U.S. and China Will Hold Talks About Hacking  —  WASHINGTON — The United States and China have agreed to hold regular, high-level talks on how to set standards of behavior for cybersecurity and commercial espionage, the first diplomatic effort to defuse the tensions over what the United States …

WWDC 2013: Slimmer Retina MacBook Pro w/1080P camera and MacBook Air microphone improvements expected  —  In a report this morning, one of the better Apple analysts, Mingchi Kuo of KGI securities listed his forecast for MacBook Pro and Air updates expected at WWDC starting June 10th.

Haswell is here: we detail Intel's first 4th-generation Core CPUs  —  Quad-core chips for laptops and desktops are first, with dual-cores to follow.  —  Intel has been releasing information about Haswell, its next-generation CPU architecture, for months now.

Mark Shuttleworth gives up dream of Ubuntu toppling Windows  —  When Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth began shipping Ubuntu nine years ago, he created “Bug #1.”  Its title was “Microsoft has a majority market share,” and Shuttleworth said “[t]his is a bug which Ubuntu and other projects are meant to fix.”

IE10 blows past IE7 and IE6′s combined market share, Firefox gains too, but Chrome hits 21-month low  —  The browser war continues into the middle of 2013.  May saw the second full month of IE10 availability on Windows 7, as well as the release of Firefox 21 and Chrome 27.

Oculus VR co-founder, 33, killed by speeding car  —  Tragedy hits the company that made the Oculus Rift head-mounted virtual-reality display as co-founder Andrew Reisse finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time during a police chase.  —  Andrew Scott Reisse, co-founder of the company …

The Quantitative VC  —  It's no longer sufficient in venture capital for firms to wait for companies, people and trends to come to Sand Hill Road.  Seeing a startup on Demo Day at Y Combinator used to be the pipeline for scouting an early deal.  But these days, YC companies are raising from angels before demo days.

The Aftermath Of Napster: Letting Incumbents Veto Innovation Slows Down Innovation Drastically  —  Last fall, law professor Michael Carrier came out with a really wonderful paper, called Copyright and Innovation: The Untold Story.  He interviewed dozens of people involved in the internet world …

Did Apple conspire to fix ebook prices?  The DOJ takes Cupertino to court on Monday  —  In the antitrust case USA v Apple, high-ranking Apple and Amazon executives are expected to testify  —  Propelled by the public's embrace of the Kindle, Amazon was running away with the burgeoning ebook market by the end of 2009.

Mac Pro Retail Supplies Drying Up Ahead of WWDC  —  Apple's WWDC conference is almost upon us, and with the expectation that the company will unveil new Macs at the event, I decided to do a bit of checking around on retail stock levels.  What I found, somewhat to my surprise, was a remarkable shortage of Apple's entry-level Mac Pro.

Software Freedom Law Center effectively blesses Microsoft's Android and Linux patent license deals  —  After many years of fundamentalist opposition to patent licensing it appears that Free Software advocates have become more pragmatic and now, at long last, tend to appreciate the benefits …

Samsung Galaxy S 4 Active Revealed for AT&T  —  It's no secret that Samsung's got a full complement of Galaxy S 4-derived handsets trickling out over the next few months; the company just revealed the S 4 Mini, and next up we're expecting a more rugged, full-sized device known as the Galaxy S 4 Active (codename: J Active).

‘Virtual’ Currencies Draw State Scrutiny  —  State banking regulators are scrutinizing companies that let people buy and sell virtual currencies such as bitcoin, and some are looking at requiring costly licenses, according to people familiar with the efforts.