will also be able to purchase or rent the newest digital releases without being a Redbox Instant subscriber.

The Xbox 360 is the exclusive gaming and entertainment console partner for Redbox Instant when it launches.

App brings old classics to Sony's latest handheld.

The PlayStation Home Arcade app is available to download for free from the PlayStation Store for the PS Vita, and can be used to purchase a variety of classic games for $1.49. Some newer games are also available, like Icebreaker and Scribble Shooter, which was previously only available on PlayStation Home.

From today, the following titles are available:

• Icebreaker (Free)
• WipEout 2D (Free)
• Scribble Shooter (Demo available for Free) – $1.49
• Frogger – $1.49
• Time Pilot – $1.49
• Asteroids – $1.49
• Centipede- $1.49
• Astrosmash Gen2 – $1.49
• Shark! Shark! Gen2 – $1.49
• Mad Blocker – $1.49

Apple did not violate state law.

The California Supreme Court found that Apple did nothing illegal by requiring customers to provide home addresses and phone numbers in order to accept payments made by credit card. Privacy protection policies in California do protect customers from being asked for such information from brick and mortar retailers, but the supreme court found that this did not extend to digital transactions.

The ruling was not unanimous however, with three dissenting justices arguing that consumers had lost in the decision, as such requirements were a violation of their privacy.

The majority justices disagreed with that view however, pointing out that conditions are different for transactions in person and over the Internet.

"Unlike a brick-and-mortar retailer, an online retailer cannot visually inspect the credit card, the signature on the back of the card, or the customer's photo identification," Justice Goodwin Liu wrote.

Apple had received backing in the case from Wal-Mart and eBay.

European Union regulation sets default sound limit of 85 decibels (dB).

While it is described as a limit, users will be able to increase the limit to 100dB if they choose to do so. The limit comes from research into the affects of high volume music on hearing, and its ability to bring on conditions like tinnitus, which is a persistent ringing in either ear, or both, and is often associated with hearing loss.

Experts embraced the new regulations as good news, but charity Action on Hearing Loss fears that a large proportion of listeners may decide to ignore the warnings and bypass the 85dB limit.

After this month, all portable music players sold in the EU must come pre-set with a limit of 85dB, and must display some form of warning if the limit is bypassed informing the user of the danger of hearing damage.

The European Commission cited research into the matter that concluded that persistent listening at 85dB was safe, while some users push the volume up as far as 120dB, which is the equivalent of standing new a jet as its taking off.

The quality of headphones/earphones can also contribute one way or another.

Trade group urges cooperation.

The U.S.-China Business Council, which represents 230 U.S. companies that have varying interests in China, is urging the U.S. Government and Beijing to cooperate against cyber attacks. The group warns that such high-profile attacks can undermine the trade relationship between both countries, with possible devastating economic consequences.

"We would simply say it's time for the governments to work on it," John Frisbie, president of the trade group, said. "We do know that companies are constant targets of efforts to get into their systems globally."

As a start, Frisbie has urged an annual summit between the U.S. President Barack Obama, and China's next President Xi Jinping. Obama has met with outgoing President Hu Jintao many times, though its usually during an international gathering of one sort or another.

The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post are the latest high profile hacking cases which seem strongly linked to China, but they are far from the only organizations making such allegations. China vigorously denies that it is involved in cyber attacks, and says that it is also a victim of such crime on a regular basis.

Iwata says Cloud gaming has major issues.

Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, was asked by investors about the future of dedicated gaming platforms, and whether they would be negatively affected by newer gaming solutions, like Cloud gaming services. Needless to say, he dismissed the notion right away, pointing out that Cloud gaming has some inherent problems.

"For some highly interactive games, action games in particular, the time required to reflect the push of a button on the screen is critical and the frame rate determines the fluidity of the movements," he said, referring to the latency issues of online cloud gaming services.

"This means that there are some types of games that can be put on the Internet and others that cannot. There are many things that cloud gaming cannot do by design, but this fact has not been communicated well to the public, and I find it strange that many people claim that cloud gaming is the future."

He said that Nintendo's stance is that dedicated gaming platforms will not die out, and denied suggestions that Nintendo was going to integrate its home and portable devices into one in the near future.

Court tells Apple it must wait.

The Federal U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. rejected a request made by Apple Inc. to expedite its appeal against a District court's decision not to impose an injunction on the sale of some Samsung smartphones. The California court had awarded Apple $1.05 billion in its case against Samsung, but Judge Lucy Koh rejected a request to impose a sales ban.

The appeals court has informed Apple's representation that a three judge panel must consider Apple's appeal first, and the court will later decide whether to hear the case.

