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The rumor lived and died last year, but it has resurfaced today; Microsoft is looking into buying a stake of Research in Motion.

Today's rumor comes via Benzinga, who suggests Microsoft would be willing to pay up to $3.5 billion to buy a large stake in the struggling BlackBerry maker.

The rumor comes weeks after new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins announced that the company is "exploring partnerships and other strategic opportunities."

Earlier in the week, it was rumored that Samsung was interested in buying a $1.5 billion stake in RIM, although neither RIM, Microsoft or Samsung have commented on the stories.

The investments make sense, because even though RIM's market share has dwindled in the last four years, the company has an extensive collection of patents, the popular BlackBerry Messenger platform and numerous enterprise contracts around the world.

The latest rumor for the Xbox 360 successor is here.

Microsoft's upcoming console, code-named Durango is rumored to be powered by a 16-core processor, says Xbox World magazine.

The magazine says devkits have already been sent to developers, following "secret" meetings held in London. Of course, the Durango kits will not resemble the final device, but the internals should match (at least similarly) what is expected to be in the final console.

All rumors point to a holiday 2013 release and the sources claim the devkits have "a 16-core IBM Power PC CPU with a graphics processor on par with AMD's Radeon HD 7000-series graphics cards."

If accurate, the console will certainly be forward-looking, as the business market saw its first 16-core processor (from AMD) just last November. Adds the magazine: "It's a ridiculous amount of power for a games machine - too much power, even. But remember, Kinect 2 could chew up four whole cores tracking multiple players right down to their fingertips, so it'll need a lot of power."

Microsoft has reminded its customers this week of Windows XP's impending end of life.

Support for Windows XP SP3 will be dropped on April 8th, 2014, as will support for Microsoft Office 2003.

Marketing director Stella Chernyak says the end-of-life means Microsoft will kill off all security updates, non-security hot-fixes and technical support after that date.

Says the director: "Windows XP and Office 2003 were great software releases in their time, but the technology environment has shifted. Technology continues to evolve and so do people's needs and expectations."

Microsoft has always supported a policy of a minimum of 10 years of support and has given Windows XP extra time despite the release of Vista, Windows 7 and soon, Windows 8.

If you are an enterprise, the company recommends switching to Windows 7 and Office 2010 rather than waiting. To help the move, the company is offering free deployment toolkits.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced today that their Raspberry Pi computer has been cleared for delivery in Europe, Canada and Australia.

After passing compliance testing, the device gained Conformité Européenne (CE) quality-control marks without need for modification in the EU. For the other nations, the device complied with FCC regulations.

Reads the blog post: "We just received confirmation that the Raspberry Pi has passed EMC testing without requiring any hardware modifications. There is still a mountain of paperwork for us to sign, and that then has to be looked over by RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell; but that's a piece of cake compared to what we've been doing all week."

Because of the completion of the process, distributors Premier Farnell and RS Components can finally begin to deliver the $35 mini-computer to customers who pre-ordered last month. The first batch should hit customer's hands in 10 days, says the company.

For $35 you get a 3.3-inch wide board with a 700 MHz ARM11, 256MB RAM, HDMI-out, SD card slot, a USB port, ethernet, audio jack and Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU.

According to initial sales indicators, the AT&T Lumia 900 is off to a solid start, a good sign for Nokia and its partner Microsoft who have put a significant amount of money into the Windows Phone project.

The sales are strong especially since the company launched the phone on Easter Sunday, when many AT&T stores were closed.

On Amazon's mobile list, the Lumia 900 took the top spot, beating out the Galaxy Nexus and Droid Razr Maxx. In fact, the black model of the Lumia 900 was in first place while the cyan model took second. On Amazon, the device is selling for just $50 with contract, while AT&T has similar promotions for the device which has a retail price of $100 with contract.

Even though the device was not available in stores on launch day, Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney says "the advertising campaign coordination will be the most important factor to its longer term success."

