Google faces Brazil investigation over Orkut
Brazilian state prosecutors in Rio de Janeiro opened a formal investigation into Google over paedophilia, defamation and false identity on its social networking site Orkut, O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper reported on Wednesday. The Rio de Janeiro state prosecutor's office will give Google 120 days to implement a system that stores Internet protocol addresses, making it easier for authorities to track down images and pages that could be considered as complicit to a crime, Estado said. "These mechanisms already exist, but Google only stores user information for 30 days," Estado quoted Rodrigo Mascarenhas, a top prosecutor, as saying. "It is a problem the police face when they investigate a crime."
The Independent

Rumour: Microsoft killed X-platform play because console gamers suck
Microsoft canned plans to implement cross-platform PC-Xbox play on a number of games because console gamers were not as good as PC gamers, according to the founder of specialist PC gaming brand Voodoo PC. Voodoo PC founder Rahul Sood, now an HP employee, claims that the testing on the games which were planned to work across the Xbox 360 and the PC didn't go down as planned.
Tech Radar

Facebook tops 500m active users worldwide
Facebook has announced it has crossed 500m active users – six years after it was first launched. That number comes after it reached 400m active users in February, showing that the social networking site is not slowing down in terms of popularity. To celebrate, Facebook Stories is being launched – which is basically a chance for users to write just how great Facebook is and the impact it's had on their lives. Needless to say, those that made the front page are a touch sycophantic to say the least, but it does have a cool interactive map to see the stories by location.
Tech Radar

2010 media tablet shipment forecast boosted to 11 million
When ABI Research first examined the media tablet market, neither Apple’s iPad nor any other multinational-branded tablet had been released. Six months later, the firm has revisited its forecasts, almost tripling the original estimate to reach about 11 million tablets expected to ship by the end of 2010. Its long term estimates, however, remain basically unchanged. “Our forecast of 11 million media tablet shipments in 2010 is based both on the broader availability of the iPad and on the delayed introduction of competing products,” said ABI Research principal analyst, Jeff Orr.
Mobile Business Magazine

AOL does deal to show ITN clips
AOL UK has sealed a deal to show ITN clips, bringing a wealth of news clips to the portal. AOL is desperately trying to stay relevant in the ever-changing world of the internet, with the company looking to content as a key factor in keeping its audience. That content now includes clips from ITN, giving a wealth of video news content and presumably supporting AOL's admirable drive to recruit more journalists to write its content.
Tech Radar

Intel sued over circuit design
Chip giant Intel is being sued in a Delaware district court for alleged infringement of a circuit design. AVM claims it owns US patent 5,859,547, called Dynamic Logic Circuit.  This patent concerns the implementation of logic functions using high speed and low power dynamic logic circuits, says the filing.
Tech Eye

Motorola slams Huawei for spying
Motorola has sued its Chinese rival Huawei for allegedly conspiring with former employees to steal trade secrets. The mobile phone maker said that in 2001 five of its former employees  left to join Lemko, which has a reseller agreement with Huawei. Motorola originally sued five former workers in 2008 for allegedly taking trade secrets with them. Motorola claims a staff engineer shared information about a new transceiver and other Motorola technology with Ren Zhengfei of Huawei
Tech Eye

Fusion-io's flash memory OS plug-in
Fusion-io has created a flash-optimised operating system subsystem, the ioMemory Virtual Storage Layer. VSL effectively pools or fuses traditional server DRAM and additional flash memory so that I/O operations requested by applications for files or blocks can use both DRAM, as before, and flash memory to speed up previously disk-bound I/O operations. Existing software such as file systems, volume managers, and applications will be able to access ioMemory without modification.
The Register

Linux police offer deviant Android return from exile
OSCON Linux kernel maintainers have offered Google three ways of returning Android into their good graces. Google's options for re-admission to the kernel are: put the stubs of Android's wait locks into the main kernel, introduce Android's wait locks as PMQOS constraints, or adopt a patch written by a Linux kernel maintainer that would re-implement wait locks in a "socially acceptable way".
The Register

The world’s slowest SMS billboard created
Thai artist Wit Pimkanchanapong took the “instant” out of instant messaging with his latest project -- an interactive artwork called "The World’s Slowest SMS Billboard". The enormous billboard was positioned on the façade of the Singapore Art Museum as part of the Night Festival, an annual outdoor arts event held after sunset.
Wired