While the injunction sought by Apple is now for older Samsung smartphones, the iPhone-maker would be expected to try to have such a ban extended to Samsung's newer devices.

For now, Samsung's products will stay on the market in the United States, and Apple will have to wait on the appeals court.

Logitech has announced the launch of the Ultrathin Keyboard Mini, aimed at iPad Mini owners.

The case/keyboard is one of the highest rated and most popular for the larger sized iPads.

Using the UKM turns your iPad Mini into a portable notebook (for the most part), as it has a full keyboard and connects via Bluetooth. Additionally, the keyboard doubles as a protective cover, including instant-on when flipping the case open.

Microsoft has tried pushing similar accessories with their Surface tablets, but the keyboards do not have solid bases and are hard to type on if you are not sitting someplace with a solid foundation.

Logitech's latest is built from light and slim aluminum.

The rated battery life of the keyboard is 90 days per charge.

Available next week in the U.S. and Europe, the accessory costs $79.99.

According to a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project survey, U.S. residents are quickly losing interest in Facebook, the dominant social networking behemoth.

About 70 percent of all online Americans use Facebook, compared to 16 percent for Twitter and 20 percent for LinkedIn.

The report, which cites the survey of 1000 Americans aged 18-99, is called "Coming and Going on Facebook."

20 percent of online adults who do not currently use Facebook did use it at one time, but became so angry with the site and its experience that they eventually stopped using it. Many users cited privacy concerns and a want to not have to share their lives as the main reasons for leaving. Additionally, 61 percent of users said they have taken voluntary breaks from the site for a period of 3 weeks, or longer.

28 percent of users also claimed the site has become less important to them over the last year and 34 percent said they spent less time on the social network over the last year.

Apple has made their new 128GB iPad tablet available.

The tablet is exactly the same as the existing fourth-generation models, except with larger internal storage.

Apple has made the tablet available for $799 (Wi-Fi-only) and $929 for Wi-Fi + 4G.

When the company announced the new model, they added this, "With more than 120 million iPads sold, it's clear that customers around the world love their iPads, and everyday they are finding more great reasons to work, learn and play on their iPads rather than their old PCs. With twice the storage capacity and an unparalleled selection of over 300,000 native iPad apps, enterprises, educators and artists have even more reasons to use iPad for all their business and personal needs."

After expanding wildly in 2012, Microsoft has announced it will open five new retail locations in the U.S. for 2013, following the six already announced.

The company has not revealed the exact dates, but does say they will be open by the summer.

Here are the locations:

Natick Mall, Natick, Massachusetts
Ala Moana Center, Honolulu, Hawaii
Pioneer Place, Portland, Oregon
The Somerset Collection, Troy, Michigan
Woodfield Mall, Schaumburg, Illinois

Nokia's share of web usage plummets year over year.

The Finnish giant saw the share of mobile web usage attached to its products drop by 15 percent in January 2013, compared to January 2012. Apple moved itself to the top of the list despite losing some share itself, though the iPad was not counted in the StatCounter research. Apple's share of mobile web usage stood at 25.86 percent, down from 28.67 percent a year earlier.

In second place, Samsung showed the only gain, rising to 22.69 percent from 14.84 percent a year earlier. Nokia's fortunes continued to sour, as its devices accounted for 22.15 percent, compared to 37.67 percent a year earlier.

"It's good and bad news for Apple," said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen.

"Apple has been handed the number one spot despite its falling usage share. A decline in Nokia usage from January 2012 to January 2013 means the Finnish company ceded the top spot to Apple. Samsung, in contrast to Apple, has seen an increase in its usage share since January 2012."

North Korea uploads truly bizarre video.

The video shows a man as he sleeps, dreaming about blasting off into space, and seemingly circling the Earth in what looks like a really cheap model of a space shuttle. All the while, "We are the World" is the tune that is playing along.

Later in the video, around the 2:15 mark, you see a burning city draped in an American flag. The burning city appears to be New York, and the footage seems to have been lifted right from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

"Somewhere in the United States, black clouds of smoke are billowing," the caption reads, according to the description on LiveLeak. "It seems that the nest of wickedness is ablaze with the fire started by itself."

Given that a North Koran nuclear test is apparently imminent (in response to UN imposed sanctions), you would think they could at least make a better video, right?

Android console to hit retail in June.

The Ouya games console - the result of a very successful Kickstarter campaign that raised $8 million - will go on sale at Gamestop, Target and Best Buy from June, which is good news for interested consumers who missed out on the campaign. The console will sell for $99.99 and will come with one controller, an extra pad costing $49.99.

Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman admitted to the Wall Street Journal that $49.99 is a "premium price" for an extra controller, but that the inclusion of a touchpad makes up for it.

