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Kim Dotcom claims U.S. government officials had Megaupload accounts.

He told TorrentFreak that those who used Megaupload included members of the United States Senate, and the Department of Justice (DoJ). He is currently out on bail, despite FBI protests, and is fighting in New Zealand courts against extradition to the United States.

"Guess what ? we found a large number of Mega accounts from US Government officials including the Department of Justice and the US Senate," Kim told TorrentFreak. "I hope we will soon have permission to give them and the rest of our users access to their files."

He told TorrentFreak that his main concern now was that users get back access to their own data. "Megaupload's legal team is working hard to reunite our users with their data," Dotcom said. "We are negotiating with the Department of Justice to allow all Mega users to retrieve their data."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has pledged to help legitimate users of MegaUpload retrieve their data.

Lawsuit focuses on ten patents.

Yahoo said the patents are related to methods and systems for advertising on the Internet. This is the latest case in a growing number of high-profile patent-related lawsuits in recent years, and it comes after Facebook announced plans for an initial public offering that could value the service at $100 billion.

"Unfortunately, the matter with Facebook remains unresolved and we are compelled to seek redress in federal court," Yahoo said in a statement.

Facebook staff say they learned about the lawsuit in the media. "We're disappointed that Yahoo, a longtime business partner of Facebook and a company that has substantially benefited from its association with Facebook, has decided to resort to litigation," said Facebook spokesman Jonathan Thaw.

Yahoo said last month that it was seeking licensing fees from Facebook over the patents relevant to the case, and pointed out that other companies had already agreed licensing terms with Yahoo. Talks were held between both firms but quickly collapsed, leading to speculation that Yahoo would go to court.

Spotify finally entering Europe's largest market.

The music streaming service is already available in the United States and many European countries. Until now, it was widely believed that Spotify stayed out of the German market due to possibly high licensing costs. Gema, the group responsible for collecting royalties in Germany, has a reputation for being very aggressive.

Spotify's rival, Grooveshark, had to pull out of Germany this year over licensing costs. At the Reeperbahn music conference in Hamburg in 2010, Spotify was brought up in a debate. A representative for Gema, Alexander Wolf, said bluntly that if Spotify wanted to launch in Germany, it would need a dramatic change to its business model.

Since then, Spotify had gained many premium subscribers willing to pay a monthly fee to get rid of time limits and adverts. Some major music companies also have equity in Spotify, and may have forced Gema to ease up its stance.

The service has added German albums to its catalog, pushing its number of available tracks to 16,000,000. "It's the third largest music market in the world and is a very important market," Jeff Levick, the firm's chief sales officer told the BBC.

Critical patch for Windows operating systems included.

Microsoft is preparing to push out patches on Tuesday, one of which carries a critical rating due to a risk of remote code execution on Windows operating systems. An update for that bug will be pushed out for seven versions of Windows through Microsoft's update service.

Other fixes will tackle possibly privilege elevation attacks or denial of service bugs in other products, including Visual Studio and Expression Design.

Final chapter of BioWare's popular franchise got off to a great start.

In North America, the game sold 890,000 copies following its launch, according to Electronic Arts chief executive John Riccitiello. He revealed the sales figure at the Wedbush Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference in New York late last week.

International figures for the title were not disclosed, but will undoubtedly be substantial.

In addition to strong launch sales for the title, GameSpot also reported a tie ratio of 40 percent for customers who purchased a DLC download code. This tie ratio at the register is the highest in EA's history, according to Riccitiello.

The game has received generally positive reviews from critics and gaming outlets, though there has been many complaints about the ending filling Internet forums.

UK video game retailer faces administration.

Shares of GAME took a nosedive on Monday after the firm told shareholders that their investment in the chain could be worthless. "It is uncertain whether any of the solutions currently being explored by the board will be successful or will result in any value being attributed to the shares of the company," the firm stated to investors.

GAME is still in talks with suppliers while sending some customers away to other stores to buy the latest releases, such as Mass Effect 3, and is seeking alternative sources of funding.

Shares in GAME had lost 94 percent of their value during the past year before Monday. It operates from 1270 stores in 9 European markets and Australia, and employs 10,000 staff. In two weeks time, the firm needs to make a large payment. Failure to do so could result in administration.

Recently, GAME has been shutting some of its stores and moving into digital distribution, hoping to avoid the fate of others in the music business in the past decade.

Last week, the major broadcasters Fox, ABC, CBS and NBCU sued Aereo, citing copyright violation concerns.

The firm was set to launch an Internet TV service starting in New York. The service allows customers to view broadcast TV over the Internet from anywhere they have access.

In their suit, the broadcasters claimed that "Aereo will infringe their copyrights by making available technology which enables consumers to access broadcast television via a remote antenna and DVR."

Today, the company, backed by billionaire Barry Diller, has countersued.

Aereo says its tech lets viewers "do no more than what they are entitled to do," which is watch broadcast TV programs using antennas.

The countersuit was filed against ABC, CBS, NBCU, Fox, Telemundo and others.

Chinese fans of the micro-blogging network Sina Weibo will be forced to verify their identities if they want to keep posting past March 16th, the government's mandated deadline.

