Just yesterday I reported that a South Korean court had found Apple and Samsung both guilty of infringing each other’s patents, and claimed that in a good patent war no one wins. Turns out I was wrong. Big time. A few hours after that story posted, news reached us that the jury in the American leg of the global Apple vs. Samsung battle returned a verdict, and a damning one for Samsung.

After taking less than three days to deliberate the case, the jury found that Samsung copied from Apple, rejected all of Samsung’s own counter claims, and awarded the American company $1.05 billion in damages.

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In the 1983 classic movie WarGames, Matthew Broderick hacks into a top secret super-computer and comes close to initiating World War III. The global catastrophe is only avoided when the computer, "Joshua", starts playing Tic Tac Toe against itself and discovers it can’t win, coming to the inevitable conclusion that "the only winning move is not to play."

It’s a film that maybe Apple and Samsung should sit down and watch together. While the jury is still out in their current big Californian patent case, in South Korea, Samsung’s home and just one of several countries where the global lawsuit is being fought, the court has just ruled simultaneously that both firms infringed each other’s patents. And, as a result, ordered them to both pay damages, and imposed sales bans on all related products (none of which are the latest models).

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Like a lot of people I was intrigued and confused by the two stories that appeared on BetaNews yesterday regarding Microsoft’s issuing of DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) take-down notices. If you haven't already done so, you can read them here and here. While we’re waiting to find out why Microsoft asked Google to delist one of our old Windows 8 stories, it seems to have boiled down to two things. 1) Because we used an officially-sanctioned-for-editorial-use photo (which makes no sense), or 2) Because it was a negative story.

In his post concerning our DMCA notice, my colleague Joe Wilcox mused: "I wonder if the Microsoft censor police are trying to squash negative Windows 8 reaction using DMCA as a sword".

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First in a series. A lot of people are on the fence when it comes to Microsoft’s forthcoming OS. The Modern (formerly Metro) UI has made some previously enthusiastic Windows devotees reluctant to upgrade and, to be fair, it’s easy to understand why. But there’s much more to Windows 8 than just its touch-friendly but slightly clunky Start screen. If you’ve yet to make up your mind about upgrading, maybe some of these new features will sway you.

Earlier this week, colleague Martin Brinkmann identified "10 Windows 8 features you should know about". I've got eight more. In a companion post to this one, colleague Mihaita Bamburic gives "Eight reasons why Windows 8 is NOT for you".

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Did you know that updating Facebook while driving can cause lane veering by up to one meter, or that texting adds 8.5m to the overall stopping distance when travelling at 70mph? Well, it’s true according to a new study by Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) on behalf of insurance company esure. The report also says that 1 in 5 drivers took their eyes off the road for 7 seconds when they heard a ringing phone. Check out the fancy PDF infographic if you want to find out more.

To help remove these distractions (and reduce the number of claims it has to process, presumably), esure has produced a free Android app which eliminates mobile phone distractions. The DriveOFF app, available through Google Play, uses GPS to detect when your car is in motion and travelling above 10mph and automatically turns off all other apps and blocks incoming calls and texts.

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When film director Tony Scott committed suicide, Apple quickly put up a tribute to him on the iTunes store. Except the page is less of a tribute and more of a shop window. Underneath a picture of Scott, and a brief biography, are links to all of his movies available to rent or buy from Apple. It doesn’t mention his death, at all, just lumps all of his films together into a collection that’s prominently listed on the front Films screen.

When I first encountered the so-called tribute page, I was a little dismayed. When someone dies, the proper etiquette is to mourn them, and to reflect on their lives and on their achievements. It isn’t, generally, to try and make a quick buck from their passing. But that’s exactly what Apple has done here -- and it's not the first time.

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Microsoft’s new OS has a ‘Charms’ bar, which provides quick access to commonly used tasks -- Search, Share, Start Screen, Devices and Settings. It appears on the right-hand side of the screen when you move your mouse to either the top or bottom right corner. It’s an integral part of the Modern UI, but can get in the way on occasion. Fortunately, you can disable the two hotspots that cause the bar to appear by making a simple registry tweak.

Open the Run box by hitting Win+R, and then launch the Registry Editor by typing regedit into the box and hitting enter. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ImmersiveShell, right-click in the right-hand pane and create a new key called EdgeUI. Select the key and in the right-hand pane create a new DWORD and call it DisableCharmsHint. Right-click the DWORD and select Modify. Change the Value Data to 1. This will stop the Charms bar appearing when you move your mouse to the top or bottom right-hand corners.

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US bookseller Barnes & Noble has confirmed that it will be bringing its Nook digital eBook readers and bookstore to the UK in the autumn. Initially the devices, which include Nook Simple Touch and the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, will only be available through the company’s online storefront at www.nook.co.uk (which currently redirects to the main Barnes & Noble site). However, according to the company, the devices will additionally be available through various "leading retailers", which the company expects to announce shortly.

