If purchases of the successful-if-flawed Amazon Fire bit into iPad sales during the holiday season, Apple CEO Tim Cook didn't see it.

Review

The long-running case of Gary McKinnon returns to court on Friday.

Researchers in Singapore and America have determined to their own satisfaction that it is actually much more difficult to think outside the box if you are, in reality, inside a large box at the time.

The UK economy might be down in the dumps, but there is a ray of sunshine from an unlikely source: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook has supposedly helped to contribute £2.2bn to the country's GDP in 2011.

Toy Fair 2012Robotics toy tycoon WowWee is down at the Toy Fair 2012 in London this week with its range of smartphone games based on the notion of augmented-reality.

iGamerI liked the original Infinity Blade when it arrived just over a year ago, but it seemed to fall short of classic status due to the repetitive nature of the combat, the rigidly linear exploration and threadbare fantasy storyline.

Mountain View's Chocolate Factory is putting its vast userbase on notice of major changes to its privacy policies.

Nokia has shipped 1.5bn Series 40 handsets, the milestone unit being snatched up by a Brazilian lass, 21-year-old Mayara Rodrigues.

A revised EU anti-piracy laws will provide content creators with "solid legal certainty" when developing new ways for consumers to legitimately access their works, an EU Commissioner working on the legislation has said.

Toy Fair 2012Hornby is at the London Toy Fair 2012 this week putting the Force into slot racing classic Scalextric with a series of Star Wars race kits.

Transport for London (TfL) is in the final stages of the tender process for the supply of Wi-Fi to up to 120 of its underground stations.

Being held in custody is bad enough for anyone accused of a crime, but when it means you'll lose the number one position on the Call of Duty ranking boards, it's really gonna hurt.

Toy Fair 2012Gadget specialist Bladez Toys is to cater for the Star Wars collective with a handful of officially-licensed remote-controlled inflatables based on characters from the films.

Acer has said it expects ASPs to continue to climb this year as the market shifts to ultrabooks – even as the vendor finally levels the inventory mountain that bedevilled it last year.

Viruses are accidentally infecting worms on victims’ computers, creating super-powered strains of hybrid software nasties.

UpdatedO2 UK is dishing out its customers' mobile numbers like free sweeties to every website they visit over a 3G connection.

Pope Benedict XVI has given a tentative thumbs-up to micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, but explained to his followers that they may reap more spiritual reward by just piping down a bit online.

NASA’s exploration rover Opportunity entered its historic ninth year of service on Mars today, having already driven over 21 miles and helped boffins make groundbreaking scientific discoveries on the unforgiving world.

Review

EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding will imminently table a draft bill that will – if passed in Parliament – require internet firms to be upfront about the user data they hold.

Ultrabooks are still too darn pricey for punters, with the new skinny laptops' average selling price during Q4 2011 63 per cent higher than that of regular notebooks.

Boffins employed by the US Department of Environmental Health and Microsoft (among others) say that users of tablet computing devices – an area almost completely dominated at the moment by Apple's iPad, selling in unbelievable numbers – run a more serious risk of "neck and shoulder discomfort" compared to people using normal desktop kit.

IPTV Week

Acer will capitalise on its Olympics prominence this year by ratcheting up its SMB channel and setting an end-user sales team on the UK's biggest companies.

Lego has given the green light to a set of the famous building bricks based on the world of the cult cyber-block game Minecraft.

European Commission vice-president Viviane Reding was forced into a defensive corner today, after putting forward her proposed rewrite of the EU's 17-year-old data protection law.

Groupon has been rapped for selling snake oil after the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) ruled that the online deals giant couldn't substantiate their claims about the reptile juice.

Microsoft will call time on its virtual currency, Microsoft Points, with a switch to real money on the cards later this year, it has been claimed.

After a flurry of complaints, O2 engineers appear to have shut off the proxy server quirk that leaked to websites the phone numbers of punters browsing the net on 3G connections.

Google is betting that slow and steady will prove a winning strategy for its Chrome OS platform, and is reporting some successes for the system in the education sector.

Tremble, thing-makers, because The Pirate Bay has started to share the source files for physical objects.

AnalysisCompare these two headlines: "Google shares tank after disappointing financial report" (here) and "Apple tops estimates with earnings leap of 118 per cent" (here).

Organisers of security conference CanSecWest have changed the rules for the next outing of its Pwn2Own computer hacking contest.

The government may never be able to “think rationally” about the therapeutic properties of hallucinogenic drugs, says Professor David Nutt. The top boffin was speaking on the publication of two new studies that show the anti-depressant qualities of magic mushrooms.

Dell is hedging its bets in the private cloud war that is ranging between VMware and Microsoft and has crafted two different versions of its vStart prefabbed clouds: one to run the vSphere stack (and thus ending with a "v") and another the Hyper-V-Systems Center stack (and thus ending with an "m"). Dell is today rolling out the largest Microsoft vStarts and promising to build even larger machines later this year to support both stacks.

IPTV Week

Anonymous took out several key Irish government websites last night and promised more disruption to come in retaliation for new SOPA-like legislation which it claimed would make it easier for copyright-holders to block access to file sharing and other sites in the country.

Symantec is urging users to patch pcAnywhere, its remote control application, following the discovery of a brace of serious security flaws.

The unannounced Samsung Galaxy S III will hit shelves in April with some meaty specs, including a quad-core processor and a 12Mp camera, it has been alleged.

Ofcom has granted BT and Everything Everywhere an extension to their test licence for cohabited LTE spectrum until the end of 2012, much to the relief of the trialists.

Microprocessor and GPU maker Advanced Micro Devices said yesterday that its financial results had been whacked by an unexpected downturn in discrete graphics processor sales in the fourth quarter, and Nvidia now says it had the same problem.

O2 has been sharing customers' phone numbers with every website they visited, but O2 isn't the only offender - it's just the one that slipped up and got caught.

Amazon has become an official supplier of enterprise IT by turning its cloudy Simple Storage Service (S3) into a back-up option for earth-bound data.

The shortages of disk drives due to flooding in Thailand continues to take its toll on IT suppliers, with motherboard and whitebox system maker Super Micro joining the club of companies adversely impacted by the shortages.

EMC recorded record revenues and profits for the full year and final quarter of 2011, although Information Intelligence results didn't look so clever.

Intel has quietly announced that it will pay a quarterly dividend of 21 cents per share on March 1, just as they did last September and December, and in earlier quarters at lower rates.

Server flash array vendor Fusion-io saw stonking quarterly revenues but disappointed with a loss despite unexpected higher sales. Did it under-price its ioDrive 2 products?

O2 has issued a public apology for leaking the phone numbers of some 3G customers in header information sent to website managers.

HP has announced the schedule for the open sourcing of WebOS tools and source code, and said it will be continuing to push development hard to build a truly open platform.

From “wow, that’s cold” we now get to meet a “wow, that’s hot” laser application, courtesy of the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory: its X-ray laser has created and probed matter as hot as the Sun’s corona.