Attorneys for the former top cyberlocker Megaupload have come out swinging, calling the criminal prosecution of the site's top executives "unduly adventurous," while accusing the government of trying to destroy evidence in the case.

"In essence, the government has taken what it wants from the scene of the alleged crime and is content that the remaining evidence, even if it is exculpatory or otherwise relevant to the defense, be destroyed," says defense attorney Paul Brinkman.

A hearing on the court case, which is the largest copyright case ever, will focus on over 25 petabytes of data seized from 1100 servers in January.

The government has openly admitted to copying "selected data" from the servers and has now cleared hosting service Carpathia to delete the rest. Brinkman is accusing the government of "cherry picking" relevant data "to support its theories of criminal misconduct."

Megaupload and Carphathia set up a deal where the host would retain the data for an indefinite period for $1.5 million but the government will not unfreeze the $50 million in assets taken from CEO Kim Dotcom and other executives. The data currently costs Carpathia $9000 per day to host.

Netflix has announced the addition of a few 80s cartoons to its streaming library.

Among the shows coming to Netflix instantly are "My Little Pony," "Transformers Prime," "GI Joe: Renegades," "Pound Puppies," and "The Adventures of Chuck & Friends."

Additionally, "JEM & The Holograms," "Transformers: Generation 1," "G.I. Joe: Real American Heroes," "Transformers: Beast Wars "and "Transformers: Rescue Bots" will hit the catalog later in the year.

Financial details for the deal with Hasbro were not disclosed, and neither was the length of the contract.

Each of the shows will be hosted in the "Just for Kids" section, which launched last year.

Netflix has made many moves in the recent past, including getting exclusive first rights to the "The Artist," 2012's Academy Award for Best Picture.

Sony has forecasted a massive $6.4 billion annual net loss, well above their previous forecast of $3 billion.

The company will have to write off deferred tax credits leading to the loss, which is Sony's fourth in a row.

For the fiscal year ended March 2013, the company says it intends to have a profit of $2.2 billion, a number investors should surely appreciate.

Another Japanese-based titan, Sharp, posted a similar loss for the year this week, $4.67 billion.

New CEO Kaz Hirai has stated publicly that he is willing to take "painful steps" to return the company to profitability and has already announced 10,000 job cuts. The bane of the company is its TV business, which has lost $10 billion alone in the last decade.

Sony will reveal the full results on May 21st.

Jack Tramiel, founder of the company behind the Commodore 64, died on Sunday. He was 83 years old.

Tramiel founded Commodore as a typewriter repair business. Eventually the company began selling their own typewriters and later branched out into adding machines and then calculators. As plummeting pocket calculator prices in the 1970s put pressure on companies like Commodore who had to buy their microchips from competitors like Texas Instruments, Tramiel decided to acquire integrated circuit manufacturer MOS Technologies.

MOS Technologies also provided Commodore with a new lead engineer who convinced Tramiel to get out of the calculator business in favor of home computers and the Commodore PET was born. Lacking color graphics or sound, the PET failed to attract home buyers but was fairly popular in schools. It also led to the development of the VIC-20 and later the Commodore 64.

The low prices of these new computers propelled Commodore to the top of the microcomputer market for several years. According to data compiled by Jeremy Reimer, which doesn't include VIC-20 sales, the Commodore 64 outsold the Apple II from its second year on the market in 1983 until both models ceased production in 1993.

28 companies have revealed support for the new "Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (H.R. 3523)."

The act was introduced by Rep. Mike Rogers and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger and will "allow companies or the government free rein to bypass existing laws in order to monitor communications, filter content, or potentially even shut down access to online services for 'cybersecurity purposes,'" says the EFF. Furthermore, "companies are encouraged to share data with the government and with one another, and the government can share data in return. The idea is to facilitate detection of and defense against a serious cyber threat, but the definitions in the bill go well beyond that. The language is so broad it could be used as a blunt instrument to attack websites like The Pirate Bay or WikiLeaks."

