There are no snow days on the Internet. If you work from home and write online like I do, drudgery never ends. Or does it? This Saturday, Anonymous may change that.

"To protest SOPA, Wallstreet, our irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of sheer sadistic fun, on March 31, Anonymous will shut the Internet down", so claims a February 19 Pastebin post.

According to reports from former Washington Post reporter Brian Krebs, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg, a major data security breach is currently being investigated which could affect millions of credit card numbers.

Visa, MasterCard, and Discover Financial have issued statements to the media that address the incident, but none have addressed the scope of the breach because investigations are still under way.

March 30 is finally here. Can you believe it took so long to arrive? Today, AT&T is taking preorders for the tasty Nokia Lumia 900. Yes, tasty. What? You think only Google's Ice Cream Sandwich is sweet? Not so. Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" Commercial Release 2 is, too. It's yours on a swanky Nokia smartphone pimped with Carl Zeiss lens for the 8-megapixel camera and pumped with speedy LTE for data. For 99 bucks, AT&T practically gives away Lumia 900.

Many of you think so, too. Earlier in the week I asked: "Will you buy Nokia Lumia 900 Windows Phone for $99?" The overwhelming majority of respondents will -- nearly three out of four. The Finnish phone maker bet the company on Microsoft's mobile OS and brings this handset to a large, overlooked market. Nokia's US presence is mighty invisible outside T-Mobile. If Lumia 900 and its companions fail, so may Nokia.

Thursday evening, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion posted its fourth quarter 2012 results, marking major losses: a 21 percent quarterly decline in BlackBerry smartphone shipments (11.1 million,) and a 19 percent decline in revenue ($4.2 billion,) which resulted in a $125 million net loss.

Furthermore, RIM's former co-CEO Jim Balsillie, who stepped down from his position in January, tendered his resignation from RIM's executive board. This brings a complete end to Balsillie's twenty year term with Research in Motion.

But I'll shed a tear for you and remember the good times we had together.

That's because IDC asserts, despite exciting Windows 8's coming launch, that the PC era will be over by 2016. Gartner uses a different metric to arrive at 2014. But whatever the measure, the Windows era is over, too, as (gulp) Android becomes the most widely shipped operating system on the planet. I guess you were right to obsess about Google after all. Cripes! As long ago as 2003, wasn't it? Who could have imagined that it would really come to this? You weren't being paranoid at all.

Now there's a headline I never expected to write, particularly following "Android is unstoppable" nine months ago. But in the United States, at least, iPhone has nearly matched pace with Androids. Looks like the Apple apologists will get their day. After years of wrongly boasting iPhone's leadership over Androids, they might yet be right.

For the three months ending in February, 48 percent of Americans who recently bought a smartphone, chose Android -- 43 percent iPhone, according to Nielsen. Those numbers are up considerably for both, but iPhone surged to close the gap, following the release of the 4S in October. A year ago, 27 percent of new acquirers chose Android versus 10 percent for iPhone.

Shares of Red Hat rose 17 percent to $60.12 in heavy midday trading. Yesterday, after the bell, the company reported $1.13 billion revenues for fiscal 2012, ended February 29. Red Hat is the first open-source based company to post $1 billion in revenues

Quite a feat for a platform Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once called a "cancer" and has repeatedly questioned the security of. One has to wonder if Ballmer might be reconsidering the parnership Microsoft penned with Red Hat back in February 2009.

Over two years in the making, Google's Go project on Wednesday hit its 1.0 version milestone release, this is the first time the general-purpose programming environment has been made available in supported binaries on Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS, and Windows.

This release defines both the specification of the Go language and the specification of a set of its core APIs, and implements them in the form of two compiler suites, and the core libraries themselves.

Smart Projects has updated its shareware data recovery tool, ISOBuster, to version 3.0. Previously limited to examining and recovering data from optical discs such as DVD, CD and Blu-ray, ISOBuster 3.0 now extends support to a wide array of disk formats, including hard disks, memory cards, USB thumb drives and even Zip, Jaz and floppy disks, adding support for the NTFS filing system at the same time.

Past versions of ISOBuster were renowned for being able to recover data from corrupt and even physically damaged optical discs, and the functionality will be similar for newly supported drive and file system formats too.

Whether you’re concerned that files you have stored on a USB drive might be recovered by someone else after they have been deleted, or you are selling your computer and want to ensure that none of your personal documents can be accessed, almost everyone has a need to securely delete data at some point. Simply deleting files is not enough as there are all manner of tool in existence that can be used to restore them, but Disk Wipe is a free, easy to use app that helps to ensure that when a drive is formatted, none of its data is recoverable.

It is not just hard drives that the app can be used to secure. If you have stored private documents on a USB drive or have photos or other files stored on a memory card, the same app can be used to completely format any FAT, FAT32 or NTFS drive that can be accessed from within Windows. In addition to the secure file wiping, Disk Wipe also provides you with a good deal of information about the drives it detects, such as the number of sectors, the manufacturer and serial number.

Are you 35 and claiming to be 29? Don't post photos to Facebook. Today Face.com added a new attribute to its facial-detection API: age detection. The startup claims the new attribute will let developers create apps that use three criteria -- minimum, maximum and estimated age -- to determine how old people are in photos.

While the technology surely will appeal to social networkers, the big boon could be marketers looking to maximize exposure to select demographic groups, such as 18-24 year olds. Developers can set the attribute to look for specific age segments, hence the marketing potential. But there are others, such as detecting fake IDs at establishments serving alcoholic beverages. Additionally, Face.com claims to have improved facial recognition by 30 percent in this release of the API.

Opera Software on Wednesday released the latest version of its compact Opera Mini browser for Android devices, which was heretofore available only as an Opera Next advance build.

Opera Mini 7 for Android features improved hardware acceleration for faster and smoother performance, and features the ability to set up the homescreen with an unlimited number of Speed Dial buttons.

Properly understanding what’s happening on your PC -- monitoring hardware, assessing performance, diagnosing errors -- normally requires you to navigate a host of Control Panel applets and third-party tools. But if you’re tired of such hassles, then there is an easier way: install AIDA64 Extreme Edition 1.85 and you’ll get a whole library of PC management and information tools in a single, easy-to-use package.

Need to know more about your PC devices, for instance? AIDA64 provides detailed reports on your motherboard, BIOS, RAM, hard drive, sound card, network adapters, PCI and USB-connected devices, their resource use and more, so you can get a feel for your system setup without having to open the case.

Google Chrome 18 has just landed as a stable release, and while it has the usual mix of minor tweaks and security fixes, the real news is its graphics improvements.

Part of this comes from the browser enabling GPU-accelerated rendering for 2D Canvas content, which could bring a real performance boost to canvas-based animations and games. (Or that’s the plan, anyway. If you have any issues, or just want to find out what’s happening on your system, then entering chrome://gpu will give you more information on the browser’s current GPU acceleration usage.)

Google isn't waiting for the install base of Android users to move to Ice Cream Sandwich, not that carriers or handset manufacturers help much (if you're waiting for that upgrade from Gingerbread, you know what I mean). Today the search and information giant updated Google Maps for Android to version 6.5, packing in capabilities specific to version 4.x. Don't you feel cheated? I would.

Google offers the best to a minority of users, and small is too big a word to describe them. According to Google's official stats, as of March 5, Ice Cream Sandwich accounts for a mere 1.6 percent of Android devices. But, hey, many of these users are the bleeding edge of influencers Google should want to reach -- and keep enthusiastic.