The Ouya packs a ARM Cortex-A9 Quad-Core 1.7GHz processor, Nvidia Tegra 3 SoC, 1GB of RAM and 8GB internal flash memory. It's OS is based on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and it has its own tailored Ouya store for applications and games. Ouya will be compatible with the OnLive video game service too.

The console can be rooted without voiding the warranty and is purposely made to be easily disassembled for hardware expansion and modifications.

Deal done at $13.65 per share.

Dell's original founder, Michael Dell, wants to take the company into private ownership, joined by equity firm Silver Lake. Dell will put up some of his own money toward the deal, as will his investment firm MSD Capital, and Microsoft Corp. will also provide financing in the form of a $2 billion loan.

Four other banks are included in the deal, which is the largest leveraged buyout since the financial crisis hit more than four years ago.

Under the terms of the agreement, Dell stockholders will receive $13.65 in cash for each share of Dell common stock they hold, in a transaction valued at approximately $24.4 billion.

The price represents a premium of 25 percent over Dell's closing share price of $10.88 on Jan. 11, 2013, the last trading day before rumors of a possible going-private transaction were first published; a premium of approximately 35 percent over Dell's enterprise value as of Jan. 11, 2013; and a premium of approximately 37 percent over the average closing share price during the previous 90 calendar days ending Jan. 11, 2013.

"I believe this transaction will open an exciting new chapter for Dell, our customers and team members. We can deliver immediate value to stockholders, while we continue the execution of our long-term strategy and focus on delivering best-in-class solutions to our customers as a private enterprise," said Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell.

Samsung Display and LG Display have agreed to settle outstanding display patent disputes with a verbal agreement.

The companies were in four separate litigations over display patents.

Samsung Display chief Kim Ki-nam and LG Display chief executive Han Sang-beom had a meeting in Seoul, and say they will "resolve the issue one by one."

This means the suits will likely be settled, with new licenses being agreed to without any need for fines or penalties.

According to sources, Twitter has acquired social TV analytics company Bluefin Labs.

The price is not known but the acquisition is said to be the largest in the microblogging company's history.

In 2011, the company purchased TweetDeck for $40 million, so the assumed priced is above $50 million.

Bluefin has raised $20.5 million from investors including Time Warner Investments, SoftBank Capital, Acadia Woods Partners, Bedrocket Media's Brian Bedol, Jim Pallotta, Redpoint Ventures, Dan Gilbert, Lerer Ventures, Kepha Partners and the National Science Foundation so any buyout will bring a healthy return to each.

Twitter has been quickly moving into the TV space, signing a multi-year deal with Nielsen to produce social TV ratings and hiring a new Head of TV.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop would not officially confirm it, but the exec made more statements suggesting that the phone maker will be building a Windows-based tablet in the future.

"It is the case that in the months and years ahead, you will see us broaden out the portfolio, which means pushing to lower and lower price points, in some cases smaller form factors and so forth," said Elop. "We haven't announced tablets at this point, but it is something we are clearly looking at very closely. We are studying very closely the market right now as Microsoft has introduced the Surface tablet, so we are trying to learn from that and understand what the right way to participate would be and at what point in time."

The CEO noted that there are merits to both popular form factors, the 7/8-inch tablet and the original 10-inch models made popular by the iPad.

"We would consider any option [Android or Windows]...It is important to note that the opportunity for companionship is something that any user is looking for. So, when you think about the Lumia 920, running on Windows phone, having a Windows tablet or PC or Xbox is something that will give us the opportunity to have a pretty integrated experience. Our first focus on what we look at is clearly in the Microsoft side," added Elop. "But we have made no decision or announced nothing."

A number of major story lines led to a record overnight rating for last night's Super Bowl.

Nielsen reported that the game had an overnight rating of 48.1, beating out last year's Super Bowl for the highest ever. The overnight rating "reflects the percentage of households watching television that tuned in to a given show."

Last year's game scored a 47.8 rating and was most-watched show of all-time, with an average audience of 111.3 million. This year's matchup brought in 108.3 million viewers, making it the third-most watched show, ever, in the U.S.

Social media saw an expected boost, as well, a total of 24.1 million Tweets. Despite a major comeback by the 49ers, and a surprise blackout, the most tweets came during Beyonce's halftime performance. Twitter was recording 268,000 messages per minute as she wrapped up the show.

The Super Bowl ended in a thriller last night, with the Baltimore Ravens finishing as champions over the San Francisco 49ers, 34-31.

As with every Super Bowl, a few of the commercials, (which cost $3.9 million for 30 seconds) stole the show, highlighting products from behemoths like Coca Cola, Pepsi and Samsung and from up-and-comers like SodaStream and GoDaddy.

