On Monday, Intel Corp announced it had completed the $1.4 Billion acquisition of Infineon AG's Wireless Solution business (WLS), to finally tie baseband processors into the company's CPU solutions. The WLS unit will be part of the new Intel Mobile Communications group, a standalone business unit within Intel's Architecture Group.

With the new portfolio of 2G, 3G and LTE baseband products acquired from WLS, Intel is going to move forward with a business to "serve a broader array of customers and market segments."

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Sadly, I must reaffirm my position stated during Apple CEO Steve Jobs' last medical leave, in January 2009: His health situation isn't a private matter, and, frankly, it's even less so now. The seeming suddenness of Jobs' more recent medical leave, which this time is open-ended, raises reasonably disconcerting questions about how long he can continue as chief executive and whether Apple has in place an appropriate succession plan. I didn't expect to return to this topic again, and surely Macheads will beat me aside the head with snide and accusing comments or rebuttal blog posts. So be it.

As leader of a public company, Jobs has no inherent right to privacy where his ability to act as CEO is concerned. Jobs' share in Apple was, last time I checked, well below 5 percent. He isn't principal owner of Apple, tens of thousands of shareholders are. If not Jobs, then at least Apple's board of directors has a responsibility to appraise shareholders about such an iconic CEO's realistic ability to continue in the role. Right now, Jobs has essentially abdicated the responsibility for an undetermined amount of time. In a January 17 letter, Jobs explained that he had "asked [COO] Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple's day to day operations." Not some responsibility but all.

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Responding to widespread civil unrest, the government of Egypt on Thursday evening ordered all private network operators to shut down their services, both wired and wireless.

At around 12:30am local time, Egypt's outbound connections to the Internet hit a brick wall, and fell approximately 80%. Both BGP Mon and Renesys observed similar withdrawals of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes in Egypt.

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The Web of Trust (WOT) plug-in, which delivers security and privacy ratings on websites and search engine results worldwide, has extended its support to the Opera web browser now that version 11 supports the use of third-party extensions.

WOT 0.9 works in the same way as it does on other supported browsers -- namely Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox -- to provide a traffic-light icon in the browser toolbar and next to search engine results to provide at-a-glance safety and privacy ratings for the websites in question. If a site is rated red, Web of Trust throws up a warning message making it clear it doesn't recommend the user visit the site -- this can be overruled by the user, but is not recommended.

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Microsoft announced fiscal 2011 second fiscal quarter results after the stock market closed yesterday. The company reported $19.95 billion in revenue and $6.64 billion net income. Business and Entertainment & Devices divisions reported enormous revenue gains, while Windows & Windows Live can only be described as abysmal. Overnight, I took another look at the numbers, from which I want to highlight three takeaways.

Wall Street didn't respond favorably to Microsoft's quarterly report, but that's typical. It doesn't seem to matter how good are the results, Wall Street won't give Microsoft a break. As I post, Microsoft shares are down 4 percent in late-day trading.

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The FBI said Thursday that it had executed more than 40 search warrants across the US, part of an expanding global probe into the attacks by hacktivist group Anonymous on several companies. The move followed another by British authorities also on Thursday that resulted in the arrests of five suspected participants.

Law enforcement agencies in at least five countries are now conducting their own investigations. The arrests in the UK are the only ones to occur as part of the investigation, although the FBI's move may signal arrests here in the US may not be too far behind.

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CodeWeavers has released a major new version of its Wine-based CrossOver tool, which is designed to make it possible to run Windows applications and games on both Macintosh and Linux platforms. CrossOver Impersonator Edition boasts a brand new CrossTie feature, which enables users to install hundreds of Windows applications with a single click. It also incorporates over 4,500 patches that went into the latest release of Wine (1.3.9), and replaces all previous versions.

CrossOver is based on the open-source Wine software, which CodeWeavers contributes a massive amount of code to. Wine works by isolating programs in "bottles," each complete with its own C drive (including all sub-directories), Windows Registry, Wine settings and, of course, all the application files. Separate bottles can be created to isolate programs from each other or for setting up different versions of Windows for compatibility purposes. CrossOver Impersonator provides a more user-friendly front end and support, albeit in return for a commercial fee.

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Samsung and ZTE were big winners selling mobile phones in 2010, based on new data released by IDC. Apple fell from fourth to fifth place. Smartphone shipments drove year-over-year growth to a new quarterly high -- 17.9 percent -- in fourth quarter. Unit shipments rose from 340.5 million units to 401.4 million. IDC measures shipments into the channel, which means unsold handsets are counted. Gartner should soon release actual sales data, for which the numbers will be lower.

