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Dell and its founder Michael S. Dell have agreed to pay over $100 million in penalties to settle charges of accounting fraud brought forward by the SEC.

The computer maker was accused of misleading investors after it used money received from Intel to pad its bottom line. Without the money, the company would have likely fallen short of analyst expectations, thus leading to a hit on their stock price.

Intel paid Dell the money as "rebates," part of shady agreement that would ensure Dell used Intel processors in their computers and not rival processors from AMD.

Dell eventually started offering computers with processors from AMD, and Intel cut the rebate checks. This led to a downturn in the computer maker's finances, and a hit on the stock share price, losing investors money.

"Dell manipulated its accounting over an extended period to project financial results that the company wished it had achieved but could not," says Christopher Conte, associate director of the S.E.C.’s enforcement division. "Dell was only able to meet Wall Street targets consistently during this period by breaking the rules."

Steven Bird, the dev who goes by the alias "Birdman" has posted today that he has successfully rooted the Motorola Droid X, just six days after launch, easing worries that the locked-down smartphone would take weeks or even months to root.

There have been no custom ROMs created yet, but those are likely in the works over the next few weeks.

Says Phil Nickinson of Android Central: "We're talking root access, not custom ROMs just yet. But it's a big step. You'll need to be handy with the command line (and if you can copy and paste, you should be) and read the instructions, because everything on the Droid X will have root access after this."

Root access, and eventually custom ROMs, will give Droid X owners the advantages that other rooted Android device owners have, including the ability to backup your system to the SD card, superuser access to the Android operating system, running apps that require root, the ability to remove all apps installed on your phone (including MotoBLUR) and the ability to save apps to the SD card, to save internal memory space.

Microsoft has set the lofty goal of selling 30 million Windows 7 phones over the next few years, and the company has apparently gotten off to a quick start, purchasing a handset for all of their 90,000 employees.

Mary Jo Foley, the Microsoft guru behind ZDNet, tweeted the move today, retweeting a Microsoft employee: "90K down... just under 30 million to go: RT @simchabe: Woot. Every single microsoft employee will get a windows phone 7 #mgx"

Earlier in the day, senior product manager for Microsoft Greg Sullivan confirmed that Dell, Asus, LG, HTC and Samsung each have Windows Phone 7 devices in the pipeline.

Dell has already announced theirs, the extremely elegant Lightning, which uses Windows Phone 7, has a large 4.1-inch OLED screen, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, a full QWERTY keypad, 512MB RAM, 1GB ROM, 8GB of internal storage for music, movies, etc, a 5MP camera with LED flash, and Adobe Flash, DivX and Microsoft Silverlight support.

AT&T, the second largest wireless carrier in the United States posted their quarterly earnings today, announcing a 26 percent jump in profit on a slight increase in revenue.

The company said they activated 3.2 million iPhones and an overall net wireless subscriber gain of 1.6 million.

Profit rose from $3.02 billion to $4.01 billion year-on-year, with revenue staying about even at $30.8 billion, up from $30.7 billion.

AT&T added that its U-verse TV revenues exceeded $1 billion for the first time, with subscribers jumping to 2.5 million, a 60 percent gain.

"We continue to see positive signs of growth in almost every customer segment of our business, especially wireless, which speaks to the quality of our execution and our leadership in the industry's most powerful growth driver -- mobile broadband," says Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and CEO.

Microsoft reported their latest quarterly earnings today and the company had its best quarter ever, thanks mainly to incredibly strong sales of the Windows 7 operating system.

The software giant says they have sold about 175 million licenses of Window 7, making it easily the fastest selling operating system in the company's history.

Furthermore, consumers and especially corporations have increased their purchases of Microsoft software.

Microsoft posted revenue of $16.04 billion, on 22 percent growth. Earlier this week, rival Apple posted their best quarter ever as well, seeing revenue of $15.7 billion.

The company had net profit of $4.52 billion, a 33 percent jump year-on-year.

Sales of Windows rose to $4.55 billion from $3.17 billion and sales of Office and other software rose to $5.25 billion from $4.57 billion.

The company's Entertainment and Devices group, which includes the Xbox 360 and Zune players, lost $172 million, closing in on profitability.

During the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference this week, Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein has confirmed that the company, under the new management of HP, will also be creating WebOS netbooks, alongside tablets, smartphones and printers.

Says Rubinstein: "We're working a wide variety, as Todd said, smartphones definitely, slates, netbooks, working with the guys in the printer group. webOS [...] will have a unified user interface across all of these, will have a unified developer environment, and it's all based on the foundation that we build in webOS from day one.

When we developed webOS, we thought about making this scalable across a variety of mobile devices; that's what we'll be delivering going forward."

While tablets, printers and smartphones had been confirmed in the past by either HP or Palm, netbooks had only vaguely been mentioned.

In April, HP purchased Palm for $1.2 billion, after outbidding RIM, Apple and Lenovo.

Yesterday Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced plans to update the streaming video client for the PS3.

The update, which he expects to be available before the company's third quarter earnings are released in October, will eliminate the requirement for a disc. Besides the obvious convenience for customers, this will allow them to continually update the interface as the Netflix Watch Instantly UI is improved.

Netflix continues to grow, largely on the strength of their ever expanding lineup of offerings for streaming to computers, set-top boxes, HDTVs, Blu-ray players, game consoles & other devices.

In the second quarter of 2010 year on year subscriber growth grew to an impressive 42%, which Hastings attributes primarily to the growing popularity of streaming. Although disc shipments continue to increase, they are being replaced by streaming more quickly than Netflix had forecast previously.

Pandora has announced today that they have reached 60 million registered listeners, seeing strong growth thanks to availability on a plethora of devices.

