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An original Apple-1 Personal Computer sold by Steve Jobs from his home to Charles Ricketts has sold at auction for $365,000 in New York.

The "Ricketts Apple-1 Personal Computer" is the only known surviving Apple-1 documented to have been sold by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs from his parent's home to a customer. Of the few hundreds Apple-1s that were made, only 50 are thought to survive and less in working condition.

The Apple-1 was put up for auction by Christie's as part of the auction house's inaugural Exceptional Sale in New York yesterday, held at the Rockefeller Center. It was estimated at between $400,000 and $600,000 so it actually sold for lower than expected.

Steve Jobs sold the Apple-1 to Steve Ricketts (whom it is now named after) from his parents' garage in July 1976.

"The Ricketts Apple-1 is fully operational, having been serviced and started by Apple-1 expert Corey Cohen in October 2014. Mr. Cohen ran the standard original software program, Microsoft BASIC, and also an original Apple-1 Star Trek game in order to test the machine," a press release from before the auction reads.

Max Sound Corp has sued Google and its YouTube subsidiary for patent infringement relating to streaming H.264/AVC video content.

It filed a lawsuit in the District Court of Mannheim, Germany against Google Inc in the United States, Google Commerce Ltd, in Dublin, Ireland, Google Germany in Hamburg and YouTube LLC in San Bruno, USA. At the center of the lawsuit is the EU 2 026 277 patent, held by Max Sound Corp.

"Max Sound Corp. claims that all products on the market that use the format H.264 for video compression infringe the asserted patent," a press release reads.

"This allegation comprises, in particular, current versions of the Google operating system Android, which is installed on many mobile phones and tablet devices. The complaint addresses the current Google Products: Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9 Chromebook and Chromecast."

Max Souhnd Corp also alleges that Google's YouTube video service infringes its patent. Max Sound requests information about profits and damages for each video streamed to Germany in one of the relevant formats.

It expects the case to come to a ruling in less than 12 months.

For just a few more days, it is possible to get all three Batman Arkham games and DLC for just $10 in the United States, or €9.79 in Europe.

The offer applies to PC gamers using the Steam platform. It is being offered by Bundle Stars for just $9.99 in the United States, or €9.79 in Europe (not sure in UK) and it includes the Batman: Arkham collection as it stands. For this ridiculously low cost you get:

• Batman: Arkham Asylum Game of the Year Edition
• Batman: Arkham City Game of the Year Edition
• Batman: Arkham Origins
• Batman: Arkham Origins: Season Pass - DLC
• Batman: Arkham Origins: Black Mask Challenge Pack - DLC
• Batman: Arkham Origins: Online Supply Drop DLC

According to data from research firm NPD, Microsoft's Xbox One console finally outsold Sony's PlayStation 4 (PS4) after more than a year on the market.

The small victory in the month of November was made public by Microsoft very quickly. It said that in November, more than 1.2 million Xbox One consoles were sold in the United States, which apparently beat sales of its rival but we haven't seen any sales figures for the PS4 yet.

According to Microsoft, the Xbox One also outsold the PlayStation 4 in the United Kingdom during the same period.

Whether the Xbox One sold more globally in November is not clear, but Microsoft will take the win in the U.S. gladly in any case. The console was helped greatly by a price cut and by a decent software line-up heading into the busy holiday period.

Microsoft's console has been trailing PS4 in the year that both have been available on the market, and in the meantime went through some major rethinks affecting its hardware and services. The biggest change was the unbundling of the Kinect motion sensor system from the Xbox One, immediately cutting $100 off the price.

In addition to topping the sales charts in the UK and U.S. at least, Microsoft also said that more users logged on to Xbox Live than any other month in the history of the Xbox brand.

The Pirate Bay has been down since Tuesday following a police raid in Stockholm, but since then there have been many reports of it resurrecting elsewhere.

On Wednesday, we reported that claims of the Pirate Bay moving to Costa Rica and taking up a .CR domain were false. At the time, only the frontpage would load and the search didn't work at all, which you would expect given that the .CR domain was being used as a Pirate Bay proxy/mirror that relied on the .SE website for its results.

