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Federal court filing argues against Justice Department's challenge to proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile.

If the $39 billion deal goes ahead, AT&T would become the biggest carrier in the United States, jumping above Verizon Wireless. It is currently the second largest provider in the United States, while T-Mobile is the fourth largest.

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit to stop the deal from going ahead last week, citing concerns about competition and prices for consumers. The Justice Department views T-Mobile as an innovative, discount carrier that helps to keep wireless prices down in the market.

"T-Mobile has not been a meaningful or unique innovator in terms of network development and deployment, nor is it likely to become one in the foreseeable future," AT&T argued in the court filing, made with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It wants the court to allow the deal to go ahead and force the Justice Department to pay the costs of this challenge.

The filing argues that the merger would free up spectrum, providing some relief to U.S. smartphone users who are consuming increasingly large amounts of wireless data.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announces five operators have been charged with conspiracy and copyright infringement crimes.

A federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia returned the indictment on Friday. The five individuals stand charged with one count of conspiracy and five substantive copyright infringement counts for their involvement with NinjaVideo.

The website operated from February 2008 until it was shutdown in June 2010. In the meantime, the defendants are alleged to have collected more than $500,000 in proceeds, and facilitated millions of dollars in copyright infringement activities.

ICE said on Friday that these efforts are made to "safeguard the nation's economic security against those who seek to profit illegally from American creativity, innovation and hard work."

The five individuals charged by the grand jury include.

• Hana Amal Beshara, New Jersey - Co-Founder, Administrator.
• Matthew David Howard Smith, North Carolina - Co-Founder, Administrator.
• Jeremy Lynn Andrew, Oregon - Website Security.
• Joshua David Evans, Washington - Active Uploader.
• Zoi Mertzanis, Greece - Active Uploader.

Microsoft services hit by outage late Thursday, early Friday.

The outage was caused by DNS issues, according to Microsoft posts while the problem was being fixed. It lasted for around two and half hours late on Thursday night (early Friday morning in Europe.) Affected services included Microsoft's Hotmail e-mail service, Skydrive cloud storage and Office 365.

"We have completed propagating our DNS configuration changes around the world, and have restored service for most customers. Depending on your location you may still experience issues over the next 30 minutes as the changes make their way through the network. Thank you for your patience as we have worked to address these issues," a Microsoft blog read on Thursday night.

Cloud services allow corporate and home users to move their files and computing needs to powerful remote servers. In the case of Office 365, corporations can pay monthly subscription fees for its employees, only paying for services that those particular employees will use.

The advantages are potentially reduced costs, universal access to documents and other materials from anyway there is Internet access, piece of mind that important work is kept safe in the cloud where local system failures cannot destroy it and strong security that these services generally utilize.

Companion App for iPad lets users interact with Virgin Media: TiVo service with new ways.

The new feature will be available and usable as part of the first major software update for the system and is designed to build on the user experience of the award-winning service. The update will be rolled out by Virgin Media to the TiVo service customers in the UK over the coming months.

Customers will be able to use their Apple iPads to interact directly with their TiVo service and extend their viewing experience beyond the remote control. Using the free app, viewers can interact with the TiVo interface directly on the iPad and also search across Virgin Media's content including the TV Guide and thousands of hours of content available through its video on demand library.

Using the App for browsing content will not interfere with the video on the television at the time. Using just a couple of swipes, the viewer can begin viewing content on their TV that they discovered with their Companion App.

  

BSA tip-off leads to settlement over use of unlicensed software.

Citrin Cooperman, an accounting, tax and consulting firm that works with entrepreneurs, of New York, NY, has paid $385,000 to the BSA to settle claims that it had unlicensed software developed by Adobe, Corel, Microsoft and Symantec installed on some of its computers.

The company has also agreed to delete all unlicensed copies of software from its computer and acquire any licenses necessary to be complaint, and to implement stronger software asset management (SAM).

"Our firm has grown significantly in the last decade. We have always felt we were fully in compliance and had no idea there was any unlicensed software on our computers. When BSA asked us to check, we launched an investigation. Upon learning there was unlicensed software, we immediately contacted BSA and corrected it," said Joel Cooperman, Managing Partner of Citrin Cooperman.

"We are happy to say that in addition to ensuring all of our software products are fully and properly licensed, BSA has helped us safeguard our IT systems from serious risks such as malware and viruses that pirated software often brings."

World's only certified PlayStation smartphone comes to AT&T stores this month.

Sony Ericsson and AT&T announced this week that the Xperia PLAY smartphone will be available in AT&T stores throughout the United States from later this month. The smartphone is available through major carriers around the world, including Verizon, America Móvil, Telefónica Movistar, Vodafone, T-mobile and Orange.

There are currently 150 optimised titles available to download for Xperia PLAY, including Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Dead Space 2 and Minecraft Pocket Edition.

“Xperia PLAY is the only true gaming smartphone and Sony Ericsson is creating a new and unique market category. Games are the most popular content for smartphones and Xperia PLAY users are at the forefront in downloading content. This presents a major opportunity for operators," said Steve Walker, Global Head of Marketing at Sony Ericsson.

AT&T will market the smartphone as "Xperia PLAY 4G supporting HSPA+" with an exclusive "stealth blue" color. It will be available as a smartphone package complete with accessories including the Sony Ericsson Multimedia Dock DK300 and MC100 music cable.

The microblogging and picture sharing platform has hit its latest milestone, 10 billion posts.

Tumblr says the service now hosts 28 million blogs, and over 10 million posts are made per day.

The service really began becoming popular last year, and now traditional media sites like NPR, Rolling Stone and others have pages, as a way to engage readership, adds RWW.

