The question of whether or not PlayStation Network users' credit card information had indeed been compromised was still unanswered Friday, closing in on two weeks after the breach had occurred. On the one hand, Sony was telling customers it had "no evidence" of the data being taken, but press reports suggest otherwise.

Trend Micro senior security researcher Ken Stevens tweeted that a purported database with PSN users' personal data was apparently up for sale on the web. "The hackers that hacked PSN are selling off the DB. They reportedly have 2.2 million credits cards with CVVs," he tweeted on Thursday.

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Security firm BitDefender's report for Q1-2011 highlighted autorun-based exploits as one of the most exploited PC security vulnerabilities. But there's no need to panic, just yet. The company has conveniently just released a free USB Immunizer tool that promises to address the issue.

The program is easy to use, essentially just creating an Autorun.inf folder on your chosen drive, which in turn contains additional files and a hidden folder. So if you plug the device into an infected PC, and something attempts to write a new Autorun.inf file, then it won't be able to do so. Or, at least, that's the plan.

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Surely everyone likes the idea of saving money -- and if it can be coupled with doing something that might help to save the planet, so much the better. It is this philosophy that helps to explain the success of energy saving light bulbs; as well as helping to reduce energy consumption, and, therefore, carbon production; they also help to reduce electricity bills. The same philosophy may help the energy-saving app Granola to succeed.

Despite the name, this is not an app that has been designed to appeal solely to the crunchy granola brigade. The notion of being green and helping to do one's bit for the environment is universally appealing, particularly if it involves very little effort. Granola makes it as easy as it can possibly be to reduce the energy consumption of your computer.

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"Increasingly, smartphones will drive market growth. This means feature phone makers will either need to become smartphone dependent or consolidate that part of the market." That statement, from Kevin Restivo, IDC senior research analyst, describes the outlook for the global handset market in 2011. If he's right, and by every indication he is, Nokia will likely lose more market share during the Windows Phone transition. Perhaps more than Gartner and IDC already have forecast.

Nokia's dominance is driven by sales of feature handset and dumb phones, particularly in emerging markets. But those same markets have started adopting smartphones at brisk pace, according to IDC. The handset manufacturer's core problem is threefold:

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Research firm NPD Group said Thursday that the introduction of the iPhone on Verizon did help Apple to eat into at least some of the Android platform's dominance of the smartphone industry in recent quarters. Additionally, the higher sales made Apple the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the United States.

The iPhone 4 was the best selling phone in the United States, followed by the iPhone 3GS, the Motorola Droid X, HTC Evo, and the HTC Incredible. The fact that the 3GS -- now a nearly two year old device -- still is one of the top selling smartphones in this country goes to show that rumors of Apple's downfall in this sector may be greatly exaggerated.

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Today, after the closing bell, Microsoft answered an oft-asked question: What would the quarter be with no new major products in the pipeline? Would Windows 7 and Windows Server R2 (released October 2009) and Office 2010 (released May 2010) provide enough sales tailwinds?

For fiscal 2011 third quarter, ended March 31, Microsoft's revenue rose 13 percent to $16.43 billion, year over year. Operating income: $5.71 billion, or 10 percent increase. Net income rose 31 percent to $5.23 billion, or 61 cents a share. Earnings per share rose by 36 percent year over year.

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As the PSN outage enters its eighth day, some online gamers surely are asking "What now? What can I do?" You've spent more than a week -- yes, it does feel like years -- in front of the TV looking at the PSN offline message and hoping the network will magically come back up. Sorry, bud, but the only magic is in the game.

I present some things you can do while waiting for PlayStation Network to come back up -- and perhaps buckle under the load of 77 million subscribers trying to change their passwords all at the same time. To our readers, the list is but a start. Please offer your own activities in comments. Let's have some real fun with this. Hey, adding to this list is one of the things to do while waiting for PSN. In no particular order of importance:

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CyberLink's PowerDVD has long been many people's DVD and Blu-ray player of choice. But that's no longer enough for CyberLink, which boasts that PowerDVD 11 "is the world's leading universal media player for the PC", so powerful that it can "play any media format, from any source." Universal media player? Any media format? Big claims, then, but has CyberLink delivered? We took PowerDVD 11 for a spin in an effort to find out.