Speaking about the upcoming launch -- the first time the company has expanded its business outside of the United States -- William J. Lynch, Chief Executive Officer at Barnes & Noble, says, "We are proud to be able to offer our top-rated line of Nook reading devices and our award-winning digital bookstore to the discerning and highly educated consumers in the UK. We’re confident our award-winning technology, combined with our expansive content -- including books, children’s books, magazines, apps, movies and more -- will bring UK customers the option they’ve been waiting for."

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Social gaming just used to be about having fun, but now there’s a real-money element creeping in. First Gamesys launched a Facebook app that allowed UK residents aged 18 and over to play for real cash prizes while interacting with friends, and now Big Fish Games is getting in on the act with Big Fish Casino for iOS devices. The game is a relaunched and rebranded version of Card Ace: Casino, from recently acquired Self Aware Studios, that offers new games and additional social features, and will soon also allow UK users to play slots for real money.

If the thought of wagering your earnings on spinning reels doesn’t do it for you, you might be more interested to hear that the real-money feature, powered by UK-licensed online gaming company Betable, will also be available in blackjack, roulette and video poker in the coming months.

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You can’t have failed to notice that Windows 8 is attracting a lot of negative press. Some commentators, such as myself, have said it will flop, others that it will be the new Vista.

But not everyone thinks the updated operating system is a disaster. Thomas Koll, CEO of Laplink, is actually pretty positive about Windows 8's chances, and took the time to sit down with me and share his views about that and other topics, including flat PC sales, Microsoft Surface and tablet adoption in the enterprise.

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Cloud security has been a hot topic in the news lately. While most of the hacks reported in the press have affect consumers and popular free services, there’s no question that some businesses will be concerned, in the light of all these negative reports, about just how safe their off-site data actually is. It’s one thing for an individual like Mat Honan to lose his digital identity, but if a business loses the data it has stored in the cloud (or worse still, if it should fall into the wrong hands), that can have truly catastrophic consequences, both in terms of monetary loss and damage to reputation.

The perceived risk of cloud storage might have some small-and-medium businesses rethinking their strategy and looking to return to the old days of just backing up locally. But doing so could actually put company data at far greater risk. If the firm’s servers fail as a result of a cyberattack or a natural disaster, it’s going to be much harder to affect a speedy recovery.

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If Surface is the hit Microsoft hopes it will be, there’s the possibility that Apple might follow suit with an OS X powered MacPad at some point in the future (well, we can hope, can’t we?). The good news is you don’t actually have to wait for Apple, before trying out OS X on a tablet, you just need OS X Pad HD.

The advanced theme from Fnet Designs transforms your iPad into a Mac tablet with a fully functional Finder bar, and lets you add apps to the dock and change its style to match any of the 70 available wallpapers (or your own), create sidebar folders for Finder windows, and access settings and customization options through the System Preferences Menu. All software updates are applied directly through the theme.

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Windows 8 gets grief from all angles, including from the gaming industry. Valve’s boss Gabe Newell recently called the forthcoming OS "a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space", and Blizzard's Executive vice president of Game Design, Rob Pardo, tweets that Windows 8 "was not awesome for Blizzard either".

There are a couple of reasons why Gabe Newell, who worked at Microsoft for 13 years before leaving to form Valve, doesn’t like the new operating system. The awkwardness of running games through the interface formerly known as Metro is the most obvious issue, but the integrated Windows Store, which will directly compete with Valve’s distribution service Steam, is a much bigger concern for the company.

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It had to happen eventually. Representatives of the media and entertainment industries have been complaining for years about Google linking to sites that offer copyrighted content, accusing the Internet giant of not doing nearly enough to prevent access to infringing material. The company’s stock response has always been that it only indexes the web, and the results that appear when someone types a query into Google simply reflects the sites that people go to, and other sites link to. It’s a fair argument, although one somewhat undermined by last year’s algorithm update that targeted content farms, and showed the company’s willingness to tweak what sites appear where in its index.

Google does of course remove pages when it receives copyright removal notices to do so. In fact, in an effort to demonstrate just how actively, Google recently expanded its Transparency Report to show how many URLs it removes, from where, and at whose request. The figures are staggering. In the last month alone, Google removed over 4.3 million URLs from its index.

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Nine people have gone on trial in the central province of Hunan, China, accused of illegal organ trading and intentional injury after a 17-year old high school student sold one of his kidneys to buy an iPad and iPhone. The teenager, identified in a report by the state-run China Daily as Wang Shangkun from the Anhui province, was allegedly recruited through a chat room by one of the defendants, and paid 22,000 Yuan ($3,456) for the organ, which was removed in an illegal transplant operation by a team from a local hospital. The kidney was sold by the gang behind the trade to an unknown buyer for 150,000 Yuan ($23,566) and a further $10,000 in cash, netting them a profit of around $30,000.

While to Westerners $3,458 seems a shockingly low price to sell a kidney for (especially considering how much the recipient was willing to pay), it’s important to put that figure into context. The average wage paid to workers assembling Apple products at Foxconn is around 2,200 Yuan ($346) a month, so the figure Wang received would have equated to nearly ten months’ salary for someone working at the plant -- a colossal amount of money to a young man still in full-time education.

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