Tumblr, in pageviews at least, has now surpassed Wordpress, the blogging network.

The service has an expected 3 billion pageviews per month.

Multinational personal technology firm believes its long-running growth will continue.

It is on course to surpass Dell is sales by year's end, becoming the second largest PC vendor in the world behind HP, which currently claims 18.1 percent of the global PC market. Lenovo has just jumped above Acer Inc. to claim the third spot in the world, with a 12.2 percent share of the market.

It now has its eye on Dell, which is just ahead with a 12.9 percent share of the PC market. For seven straight quarters, Lenovo has been the fastest growing major PC maker, and it shipped more than 10 million units worldwide during Q1.

"Lenovo has tremendous momentum in the market. We continue to not only outgrow the market, but also significantly outpace our competitors. With our own rapid growth, combined with the successful execution of our joint venture in Japan with NEC and our acquisition of Medion in Germany, we fully expect to be number 2 in worldwide PCs this year," said Lenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang.

"PCs continue to be a very strong core business for us. Even as we invest in new areas like tablets and mobile internet, we see great opportunity in PCs around the world. We are committed to the PC space for the long term and expect it to continue to fuel profitable, balanced global growth for Lenovo."

Microsoft has announced two new patent licensing agreements.

Those deals are with Acer and ViewSonic, companies that manufacturer Android tablets.

The software giant says Acer's deal covers Microsoft patents for Acer tablets and Android smartphones and Viewsonic's covers tablets and mobile phone running either Android or Chrome platforms.

There was no word on the financial details of the deal, but it is expected to be in-line with others, at around $5-10 per device.

Additionally, ViewSonic will pay royalties of some sort.

Microsoft continues to sue or pressure Android device makers to settle or be taken to court.

Smartphones now account for more than half the mobile phones sold in western Europe according to numbers released by IDC.

The figures represent sales for the second quarter of 2011. It is the first quarter in which smartphones outsold regular feature phones in the region.

Android dominated smartphone operating systems, representing 52% of that market segment. This was largely due to the success of Samsung, who became the top phone vendor, surpassing Nokia.

Samsung accounted for approximately one third of all phones, with sales of 13.9 million units. This is an improvement from the same quarter in 2010 when they sold 10.8 million phones accounting for 25% of the market.

By contrast, Nokia's sales dropped from 16.2 million in 2Q 2010 to just 9 million in 2011. Their market share fell from 37% to 21%, still making them the number two phone vendor.

Apple's share of the market nearly doubled from 6% in 2010 to 11% in 2011. Of course, unlike either Samsung or Nokia, Apple doesn't sell feature phones.

HTC and Research In Motion rounded out the top five, accounting for approximately 3% each.

Looking just at smartphones, Samsung improved to a 22% market share compared to just 4% a year earlier. Apple was close behind, capturing 21% of smartphone sales.

The latest tablet oriented Windows 8 feature to be unveiled by Microsoft is a new fast startup mode.

Fast startup mode is basically a hybrid of a cold boot and resuming from hibernation. This new startup mode looks to be the default for Windows 8, assuming hibernation hasn't been disabled.

When you boot your computer, a set of processes for the operating system, called the system session, are started. When you login another set of processes, called a user session, is started.

When Windows 7 (or earlier versions) shuts down it first closes the user session and then the system session. When you boot the computer, the system session must be initiated again and all the associated processes initialized.

Nintendo is having a really bad year.

This week, ThinkOptical has filed a lawsuit against the gaming company, claiming the Wii console infringes on patents they own.

ThinkOptical are the creators of the Wavit Remote.

Nintendo is accused of infringing on three patents, including one for “Electronic Equipment for Handheld Vision Based Absolute Pointing System.” ThinkOptical is demanding monetary compensation, attorney fees and future royalties.

The company also claims Nintendo knew of the infringement before launching the Wii in 2005.

ThinkOptical has also added Wal-Mart, Gamestop and Radio Shack in the suit, in their attempts to be the latest notable patent troll.

Team TouchDroid, one of the groups working on getting Android running on the HP TouchPad, has disbanded after being caught taking credit for work CyanogenMod developers.

CyanogenMod is a community ROM which runs on a wide variety of Android devices. CyanogenMod developers have made significant progress toward getting Android up and running on the TouchPad, which includes writing touchscreen drivers.

Those drivers were used to enable multitouch on the HP tablet in the video we reported on earlier this week.

fnj00 of Team TouchDroid apologized for the incident on their website, writing:

I am the site host and was the guy you saw in all the videos under the account fnj001. I would first like to say to the community and team CM I am sorry for all the drama that has unfolded over the past few days/weeks and would like to clear it all up with the community and CM. I am doing this fully on my own will without any backing from whats left of team-touchdroid.

According to BI, Apple tried to acquire cloud storage company Dropbox earlier this year.

The company, which is set to go public eventually, first went through an elaborate M&A process, and had Apple and Citrix as potential bidders.

Sources hear that Apple offered up $800 million for the company, after seeing revenues would reach $100 million in 2011.

Dropbox passed on the offer and instead accepted a new round of private investments that valued the company at $4 billion.

The purchase would have been notable for Apple, who has infamously sat on their $70 billion cash with very little acquisitions in the past five years.

Thanks to a popular Italian Xbox 360 magazine, the oft-rumored Xbox 360 Blu-ray add-on is back in the news.

For years now, there have been rumors that Microsoft will launch a Blu-ray add-on similar to the HD-DVD add-on the company released in 2007 when the two formats were fighting for supremacy.

The magazine says Microsoft is working on an external Blu-ray drive that could also "act as an external hard drive" and let gamers backup their game saves and DLC.

Of course, like in the past, file this under speculation.

Mockup via GR: