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The National Arbitration Forum has transferred so-called "typo domains" into Google's possession after a very quick hearing.

Google filed the complaint (Case No. 1416796) two months ago with the single-member panel.

The names that will now move into Google's possession are youtbe.com, youtub.com, youtue.com, youube.com, and yutube.com.

Each of the domains were being used to steal personal information through sham surveys (as pictured via Fusible).

ICANN, the group in charge of Internet domains and regulations, has a policy where domains can be transferred as long as three elements are satisfied. Those are:

1) the domain name registered by Respondent is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which Complainant has rights; and
2) Respondent has no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and
3) the domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith

Panelist Judge Harold Kalina found all three elements to be easily satisfied in this case, which did not even receive any response from the current domain holder.

We reported earlier that Vizio plans to disrupt the PC market, with a new line of ultrabooks and all-in-ones.

The company has released press shots of the computers, but a full announcement is coming at CES, hopefully with more details on the specs.

Original story:

Vizio, which quietly took over the U.S. HDTV market with its low-priced offerings, has plans to do the same to the PC market.
The company will show off two desktops and three notebooks at next week's CES show, said Chief Technology Officer Matt McRae. The computers will go on sale in June and McRae says they will sell at "a price that just doesn't seem possible."

Vizio started in 2002 and the company became so popular due to their good quality at low price points that two veterans, Philips and Pioneer, eventually left the market completely. "It's very similar to TV -- we want to get in there and disrupt it," added McRae. "We think most PCs have been designed for the small-business users, that others have not done a very good job of making them entertainment devices."

Although unconfirmed by Microsoft and Nokia, the New York Times says the companies will launch the Lumia 900 at CES next week.

The smartphone, codenamed the "Ace" for weeks, will head to AT&T in the U.S. and be the carrier's first LTE Windows Phone.

Because the device is still unconfirmed, there is no official word on the hardware. Luckily, there have been multiple leaks and there is a rumored spec sheet. The Lumia 900 will come with a 4.3-inch WVGA display, 512MB of RAM, an 8-megapixel camera, a huge 1,830mAh battery and run on Windows Phone 7.5 Mango.

The Steam digital distribution platform continues to see exponential growth.

Valve has reported on Steam's 2011 accomplishments, which showed 100 unit sales growth for the 7th year in a row. Steam disseminated 780 petabytes of data in 2011, a remarkably huge number.

During the year, the service grew to 40 million accounts, 1800 games and at one point had 5 million concurrent users.

In order to handle the data, Steam had to "more than double its service capacity and a new content delivery architecture was deployed to improve user download rates.

Concludes Valve:

Steam and Steamworks continues to evolve to keep up with customer and developer demands for new services and content. Support for in-game item trading prompted the exchange of over 19 million items. Support for Free to Play (FTP) games, launched in June, has spurred the launch of 18 FTP titles on Steam, with more coming in 2012. Looking forward, we are preparing for the launch of the Big Picture UI mode, which will allow gamers to experience Steam on large displays and in more rooms of the house.

Spotify finally made its way to the U.S. on July 14th, and hundreds of thousands of early adopters got a peak at the new service from invites through services like Klout and from giveaways from tech sites.

AfterDawn posted a quick review of the great service on that day, as well.

Now that almost 6 months have passed, we have to leave a headsup to any reader that may have gotten in the service those first few days. Once the 6 month anniversary passes for your account, the currently unlimited service will move to a restricted 10 hours per month service. Additionally, you will only be able to listen to the same song 5 times per month.

Spotify offers access to millions of tracks from all the top labels in an easy-to-use interface that includes search, sharing, playlists and more.

To get back to a truly unlimited service, you can pay $5 a month for the PC, or pay $10 per month to get unlimited music on the PC, portable devices, and higher bitrate tracks.

According to network firm Arieso, the voice recognition software Siri has led to a huge surge in iPhone data usage.

Because of Siri, iPhone 4S owners are using double the amount of data than their iPhone 4 counterparts.

Arieso Chief Technology Officer Michael Flanagan says voice recognition is leading consumers to "use their smartphones' functions more often." The firm advises major clients like Vodafone and Nokia Siemens on how to manage their wireless networks.

The firm "measured more than 1 million subscribers across a single European network in both urban and rural areas, without identifying the operator" to see the amount of data being used, and from what applications.

Over the past year, carriers have moved away from an unlimited data experience, instead charging customers for tiered plans, which usually top out at 10GB per month of 2G/3G/4G data and can be very expensive. The carriers claim anyone using over 2GB per month begin to put strain on their networks, which are ever expanding. The average smartphone owner uses just 750MB of data per month.

Israeli officials have vowed to retaliate against "Saudi" hackers that stole and posted credit card info on over 20,000 Israeli citizens.

The officials say they will respond to the cyber-attacks in the same way they respond to "violent terrorist acts."

"Such cyber-attacks are a breach of sovereignty comparable to a terrorist operation, and must be treated as such," added Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. "Israel has active capabilities for striking at those who are trying to harm it, and no agency or hacker will be immune from retaliatory action."

Earlier in the week, an allegedly Saudi hacker with the pen name OxOmar began leaking info stolen from an attack on One.co.il, the largest sports site in Israel. The hackers redirected users to a new site where their login info and other personal data could be stolen. OxOmar, part of the team "Group-XL" says they have credit card details, including expiration dates and security codes listed on the back of the cards, social security numbers, names, addresses, phone numbers and more.

Vizio, which quietly took over the U.S. HDTV market with its low-priced offerings, has plans to do the same to the PC market.

The company will show off two desktops and three notebooks at next week's CES show, said Chief Technology Officer Matt McRae. The computers will go on sale in June and McRae says they will sell at "a price that just doesn't seem possible."

Vizio started in 2002 and the company became so popular due to their good quality at low price points that two veterans, Philips and Pioneer, eventually left the market completely. "It's very similar to TV -- we want to get in there and disrupt it," added McRae. "We think most PCs have been designed for the small-business users, that others have not done a very good job of making them entertainment devices."

Sprint has announced the first four cities to receive its upcoming 4G LTE network.

Those cities are Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. Sprint began testing its LTE towers in Kankakee, Ill, last month.

The LTE network is set for release "in the first half of 2012," right alongside improved 3G coverage and improvements including "boosting voice and data quality."

Sprint's current 4G is WiMax, which offers 3-6 MB/s average download speeds but the network is not large and can be spotty. LTE will require new towers and will offer much higher theoretical speeds than WiMax and even the HSPA+ networks used on AT&T and T-Mobile.

Into the future, LTE promises 300MB/s downloads, which is 100 times faster than current 3G and many, many times faster than even the fastest commercial home Internet connections.

Sprint notes that WiMax users will still have access throughout the length of their two-year contracts that are currently signed. There will be 15 new smartphones, tablets and modems/cards with the LTE access to be launched this year.

Following Sprint CEO Dan Hesse's conference call yesterday in which it was implied that the carrier could throttle heavy unlimited data users, the company has released a new statement on the matter.

In his call, Hesse said (transcript via Verge):

By the way, when we say "unlimited," we have terms and conditions. Just like back in the old AT&T days when we launched Digital One Rate, you could abuse it, you know, like roaming, go and use it in your house in rural Montana all the time and you're roaming. We could cut you off. There are certain things in our terms and conditions, those abusers [...] we can manage them and we do that quite aggressively and cut them off. So for the vast majority, your 98-99 percent, to them it's an unlimited experience. But for people that want to abuse it and really run up the big data charge, we can knock them off.

Sprint does not throttle any postpaid phone data users for on-network or off-network usage. Sprint is the only national carrier offering smartphone users truly unlimited data with no throttling, metering or overages while on the Sprint network.

Google has announced that its once-hyped Google TV platform will be fully revived this year, starting with debuts at next week's CES event.

The search giant has said LG, Sony and Vizio will each show off a Google TV device at CES, with Samsung introducing their devices later in the year.

Marvell and MediaTek will create the ARM-based chips needed to run Google TV. Marvell says its Armada 1500 chip would be used, which had been anticipated for a few weeks now.

Since updating Google TV to 3.0 Honeycomb firmware, Google says there are now over 150 apps in the app store. The lack of apps optimized for large screens was a significant downside to purchasing a Google TV device when it first launched.

Microsoft has said today that they are expanding the Windows Phone Marketplace to six new markets.

Devs can now start creating apps for Argentina, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru and the Philippines.

A few of the new markets (the Asian ones) will require devs to sign off additional requirements due to regulations in the nation and other local laws. Microsoft has opened up the submission process very early, with the Marketplace launching later in the year.

Microsoft says the application certification may take a bit longer than usual if you select the "worldwide" option.

Windows Phone has 50,000 apps in the Marketplace even as the OS struggles to take market share from Android and iOS.

Corning has announced that it will use the CES event next week to unveil its Gorilla Glass 2 displays.

The glass, which is damage-resistant and used in smartphones and other devices, will be updated to work with even thinner displays and larger devices like 70-inch TVs.

"Corning Gorilla Glass has been a tremendous success for Corning, enjoying excellent market acceptance across mobile device industries. Handset and tablet device manufacturers are clearly driving toward higher functionality from thinner designs. Corning's latest innovation in Gorilla Glass technology is very well positioned to meet these challenges and enable broader touch technology penetration," added James R. Steiner, senior vice president and general manager, Corning Specialty Materials.

More details will be revealed on January 9th.

Steiner continues: "As we did last year, we'll provide consumers and customers visiting the Corning booth the opportunity to test first-hand the outstanding damage resistance and flexibility of this industry-leading, ultra-thin, and tough specialty glass."

Gorilla Glass is featured on 575 different products and available on over 500 million units.

Anonymous has hacked Sony Pictures, again.

The hacking group Anonymous has confirmed that they have once again hacked Sony Pictures, gaining access to their Facebook account and website.

After taking over the Facebook page, the group left a few comments on the page, proving they had done so.

Anonymous says the hack has been done thanks to Sony's support of SOPA. The group has dubbed the attack as #OpSony.

SOPA was proposed earlier this year. SOPA is the first of two bills being considered by Congress, the second of which is E-PARASITE/Protect-IP. The bills are created to prevent piracy, copyright infringement, and block access to "rogue foreign sites." The bills have been generally panned by the public and the major tech companies due to the fact that companies can get domains and websites shut down if they "engage in, enable or facilitate infringement" or are even accused of it. By creating this blacklist, governments and companies can choose to get sites cut off from search engines and from accepting payments for ads. SOPA only gives accused websites 5 days to file an appeal before they get shut down. If a user posts pirated material in the comments or forum section, the entire site can be shut down for good.

HBO has officially declared war on Netflix, telling the company they have to pay full price for DVDs and Blu-rays for their rental service.

The move, which will forbid Netflix from purchasing HBO content at a discount (or rental versions), has made it clear that HBO believes Netflix to be a competitor, one that it will not just roll over for. HBO has significant assets and has seen strong demand for its HBO Go streaming service.

Because of HBO's decision, Netflix must purchase seasons discs of True Blood and other popular series at retail prices. Netflix, for its part, says it will "continue to provide HBO titles on DVD and Blu-ray to our members."

Netflix has tried for over a year to license a deal with HBO for its original content, but the company has not budged. That being said, HBO remains a premium channel, and its HBO Go streaming service is available to anyone who pays for the TV channel.