For the year, manufacturers shipped 1.39 billion cell phones, up 18.5 percent from 1.17 billion units a year earlier. The United Nations estimates there are 5 billion cellular subscribers worldwide. IDC predicts that smartphones will be the major sales growth driver through 2014. This year, smartphone shipments are projected to rise by nearly 44 percent year over year.

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Sound quality really matters. The tiniest of audio glitches can often be enough to ruin a home movie or audio file, yet most applications offer little to address this. Video editors may offer hundreds of ways to tweak your picture, for instance, but when it comes to audio processing, if you get as much as a wave editor and a "clean" button then you're generally doing very well. If your software simply isn't delivering the audio quality you need, then, it may be time to get some help from a specialist tool -- and MAGIX Audio Cleaning Lab 17 Deluxe has plenty to offer.

The program can import audio from audio files, videos, or even record it directly from any external audio source that you can plug in to your soundcard (microphone, record player, cassette player and so on), useful if you're looking to digitize your old vinyl record collection. A stack of cleanup tools can then automatically remove clicks, crackles, humming, hiss and more.

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Hot on the heels of its first stable release, The Document Foundation has announced the immediate availability of LibreOffice Portable. As the name suggests, it's a repackaged version of The Document Foundation's free open-source application that is designed to run directly from USB -- or even cloud -- drives, allowing the end user to run the program on any Windows-compatible computer, including Macs and Linux running WINE.

LibreOffice is an offshoot of the OpenOffice project, brought into being by The Document Foundation because of concerns of the project's future as an open-source program having come under the ownership of Oracle following its purchase of Sun Microsystems. It contains a free word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentations tool and drawing application.

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In the company blog Thursday, Netflix Director of Content Delivery Ken Florence presented a ranking of the best and worst network operators for Netflix streaming, a ranking that the company plans to maintain and publish as a monthly report.

Florence says the top HD streams from Netflix are about 4,800 Kbps, and because the service adapts to the available bandwidth a provider may have, no one carrier would hit that maximum and maintain it. However, it serves as a good reference point for the average overall throughput a network can provide. Charter, the leading US network in overall throughput, averaged 2,667 Kbps between October 1, 2010 and January 15, 2011.

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[Editor's Note: This was a live document from 4:20 p.m. EDT until 5:40 p.m.]

Microsoft weathered the brunt of slower-than-forecast PC sales to beat Wall Street consensus for fiscal 2011 second quarter. The software giant announced earnings after the bell, for the three-month period ended Dec. 31, 2010.

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Facebook has denied reports that it had partnered with Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC to release its own phones, calling the reports "overblown" in comments to Reuters. Reports of a possible partnership first surfaced in London-based business website City A.M. on Wednesday. The site claimed that the phones would be launched at an event at the Mobile World Congress, to be held February 14-17 in Barcelona.

While not saying that HTC was not developing some type of Facebook-enhanced phone, it would not be branded as such, the site's business development chief Dan Rose said. "This is really just another example of a manufacturer who has taken our public APIs and integrated them into their device in an interesting way," he said. Regardless, mobile is an ever bigger portion of the social networking site's business, a quarter-billion users visit its mobile site every month.

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Google took steps Thursday to honor a previous commitment to root out piracy in its searches, beginning to censor torrent searches from its Autocomplete and Instant functionality. The Mountain View, Calif. company's efforts don't seem perfect: several torrent searches still seemed to be available.

Among the terms apparently filtered out include popular clients BitTorrent and Rapidshare according to reports. On some built-in search functions in browsers such as Internet Explorer and Safari, the terms appear to have disappeared. Betanews was still able to search for specific torrents such as "windows xp torrent," however, and Google was still returning torrent links through Instant at least for our testers.

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London police have detained five individuals ages 15 to 26 in connection with an investigation into Anoymous, a "hacktivist" group responsible for attacks on companies that suspended accounts associated with leak site WikiLeaks. The investigation is a global effort, and includes law enforcement agencies in both the US and Europe.

The Metropolitan Police Service did not indentify the accused, nor did they directly link them to the group. In the US, efforts have been stepped up to identify anyone who may have been involved in the efforts here, although so far no arrests have been made. The UK five are charged with offenses under the Computer Misuse Act, passed by Parliament in 1990.

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