Ed Oswald

The joke is on LulzSec this morning following the arrests of three top members of the group, and charges filed against two more. The action follows the cooperation of its leader, Hector Xavier Monsegur, aka "Sabu", who has reportedly worked with authorities since his arrest last June.

Monsegur plead guilty to 12 hacking-related charges in August. Although details of his arraignment have yet to be made public, the charges against four of the five are now available online.

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Sony's problems surrounding the hacking of the PlayStation Network is much worse than originally thought. The company confirmed over the weekend that hackers stole some 50,000-plus Michael Jackson tracks and music files from Sony servers. The company paid the Jackson estate $250 million last year for the rights to the unreleased material.

Reports say Sony's plans were to release the stolen music on up to ten separate albums, a strategy now in jeopardy as the tracks are now in the hands of Jackson's most avid fans. In fact, that's how Sony discovered the breach in the first place -- discussions of the tracks appeared on fan forums as they leaked to the Internet.

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AT&T is publicly conceding defeat after treating its long-time customers like second-class citizens, merely because they have an unlimited data plan. On Thursday the company announced changes to its throttling policy, boosting the throttling level to 3GB for customers using the HSPA+ network, and 5GB for those on its LTE network.

There is no other way to describe this than a win for consumers. AT&T was left to defend an untenable position where current customers paid $30 for 3GB of unthrottled data, yet long-time customers paying the same price were essentially cut off at 2GB. The position has already gotten the company sued once, and a judge found AT&T's practice unfair and awarded the plaintiff $850.

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Google's new privacy policy takes effect today, March 1. There are significant changes on how your data is handled across the Google family of sites, and that's enough to raise the concern of privacy regulators in both the European Union and Japan.

Their concern should be yours, too. Who's that looking over your shoulder online? Google.

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As Windows chief Steven Sinofsky takes the stage in Barcelona Wednesday to debut the Consumer Preview of Windows 8, there's a sense that a new era is dawning at Microsoft. Windows is about to take a dramatic turn and Sinofsky is very much responsible for that.

On top of this, Windows is coming out on time (AGAIN!), a real change in Microsoft's track record of missed deadlines. With current CEO Steve Ballmer's time at the helm arguably less than stellar, you have think there must be someone waiting in the wings at Microsoft to take his place.

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Apple sent out event invites to selected members of the press Tuesday for a March 7 event to be held at Yerba ay Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Calif. at 10 am PT, reportedly to launch the iPad 3. The location is significant because it is where Apple has unveiled the last two iPad models.

The invitation reads "We have something you really have to see. And touch". The reference could indicate that the Retina Display that has long been rumored to be part of the iPad 3 is coming. The resolution is thought to come in at 2,048 by 1,536 pixels, twice the 1,024 by 768 screen found on the iPad 2.

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While smartphones are commonplace in the developed world, market penetration in developing countries remains poor. Mozilla aims to change that, and is leaning on two international wireless carriers to make that happen. Both Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom are pledging varying degrees of support for its Boot-to-Gecko (B2G) initiative.

Boot-to-Gecko is Mozilla's browser-based mobile operating system. It uses Web standards like HTML5 at its core peppered with borrowed code from the Android operating system. The end result is an open platform that requires little in the way of raw power to provide users with a full smartphone experience -- perfect for producing phones cheaply.

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The practice of data speed throttling and the reasons behind it look less sanguine now following the results of a study showing that on average there is little difference between the data usage of the top five percent on both tiered and unlimited plans. So now what's the excuse?

I have been beating the drum against throttling for much of this month on the pages of BetaNews. First was my response to AT&T's unfair treatment of long-time customers. Then Cisco came out a week later with a study that shows consumers are using more data than the carriers lead us to believe. AT&T of course responded to this, blaming you for its bandwidth issues.

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Google plans to unload its stake in WiMAX venture Clearwire, selling its 6.5 percent stake at $1.60 per share or about $47 million. As a result of the sale, Google will take a substantial hit on its initial investment: the Mountain View, Calif. search company dumped about $500 million into Clearwire in 2008.

With Google headed for the exits, Clearwire is now sent scrambling to find new investors to continue bulding out its planned LTE network. At the moment it appears that fellow investor Intel will grab up some of the shares, but in the end a large portion may make it back on to the open market.

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Apple's annual shareholders meeting is providing little in the way of juicy news, but there appears to be an undercurrent of change in both the statements of executives and the votes of shareholders. Could this be a sign of a change in how Apple operates? It certainly seems so.

In his first Q&A with shareholders since becoming CEO, Tim Cook yet again acknowledged that Apple has "more [cash] than we need to run the company". At close to $98 billion, it's quite the chunk of change. Cook failed to specify, however, what the company plans to do with the money, only sharing that there are "active discussions" among the board on Apple's next steps.

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With the AT&T merger in the rear view mirror, T-Mobile USA faces new problems: mounting customer losses and a lack of clarity on its future path. This uncertainty is a negative for the company, and the carrier attempted to allay some fears on Thursday.

Late Wednesday during its earnings release, T-Mobile blamed the launch of the iPhone 4S from its three biggest competitors as the primary reason behind a massive number of defections in the fourth quarter. The carrier lost a net of 706,000 customers, which also dragged revenues down 3.3 percent to $20.6 billion.

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Flash is dead. Well, maybe that wording is a bit strong, but Adobe's roadmap for the platform released on Wednesday officially codifies the company's plans to scale back development efforts as new web standards take Flash's place, like HTML5.

As announced last year, development on mobile is officially over, as is direct development for Linux flavors of the Flash player. Adobe will focus its efforts on two key areas where Flash has a significant presence: video and gaming. The effort is aimed at making the technology viable "for the next decade", the company says.

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Verizon Wireless customers coast to coast are taking to social media and the company's support forums to complain about yet another nationwide 4G LTE outage, at least the fourth in the past three months. The issues started sometime early Wednesday morning and continues through press time.

"VZW is investigating customer issues in connecting to the 4GLTE data network. 3G data, voice and text services are operating reliably", the company writes in a tweet mid-morning on Wednesday. Reports are widespread: outages are reported in Detroit, Phoenix, Indianapolis, and Columbus, Ohio among other locations.

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Microsoft is stepping up its anti-Google campaign, in a couple new moves clearly intended to generate FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about its rival's products, corporate image and credibility. In the past two days, Microsoft launched at least two separate offenses: one against Google Apps, which competes with Microsoft's key businesses -- productivity software -- and the other an attempt to capitalize on the news surrounding Google's apparent circumvention of Safari privacy controls.

Google must defend against attacks from Microsoft on multiple fronts -- they're opportunistic and follow a pattern of attempting to cash in when Google is vulnerable. It also happens with increasing frequency. Consider Microsoft's attempts a year ago to justify copying Google results by turning around and accusing the Mountain View, Calif. company of click fraud.

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Say you are building a mobile operating system. What are the major applications you build into that OS? Email, calendar, and contacts apps right? Not Research in Motion. The company that built its business on business productivity failed to include that in the original PlayBook OS.

Fast forward to today. RIM attempts to right the sinking ship and fix the disastrous initial release of Playbook OS 1.0 with the second version of that mobile operating system. You guessed it: the signature additions to the operating system are those native email, calendar, and contacts apps missing from RIM's first try.

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