Remember that guy who got Meego to run on his HTC HD2 ? Well, he's at it again, now booting Meego on a Nexus S. He also ran Ubuntu on it shortly thereafter.

"Early in December Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle notified the German regulator that they planned to form CPTN Holdings with a view to purchasing 882 of Novell's patents. But the filing was withdrawn (Rucknahme) on Dec. 30. No reason was given for the withdrawal by German authorities, but it is likely voluntary as authorities would not yet have had time to investigate the proposal."

"A sampling of only 22 brands revealed that websites offering pirated digital content and counterfeit goods generate more than 53 billion visits per year, according to a study released today by MarkMonitor. It is estimated that the annual worldwide economic impact of online piracy and counterfeiting reaches $200 billion. Among the study's findings were that 67 percent of sites suspected of hosting pirated content and 73 percent of sites categorized as 'counterfeit' were hosted in North America or Western Europe."

Nowadays smartphones, tablets and desktop/laptop computers are all siblings. They use the same UI paradigms and follow the same idea of a programmable and flexible machine that's available to everyone. Only their hardware feature set and form factor differentiate them from each other. In this context, does it still make sense to consider them as separate devices as far as software development is concerned? Wouldn't it be a much better idea to consider them as multiple variations of the same concept, and release a unified software platform which spreads across all of them? This article aims at describing what has been done in this area already, and what's left to do.

From scent-replication devices to miniature candy, CES had its share of unexpected announcements. InfoWorld's Ted Samson wraps up the more offbeat innovations of this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, including keyless keyboards, Trojan's Vibrating Twister, dynamic credit cards, and the smallest Reese's peanut butter cups ever.

The free OS runs on your phone, your netbook, your desktop, and even your alarm clock. You named your dog Linus and you have Tux wallpaper. Andrew Morton signed your underwear. But how much do you really know about the most pervasive open source project on the planet? Core files, httpd service checks, determining the architecture of a Linux box from the shell -- take the Linux IQ Test: Round 2 and find out.

Now that the Mac App Store has been snuck installed onto your machine alongside Mac OS X 10.6.6, you might be wondering - is there some way to remove that monstrosity of an application from my Mac? While it's not officially supported, it does seem like Apple has taken this scenario into account.

Since the big Windows news last week was the announcement that the next version of Windows will run on ARM, this one kind of slipped in under the radar. It's a rumour, but confirmed by different people: there will be a new application model in Windows 8, currently named Jupiter, while thee will also be a tile-based interface for tablets. It seems like the pieces of the puzzle are all falling into place: Windows NT everywhere, Silverlight/.Net everywhere.

"While the availability of power in certain regions of the world cannot be solved by the OLPC, it can improve upon the power use of the XO Laptop. And with v1.75 they have managed to half that power use. The reason this has been made possible is the move to use an ARM rather than an x86 processor. So now rather than drawing 4 watts of power, the XO-1.75 draws 2 watts. The new chip being used is a 1GHz Armada 610 from Marvell." Update : Here are some clarifications regarding the use of ARM chips and Linux at OLPC.

Everything we know is being turned on its head. It's a brave new future. Or maybe we've woken up in 1994 again. Windows and Office on a different architecture? Tablets galore? My head is spinning. Let me just dial into my favourite BBS and rant about how I like things how they are. (N.B. the title is a Dutch phrase "In de hoek waar de klappen vallen", meaning "in the corner where the punches hit", relevant to our discussion of Intel and PS3 being completely caught out)

When it comes to the Wikileaks saga, we've been trying to only report on it if it crosses into the realm of technology. It was revealed yesterday and today that the US Justice Department has sent subpoenas to Twitter, demanding the personal information of several Wikileaks supporters who use Twitter. One of them is a member of the Icelandic parliament.

Some people swore to me that just because the free-software General Public License (GPL) clashes with the Apple App Store's Terms of Service (ToS), didn't mean that Apple would actually pull down GPLed apps. Well, Apple just did. Remi Denis-Courmont, a Linux developer of the popular VLC media player, has just announced that Apple had pulled the popular GPLed VLC media player from its App Store.

"Phoronix recently published an article regarding a ~200 lines Linux Kernel patch that improves responsiveness under system strain. Well, Lennart Poettering, a RedHat developer replied to Linus Torvalds on a maling list with an alternative to this patch that does the same thing yet all you have to do is run 2 commands and paste 4 lines in your ~/.bashrc file. I know it sounds unbelievable, but apparently someone even ran some tests which prove that Lennart's solution works."

"On the same day that we learn VIA's Linux support is basically dead and after a troubling week for Intel with regards to open-source graphics support for their new Sandy Bridge CPUs, Advanced Micro Devices has come forward and released open-source graphics driver support for their AMD Radeon HD 6000 series of graphics cards."