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For anyone excited for the upcoming "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," this has been quite the weekend.

Disney has revealed the final poster for the upcoming film, and it matches the tone of the previous movies in showing off key characters, a space background and the red to blue (evil to good) transition.

Interestingly, in the back there is also a huge canon-looking planet, which could be the rumored 'Starkiller Base' that is rumored to destroy entire star systems.

Even better for fans, Disney has announced that the next official trailer will be released tomorrow during Monday Night Football.

Amazon has sued 1114 John Doe defendants who are offering to write fake reviews via Fiverr, the site that allows you to purchase services for as low as $5.

The Fiverr sellers offered to write fake, positive product reviews for sellers and manufacturers, clearly tainting what is usually a pretty honest system.

"While small in number, these reviews can significantly undermine the trust that consumers and the vast majority of sellers and manufacturers place in Amazon, which in turn tarnishes Amazon's brand," said Amazon's complaint. The lawsuit only names the defendants by their Fiverr names, with the hope of being able to sue them by their legal names soon.

Amazon's own investigators emailed with the Fiverr users and found that some were willing to use multiple accounts, multiple addresses and different IP addresses to try to avoid detection by Amazon. Others were willing to receive an empty envelope from the seller so they could show up as "Verified Buyer" and also have a shipping record.

"Defendants are misleading Amazon's customers and tarnishing Amazon's brand for their own profit and the profit of a handful of dishonest sellers and manufacturers," added Amazon. "Amazon is bringing this action to protect its customers from this misconduct, by stopping defendants and uprooting the ecosystem in which they participate."

Apple has lost the patent infringement case brought by the University of Wisconsin's Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), and must pay $234 million in damages.

The processor patent tech was ruled to have been used in Apple's A7, A8, and A8X processors, and WARF had initially asked for $862 million before reducing the damages request to $400 million.

U.S. District Judge William Conley had ruled earlier this week that Apple did not willfully infringe on WARF's patents so the damages are significantly lower than what was being asked for but still obviously very hefty.

"Table based data speculation circuit for parallel processing computer" (improving processor efficiency) was the patent in question and was granted in 1998. WARF sued Intel in 2008 over the patent and won $110 million. WARF uses its income to pay out grants to researchers, including $58 million last year.

Last month, the foundation sued Apple again, this time for their latest round of products, iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, and iPad Pro. Apple, the most profitable company on the planet, made $10.67 billion in net profit last quarter, alone.

The best-known torrent site in the world, The Pirate Bay, appears to be offline, globally, right now.

According to online forums, such as Reddit, the site seems to be having some kind of technical problems, as it shortly reappeared after its first period of offline earlier today.

The Proxy Bay, a site that lists mirrors and proxies for The Pirate Bay, confirms this to be the case, stating on their homepage:

The Pirate Bay is currently experiencing issues

A Finnish startup by the name of Solu Machines has introduced a new type of computer in San Francisco, CA. Solu, as they call it, is a mobile computer that relies solely in the power of cloud computing.

Everything about the small square box, veiled in wood in a very Scandinavian fashion, is stored in the cloud. This doesn't only mean the pictures and videos but also the settings in the operating system and apps that you use.

Even though Solu can be used as a separate device, connecting it to the peripherals typically connected to a PC (e.g. mouse, keyboard, display, etc) will reveal it's full potential. The device itself encompasses a 1440 x 1440 resolution 450 ppi touchscreen, 4 gigs of RAM, 32 gigs of storage and Nvidia's SOC with a quad-core processor.

Device demoed at the presentation was a prototype and Solu Machines is now looking to fund production on Kickstarter. A single Solu costs a 349 euros (just under $400) but for more adventurous crowd funders there are obviously other types of packages as well. The company is looking to ship the first final versions to customers in Q2 next year.

Mojang and Telltale Games have launched the first chapter of their new 'Minecraft: Story Mode' for mobile gamers.

The mobile launch follows release for PlayStation, Xbox and Steam on Monday.

"Minecraft: Story Mode" lets you follow the story of Jesse, who sets off on adventures across Overworld.

The first chapter of Story Mode is called "The Order of the Stone," and "focuses on Jesse's encounter with a mysterious figure who unleashes a monster Jesse and friends need to save the world from." You get to choose-your-own-adventure, with a selection of dialogues or action that will impact how you progress in the game. Fans of 'The Walking Dead' and 'Game of Thrones' from the same publisher should feel at home, just with less violence.

Available now on Android, Amazon and iOS, the game costs $4.99 per episode.

Samsung has revealed its new Tizen-based Z3 smartphone, the second phone to use the fledgling operating system.

The Z3 will be available in India and will feature some nice upgrades from the really low-cost Z1 released in January.

Samsung says the new phone will have a 720p 5-inch display, a 1.3GHz quad-core processor built by Spreadtrum, 1GB RAM, a 2600mAh battery, dual 8MP/5MP cameras and a metal-looking design. Unfortunately, there is no LTE support, but it does support HSPA+.

