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Intel Corp., Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Toshiba Corp are to form a working group to develop the next generation of chip technology by 2016, according to the Nikkei daily.

The three will invite other players in the industry in a bid to develop chip manufacturing technologies that can more than halve the semiconductor line widths to nearly 10 nanometers by 2016. A nanometer is unit of length in the metric system that equals one-billionth of a meter.

According to the report, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Japan will put up 5 billion yen toward an initial 10 billion yen in funds for R&D efforts, with the other half coming from members of the consortium itself.

Samsung and Toshiba are the world's largest and second largest makers of NAND-type memory respectively, and will use any resulting manufacturing technology to produce 10-nanometer class NAND flash memory chips, while Intel will use the technology for a new generation of powerful microprocessors.

Google has admitted for the first time that its Street View cars accidentally captured more sensitive information from wireless networks around the world than it previously thought.

The disclosure by the web giant comes just days after the Canadian privacy watchdog accused the company of collecting complete e-mails and passwords from wireless networks in the country while its Street View cars were out capturing the area.

It remains unclear just how many users worldwide have been affected by the security breach, and different states have decided to deal with the situation in different ways. Where it has been allowed to do so, Google has already destroyed the data that it captured, while bodies in other states are still analyzing the data and carrying out investigations.

Regulators in France, Germany, Spain and other countries have ongoing investigations into the matter. "If in fact laws were broken...then there's some serious question of culpability and Google may need to face significant fines," said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

In the United States, a collection of more than 30 attorneys general have launched a joint probe into the matter, lead by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. He said that Google's disclosure about the data it collected "validates and heightens our significant concerns."

Dutch authorities announced earlier this week that a computer virus "mastermind" had been arrested in Armenia as part of a move against the spam-spewing Bredolab botnet.

Earlier this week, the High Tech Crime Team of the National Crime Squad in the Netherlands announced that 143 servers hosted by LeaseWeb were taken offline. It identified them as command and control servers for the Bredolab botnet, which at its strongest could infect 3 million computers a month and sent an estimated 3.6 billion spam e-mails a day.

"At the request of the national (Dutch) prosecution service, a 27-year-old Armenian believed to be the brains behind the notorious Bredolab network, was arrested at the Yerevan international airport last night," the prosecution service said in a statement in The Hague.

The Netherlands has no extradition agreement with Armenia, and so the prosecution is currently in discussions to possible put the suspect on trial in Armenia.

Adobe has revealed the discovery of a zero-day vulnerability that affects its Flash player, Reader and Acrobat software.

The vulnerabilities can be used by malicious users to run arbitrary code on a victim's computer, according to the advisory published by Adobe. The company said that the vulnerability affects version 10.1.85.3 and earlier of Flash Player for the Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris operating systems.

The authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader 9.4 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows, Mac and Linux is also at risk, while mobile users are also vulnerable as Adobe Flash Player 10.1.95.2 and earlier versions for Android are vulnerable.

Adobe Acrobat 9.4 and previous 9.x versions are also vulnerable for Windows and Mac.

Adobe is working on a fix for the unpatched flaw and expects to provide an update by November 9th, while following with fixes for Adobe Reader and Acrobat during the week of November 15th, which unfortunately gives plenty of time to malware peddlers to attack.

Mozilla released patched updated versions of its popular web browser on Wednesday, addressing a zero-day security flaw that put potentially millions of Internet users at risk.

Morten Kråkvik of the Norwegian security vendor Telenor SOC was credited with the discovery of the flaw on Monday by Mozilla. Within 48 hours of the disclosure, Mozilla had patched the bug. The company has always prided itself on the speed at which it responds to threats, and has claimed that it gets fixes to users of its browser faster than Microsoft or Google.

The bug affected Firefox 3.5 and Firefox 3.6 versions. Firefox 3.6.12 and 3.5.15 were released, while the Firefox 4 beta was not at risk. The update to the Firefox 3.5 browser comes two months after Mozilla said it would stop providing security and other updates for it.

