It’s been a big weekend for hackers. Over the last month or so, Sony has been bombarded with attacks from hackers. However, Sony is not the only one under attack. Nintendo and the UK’s National Health Service have also gotten some attention as of late, though the breaches weren’t quite as damaging as the one that saw Sony lose the personal data of 77 million users. Over the last few days, Codemasters, Epic and the International Monetary Fund were added to the list of companies targeted by hackers. Read more…

Finally Toshiba’s Honeycomb tablet gets a proper date, and a price! Toshiba is marking June 13th with pre-order availability of its Thrive Android (3.1!) tablet, a device whose life aspiration and name happen to coincide perfectly. This 10-inch Tegra 2 portable has the usual 1280 x 800 resolution, dual cameras (5-Megapixel on the back, 2-Megapixel up front), a gigabyte of RAM, and a 23WHr battery, but it also brings nice expandability with full-size HDMI, USB 2.0 and SD card slots. The Easy Grip back covers can be swapped — which, yes, means you can also replace the battery — though you’ll have to splash out $20 for any non-black hues. The 8GB Thrive costs $430, followed by the 16GB unit at $480 and the 32GB option at $580. You can order yours directly from Toshiba or at Amazon, Best Buy or Office Direct, with deliveries slated for mid-July.

SOURCE via Toshiba

The patent battle between Nokia and Apple just ended not with an injunction, but with a press release citing a license agreement and payments from Apple to Espoo. The specifics of the agreement are confidential, but Nokia does say that Apple will make a one-time payment followed by on-going royalties. So, while Nokia may be having troubles selling its zombied handsets, at least its IP portfolio can help fill the coffers during the transition to Windows Phone. Read more…

AMD’s Llano platform has been on our radar for more than two years, and finally, the company has come clean with its latest class of hybrid CPU / GPU chips, officially dubbed the Fusion A-Series. Unlike the low-power flavor of Fusion accerlated processing units already on the market, these 32-nanometer APUs were designed with desktops and mainstream laptops in mind, taking direct aim at Intel’s Core 2011 processors with the promise of superior processing and discrete-level graphics, and 10-plus hours of battery life. Read more…

Viruses, malicious software, phishing websites are getting so serious, everybody is afraid of getting hit and loosing not only data and personal information, it could also lead to serious monetary loss. Realizing this, hackers are now targeting Firefox users with fake antivirus software that convince users that they should do a Windows Update via a phishing website that very much resembles a legitimate Microsoft Windows Update page.

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Steve Jobs and co. showed off all kinds of cool new features during the debut of iOS 5 at WWDC earlier this month. Now that more and more folks have tried their hand at iOS 5, more and more features are getting their turn to shine. Here’s a list of some of the cooler ones we’ve seen in the last few weeks.

• Apple has added the ability to make FaceTime calls over 3G — though rumour has it that this may be a beta-only feature, which carriers can choose to disable, over obvious data usage concerns.
• AirPlay Mirroring has been shown off. The feature lets users display video from an iPad 2 on an HDTV, by way of Apple TV, for those times when you just can’t keep your tablet content to yourself. (Read)
• The new software also offers up the ability to sync 1080p video to iOS 5 devices, opening the door to speculation that future iPads and iPhones may be able to play back content at full 1080p. (Read)
• Like to play your iTunes over your car stereo? Good news, iOS 5 will transfer audio information like album, track, and artist names over Bluetooth. (Read)

The Android keyboard app has always inspired us to get a bit dramatic, but we had no idea that predictive text and moveable QWERTY pads were this intense. To celebrate the beta release of Swype 3.0 it appears the company hired Doug Liman (or at least someone who has studied the Bourne Identity very closely) to whip up a promo video. Enjoy the thrills of a resizable input area! Be wowed by the Honeycomb support! Get stunned by the auto-correct!

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