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Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu has come out with the most bold iPad prediction yet, 48 million units expected sold in 2012.

That number will be greatly boosted by the launch of the iPad 3 sometime in the next few months. Rumors have ranged from February to May. The iPad 3 is said to have a Retina Display with a massive resolution, a quad-core processor, LTE support and other slight aesthetic fixes.

Says Wu: "We believe this significant refresh will likely help drive higher iPad sales and help further differentiate from arguably the only real competitor in the market, Amazon?s Kindle Fire, and not to mention the myriad of Android offerings out there. We are currently modeling 48 million iPad shipments for calendar 2012."

Wu would go on to say that number is his firm's "conservative" figure. The analyst has been accurate in the tech sector over the past decade, and does a lot of work on Amazon and Apple.

AT&T has expanded its wireless data plans, adding new options for smartphone users.

As of January 22nd, AT&T will offer a new 300MB plan for $20 per month, a 3GB plan for $30 and a 5GB plan for $50. The current plans are $15 for 200MB and $25 for 2GB.

The carrier removed unlimited data plans last year, in an effort to cap excessive use. AT&T says, however, that data usage is increasing at a blistering 40 percent per year and they want to give users more options.

"Customers are using more data than ever before," adds David Christopher, chief marketing officer for AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets. "Our new plans are driven by this increasing demand in a highly competitive environment and continue to deliver a great value to customers."

Rival Verizon offers similar plans, while T-Mobile offers "unlimited" data up to 2GB with throttled speeds above it for a much cheaper price. Sprint offers unlimited data, with no restrictions, but charges all smartphone owners a $10 4G fee, even if their phones don't have 4G radios.

Microsoft's minimum hardware requirements for Windows 8 OEM tablet partners is out in the wild. Most of them are fairly routine, representting a reasonable baseline.

But there's one particular item which has sparked a lot of discussion and accusations against Microsoft. It's the requirement that tablets with ARM processors not allow the user to disable secure boot.

Secure boot is a feature supported by the use of special UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) firmware. It prevents malware attacks which occur between a computer's initial boot process and the operating system taking control. Support for UEFI has been in Windows for a while.

In Windows 8 Microsoft decided to go a step further, at least with their OEM partners. Computers sold with Windows 8 must have UEFI firmware to pass Windows Certification, and it must be enabled by default. All of that seems fine. Secure boot is good, and turning it on by default makes sense.

What's confusing is why you would forbid the tablet's owner from disabling it. Sometimes you may want to run software, like an operating system installer or antivirus scanner, without secure boot getting in the way. In fact, when Microsoft first announced the secure boot requirement, it caused enough of an uproar for Steven Sinofsky, head of the Windows division, to address it personally:

Following this weekend's big story on Zappos being hacked, the shoe retailer has been sued by an angry customer.

The customer claims Zappos did not properly "maintain adequate procedures for protecting customers? personal information." 24 million accounts were compromised over the weekend in the largest breach of security since the PSN hack in April 2011.

Original Story:

Late last night, I received an email, as did 24 million other account holders, that our Zappos accounts had been hacked and we needed to change our passwords.

The popular shoe retailer owned by Amazon says that information such as names, email addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers, the last four digits of credit card numbers and encrypted versions of account passwords were likely compromised.

Zappos says all credit card numbers and other payment information were not accessed, since they were housed in a different database.

Additionally, Zappo's discounted 6PM.com site was also hacked in the same attack. At 24 million compromised, the attack is the largest since Sony's PlayStation Network was taken down in April 2011, compromising data on 101 million gamers.

The retailer reset everyone's passwords, but has shut off its phone lines, meaning all customer service requests will go to email.

Just hours after multiple sources reported that BlackBerry maker RIM was seeing interest from buyers, one of the alleged companies has denied the rumors.

Samsung, the second largest phone maker in the world (by volume) has said they have no interest in acquiring RIM. RIM's stock had jumped 10 percent during the day on the rumor, but has since faded after the denial.

More specifically, Samsung spokesman James Chung says: "We haven't considered acquiring the firm and are not interested in (buying RIM)."

Chung also noted that RIM had not contacted them looking for a takeover.

The earlier rumors had claimed that RIM co-chief executive Jim Balsillie was negotiating with companies that were looking to license its software or buying part or all of the company.