When 2009 began, the streaming music recommendation service had 20 million users. By the start of 2010 they had 40 million. It took until April to reach 50 million, and just over 3 months from that point to tack on another 10 million registered listeners.

Pandora says the growth is mainly thanks to expansion on mobile devices. Apps on the iPhone and Android devices are regularly the most popular free apps available and Apple finally updated to mutli-tasking with iOS4, giving users the ability to stream the music in the background, via 3G or Wi-Fi.

Android users have always had that ability.

Furthermore, Pandora is now becoming a standard on set-top boxes from many different device manufacturers.

If the trend continues, Pandora will hit 100 million listeners during early 2011. Not to mention they are also finally profitable after being on the verge of bankruptcy last year.

Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), the syndicate of technology, cable and entertainment companies has introduced their long awaited cloud-based digital locker today, dubbing the service Ultraviolet.

Consumers would create an Ultraviolet account which would allow them to purchase movies, TV shows and music and access it from any web-connected device like HDTVs, Blu-ray players, smartphones, tablets and gaming consoles.

DECE consists of Best Buy, Cisco, Comcast, Cox Communications, Fox Entertainment, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, LG Electronics, Lionsgate, Microsoft, Motorola, NBC Universal, Netflix, Nokia, Panasonic, Paramount Pictures, Philips, Samsung Electronics, Sony, Toshiba, and Warner Bros.

Google announced last week that HTC had shipped out the last batch of Nexus One smartphones, and the phone would reach the end of its lifespan once Google sells the remaining stock.

That day has come and Google has stopped selling the devices, effectively ending their "superphone" experiment.

Google had offered the device for $530 unlocked or $180 with contract through T-Mobile.

Would-be buyers visiting the Nexus One online store are now greeted with this message: "Sorry, folks. The Nexus One is no longer available for purchase directly from Google."

The Nexus One was supposed to "fundamentally change the way phones are sold," but it never really did. Buyers were not satisfied with the 360 degree virtual tour of the phone, preferring to feel and actually see the device before purchasing it.

In their most recent report on the status of broadband internet in the US, the FCC has finally admitted "broadband is not being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion."

Although this is the sixth Broadband Deployment Report to be issued by the agency since 1999, it is the first to reach this conclusion. Previous reports have been widely criticized for both the benchmark by which broadband was defined and the methodology for determining service areas.

For example, in the last report, from 2008, 200kbps downstream (download) speed was still considered broadband. Additionally, a single address capable of broadband service was equated to the entire zip code being served.

In the current report notes, "Our examination of overall Internet traffic patterns reveals that consumers increasingly are using their broadband connections to view high-quality video, and want to be able to do
so while still using basic functions such as email and web browsing."

In order to more accurately reflect that reality the standard for broadband has been raised to 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream. Service areas were based on numbers from the National Broadband Plan, published earlier this year.

Marking a first, an unemployed 31-year old has been arrested in Japan this week for sharing unauthorized TV shows via BitTorrent.

The arrest is the first ever in Japan for torrent use.

Shuichiro Tanaka of Saitama Prefecture was arrested by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s cyber crimes division for allegedly uploading and sharing TV shows.

The authorities said that from June 4th to 9th, Tanaka captured the programs using his computer then uploaded them via BitTorrent.

Over the course of the year, Tanaka allegedly uploaded 165 episodes of different shows such as "Waratte Iitomo" and "Genius! Shimura Zoo."

When asked why he uploaded the shows, Tanaka plainly said: "I did it for people who missed the programs. Because there is a potential for viruses on Winny [another popular Japanese peer-to-peer file sharing program] and others, I used BitTorrent, which I heard police weren’t investigating."

Yesterday, after the market closed, Apple crushed their quarterly earnings, having its best quarter ever.

Apple reported revenue of $15.7 billion, a 62 percent jump, year-on-year (YoY). Analysts had expected revenue of $14.75 billion for the quarter.

Net profit rose to $3.25 billion a massive 78 percent jump YoY.

While the numbers were impressive, most fans were more intrigued by Apple's implication that it was releasing multiple new products by the end of the year.

Said CEO Steve Jobs: "It was a phenomenal quarter that exceeded our expectations all around. And we have amazing new products still to come this year."

Jobs stopped there, but the comments have gotten the rumor mill in full swing. Most believe the new products are a rehauled iPod Touch with multiple cameras and a completely rehauled Apple TV.

In 2008, Apple CEO Steve Jobs made headlines when he called Blu-ray "a bag of hurt."

At the time, Jobs said: "Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It's great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we're waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace."

Two years later and Blu-ray is mainstream but Jobs is still anti-Blu. Last month he said the following: "Blu-ray is looking more and more like one of the high end audio formats that appeared as the successor to the CD - like it will be beaten by Internet downloadable formats."

This week, the BDA (Blu-ray Disc Association) has responded, saying Jobs is wrong in his assertions that Blu-ray is just for a niche market and that it will soon be replaced by streaming and HD downloads.

Google has said today that 55.5 percent of all Android smartphones are now running 2.1 Eclair.

22.1 percent of Android users are still running 1.6 Donut and 18.9 percent are still using a variant of 1.5 Cupcake.

The numbers are moving quickly, however, as in May in the figures were 37.2 percent for 2.1, 28 percent for 1.6, and a huge 34.1 percent for 1.5.

Although it has not officially released the latest software update, 2.2 Froyo, to any device besides the Nexus One, Google says 3.3 percent of all handsets are running the advanced update, likely meaning a decent portion of Droid, Incredible, EVO 4G and other owners are running rooted devices with Froyo.

Froyo has been promised, officially, for the above mentioned devices, and others like the MyTouch 3G Slide and Samsung Galaxy S by the end of the year.