Weibo says it only expects 60 percent of users to reveal their name and phone number before the deadline, with the other 40 percent being kicked off the service until they verify their info.

The service, which is almost identical to Twitter, has 260 million users. Twitter, based in the U.S., is blocked in China.

Chinese officials mandated the deadline in an effort to "stop the spread of harmful false rumors" in the nation.

The "Great Firewall of China" closely monitors social networks, news sites and blogs and blocks Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites where news can spread quickly and efficiently.

Intel is currently developing an Internet-based TV service that will make the chipmaker a "virtual cable operator," says the WSJ.

The company is said to have been pitching the idea for months now in an effort to have media companies stream their U.S.-based TV channels over the Internet in a bundle that is similar to monthly cable/satellite subscriptions.

Intel will be creating its own set-top box to carry the service, and the box will carry the Intel name. The company has already shown off the user interface to content holders.

It appears the company wants to launch the service before the end of the year, although that goal may be unrealistic given the recent trend of cracking down on bandwidth by certain ISPs.

Intel has long stated they want to expand into the TV business but has so far been unsuccessful with their attempts. The new move would help the company expand out of its bread-and-butter business of processing chips.

Earlier this week, we reported that Warner is working with retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy to offer technology that will allow consumers to bring in their discs and have them uploaded to the UltraViolet cloud for playback anywhere.

All converted files will have the UV DRM embedded.

Wal-Mart will announce the details on their UltraViolet offering tomorrow at 1pm, alongside partners Warner, Paramount, Universal, Fox and Sony.

According to SMB, the retailer will charge $2-$4 to convert each of your DVDs to UltraViolet, and the range will depend on the quality you want for the files. After conversion, your films will be available digitally wherever you have Internet.

After the DVD is converted, the disc will "be stamped" so others cannot use the same disc to get a digital copy, as well.

According to Digitimes, Nokia is preparing to enter the Windows 8-on-ARM market, with their own tablet by the end of the year.

The tablet will be powered (obviously) by Windows 8, and run on a dual-core Qualcomm SoC.

Getting specific, the site says the Q4 2012 will be the earliest that Nokia could offer the tablet, which makes sense given that the operating system is expected to be released in September in final form.

On the processor side, while there are quad-core chips available, the tablet will be powered by the very efficient Snapdragon S4. The S4 was just recently introduced on devices like the HTC One S, and shows extreme improvements in power efficiency compared to past dual-core chips.

If accurate, the site says Compal Electronics will be the manufacturer with a standing order of 200,000 of the 10-inch devices.

The major rumor of the day is that social news web giant Mashable is about to be acquired by CNN.

CNN is already one of the most popular news sites in the U.S., but the company does lack in the social media department. Mashable, on the other hand, specializes in social media news as well as tech news.

Felix Salmon of Reuters first reported the rumor last night, saying the buying price could be as high as $200 million.

Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore, however, rejected that idea, telling his staff that the "rumor going around on Twitter that Mashable will be acquired this week" is not true. The email did leave the door open for an acquisition in the future, however. Fueling that fire was a move by Adam Ostrow, the executive editor of Mashable, who "liked" Salmon's story on Facebook.

CNN recently purchased Zite, an iPad app company that determines what users want to read for a price, for $25 million.

Last week, we reported that Netflix has been meeting with cable companies in the past weeks in an effort to get their own channel.

If CEO Reed Hastings is successful, Netflix would become available as an on-demand option for cable subscribers, similar to rivals HBO and Showtime. The channel would offer Netflix's streaming catalog of 25,000 TV episodes and movies.

Although Netflix wants this move to happen, it appears that the cable and satellite operators do not.

Comcast, DirectTV and Dish Network have all said "no" to Netflix, say sources, knocking out three major players in the industry already.

Dish and Comcast already have streaming services of their own, which makes their decisions understandable, but still a large blow to Netflix. The three operators control 56 percent of the U.S.' TV subscribers.

Verizon is expected to say no, as well, as they work on a rival service with Redbox.

AT&T has announced the newest markets to receive their LTE network.

By the "early summer," 12 new cities will be included in the carrier's network, including some relatively small markets, as well.

Those cities are:

Cleveland, OH
Akron, OH
Canton, OH
Naples, FL
Bloomington, IN
Lafayette, IN
Muncie, IN
Baton Rouge, LA
New Orleans, LA
St. Louis, MO
Bryan-College Station, TX
Staten Island, NYC, NY

Most of the cities will begin to go live through April and May although there is no specific timeframe.

When the next 12 go live, AT&T will have 40 cities with LTE coverage. That number is still well behind Verizon, but they are quickly playing catch-up.

Nintendo has announced today that the Wii console is closing in on 40 million units sold in the U.S.

After selling 228,000 units in February, the console reached 39 million lifetime sales.

Outside of the Wii, Nintendo also sold 262,000 3DS and 135,000 DS handhelds during the month.

Finally, the company announced that Super Mario Galaxy has surpassed 5 million unit sales in the US, the 9th Wii title to reach the milestone.

Nintendo has been quiet of late as it prepares to launch its Wii U at this year's E3.