Yahoo's co-founder Jerry Yang has resigned from his position on the company's board of directors, sending the company's shares up significantly.

Additionally, Yang will step down from any remaining positions at the company.

In his resignation letter, Yang writes: "My time at Yahoo!, from its founding to the present, has encompassed some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my life. However, the time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo! As I leave the company I co-founded nearly 17 years ago, I am enthusiastic about the appointment of Scott Thompson as Chief Executive Officer and his ability, along with the entire Yahoo! leadership team, to guide Yahoo! into an exciting and successful future."

The company just hired top Paypal exec Thompson to fill the CEO position after the firing of the erratic Carol Bartz. Over the tenure of Yang and Bartz from 2007 until late 2011, Yahoo's market value has fallen from $40 billion to just $19 billion.

Yang has an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion.

Sprint has confirmed today that it will be providing maintenance releases to its smartphone devices to remove Carrier IQ.

In December, Sprint, the largest user of Carrier IQ software in the U.S., said it was completely disabling the software in all of its devices. Although it was disabled, the remnants remained dormant. The carrier also admitted to using the software since 2006, and that it is installed on 26 million Sprint smartphones and tablets.

The new updates will also provide security enhancements and bug fixes, says the carrier.

Last month, following customer concerns over the rootkit, Sprint stopped collecting data using Carrier IQ even though they said they only used Carrier IQ to collect network- and device-related information for quality-of-service-related purposes.

Carrier IQ, which is installed in over 140 million Android, iOS and BlackBerry devices, can read the state of your phone at all times, log all keystrokes, see who you called, see who you texted, see what terms you have searched for, and log sleep/uptime.

Netflix is now facing a class action lawsuit in California from investors who allege that the streaming giant misled its shareholders while cashing in their own stock.

Senior executives are accused "of issuing materially false and misleading statements regarding the company's business practices and its contracts with content providers" while at the same time cashing in $90 million worth of stock at "inflated prices." A few of the defendants named are chief executive Reed Hastings, finance director David Wells, chief content officer Ted Sarandos, chief product officer Neil Hunt and marketing director Leslie Kilgore.

Reads the lawsuit: "Defendants' statements about Netflix's ability to secure content and maintain profit margins were crucial to investors' evaluation of Netflix. Rather than fully disclose the devastating cost increases which were then threatening Netflix's entire business, defendants talked about its ability to grow. Specifically, defendants concealed negative trends in Netflix's business."

Netflix reached $305 a share during the summer, before falling to $63 in December in practically a straight line. Insiders managed to sell 388,000 shares at prices above $200. The shares closed today near $100.

Security researchers have unmasked the gang behind the Koobface computer virus.

The group members are said to be "hiding in plain sight" in St. Petersburg, Russia. Koobface, which used Facebook and other malware tactics to gain "zombie" computers for a large botnet, has been around since 2008.

SophosLabs, the noted online security firm, says the identities of five of the Russian suspects have been handed over to law enforcement.

Through Facebook and email phishing with subject lines such as "You look just awesome in this new movie," the Koobface virus spread. Users who clicked through were met with an error message that their Flash player was out of date or their anti-virus software was no longer working. When they downloaded the new software, their computer became infected and PC joined the legion of zombie bots controlled by the Russian gang.

Last March, Facebook Security took down the Russian "Command and Control" server:

"This remained the case until last March, when Facebook Security was able to perform a technical takedown of this 'Command & Control' Mothership. Since then we have had no new sightings of Koobface for over nine months and our teams are working hard to keep it that way. While we have been able to keep Koobface off Facebook, we won't declare victory against the virus until its authors are brought to justice," added Facebook.

It's hard to imagine how Samsung could have had a better year in 2011. It seemed like everything they touched turned to gold.

Android smartphones flew off the shelves, building on the foundation laid by the Galaxy S in 2010. Starting with the Galaxy S II and continuing with numerous other models, they even partnered with Google for the latest Nexus. Thanks to that partnership, the Galaxy Nexus was even the launchpad for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Samsung reversed their fortunes in the TV market after a weak 2010, with sales really picking up steam in November. At year's end they added an exclamation point by buying out Sony's stake in their joint TV venture. Despite relatively good sales, TVs have been one of many culprits for Sony's recent financial woes.

This year analysts expect Samsung to invest much of last year's windfall on continued product development. Based on the wide range of TV and Blu-ray developments they showed off at CES last week, and a major smartphone chip initiative announced last month, they appear to have plenty of projects to spend a reported $41.4 billion.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak always made something of an odd pair during the early days of Apple.

In many ways they were opposites, but really they complemented each other in a unique way. Where Jobs was more of an artist, excelling at design and usability, Wozniak, better known as just Woz, was the technical wizard. In fact many people still refer to him as the Wizard of Woz.

Given those differences, perhaps it should come as no surprise that Woz doesn't share his later partner's hatred of Android. In fact he prefers it to his iPhone for a number of everyday tasks.

He's particularly impressed with the Google Maps powered navigation app, and even its voice recognition. In fact, he prefers Android's voice recognition to Apple's Siri, and believes Siri was better before being purchased by Apple.

A few days ago, Woz told The Daily Beast:

In Windows 8 Microsoft will be introducing a new file system called ReFS. It borrows a number of features from the NTFS file system which has been available on Windows NT (NT 3.1 - 4, 2000, XP, Vista, 7) computers from 1993 on.

This is not the same as the database driven WinFS file system announced for, and later pulled from Windows Vista. That file system has since been abandoned by Microsoft, with parts of it being used in their database products.

The underlying technology of ReFS features a number of improvements over NTFS. While these changes should be invisible to the average user, the performance and resiliency improvements should be obvious in certain circumstances.

One of the changes is switching from journaling to write-on-allocate for metadata updates. In NTFS, when metadata for a file or folder (name, security permissions, and other information) is altered, those changes are also recorded in a journal in case they need to be rolled back. Normally this is reliable, but data may be corrupted if the drive loses power in the middle of an operation.

The write-on-allocate strategy used in ReFS improves on that by making all metadata changes to a different location (ie copying, rather than overwriting) so the original metadata is left completely intact. If the drive loses power while metadata is being changed, the original will still be available.

The HTC Dev unlock tool is now expanded for even more consumers.

HTC smartphone owners can use the tool to unlock the bootloaders on their device, legally, making it easier to add custom ROMs.

The new devices to be supported by the tool are the Droid Incredible, Desire Z, T-Mobile G2, Aria, ChaCha, and Status. There are now 28 different devices that are supported, with more to be added into the future. Most of the devices on the list are newer devices but the company promises older devices will continue to be added.

HTC added the Wildfire S, Wildfire, Salsa, Merge and Desire just last week.

CEO Peter Chou noted last year that all new devices would have unlocked bootloaders, following criticism from the developer community.

Massive retailer Wal-Mart has put the brand new Nokia Lumia 710 up for sale for free with contract with T-Mobile.

The device is Nokia's first Windows Phone to hit the U.S., a couple of months before the more powerful Lumia 800 and 900 reach our shores.

Making the deal notable is the fact that T-Mobile itself is selling the device for $50. Existing users can potentially get the price down to $20, but there seems to be some extra work required, like a rebate.

The Lumia 710 runs on Windows Phone 7.5, a Qualcomm 1.4 GHz Snapdragon processor, has 512MB of RAM, 8GB storage, Gorilla Glass and a 5MP camera.

Nokia's entry-level device has a 3.7-inch TFT display.

Last year stories started circulating about a Microsoft plan to integrate pay TV into Xbox Live. Reports claimed they were close to finalizing deals with companies including Time Warner, the BBC, and HBO.

However, it now appears they weren't as close as originally reported and their plans have been put on hold indefinitely. It seems TV executives weren't impressed enough to offer terms acceptable to Microsoft, and the deal fizzled.

Citing an unnamed media executive personally involved in the negotiations, Reuters says Microsoft got so far as demonstrating their TV platform in action, but ultimately decided the price of programming was too high. Their source reportedly said, "They built Microsoft TV, they demoed it for us, they asked for rate cards but then said 'ooh ah, that's expensive."

Combining this new information with previous reports about Microsoft TV, it appears their plan was to provide both Netflix-style video on demand, but with more current content, and a traditional (but web-based) pay TV service. In addition, they seemed to be considering producing exclusive content of their own.