Ed Oswald

A British judge has released Jake Davis -- more commonly known as "Topiary" -- on bail Monday, however he has been banned from using the Internet as a condition of his release. Davis was apprehended last Wednesday by the Metropolitan Police as part of a larger effort against LulzSec and Anonymous.

Topiary originally served as the mouthpiece for the LulzSec hacktivist group, but following its disbandment continued his work for Anonymous. He famously taunted police following the arrests of more than a dozen suspected members of the hacktivist group by claiming "you cannot arrest an idea."

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So say you're Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and you're sitting on a boatload of cash that's burning a hole in your pocket. What to do with it? Combined with securities and other investments, that's about $75 billion in cash and cash equivalents. In actual cash -- you know, greenbacks -- it's $28.4 billion.

Just to show you the power Apple has right now with the amount of money it has, Betanews has put together a list of companies that Apple could buy right now, with just cash.

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There's something wrong with your country when one of the most financially stable companies has more cash on hand than you do. But that is exactly what happened at the end of business Wednesday, according to the latest available daily financial statement from the US Treasury.

With a cash-on-hand balance of about $73.8 billion, the US Government now has less money on hand than Apple, who reported it had $76.2 billion in cash and securities at the end of last quarter.

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As patent lawsuits become ever more frequent, companies are building up their portfolios in an effect to protect themselves from litigation. Google is no stranger to this practice, as it confirmed on Friday it had purchased 1,030 patents from IBM. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

No doubt Google is still smarting from its loss to Apple in the race to acquire the intellectual property of Nortel Networks. The company was the odd man out in bidding for Nortel's technologies. It appears that the IBM patent purchase occurred some time in the middle of this month, indicating Google quickly moved on.

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Just two weeks after it launched here in the US, music service Spotify finds itself the target of a patent fight. San Diego-based PacketVideo sued the company in both the US and Netherlands on Thursday, claiming it could not come to an agreement over licensing of its technologies.

"PacketVideo has a strong intellectual property portfolio, and will take any necessary action needed to protect its intellectual property and prevent the misuse of its patents," the company's general counsel Joel Espelien said in a statement.

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Apple may have thought an update released Monday to fix issues with security certificates wasn't a big deal, but security researchers disagree. The flaw is easy to exploit thanks to an update to a publicly available application that can snoop on the data stream of iOS devices.

That application is called SSLSniff. An update to the application also released Monday allows it to now intercept secure communications of unpatched iOS devices.

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As the law enforcement crackdown against hacktivist groups Anonymous and LulzSec continued, British law enforcement on Wednesday announced the apprehension of "Topiary," a 19-year-old man from the Shetland Islands north of Scotland who has served as the spokesperson for the group.

Police were said to still be searching the residence where the individual was apprehended, as well as talking to a 17-year-old in the municipality of Lincolnshire in east central England in connection with the arrested. The person had not been charged or arrested.

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After a five-year hiatus, Verizon Wireless will return to RadioShack shelves starting September 15, the retailer announced Tuesday. The move would end a rocky two year relationship with T-Mobile, who as recently as April was accused by RadioShack of being in breach of contract.

Verizon lost its longstanding contract with RadioShack back in 2006, when the electronics retailer instead chose to partner with Cingular through 2015. The company also around that time renewed its contract with Sprint, which will be sold in stores through 2016.

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Microsoft debuted two new accessories Tuesday that will be ready for the important holiday shopping season. A wireless headset with Bluetooth capabilities along with a new media remote are expected, both sporting the gloss black enclosures that the newer Xbox 360's have shipped with.

The wireless headset will operate on Xbox's radio frequencies, but the company has also made it compatible with mobile phones and other devices through integrated Bluetooth support. Using it as a handsfree headset shouldn't be a problem: it looks very much like the standard mobile phone wireless headset.

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For those of us who like the fact that Google+ remains free of the clutter that games on Facebook cause to our news feeds there, we may soon find that reprieve short lived. More evidence surfaced Friday that Google does indeed plan to add some type of gaming functionality to its social network.

Tech blog Slashgear discovered evidence within Google+'s help files that make reference to a 'Games Stream.' This likely means that Google plans to separate those incessant game status posts from the standard stream, but is eventually planning to add some type of social gaming to its platform.

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Hackers with the group Anonymous claimed Thursday that they had hacked into the servers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). However, it wouldn't release much of the gigabyte of information it stole because doing so would be "irresponsible," seemingly indicating some of the data may be sensitive to security interests.

"Yes, #NATO was breached. And we have lots of restricted material," the group tweeted over its @AnonymousIRC account. "In the next days, wait for interesting data :)"

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Anonymous and LulzSec issued a joint statement Wednesday, firing back at FBI director Steve Chabinsky over his comments to NPR that Tuesday's arrests of 14 hackers associated with the groups was meant to send a message that "chaos on the Internet is unacceptable." The response strikes a markedly political tone.

Posted to Pastebin, the statement accuses governments of lying to their citizens and "dismantling their freedom piece by piece," governments conspiring with corporations and wasting taxpayer money, and lobbyists having too much control over day-to-day business "and corrupt them enough so the status quo will never change."

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AT&T's planned $39 billion merger with T-Mobile may have hit a major roadblock on Wednesday as the chair of a Senate subcommittee that handles antitrust affairs voiced his opposition. Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) said that the planned merger would lead to higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.

T-Mobile is the one remaining carrier offering lower priced rate plans, Kohl noted. In a letter to both the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission, the Wisconsin Democrat asked for the merger to be blocked because it "would likely cause substantial harm to competition and consumers, would be contrary to antitrust law and not in the public interest."

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Google's engineers say they have noticed unusual patterns of activity on its search engine which has given it a way to detect a certain type of malware. As a result, the company has altered the code for its search engine to place a warning at the top of the search results that a computer has been infected.

The malware apparently sends a small amount of traffic through a proxy. The company believes that a few million PCs may be infected, and since launching the feature Tuesday has warned "hundreds of thousands" of its users to possible infection.

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Although CEO Stephen Elop has done his best to attempt to keep Nokia's 'Sea Ray' Windows Phone 7 device under wraps, it's not working too well. Yet another video is making the rounds on the Internet Tuesday apparently of the device at some factory in either China or Taiwan -- it's hard to tell.

There's not too much new here to see that wasn't shown in that original video. The device is apparently removed from a case that looks to be intended to disguise the phone inside, and booted up into Windows Phone 7. We get to see the fact that the device has a dedicated camera button unlike its similar N9 cousin, and that it appears to be running Build 7710, which has recently been released to manufacturing.

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