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YouTube announced this week on its blog that users of the service have clicked the little yellow "subscribe" button over 1 billion times since it was added.

YouTube gave users the option to subscribe to videos from other users by clicking the now-familiar yellow button back in 2006. This week it was revealed that YouTube users have amassed over one billion subscriptions to videos from other YouTube user, with the billionth subscription being to the MachinimaSports channel.

Over 1 billion subscription updates that sent to YouTube users' homepages every week. Fifteen YouTube channels have managed to cross the 1 million subscribers landmark; fred, nigahiga, kassemg, shanedawsonTV, shanedawsonTV2, smosh, universalmusicgroup, machinima, sxephil, mysteryguitarman, davedays, kevjumba, realannoyingorange, raywilliamjohnson, collegehumor and failblog.

YouTube has also now offered a widget you can embed into your own websites or blogs that allows users to subscribe to your channel without having to visit YouTube.com.

You can see more details at: http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/

The California State Senator behind a controversial piece of legislation concerning the sale of violent video games to minors has claimed that ESRB guideline ratings are "biased".

San Francisco democrat Leland Yee said that his new piece of legislation was needed because the ESRB age-rating scheme is "rather biased." He told GameSpot that since the games industry itself funds the ESRB, it is natural to assume that the ratings titles receive are biased.

"Clearly, they're not going to legitimately and appropriately place any markings on any video games, because it's in the interest of the video [game] industry to sell as many video games as possible," he said. "You never heard of an AO rating whatsoever, because that would limit your market share." (Have a look here, Senator)

A Google executive has said that Google's quiet acquisition of Android Inc. several years ago was the best deal the company has ever struck since its beginning.

The comments were made by David Lawee, vice president of corporate development at Google, at the 16th annual Stanford Accel Symposium. He said that when the search giant buys up a company, it is up to the entrepreneurs to make it a success under the Google umbrella.

Google bought Android for an estimated $50 million back in 2005. Android Inc. was a wireless software start-up that was founded by Andy Rubin.

"I saw this guy in my building for two years, walking his dog, and I was like, I hope this guy does something," said Lawee. "It's obvious when the deal doesn’t work out, because the people leave. That's the key metric: Is the technology being used? A lot of it depends on the perseverance of the team coming in."

Rubin did stick around with Google to champion the development of the open source Android operating system for mobile handsets. It now is one of the most used operating systems in handsets.

A new documentary has revealed that founders of search giant Google tried to lure Steve Jobs away from Apple to head the "then" emerging company.

Bloomberg's new documentary, Game Changers, reveals that Google's co-founders Larry Paige and Sergey Brin traveled to Apple's Cupertino campus for a meeting with Steve Jobs. The pair tried to lure Jobs to Google to act as chief executive officer but were unable to get him on board.

After interviewing about 13 different candidates, Paige and Brin eventually settled on Eric Schmidt. Whilst Schmidt touts a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the fact that he attended a hippy art festival, Burning Man, in Black Rock Desert, Nevada, apparently gave some weight to his candidacy.

Game Changers is a new documentary that tells the story of Larry Paige and Sergey Brin as they met at Sranford and all to the way to their status in the industry today.

The 48 minute documentary is available here.

After sparking speculation by asking customers whether they would be willing to pay a monthly fee for unlimited streaming last spring, Redbox' owner has now confirmed it is planning a movie streaming service.

During a conference call yesterday, Coinstar CEO Paul Davis confirmed that Redbox does have its own plans in the space. He said that Redbox will be working with a partner to deliver a movie streaming service but did not elaborate on who the company is in negotiations with or what kind of a payment structure would be in mind.

The company will launch the Redbox-branded service in 2011 if all goes well. It will either be an unlimited service for a fee like that offered by Netflix, or it could go the iTunes and Amazon route with a Video on Demand service instead.

Last spring, customers were asked if they would be winning to pay a monthly fee of $4 for unlimited streaming and up to 4 DVD rentals per month.

China claims to have built the world's faster supercomputer, surpassing the Cray XT5 Jaguar supercomputer in the United States.

The Tianhe-1A was unveiled on Thursday and claims a performance record of 2.507 petaflops (flops == floating point operations per second; petaflops == 10¹⁵), beating the Cray XT5 Jaguar's 1.75 petaflops record. The Chinese system will have to wait to be crowned the world's fastest supercomputer until the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany in a couple of weeks, which will compile a list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.

It is powered by 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs. The system still requires U.S.-made processors, but the very high-speed interconnect technology and software that runs the system was developed in China. It was designed at the National University of Defense Technology in China and comprises 103 computer racks, consumes 4.04 megawatts of electricity and covers 17,000 square feet.

"Certainly there's some nationalistic pride in having the fastest computer, but it's also a signal that the U.S. is not the dominant force when it comes to supercomputing," said Jack Dongarra, a computing expert at the University of Tennessee.

Asus has released a new software tool that is aimed at legacy systems to make it possible to fully access hard drives with more than 2.2TB of storage space.

Disk Unlocker is a free utility for Asus motherboards that are limited by BIOS as 3TB internal HDDs roll onto the market. The tool cannot create a bootable partition based on the GUID partition table (GPT). Instead, it simply allows users running Windows XP x64, Windows Vista and Windows 7 access the extra space beyond the 2.2GB limit.

To boot from a GPT partitioned drive you would need an Extensive Firmware Interface-capable motherboard. Disk Unlocker, when run, provides a drop-down list of HDDs with more than 2.2TB capacity (but does not list any that already use the GPT format). When a user makes a selection, the tool creates a new virtual drive that gives the user control over the extra storage space.