Here are all of yesterday's ads:

Teenager lucky to escape jail sentence.

Jake Birchall (or Fennic) was 16 years old when the Operation Payback actions were taken in 2010, reportedly in response to PayPal's refuse to process Wikileaks donations. Two others involved in the attack were jailed for their part, while another received a suspended sentence.

Due to Birchall being underage at the time of the attacks, judge Peter Testar did not hand out a custodial sentence, but according to the Guardian, he made it clear that if Birchall had been older he'd have received a substantial sentence.

Instead, Birchall has been given an eight month youth rehabilitation order and 60 hours of community service. "The fact of the matter is although he had and has a disadvantage in life he did actually play an important role," said the judge.

"He did play a prominent and important part in this and I think he has got to learn to get out of bed in a morning and do unpaid work."

The Judge was referring to psychiatric and pre-sentencing reports that described the defendant as isolated.

Microsoft to take stake in Dell.

A consortium led by Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Inc, has been negotiating a leveraged buyout of Dell Inc., seeking to take the prolific PC manufacturer into private ownership. Michael Dell is joined by Silver Lake and Microsoft Corp, who are expected to put up $1 billion and $2 billion respectively.

Michael Dell will roll over his 16 percent stake of the company and will invest some of his own money, but the deal clearly is heavily leveraged - the largest leveraged buyout since the financial crisis rocked the business world.

Reuters cites a person familiar with the buyout in reporting that price negotiations have narrowed to between $13.50 and $13.75 per share, suggesting a valuation between $23.5 billion to $23.9 billion.

Facing tough competition from Lenovo and others in the space - along with a shift in the industry away from the traditional Desktop - Dell has ceded market share and is struggling to recover.

L.A. Noire has its own gag reel.

The Rockstar title was released in 2011, depicting 1947 Los Angeles and the fight against crime from the perspective of Police Officer Cole Phelps.

It was noted for the quality of facial expressions and body language, due to the use of Depth Analysis' MotionScan technology, which uses 32 surrounding cameras to record actors as they portray the characters. It is up to the player to make judgements based on the characters' expressions and movements during interrogation.

But since real actors were used for the game, they are inevitably going to make mistakes. Depth Analysis has compiled such a blooper reel from mistakes made by the actors while being captured by the MotionScan process.

Enjoy!

Team evad3rs bring untethered jailbreak for iOS 6.0 through 6.1.

The evasi0n tool was released today, with support for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and iPad mini devices running iOS 6.x. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and takes only a few minutes to complete.


You require...

• 5 minutes of your time!
• A computer, running Windows (XP minimum), Mac OS X (10.5 minimum) or Linux (x86 / x86_64)
• An iPhone, iPad or iPod running iOS 6.0 through 6.1 (you may check in Settings / General / About => Version)
• A USB cable to connect the device to the computer

HP taking "multiOS approach."

It's new Pavilion 14 Chromebook sports a 14-inch diagonal HD BrightView LED-backlit display, a couple of inches larger than the typical Chromebook display, and has Altec Lansing speakers. The Pavilion 14 measures 13.66 x 9.37 x 0.83 in, and weighs 3.96lb.

As a Chromebook, naturally, its runs Google's Chrome OS, and HP focuses heavily on a seamless Google experience with popular products like Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive and Google+ Hangouts for multiperson video chat as well as access to apps in the Chrome Web Store.

Under the hood, it packs an Intel Celeron 847 1.1GHz processor with integrated Intel HD Graphics, 2GB DDR3 memory (upgradable to 4GB) and a 16GB SATA SSD (100GB free Google Drive storage for two years). The Pavilion 14 packs some necessary ports: 3 USB 2.0; 1 HDMI; 1 RJ45; 1 headphone-out/microphone-in combo and a multi-format digital media card reader. It also sports a HP TrueVision HD Webcam with integrated microphone.

The 4-cell (37WHr) Li-Ion battery lasts up to 4 hours and 15 minutes per charge, and for networking, the Chromebook features Intel 802.11a/b/g/n (2x2) and Bluetooth support - and of course a standard 10/100 BASE-T Ethernet LAN interface.

 

 

Google raises the top prize for hackers.

Previously, Google has offered prize totals of $1 million, and then $2 million, for hackers who can break its Chrome browser security in one way or another (the amount of compensation depends on the attack type). Now it is raising the total to $3.14159 million (a nod to Pi) for hackers who dare breach its Chrome OS security.

Google will issue Pwnium 3 rewards for Chrome OS at the following levels, up to a total of $3.14159 million USD: