The patent wars are cooling down. Rockstar Consortium's litigation against numerous Android handset manufacturers has come to an end after the group sold 4,000 patents to RPX Corp. The intellectual property risk mitigation company bought the patents for $900 million, ending lawsuits against HTC, LG and Samsung.

Apple, BlackBerry, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Sony formed Rockstar Consortium back in 2011 to purchase around 6,000 patents from the bankrupt Nortel Network Corp for $4.5 billion. 2,000 of the patents had previously been shared between the members of the consortium, and the remainder have now exchanged hands for less a quarter of the original sale price.

Smartphones are in the hands, pockets and purses of many people nowadays, but the type of phone varies. In the real world, you see lots of iPhones and Android phones, but beyond that, not much else. Sure, people still use BlackBerrys, and every once in a while you might experience a Windows Phone sighting, but phones based on Apple and Google's mobile OSes are really the only two horses in the race.

Even rarer than seeing a Windows Phone in the wild, is seeing a Firefox OS handset, despite its availability in many countries. In the USA particularly, Firefox OS phones have been available online, but not in the typical outlets, like Best Buy or directly from carriers. Today, Mozilla announces the first-ever Firefox OS device for Japan, and it is beautiful. With that said, will citizens of the Land of the Rising Sun actually take notice?

It’s that time of the year again when news sites and search engines look back at the stories and events that shaped the year. The top stories on BetaNews are obviously going to be different -- mostly -- from the top stories on other sites because we focus on technology. So in other words don’t expect Kim Kardashian "breaking" the internet to appear anywhere in our list. Although that’s not to say she won’t make an appearance somewhere…

Because BetaNews offers a mix of content, we’ve put together three top 10 lists -- News, Opinion/Editorial, and Guides. With news, it's not necessarily the biggest stories of year that make the list, but rather the content that was viewed the most. All three lists are presented, as ever, in reverse order.

It's that time of the year when our thoughts turn towards a large man in a red suit. Despite his jolly nature, he still manages to sometimes terrify small children, as he did mine. However, the prospect of gifts generally gets them over the hump, and perhaps it's what worked on a recent flight between London and Boston.

The people who boarded the recent Virgin Atlantic flight were treated to a visit from the jolly old man, but more importantly, he had gifts in hand.

When it comes to security, Apple can and should do better. It is one of the biggest offenders, after all, making quite a few serious mistakes in this area. One of its most-important services, namely iCloud, has been instrumental in this year's celebrity photo leaks scandal, better known as The Fappening. And, more recently, a weakness in its OS X deployment software for iOS apps has exposed hundreds of thousands of iPads and iPhones to the WireLurker malware. And these are just two examples. Unsurprisingly, as the year draws to an end, security remains a talking point in Apple's case.

Let's start with the good news, first. Apple has pushed an update for OS X 10.10 Yosemite, 10.9.5 Mavericks, and 10.8.5 Mountain Lion, seemingly for the first time, to quickly fix a critical vulnerability discovered in NTP (Network Time Protocol), a protocol which is widely used to synchronize device clocks with dedicated servers. Normally, OS X updates are not applied automatically, but this one is apparently so critical that it is.

Bandisoft has updated its free image viewer HoneyView with support for Fabrice Bellard’s new BPG image format.

BPG (Better Portable Graphics) is an efficient compressed graphics format which can deliver much smaller file sizes than JPG, while also supporting extra features like transparency.

You send a command from your smartphone and your house automatically decorates itself with a holographic Christmas tree complete with decorations and a suitably conifer-like smell.

Sound like science fiction? Maybe, but this is among the predictions by the authors of a new book that looks at how technology is changing our lives and how we do business.

Utilities developer Icecream Apps has released Icecream PDF Converter 1.3, extending the program with new text extraction tools.

The program can now extract the text from one or more PDFs, saving it in DOC, ODT, RTF and TXT formats.

North Korea experienced a complete internet outage for several hours last night before links were restored early this morning.

With the North Koreans at the center of the political storm over the Sony hack could this be some form of revenge attack?

If you’re thinking of treating yourself to a new PC or a Windows tablet, then Microsoft has some special deals that might be of interest. Its end of year sale offers some decent savings on PCs and tablets from the likes of Lenovo, Acer, HP and ASUS.

You can also pick up the HP Stream 7 Signature Edition Tablet for just $99, which is even more of a bargain than it first seems as it comes with Office 365 Personal, which by itself is worth $69.99.

Sources indicate that Samsung is lining up its own mobile payments service to launch next year.

ReCode reports that the South Korean firm is in discussions with a payments startup called LoopPay to develop a system that doesn’t require retailers to install any additional hardware.

Want to know a secret? Linux-based operating systems and Windows are the same thing -- crazy right? I know! I was shocked to learn this myself, but it is true. They are both a means to run software, called programs. Sure, the types of programs available for each are not identical, but they could be. You see, if developers wanted to, they could write their software for both operating systems. Sadly, Linux has a very small user share in the home, so it is not always financially possible to do so.

Still though, they are the same thing. Well, the same thing to some people at least, admittedly not all. One particular type of software is available for both Windows and Linux-based operating systems, making them the same thing for some -- the web browser. Yes, many home users utilize web browsers, like Chrome and Firefox, for all of their computing needs. In this sense, Windows and Linux are simply a means for running a web browser, and it doesn't matter which OS they choose.

Holiday shopping is now coming down to the final hours, and many procrastinators out there are still putting off that trip to the store. There is always the option to shop online, but the delivery window is closing quickly. Thankfully there are digital options to grab things for friends, family and even yourself.

Amazon has just the thing for the people just described -- it's a digital sale. Beginning December 24th, the app store will offer a range of games and more all offered for free. The complete bundle totals $220 in value if you were to buy each regularly.

Recently a raid took down the famed Torrent site, The Pirate Bay. With it went another popular service called EZTV. Soon after, I wrote that I felt this did little to obstruct piracy, only cause a brief slow down in the flow of files, and I predicted the Bay would come back.

It hasn't yet risen from the dead, though I still expect it will. However, fellow victim EZTV has returned to the land of the living and is now functioning as normal -- well mostly, it's up and down. In fact, it's even located at its old address of EZTV.it like nothing ever happened.

We've seen several builds of the Windows 10 Technical Preview -- some official, some less so -- and there's another big build due in January. If you're interested in Windows 10, it's likely that you have already jumped onto the preview builds and have been updated as and when new versions are released. But as we get closer to the actual launch, the publicly released builds are going to start to get more exciting.

In January users of existing preview builds will be able to upgrade automatically, or there's the option of downloading an ISO. But Microsoft hasn’t forgotten users of Windows 8, and the company has released a tool that makes it possible to grab January's Windows 10 Technical Preview build through Windows Update.