Apple Fires Back at the Feds, Amazon  —  Nearly two days after the Department of Justice filed antitrust charges against Apple and major book publishers, Apple is responding.  Here's comment from Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr: … Apple's response is similar to ones made by Penguin Group and MacMillan …

Exclusive: Former RIM boss sought strategy shift before he quit  —  (Reuters) - Former Research In Motion co-chief executive Jim Balsillie sought to reinvent the BlackBerry smartphone maker with a radical shift in strategy before he stepped down, two sources with knowledge of his plans said.

Intel's Windows 8 tablet: Checklist goes public  —  Intel ‘Clover Trail’ Atom Z2760-based Windows 8 tablet.  —  (Credit: Brooke Crothers)  —  Intel is offering more specifics on the features of future Windows 8 tablet at a conference in Beijing.  It's a laudable goal, but can Intel make it happen this year?

Google Drive integration leaked by Lucidchart  —  Google's widely rumored cloud storage service might be closer than we thought, with online diagramming tool Lucidchart adding (and then swiftly removing) a link to a Google Drive integration page to its user control panel.

Facebook One-Ups Google With A Kind Of ‘Facebook+’: Your FB Email, Timeline Names Are Now Linked Up  —  Facebook today announced a change for how people can find you on its network — a move for more consistency, but also another route to getting people to use more email in Facebook, and secure its place as the center of your web life.

Amazon Massively Inflates Its Streaming Library Size  —  Amazon counts individual episodes, not whole series, as “TV shows,” which makes its Prime streaming catalog seem 10 times bigger than it actually is.  —  Amazon boasts that it has “more than 17,000 movies and television shows” …

Despite $889M In Revenue This Year, No IPO In Spotify's Cards, But Ek Wouldn't Say No To More Funding  —  Spotify's storming of the U.S. market last year has seen the company rack up a total of 13 million active users of its music streaming services — three million of them paying.

German Court Upholds Ban On Push Email In Apple's iCloud, MobileMe  —  FRANKFURT (Dow Jones)—A German regional court Friday backed a ban on push emails in Apple Inc.'s (AAPL) iCloud and MobileMe services in Germany, granting Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. (MMI) a victory in a global patent war among several technology companies.

Oracle thinks you can copyright a programming language, Google disagrees  —  Oracle's case against Google has evolved primarily into a copyright infringement suit over the past several months, and with the full trial scheduled to begin this coming Monday, the court is making an effort to get down to the nuts and bolts of copyright law.

Apple looking to build ‘unibody’ earbuds through ultrasonic bonding  —  By using a process known as ultrasonic bonding, Apple could create new iPhone and iPod earbuds that would have a seamless, more aesthetically pleasing “unibody” appearance.  —  Headsets and earbuds include a number …

Google CEO: Android ecosystem is about more than just tablets  —  Summary: Google's top executives recognize the potential and success of lower-end Android tablets, but the bigger picture here is unifying the Android experience across multiple devices.  —  While we continue to wait for word …

Marc Samwer out as Groupon's international boss  —  After enduring a torrid few months, Groupon has confirmed a shakeup of its international business, bringing in a new chief to oversee operations outside America.  —  Out goes Marc Samwer, the oldest of the three notorious Samwer brothers …

SAP sees Q1 stumble on North America execution issues  —  Summary: SAP indicated that its sales problems in North America “have been resolved” and reiterated its outlook for the year.  —  SAP said that its first quarter will be below its initial expectations amid “sales execution issues in North America.”

Ooyala launches personalized video discovery platform  —  From mobile to desktop, Ooyala's new content discovery system aims to keep viewers glued longer  —  As the world of online video rockets in popularity, content producers and brands are searching for the best way to deliver …

Berlin Cracks the Startup Code  —  On a rainy day in March 2011, Ciarán O'Leary and two colleagues crammed into a Berlin taxi and raced for the station to catch a train back to Hamburg.  While snaking through the city streets, it hit him: Leaving Berlin was a bad idea.

Did Boxee only sell 200,000 boxes?  —  The total number of Boxee Box users is around 200,000, according to a tweet sent out by the company Wednesday.  The tweet also revealed that Boxee now has a total of 2 million users, if you include users of the discontinued PC client.

Now everyone can make money from their videos, as YouTube opens its Partner Program to all  —  You may or may not already know this, but YouTube's Partner Program is an initiative by the Google-owned video-streaming platform to help creators develop skills, build audiences and - crucially - earn some bucks.

China's mysterious Internet outage; speculation over a ‘kill switch’  —  At approximately 11am local time yesterday, Internet users around China reported significant Internet blackouts.  Not only were they unable to access some Chinese sites, but also many foreign Web sites that had not previously been blocked.

Fetchnotes Launches A Simple, Cloud-Based Note-Taking Service (That Twitter Users Will Love)  —  Fetchnotes is a promising, lightweight note-taking app for list makers and idea-havers which looks deceptively simple.  But that simplicity is actually one of Fetchnotes' key selling points.

Plot thickens in Apple “bait apps” case  —  Apple came under fire last year from parents whose children had racked up credit card charges on apps that were supposed to be “free.”  Apple tried to throw out a law suit over the apps but has come up short after a judge found the parents suffered sufficient harm to pursue the case.

Crowdfunding's Next Frontier: Academic Research?  —  Crowdfunding has become increasingly popular lately.  That is, those who are looking for funding for their various projects can now turn to the community at large, which makes small contributions that are pooled resources into some pretty sizable chunks of change.

U.S. tries to silence MegaUpload lawyers on issue of user data  —  The U.S. government says that some of MegaUpload's lawyers have a conflict that should exclude them from representing the cyberlocker service.  —  (Credit: Greg Sandoval/CNET)  —  ALEXANDRIA, Va.—The struggle for control …

IBM adds more analytics with Varicent buy  —  The desire for more, better, and increasingly specific analytics continues with IBM's acquisition of Varicent Software.  Banks, insurance companies, and retailers use Varicent software to look at data across finance, sales, human resources …

Will Data Monopolies Paralyze the Internet?  —  Tim O'Reilly spoke with me last week about Internet companies acquiring massive proprietary data sets.  “We're kind of heading toward data as a source of monopoly power in some cases,” he told me, comparing data to “Intel Inside” as a barrier to market entry.

Stuxnet Loaded by Iran Double Agents  —  The Stuxnet virus that damaged Iran's nuclear program was implanted by an Israeli proxy — an Iranian, who used a corrupt “memory stick.32,” former and serving U.S. intelligence officials said.  In the continuing battle to hold off the Iranian nuclear program …

Intel: super-dense notebook, desktop displays common by 2013  —  Intel braces for very high resolution computers  —  Intel's Developer Forum in Beijing has seen the company make predictions as to the long-term future of computer displays.  A presentation caught by Liliputing saw “Rich Displays” …