CISPA is similar enough to the recently defeated SOPA and PIPA bills, both of which had good intentions for copyright holders but severely missed the mark in regards to privacy and censorship.

The 28 companies are:

AT&T
Boeing
BSA
Business Roundtable
CSC
COMPTEL
CTIA - The Wireless Association
Cyber, Space & Intelligence Association
Edison Electric
EMC
Exelon
Facebook
The Financial Services Roundtable
IBM
Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance
Information Technology Industry Council
Intel
Internet Security Alliance
Lockheed Martin
Microsoft
National Cable & Telecommunications Association
NDIA
Oracle
Symantec
TechAmerica
US Chamber of Commerce
US Telecom - The Broadband Association
Verizon

Former Intel engineer Biswamohan Pani has pleaded guilty to stealing over $1 billion worth of internal information from the company in an effort to advance his own career.

Pani has plead guilty to five federal fraud counts for "stealing valuable computer chip manufacturing and design documents from his former employer" before moving to a competitor.

In May, 2008, Pani gave his two week's notice at Intel, and started working at AMD while retaining access to Intel's data system at the same time.

Reads the DOJ statement: "Unbeknownst to Intel, Pani had started downloading from Intel computers numerous secret documents about Intel's manufacturing and design of computer chips." Intel valued the documents stolen at almost $1 billion combined.

Pani was arrested and charged in August 2008.

RIM will soon remove the ability to sideload apps on the BlackBerry Playbook in an effort to block piracy.

The future firmware update to the operating system will block all installation of apps not directly from the BlackBerry App World.

BlackBerry VP of Developer Relations, Alec Saunders, tweeted "piracy is a huge problem for Android devs, and we don't want to duplicate the chaotic cesspool of Android market" in response to a question about the update.

Saunders did note there would probably be a solution for devs who need to test their apps.

The exec also claimed that some developers have refused to work with RIM until sideloading is banned.

T-Mobile looks like it will be getting the HTC One S on April 25th.

The highly-anticipated device's release date is seen via an internal T-Mobile training document which explains that employees are already training on the Android device.

Additionally, the document says pricing and availability will be announced on the 16th. The device will be prominently placed in most retail stores, reads the page.

HTC's One S has a 960 x 540 Super AMOLED 4.3" screen and is powered by the extremely speedy and powerful Qualcomm S3 1.5 GHz dual-core processor.

Furthermore, the phone has integrated Beats Audio, a 8MP/1.3MP dual-camera setup, Android 4.0, HTC Sense 4.0 and a 7.9mm thin profile.

Electronic Arts (EA) has been voted America's Worst Company by readers of the Consumerist.

It appears that many readers were not fans of Mass Effect 3's unsatisfying ending, and many even accused the company of "disrespect."

Reads the Consumerist article: "Consumerist readers ultimately decided that the type of greed exhibited by EA, which is supposed to be making the world a more fun place, is worse than Bank of America's avarice, which some would argue is the entire point of operating a bank."

"There have even been numerous accusations that EA and its ilk deliberately hold back game content with the sole intent of charging a fee for it at a later date."

In response, EA had little to say: "We're going to continue making award-winning games and services played by more than 300 million people worldwide."

EA beat out numerous other companies, taking a massive 64.03 percent of the vote and beating out Bank of America, AT&T, Facebook, Comcast, PayPal and Ticketmaster.

Sony has announced it will be cutting 10,000 jobs, 6 percent of its global workforce, in an effort to return to profitability.

The company has seen yearly losses for four straight years but new CEO Kazuo Hirai seems prepared to do anything to make sure the company turns its fortunes around.

Yen strength not seen since the 1940s and competition mainly from Samsung and other Korean manufacturers has led to the demise of Sony and other Japanese cos. like NEC. TV production in particular has been hit hard and Sony, Panasonic and Sharp are expected to have lost $17 billion during the last year alone, mainly on TVs.

The new job cuts will mainly "come from consolidating the firm's chemicals and small and midsize LCD operations."