"Search giant Google, facing a broad antitrust probe into its business practices, has hired 12 lobbying firms, a spokeswoman from the company said on Friday. The Federal Trade Commission, which investigates violations of antitrust law, is expected to look into complaints that Google's search results favor the company's other services, among other issues. Google, which runs an estimated 69 percent of Web searches worldwide, can make or break a company depending on its search ranking."

Apple is likely to replace Hewlett-Packard (HP) as the global number one notebook vendor in 2012 if tablet PCs are included in the calculation of global notebook shipments, according to industry sources.

"Apple has seeded the golden master version of OS X Lion to developers ahead of its public release sometime this month (July). The golden master download is available from Apple's Mac Developer website. The build number is 11A511. In addition, Apple has seeded Developer Preview 7 of Xcode 4.1." You'll now also be allowed to virtualise several instances of Mac OS X inside Mac OS X.

Via TorrentFreak: "Entertainment industry lobby groups often describe file-sharers as thieves who refuse to pay for any type of digital content. But not everyone agrees with this view. Swedish telecom giant Ericsson sees copyright abuse as the underlying cause of the piracy problem. In a brilliant article, Rene Summer, Director of Government and Industry Relations at Ericsson, explains how copyright holders themselves actually breed pirates by clinging to outdated business methods." No faeces, Sherlock.

There's no question Research In Motion is in the midst of a major transitional period. The company is planning to launch a brand new product line based on a brand new operating system within the next 12 months, and even though the first device born out of RIM's new QNX OS was impressive in some ways, it was incomplete. There still is a chance for RIM to deliver some really interesting competitive products, but time is quickly running out, as we have written time and time again. Update: RIM's response.

Newly published results show Apple's newly adopted Thunderbolt technology blows FireWire 800 out of the water with data transfer speeds to an external RAID system at 700MB/s.

Well, well, well. It would seem that HP wasn't kidding around when it coyly said it was open to licensing webOS to third-party manufacturers. Bloomberg interviewed HP CEO Leo Apotheker, and he confirmed that HP is talking to several companies about the possibility of licensing webOS.

Google is activating half a million Android devices a day, a big jump in just the last couple months, a sign of growing momentum for the platform. While SymbianOS appears to be hanging on in the mobile arena, trends indicate that the iOS share is slipping slightly, losing ground to Android. The pure marketshare numbers don't tell the whole story, since the entire segment is growing rapidly, so even platforms that are in declining share might be adding new users. But if the upsurge in Android activations continues, Android may overtake iOS in a few months and move into second place behind SymbianOS. Blackberry is in a slow decline, while WP7 does not have enough market share to appear in the statistics.

OpenJDK had been released as GA for OS/2 and eComStaion. This allows eCS-OS2 users to run modern Java apps on their platform. The development is open source and had been in part sponsored by donations of the community.

"One item of interest regarding last week's Mac OS X 10.6.8 update reveals that Apple has enabled TRIM support retroactively for solid state hard drives shipped in Apple-produced configurations. TRIM is a feature that allows solid state drives (SSDs) to automatically handle garbage collection, cleaning up unused blocks of data and preparing them for rewriting, thereby preventing slowdowns that would otherwise occur over time as garbage data accumulates."

With all the news about Anonymous, LulzSec, Anti-Sec, and so on, you'd almost forget there are more ethical hacking groups out there as well. One such group, YGN Ethical Hacker Group, informed Apple of several weaknesses in its developers website on April 25. Apple acknowledged the flaws, but so far, hasn't done anything about them. YGN Ethical Hacker Group has now stated they will fully disclose the vulnerabilities if Apple doesn't fix them in the coming few days.

Well, here we have another attempt. After the failure of the overly complicated Google Wave (remember that? It was supposed to change the world and all that), Google is undertaking another attempt at social networking. It's called Google+. Update: Forget the crap I wrote here, this article is seven pages on insider information on Google+. Surprised by the beautiful interface? It's been designed by Andy Hertzfeld. The Andy Hertzfeld.

"In today's world, most companies span several regions and sell across the world. As Foolish colleague Morgan Housel notes, 10 years ago, less than a third of S&P 500 revenue came from outside the United States. Today, more than half of the S&P 500's growth comes from overseas. And that number is growing. The truth is, investors regularly underestimate how much demand comes from abroad. More importantly, for large, multinational corporations that have already established a presence in their home markets, much of their future growth comes from foreign markets. With that in mind, today we're looking at Apple. We'll examine not only where its sales and earnings come from, but also how its sales abroad have changed over time."

In an unexpected move for a security company, SecurEnvoy today said that cyber break-ins and advanced malware incidents, such as the recent DDoS attack by LulzSec, should actually be welcomed and their initiators applauded. The company's CTO Andy Kemshall said: "I firmly believe that the media attention LulzSec’s DDoS attack has recently received is deserving. It’s thanks to these guys, who’re exposing the blase attitudes of government and businesses without any personal financial gain, that will make a difference in the long term to the security being put in place to protect our own personal data!"