Starting in November, Boxee users will be adding an application for the VUDU on demand service. In addition, VUDU is offering a free movie rental to anyone who signs up for their service through Boxee.

Boxee is a media center platform for Windows & OS X, which is primarily designed to aceess web based content. A set-top box, simply called the Boxee Box, will also be launching next month.

VUDU clients are already available on a number of Blu-ray players & HDTVs, as well as VUDU's own set-top box.

Bloomberg cites sources close to Fortinent Inc. in a report claiming that International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) has approached the network security firm about a possible takeover.

The world's largest provider of computer services approached Fortinet between six and eight weeks ago, according to the sources, and talks now may be at an advanced stage. Fortinent is reportedly working with Morgan Stanley on its strategic options.

The firm provides systems for network security, catering to companies that range from small businesses to large phone carriers. IBM CEO Sam Palmisano had previously said he plans to spend about $20 billion on acquisitions over the next five years.

"IBM's move is part of a bigger trend where technology companies are trying to fill the gaps in their portfolios," said Rajesh Ghai, an analyst at ThinkEquity LLC in San Francisco.

"Fortinet is growing very fast, and IBM is looking at high-growth companies also because the return on cash on a balance sheet is very low."

Fortinent, which has a market value of $2.14 billion, has seen its stock price surge over the past year due to speculation that it could become an acquisition target.

Despite an Dutch-led operating that disconnected 143 command and control servers from the Internet, the Bredolab botnet appears to still be receiving instructions from remaining servers.

Dutch authorities have said that the Bredolab investigation is still on-going, after already taking 143 servers offline and capturing of what authorities described as a computer virus "mastermind" in Armenia. At least two botnet command nodes appear to still be active.

The servers are located in Russia and Romania, and they will deliver FakeAV (Antivirusplus) and spam to infected machines that look them up. A third command node located in Russia was also showing signs of life earlier in the week, but appears to have gone offline permanently.

Security firm FireEye reckons that a second group of bot herders are issuing new instructions to the remaining zombie drones either attempting to make their own botnet or are continuing to use portions of the botnet they had previously rented.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has tapped into the unpopularity of an EU directive that caused major concerns several years ago which would see ISPs in the EU logging user activity.

The EFF is calling on the European Union's data protection watchdogs to pressure the governing bodies of the EU to repeal the law. The San Francisco-based digital rights activist group says the directive is disproportionate and very unpopular with citizens in any state that attempts to make it law.

Under the Directive, which appeared when the United Kingdom held the EU presidency, ISPs would be required to keep records of when its services were used and by whom. This information is then available for police and other state authorities to analyze in cases of terrorism or serious crime.

The length of time the data is retained for is between six months and two years depending on the preference of the state. "The Data Retention Directive is highly controversial, if not wildly unpopular throughout the European Union," said the EFF's Eva Galperin.

Turkish users are reportedly able to access Google Inc.'s popular video sharing website, YouTube, after videos deemed controversial in the country disappeared from the site.

Turkey had blocked YouTube back in May 2008 over video content that was deemed to be insulting to Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Under the country's penal code, it is an offense to insult the Turkish nation or its institutions.

The ban had been widely criticized since being put in place, with even Turkey's president Abdullah Gul using Twitter to voice his opposition to it publicly.

"We've received reports that some users in Turkey are once again able to access YouTube...We want to be clear that a third party, not YouTube, have apparently removed some of the videos that have caused the blocking of YouTube in Turkey using our automated copyright complaint process," YouTube responded in a statement issued on Saturday.

"We are investigating whether this action is valid in accordance with our copyright policy."

Human rights groups and media watchdogs have urged Turkey to halt its continued Internet censorship practices, with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) saying the European Union-candidate now prevents access to as many as 5,000 websites.

Google has said this week that they have spent $1.6 billion on 40 acquisitions this year, with more expected.

The search giant revealed the number via a regulatory filing.

Google's largest acquisition this year has been the massive $861 million purchase of mobile advertising company AdMob, which was easily integrated into Android.

The company also purchased social gaming company Slide for $180 million and video software developer On2 for $123 million.

That $1.6 billion figure could jump substantially if Google's proposed $700 million acquisition of airline travel software company ITA Software is completed. The purchase is pending as EU and U.S. anti-monopoly regulators look at it.

Google still has $33 billion in cash.

More new details have surfaced on the rumored Samsung Nexus Two, which AndroidandMe has compiled.

Samsung has sent out invitations for a major event on November 8th, when they are expected to unveil the device.

The device will be the first to run Android 2.3 Gingerbread, and it may be the first to have native video chat available through an updated Google Talk app.

Furthermore, the phone will run on a 1.2GHz processor, feature a 4-inch AMOLED (or Super-AMOLED) display, a 5MP camera with autofocus and HD video recording, a 1.3MP front-side camera, 512MB RAM, 16GB internal memory and support for multiple carriers, likely AT&T and T-Mobile.

With those specifications, the Nexus Two will likely became the top Android phone in the market, and a worthy successor to the powerful, but failed Nexus One.

Verizon Wireless has started their tiered data plans for smartphones this week, giving users more options for their phone bandwidth needs.

Subscribers will now have the chance to purchase 150MB a month for $15, or keep their unlimited plan for $30.

The U.S.' largest carrier has said in the past that 95 percent of users don't need unlimited plans as a good portion use under 100MB per monthly cycle, especially BlackBerry users which tend to use the phone's data for email and quick browsing only.

Five percent of smartphone users use about 50 percent of all data bandwidth, added Verizon.

The $15 package is a "holiday promotion" but Verizon is likely to make it permanent.