However, since then the search does bring up results that are light on detail and mostly old. This led to further speculation that the Pirate Bay had resurfaced in Costa Rica after all.

Initially, it seemed to be redirecting to a .EE domain, but that stopped later, and now is reportedly using some combination of old cached results and pulling torrents from other sites like Kickass. The constant changes are arousing quite a bit of suspicion, and clearly the .CR site is not the official Pirate Bay resurrected.

As for the .EE domains, one of them went offline in the past day or so (piratebay.ee) and another one (thepiratebay.ee) reportedly is using old cached data too, and some users reported that it was trying to get money from users.

YouTube has quietly added a neat little animated GIF creator to some of its YouTube videos.

Spotted by Andy Baio, YouTube added an option to create a GIF to the share options of a select few channels. For example, the PBS Idea Channel seems to be covered by YouTube's experimental GIF creator.

It allows you to create an animated GIF of up to five seconds in length from any consecutive five second portion of the video. It also allows you to add text to the top and bottom of the resulting GIF, which will be hosted on YouTube's own servers and which you can embed elsewhere just as you can with videos.

YouTube hasn't revealed what its larger plan is for the GIF creator; will it come to all videos that can be shared? Will it have to be opt in on behalf of the content creator.

If it does end up being available for the majority of all YouTube videos, then you'd better be prepared to see a lot more GIFs around than you already do!

In December 2009, a relatively unknown Finnish game developer called Rovio Entertainment released the first 'Angry Birds' title for iOS and the game quickly became a hit.

For about three years, the game was the top paid app in iTunes, and all new titles in the series all jumped to #1 quickly after launch. The game has also been a top hit for Android since launch, where most of the titles are freemium.

In its branding, Angry Birds has expanded to "Seasons," "Rio," "Space," "Star Wars," "Friends," "Star Wars II," "Go!," "Epic," "Stella" and most recently, "Transformers." Additionally, the developer released "Bad Piggies" as a spinoff from the series in 2012.

Rovio has struggled in recent times, with interest waning for each new game. The developer had to fire 110 employees earlier this year to continue its profitability and streamline operations.

Google has unveiled their Google Play 'best stuff of the year' report for 2014, showing off the most downloaded and most popular apps of the year.

The lists include top news app, top entertainment app and even the most downloaded movies and TV shows.

iOS device owners saw a similar list earlier this month and many of the same names and titles are on that list, as well.

Take a gander:

APPS

Most Downloaded Apps by Category in 2014
Education: Duolingo
Health & Fitness: MyFitnessPal
Music: Pandora
Photography: Flipagram
Social: Facebook
Entertainment: Netflix
Sports: NFL Mobile
Travel: TripAdvisor

GAMES

Top Downloaded Games in 2014
Candy Crush Saga
Don't Tap The White Tile
Farm Heroes Saga
Subway Surfers
Clash of Clans

MOVIES & TV

Movie of the year: Frozen
TV show of the year: The Walking Dead
Comeback Movie: Toy Story
Most searched actor on Google Play: Robin Williams

MUSIC

Album of the Year: Frozen: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Song of the Year: Dark Horse by Katy Perry
Song of the Summer: Fancy by Iggy Azalea
Fastest Growing Genre: Soundtracks (fueled by Frozen, Guardians of the Galaxy, Despicable Me 2, The Lego Movie and The Great Gatsby soundtracks)

We just released our first-ever mobile app, HIGH.FI News Reader. The app is a "preloaded Feedly" kind of app for following news from thousands of different news sources.

To put it simply, the app presents news from selection of >2000 news sources in chronological order, categorized and spiced with their popularity data.

Unlike traditional RSS readers, HIGH.FI already indexes and categorizes most important news sources. This saves you the hassle of figuring our what to follow, where to find RSS feeds to add to the app, etc.

As the app tracks the popularity of the headlines from all of the app's users, the "Most popular" lists can be a useful source to find new stuff to read too.

What does it look like?

Where to download?

Microsoft has set a date to show off the consumer experience of Windows 10, ahead of its scheduled launch in Autumn 2015.

The Redmond giant has alerted media and Windows enthusiasts that it will hold an event at its campus on Wednesday, January 21 to show off the consumer side of its upcoming Windows 10 operating system.

Among those in attendance that we will hear from will be senior leaders from the Operating Systems Group including Terry Myerson, Joe Belfiore and Phil Spencer. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella will also show up to say some words.

The event will be broadcast live from the Redmond campus and details of a webcast will be provided in due time.

Windows 10 represents something of a reboot for Microsoft as it fights to recover from a disastrous Windows 8 era, and from declining interest in Windows Phone. It will also take another stab at gaining ground in smartphones and tablets, an area in which its competitors Apple and Google have dominated for years.

So set your reminders for January 21, and let's see what Microsoft has in store for us all next.

Microsoft has continued its new trend of releasing apps outside of its own ecosystem, unveiling a slew of MSN-branded apps for iOS, Android and Amazon.

The apps are all free and were originally developed for Windows 8 and Windows Phone devices.

Among the new apps are News, Weather, Sports, Food & Drink, Healthy & Fitness, and Money.

MSN's portal page still receives 400 million users per year, and the name still resonates with consumers. Previously, the apps were branded as Bing, which has less recognition despite being more modern.

Each of the apps are newly coded for their respective platforms, and not just ports, says Microsoft.

As rumored, the popular mobile game Candy Crush Saga is now available for Windows Phone.

The game is freemium, with in-app purchases consisting of extra lives, moves and other bonuses.

Candy Crush is the hit money-maker for casual gaming parent King Digital, since its release in 2012 for iOS and Android and Facebook.

Have you ever posted embarrassing photos of yourself and friends on Facebook after you've had just one drink too many?

Facebook's AI labs is working to make sure that doesn't happen to you so often. It is working on a system that can tell the difference between pictures taken of you when sober, and pictures taken of you when drunk.

If it determines that you are drunk, it will try to make you think twice before uploading.

Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?" it reportedly will prompt a user.

Yann LeCun, head of Facebook's AI research, detailed the plans to Wired magazine and said that the labs are working on a digital assistant that will be able to carry out many similar tasks with photos and content uploaded to Facebook.

The social network already uses facial recognition software to correctly tag images and also to better target content to users based on their behavior.

This has led to some backlash from digital rights activists, who want customers to have the option to opt out of such AI systems.

Source: BBC News

According to e-mails, Seth Rogen was asked by Sony Pictures Entertainment to tone down a particularly gruesome scene in "The Interview", but the comedy actor refused to remove objectionable content.

The movie is at the center of the Sony Pictures hack in November. Rogen and James Franco star as two journalists who score an interview with North Korean leader Kim Jong un and are recruited by the CIA to assassinate him. Almost immediately after details of the movie became public, it was condemned by North Korea as an act of war, and of sponsoring terrorism.

While the FBI does not have hard evidence to link the mysterious state to the attack, security experts have found links and coincidences that suggest it. The group responsible for the attack also reportedly demanded the movie be cancelled.

Before this all happened however, Sony Pictures Entertainment boss Amy Pascal reportedly wrote to Seth Rogen by e-mail and asked him to tone down one particularly gruesome scene. The e-mails were first revealed by Bloomberg.

Rogen was resistant, even stating that "this is now a story of Americans changing their movie to make North Koreans happy, that is a very damning story."

Sony will release its PlayStation 4 (PS4) console in China in January next year, as the rapidly growing market is allowing console sales for the first time in 14 years.

The consoles will sell for 2,899 yuan - about $468 - each as Sony looks to profit from the appetite for gaming in the emerging economy. Microsoft is also offering its Xbox One console in China after the communist regime loosened the rules on video games systems.

However, that same regime may prove to be an obstacle on the software side since every single game will need to be approved before it can go on sale.

"Cooperating with the government, we'll provide a broad range of content for our users in China," Hiroyuki Oda, head of Asia business at Sony Computer Entertainment, said according to the Reuters news agency.

Several games have already been approved for sale after more than 30 have been submitted for licenses.

Microsoft's Xbox One is selling in China for 3,699 yuan - about $598 - and has ten titles currently on sale.