Priced at 8490 Rand, or about $130 USD, the device is cheap but still won't be as cheap as other phones being released in India.

Google has announced today that it is retiring its annoying Chrome notification center from upcoming Chrome versions for Windows, Mac and Linux. ChromeOS users will still have it, but it is much more important for them.

The search giant says "in practice, few users visit the notification center," suggesting it had just become bloat.

Chrome's desktop notification center debuted in 2013 to give users a way to catch up on their info even when Chrome was closed.

Most dedicated Chrome users immediately shut down the annoying notifications, however, as the center notably took up even more RAM than Chrome's normally extremely high usage.

If the news excites you, Chrome's next update, 47, will hit at the end of November.

Source:
Google

Last week, Microsoft surprised fans by revealing a gorgeous new reference notebook, the Surface Book.

It seems that Microsoft's new laptop has some serious fans, as all models have sold out in Microsoft's pre-order period. That is certainly interesting since the notebook retails for $1499 to $2899, in-line with the MacBook Pro, which is generally considered very expensive.

Of course, selling out does not suggest how much inventory Microsoft had to begin with, but as always, selling out is surely the preferred route for any company.

The Surface Book is set for release on October 26th.

Uber has officially launched its UberRUSH delivery service in NYC, Chicago and San Francisco, following a pilot program in New York for the last year.

RUSH allows users to receive on-demand deliveries from local businesses, similar to existing services like Postmates. If you live in those cities you will see an UberRUSH icon within your app that lets you order a courier.

Jason Droege, head of UberEVERYTHING, says the service has been integrated with most of the top e-commerce platforms, which will help increase how many companies can utilize the service.

Just three days after launching in alpha this weekend, music streaming service Aurous and its lead developer Andrew Sampson have been sued by the major record labels.

What is Aurous? The service is an internal database of links to content, collected via 120 public APIs that Sampson has integrated into the app, and the search results are then delivered to end users via the BitTorrent protocol. For this reason the service has been called the "Popcorn Time" of streaming music, although Sampson has said he does not agree. He calls the app a "player of players" allowing you to take all your services and put them in one place.

Doesn't matter now as the three majors, UMG, Sony Music and WMG (as well as subsidiaries Atlantic and Capitol) have filed sued against the app. "This service is a flagrant example of a business model powered by copyright theft on a massive scale," industry watchdog RIAA said. "Like Grokster, Limewire or Grooveshark, it is neither licensed nor legal. We will not allow such a service to willfully trample the rights of music creators."

The lawsuit has two main complaints. First, that Aurous pulls music from "websites offering vast collections of pirated copies of popular recorded music," most of which are located overseas, and second that Aurous lets users stream directly from BitTorrent, which has long been the bane of the label's existence.

Chinese smartphone OEM OnePlus has teased a new event on October 29th where the company will reveal their OnePlus X handset.

Co-founder Carl Pei said back in August that OnePlus would release a second phone before the end of the year, following the recent release of the OnePlus Two.

There have been a few minor leaks of late for the new X, including the North American FCC filing that shows off a 5.5-inch display with a metal frame and a micro-USB port.

The OnePlus X will likely be the cheaper of the company's two new devices, which likely means a $199 price tag, unlocked.

BlackBerry CEO John Chen has said this week that the company needs to sell 5 million smartphones a year to have their handset division be profitable, and if they can't hit that target the smartphone maker may have to stop building hardware altogether.

Last quarter, BlackBerry sold 800,000 units but that number is expected to jump as the company recently announced the Priv, their first phone to run on Android rather than BlackBerry's own software. The Priv has a sliding touchscreen that reveals a full QWERTY keyboard and also has security tech built in that the company says is better than Samsung's leading Knox suite.

Chen did note that BlackBerry 10 is not dead, but that their only customers are governments and corporations that do not upgrade quickly so we may not see BB10 devices for another year or two.

Perhaps most importantly for BlackBerry is the fact that carriers will actually have the Priv in stores, a nice change from past years where it was almost impossible to find a BalckBerry device even if you (for some reason) wanted one.

Hulu announced earlier this week that it had expanded its relationship with Viacom, adding more classic kids titles and bringing back hits like 'The Daily Show' now with new host Trevor Noah.

A few of the 90's hits include "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," "Rugrats" and "Doug," and the deal will expand the amount of episodes available of contemporary comedies like "Broad City," "Drunk History," and "Inside Amy Schumer."

Of note, 'The Daily Show' is also back, giving users access to new episodes the day after they air.

According to Re/code, new Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is preparing to make company-wide layoffs this week, his first major decision since being named permanently to the position.

If true, the downsizing will affect all divisions of the struggling company that currently has over 4000 employees. The report also claims that many of the layoffs will be of engineers, which are currently about half of all employees.

At the same time, Twitter is restructuring its entire organization to be more "lean" and efficient.

Dorsey, a co-founder of the service, has been interim CEO since longtime exec Dick Costolo was let go earlier this year.