Ed Oswald

Nintendo is said to be preparing a new console for a late 2012 launch in a bit to regain the momentum it had with the Wii console, gaming news site Game Informer reported Friday. Sources said that the company plans to unveil the system at the E3 gaming conference in June of this year if not sooner.

The next generation console would be able to play games in high definition, although it was not clear whether Nintendo plans to simply match its competitors or try to surpass them. Either way, the move looks aimed at regaining ground it has lost as of late due to the Wii's limitations.

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The Justice Department said Wednesday that with the help of Microsoft, it and the FBI were able to take down a botnet that had infected nearly two million computers. Controlled by a program called "Coreflood," the virus was stealing personal information including financial data from infected users, and had been operating for close to a decade.

Five control servers and 29 domain names were seized in raids, and charges have been filed against 13 "John Doe" defendants for wire fraud, bank fraud and illegal interception of electronic communications. "John Doe" suits are filed when the plaintiff has not yet identified the defendant in the case, but in this case the defendants are believed to be foreign nationals.

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Despite being in the midst of a $39 billion merger with AT&T, T-Mobile is still moving forward with business as usual. The carrier announced Thursday a new cheaper unlimited plan, however with some important caveats, including throttling for heavy data users.

The plan will cost $79.99 per month, and included unlimited voice, data, and text and picture messaging. On average, the carrier says subscribers will save up to $350 yearly when compared to competitors' plans. Customers will only have a limited time to to sign up for the new plan, although an end date was not provided. Both new and existing customers will be eligible.

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A developer spurned by Twitter's new stance on third-party applications is developing a competitor to the trendy microblogging service, CNN reported on Wednesday. Ubermedia, creator of the popular UberSocial, Echofon and Twidroyd applications, hopes to address common criticisms of Twitter with the planned offering.

In March, Twitter told its developers that it would rather have developers present user's tweets in unique ways rather than just acting as another way to display their feeds. It also cut access to several applications -- Twidroyd and UberSocial among them -- for various terms of service violations, although UberMedia later corrected the problems and was granted access once again.

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Google found itself fending off criticisms from competitor Microsoft on Monday over whether or not its Google Apps product truly had an important government security clearance. Called the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) standard, the Mountain View, Calif. company claimed on its webpage that the Government version of Apps had it. It didn't.

Instead, Google Apps Premier had the proper certification, while the more restrictive Government version was still in the process of getting FISMA certified. This is required by some government agencies in order to participate and win bids for any IT contract.

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Google's planned $700 million acquisition of flight data provider ITA was given the go-ahead by the justice department on Friday, but not without some key concessions. One of them may erase any competitive advantage from the deal: it will require to both develop and license travel software as a result.

For a period of five years, the company will be required to provide these licenses "on commercially reasonable terms." Google will also be required to keep investments in research and development at similar levels to past years for those five years as well.

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Aiming to take on the iPad where few competitors have -- on price -- Acer on Friday said that it would begin shipping its Iconia Tab tablet for $449 later this month. The device sports a 10.1-inch screen, a NVIDIA 1GHz dual-core processor, 16GB of storage and runs on Android 3.0 "Honeycomb."

The Iconia Tab's feature set will put it on par with Apple's top-selling tablet, and will be one of the few that sells at a lower price yet matches the iPad on features. Tablet manufacturers have so far struggled to produce devices that could viably compete with Apple's tablet, likely due to economies of scale.

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On a party line vote, the Federal Communications Commission mandated larger carriers to sign roaming agreements for mobile data with their smaller competitors, a move that had been widely expected. Previously such agreements had been voluntary, allowing big carriers such as AT&T and Verizon to hold a competitive advantage over rivals.

Three Democratic commissioners -- Chairman Julius Genachowski, Mignon Clyburn, and Michael Copps -- voted for the deal, while the two Republicans -- Robert McDowell and Meredith Baker -- voted against it. McDowell went a step further and maintained the FCC lacked the legal authority to enforce the measure.

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Federal prosecutors in New Jersey are looking into whether mobile application developers are illegally sharing personal data of their users with advertising firms, and now a security researcher may have just reinforced the the case against at least one of those involved.

Veracode senior researcher Tyler Shields shared details of their study on music service Pandora, and found that "personal information is being transmitted to advertising agencies in mass quantities." Shields did not explicitly say whether or not the information transmitted may be illegal.

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Google is aiming to help stop the spread of malware, saying Thursday it plans to add a malware alert feature to prevent the download of malicious applications. The feature is an offshoot of its already popular Safe Browsing feature, which is a Google-maintained list of malicious sites.

Such functionality has been available as an API for developers for about two years now, and Chrome's anti-malware alert system also leans on this code. There are no restrictions on how this API could be used, so Chrome's competitors could just as easily add a similar feature using the same database. Currently Google is the only one using it, however.

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YouTube is set to overhaul its service in an effort to prepare itself for the rise of connected devices, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. Similar content would be grouped into "channels," including fee-based ones that would feature up to 10 hours of original content a week.

Sources told the paper that this would be a significant investment, to the tune of at least $100 million. However with content increasingly being viewed off-website, the move seems aimed to protect YouTube's strong position in the streaming media sector. It could also offer the site a new revenue stream outside of the sale of advertising.

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Attempting to put more competitive pressure on Apple's iPad, both Sprint and Verizon Wireless dropped the price of the Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet to $199.99 when signing a two-year contract. The price cut is the third this year, after the Tab debuted in October of last year.

Verizon initially offered the device unsubsidized at a cost of $599.99, while Sprint decided to subsidize the cost at $399.99. In January, Verizon dropped the cost by $100 as did Sprint, although Verizon would later decide to subsidize the cost and offer it for the same price as its competitor.

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Apple has been awarded a patent for a new hybrid connector that combines several high-speed data technologies onto a single 30-pin connector. Uncovered by Patently Apple, the connector would support USB 2.0, USB 3.0, and Dual-lane DisplayPort -- now being referred to as "Thunderbolt."

Thunderbolt is an effort between Intel and Apple, and is said to deliver transfer speeds of up to 10Gbps. USB 3.0 could be seen as a competing technology, but the Cupertino company seems to be preparing itself by developing a connector that could support both.

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A day after revealing Microsoft's plans to bring its ribbon interface to Windows Explorer and a new Welcome Screen, Microsoft bloggers Paul Thurrott and Rafael Rivera have now said the Redmond company plans to ship its own PDF reader with Windows 8, as well as a redesigned and 'immersive' version of its Internet Explorer browser.

Windows 8 is currently in pre-beta form, and is not expected to be released for another two years. While it's unclear whether these leaks are truly that, based on copies of the software obtained by either blogger or more likely part of a controlled leak by Microsoft itself, the posts have provided an intriguing glimpse into the possible future of the Windows platform.

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The NASDAQ on Tuesday announced that it had changed the weighting of stocks in its NASDAQ 100 index, a move that seemed to affect Apple and Microsoft the most. The changes were necessary due to the fact that the index had not been realigned in quite some time amid the rapidly changing nature of the tech landscape.

For example, before the realignment Apple had a market value that is 46 percent larger than Microsoft, but a weight in the NASDAQ that was some six times as large. Following the realignment, the weight difference has been reduced to about the same as its market value, the apparent intention of the stock index.

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