Unfortunately the bug was exploited by code planted into the Nobel Peace Prize website. Visitors to the site were redirected to a Taiwanese attack server that launched a Javascript exploit. If successful, the exploit planted a trojan on the victim's computer, which would in turn retrieve more malware.

A German court recently shot down a damage claim of 600 euros against a teen for sharing 2 songs, opting instead to reduce the figure by 95% to just 30 euros.

In addition, a claim against the boy's father, whom the lawsuit said should be held responsible simply because his internet connection was used, was dismissed entirely by the Hamburg court.

In explaining the amount awarded, they pointed out the songs were already several years old at the time they were shared and also that the rights holders could only prove the tracks were available online for a short time.

Analyzing the decision, a German law blog noted that even if applied to a current hit, the court's formula could result in damage awards of substantially less than 100 euros.

By contrast, recent lawsuits against German file sharers have demanded 1000 euros per song.

For the first time since 2005, Yahoo has redesigned its Yahoo Mail service, which currently has 280 million users.

The main update is the addition of social networking, meaning users can update their Twitter and Facebook statuses from within Yahoo Mail.

Yahoo says the revamped service will work twice as fast as Gmail and Live/Hotmail.

Additionally, texting and IMs have been updated, as well as the ability to view photos and videos from Flickr, Picasa and YouTube from within your inbox.

"People spend more than 30 billion minutes a month on Yahoo Mail," says Dave McDowell, Yahoo Mail senior product director. "It is a critically important product to our users and this represents [the] most significant upgrade to Yahoo mail in five years."

Yahoo has also added priority messages, the service Google added to Gmail a couple of months ago.

Apple has expanded the iOS App Store to China this week, giving Chinese users a chance to view localized feature apps and charts in Simplified Chinese.

Furthermore, the company has launched a Chinese online retail store which offers free shipping, free engraving and free customization for Mac products.

Apple just launched the iPhone 4 in China on September 25th, selling out all supply in 24 hours.

PCMag reminds us that Lenovo chairman Liu Chuanzhi once said: "We are lucky that Steve Jobs has such a bad temper and doesn't care about China. If Apple were to spend the same effort on the Chinese consumer as we do, we would be in trouble."

It appears that Lenovo will need increase their "effort" now.

Alexandra Tobias of Florida has plead guilty to murder today, months after killing her 3-month-old son for interrupting her game of Farmville.

Farmville is a game on Facebook where users own their own farms and interact with other farm owners from around the world.

In January, Tobias was playing the computer game and became angry after her baby Dylan started crying.

She shook the baby out of anger, smoked a cigarette and then shook the baby again, says The Florida Times-Union.

Tobias will receive a minimum of 25 years for the charge of second-degree murder.

For the six fiscal months ended September 30th, 2010, Nintendo saw its first semi-annual loss in seven years, thanks mostly to a steep decline in DS handheld sales.

Year-over-year, DS sales (which include DS Lite, DSi and DSi XL) dropped to 6.69 million worldwide, from 11.7 million in the same period last year.

The drop in sales makes sense though, given that the market has been very close to saturation for some time. Additionally, the Nintendo 3DS is set for launch early next year, so consumers appear to be bidding their time and waiting on the new, updated handheld.

Helping contribute to Nintendo's falling bottom line was Wii sales, which fell from 5.75 million to 4.97 million in the same time periods.

GigaOM is reporting today that Apple is currently working with SIM-card pioneer Gemalto to create a special SIM card that would give consumers a chance to buy an iPhone online (or at Apple retail stores) and then activate it through the iOS App Store, eliminating the need to go to a carrier's store.

SIM cards hold subscriber information as well as contacts and are used in GSM devices.

Gemalto's special new card will be integrated right into the iPhone (in European nations), giving consumers the chance to choose a carrier at the time of purchase and getting the handset up and running almost instantly, without needing to head over to a carrier store.

European carriers have expressed some concern, as it could potentially stop millions of consumers from headed into stores, where they might be inclined to buy accessories or even other devices.

