Tired of getting swamped with spam and malware? Then just pack your things and catch the next flight to Japan, where computer viruses are now considered illegal. Under the country’s new legislation, anyone convicted of creating or distributing viruses could face up to three years in prison, or a maximum fine of ¥500,000 (about $6,200).

It’s all part of Japan’s efforts to comply with the Convention on Cybercrime — an international treaty that requires member governments to criminalize hacking, child pornography, and other terrible things. Privacy advocates, however, have already raised concerns over some stipulations that would allow investigators to seize data from PCs hooked up to allegedly criminal networks, and to retain any suspicious e-mail logs for up to 60 days.

In an attempt to quell these fears, the Judicial Affairs Committee tacked a resolution on to the bill calling for police to exercise these powers only when they really, really need to.

SOURCE via The Mainichi Daily News

Nintendo couldn’t have put all those glorious names of third party developers up alongside its Wii U announcement earlier this month without giving those companies at least a glimpse at the actual hardware they’d have to code on. Sega Europe’s Gary Dunn was among those to have tinkered with a development kit before we even knew what the Wii U would be called, but he says that Nintendo intends to refresh that hardware to the latest prototype model at some point before the end of July. According to Gary, coding for the new system is pretty straightforward, and though he wouldn’t get into specifics about performance, he does expect more details to emerge once Nintendo starts distributing the latest version of the Wii U dev platform. Asked about how it compares to the Xbox 360 and PS3, Sega’s dev leader simply said the new Nintendo console is “different.”

SOURCE via Eurogamer

The guys over at Droid-Life spotted a VZW ad starring a mysterious new Honeycomb tablet, which to our ninja-trained eyes looks to exhibit many of the design elements of Motorola’s Xoom. It could, of course, be just about anything, given that Verizon yanked the video almost as soon as the above screengrab was lifted, but the rear of this 10(ish)-inch tablet looks very much like a Xoom designed to be used in portrait orientation. We know Moto has a Xoom 2 cooking in the oven and it’s not unreasonable to surmise that Verizon is putting together the finishing touches on a promo campaign for it. Watch the video after the break. Read more…

Acer’s been mighty busy the past few days, trotting out laptops, desktops, a media streamer, and a multitouch monitor, to boot. But the company wasn’t ready to call it a week just yet — the outfit also announced the Predator G5910 gaming rig for the UK gaming crowd. As you might gather from its reddish accents and claw-like doors — a “combat-machine” aesthetic that resembles the Crysis game’s armour suit, according to Acer — this is a power tower.

These bad boys pack quad-core, desktop-grade Core i5 and i7 processors, up to 16GB of memory, 10 USB 2.0 ports, a 12-in-1 memory card slot, two swappable hard drive bays, and as much as 8TB of storage spread across four SATA drives.

In terms of graphics, the most specific thing Acer is saying is that it’s compatible with NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon cards, and that it’s NVIDIA 3D Vision-capable. You can also overclock this guy using Intel’s own Extreme Tuning Utility, but only if you opt for a K-series CPU. This would mean the machine has a P67 chipset — which is what retailers in other European countries are listing — and not the H67 listed in the press release.

As final flourishes, Acer threw in a handle on the back, and an angled deck on top to keep your inevitable morass of cables under control. UK shoppers can find it in mid-July starting at £599 with VAT of course.

Hacking group LulzSec today came forward and stated that they are not responsible for the network attack on Sega’s online gaming network, Sega Pass. In a twist of events, LulzSec issued a statement to Sega, claiming that they will help Sega take down whoever initiated the attack, saying this on their Twitter page:

“@Sega – contact us. We want to help you destroy the hackers that attacked you. We love the Dreamcast, these people are going down.”

So far, no hacker groups are coming forward to claim credit for the attack. However, a number of recent attacks on game companies and their online services are credited with LulzSec, which publicly lists their attacks. But LulzSec denies that it was ever involved with the breach at Sega.

Earlier yesterday, Sega’s online gaming network Sega Pass was attacked, which brought the service completely down. Sega’s response team confirmed the attack and mentioned that critical customer information is compromised.

Customer details such as names, DOBs, email addresses, and passwords were taken, but Sega says that passwords are encrypted. On the other hand, officials at the company stated that financial information is safe, as those details do not reside on Sega’s own servers. Sega is still investigating the breach today, but have not identied new information.

Company officials recommend Sega Pass users change their login credentials as soon as possible.

Keeping track of all accusations flying back and forth in the ongoing patent brouhaha between Apple and Samsung? Looks like you’ll have to update your scorecards again, as Apple has now amended its complaint with some even stronger language than before, and broadened the scope of the devices involved in the suit.

According to Apple, the Droid Charge, Infuse 4G, Nexus S 4G, Galaxy Tab 10.1, Galaxy S II and a handful of other Samsung devices are all also infringing on the patents in question, which now total eight in all (two previously included have been thrown out, but three new ones have been added).

As for that stronger language, Apple’s now saying that Samsung “has been even bolder” than other competitors in copying its products, and that it’s created “products that blatantly imitate the appearance of Apple’s products to capitalize on Apple’s success.” Looks like the catfight is really heating up!

SOURCE via Slashgear

That awkward looking electric car above certainly looks innocent enough, but it might have been spreading some pretty detailed gossip behind its owner’s back. Leaf-driver Casey Halverson was playing around with the RSS reader in his Carwings system when he discovered that it wasn’t just collecting feeds from RSS servers, it was also telling those servers his car’s current location, speed, heading and even the destination he’d set in the sat nav. Strangely, Halverson’s undercover tattletale appears to have halted its indiscretions after he posted the discovery on his blog, but we’re surmising there’s still hundreds of server logs up and down the country that prove it really happened, not to mention his video after the break. Cue Rockwell, fade to black.

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