The interface hasn't changed too much, with simple tabs allowing you to play particular content types. And the core DVD and Blu-ray functionality is also similar to PowerDVD 10, though there are a few useful additions dotted throughout the package. The program doesn't only play DVDs, Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D discs, for instance: it can now also handle recorded 3D TV.

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Earlier this week, Google updated its popular web browser Chrome to version 11. The latest stable release, which sports a new "flattened" version of the program icon, has one major headline feature: support for text-to-speech in supported web pages. This new feature, designed for those who have difficulty using keyboards, is based on HTML5 technology -- and works on web pages where a microphone icon has been embedded into a text or form field. It currently only supports English as a language.

The feature works by the user clicking the microphone icon before speaking into their mic. Chrome then converts this into text and pastes it into the field. Supported websites are currently thin on the ground, but it can be tested at HTML Rocks or by selecting English as the "From" language at Google Translate.

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Mobile devices running iOS generated $43.79 billion for Apple during calendar 2010, or about 57 percent of revenues. But it is the rise in overall revenue and net profit that is most significant, as seen from the chart above. Perhaps more surprising, Apple's calendar first quarter 2011 net profit was just slightly less than that of the holiday quarter, when iOS device sales were even stronger.

The revenue curve from Q1 to Q4 2010 is simply stunning. Apple revenue nearly doubled, as did its net profit -- from $13.5 billion to $26.7 billion and $3.1 billion to $6 billion, respectively. In April 2010, Apple launched iPad, which generated about $10 billion in revenue during 2010. Without iPad, Apple would have generated only $66.28 billion last year -- still impressive.

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In the 24 hours since Sony informed the world that PSN had been hacked, customers are finally getting useful information about the hack and risk to them. Clearly, Sony is trying to quell fears about the privacy risk posed to as many as 77 million subscribers.

Today's update was a Q&A, labeled #1, so more may be coming. The post responds, in part, to questions PlayStation Network subscribers asked in comments to yesterday's shocking post admitting hackers had stolen massive amounts of data -- account names and passwords, addresses and phone numbers, birth dates and security questions. Exactly how did the hackers get so much information?

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That's not just PCs but servers, too.

Today Gartner offered a refreshing perspective on operating systems, carving up the market by revenue share rather than units. By that measure, Windows combined PC and server OS share was 78.6 percent in 2010, up 8 percent year over year. While Windows' lead is commanding, Mac OS is growing faster, up 15.8 percent to $520 million in revenue. But the king of growth is Oracle, which share rose 7,683 percent from $10 million to $780 million year over year. Oracle catapulted from ninth to fourth place and ahead of fifth-ranked Apple, mainly from its April 2009 Sun Microsystems acquisition and Solaris with it.

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Bids are expected to be received for social networking site MySpace by the end of the week, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. News Corp, which acquired the site in 2005 for $580 million, is said to be seeking bids of at least $100 million for the site.

At least a half-dozen companies are said to be considering bids, including several equity firms and Criterion Capital Partners LLC, owners of social networking site Bebo. The structures of the deals are not known although it is said that some include News Corp retaining a small stake.

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A huge percentage of home computer users have a small network setup, and the same is certainly true for many small businesses. Setting up a network means that it is possible to share files and resources such as an Internet connection between multiple computers, but it is vitally important to keep an eye on how bandwidth is being used to ensure the best possible performance and to eliminate bottlenecks. Rubbernet is a network monitoring tool that enables you to do just that with your Mac.

The app can be used in a variety of ways, but at its most basic it can be used to monitor which applications are making use of your network connection. This can be useful when it comes to analyzing network performance, but also acts as a useful security tool as you will be able to see the activity of unknown applications.

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Paragon's Hard Disk Manager Professional has long been one of the most comprehensive collection of hard drive tools around. The new version 11 extends even further, though, making it straightforward to manage even more types of drives.

Plug one of the new 3TB drives into an XP system, for instance, and normally you'd find you can only use the first 2.2TB. Hard Disk Manager 11 Professional includes a GPT Loader, though, that will give you complete access to the full capacity of the drive. The program can now work with Apple HFS+ formatted partitions, too, allowing you to create, format and resize them to suit your needs (and you get read-only access from Windows systems, too).

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