Gemalto was recently in the news for suing Google, HTC, Motorola and Samsung over a patent related to the Android mobile operating system. More specifically, Gemalto is suing over a patent relating to the JavaCard, a technology which allows for Java apps to run on SIM cards.

Sony has announced today that they will be releasing a standalone 320GB PlayStation 3 console soon, pricing the console at $350.

Additionally, the company is still selling the 320GB system bundled with PlayStation Move, the PS Eye and "Sports Champion" for $400.

Making the system intriguing is the fact that Sony sells their low-end 160GB model for $300, so upgrading may even be cheaper than buying a 160GB model and adding your own HDD (unless you already have one laying around).

For September, Sony saw 312,000 PlayStation 3 sales in the U.S., a steep 37 percent drop year-over-year, although in August 2009 the company dropped the price of the PS3, leading to extremely strong sales for the period.

Sony has also reported that they have shipped 1 million Move motion controllers in the Americas for the PlayStation 3 in just 30 days since launch. Sony Europe reported 1.5 million sales for the EU during the same time.

Mike Beltzner, the Director of Firefox has said today that release candidates (RC) for Firefox 4 will be available at the beginning of 2011.

Beta 7 of the new browser is set for release in the next week.

Mozilla says Beta 7 will be a "code freeze" for the browser, meaning that new features can no longer be added afterwards.

After b7, the browser will be delivered to add-on developers.

Says Beltzner:

"As those who have been tracking our nightly builds know, great things are happening with Firefox 4. The user interface changes are converging, the graphics and layout features are wrapping up, and recently the JavaScript engine was dramatically improved. The result is a fast, capable Firefox that provides better speed and responsiveness for web applications and users. Completing this work is taking longer than initial estimates indicated as we track down regressions and sources of instability. As part of our commitment to beta users, we will not ship software before it is ready.

Development on Firefox 4 has not slowed down and strong progress is being made daily. However, based on the delays in completing the "feature complete" Beta 7 milestone against which our Add-on developers and third-party software developers can develop, as well as considering the amount of work remaining to prepare Firefox 4 for final release, we have revised our beta and release candidate schedule: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4/Beta

Today the iPad 3G went on sale at AT&T stores across the US. Meanwhile, Verizon introduced a competing deal, bundling a regular iPad with a WiFi hotspot.

Verizon's bundled alternatives are priced essentially the same as their 3G counterparts. They are charging $629 for the 16GB model, $729 for 32GB or $829 for 64GB.

Data plan details are similar, but not exactly the same. While AT&T offers a choice of 250MB or 2GB per month for $14.99 and $25 respectively, Verizon customers can choose from 1GB per month for $20, 3GB for $35, 5GB for $50 or 10GB for $80.

Of course the availability of the iPad from Verizon has led to more speculation about the oft-rumored, but never confirmed, partnership between Apple and Verizon for a CDMA version of the iPhone. Many industry analysts and tech bloggers have suggested this is further proof such a device must be on the way.

In reality there are only two conclusions you can legitimately draw from this development, neither of which is much of a revelation. Verizon wants to compete with AT&T and Apple wants to sell more iPads.

T-Mobile USA and Sprint have both confirmed this week that they will offer the Samsung Galaxy Tab for $400 with two-year contract.

Verizon announced they would be selling the tablet for $600 without contract.

T-Mobile will begin offering the tablet on November 10th, earlier than both rivals.

As you will need a data plan, T-Mobile offers existing customers WebConnect/200MB for $25 a month or WebConnect/5GB for $40 a month. If you are a new customer, however, those same plans will run you $30 or $50, respectively.

If you feel your bandwidth usage will be very minor, T-Mobile gives you the chance to use a prepaid mobile broadband rate plan, with the cheapest option being $10 per week for 100MB.

Sprint will offer the device for the same price with data plans costing $30 for 2GB or $60 for 5GB.

Samsung's tablet runs on Android 2.2, has a 1GHz processor, a 7-inch multi-touch screen and dual cameras.