AMD won a court order banning the former employees from disclosing trade secrets or soliciting their former colleagues to change sides and join Nvidia.AMD accused ex-employees of borrowing sensitive company documents when they cleared out their desks and headed over the Nvidia.

They allegedly transferred more than 100,000 files pertaining to AMD’s GPU business in the days leading up to their departure. AMD also claims that the employees tried to recruit co-workers to leave AMD, reports Businessweek.

US District Jidge Timothy Hillman said in his order that AMD could win the lawsuit, filed in January. He described AMD’s circumstantial evidence as compelling, which justified AMD’s request for a preliminary injunction. 

“They all made copies of confidential AMD information before leaving AMD, retained that information, and immediately began working at a significant competitor. AMD therefore has a reasonable likelihood of success on the merits with regard to its claims for misappropriation of trade secrets,” Hillman said.

Although the seditious ex-employees joined Nvidia, arguably AMD’s biggest competitor, Nvidia itself is not a defendant in the lawsuit, at least not yet.  

According to the Guardian, Ryan Ackroyd, Ryan Cleary, Jake Davis and Mustafa al-Bassam had been charged with attacks on the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), Sony, Nintendo, 20th Century Fox and governments and police forces in a 50-day spree in the summer of 2011.

Davis was sentenced to two years in a young offender's institution. Al-Bassam received a 20-month sentence, suspended for two years and 300 hours unpaid work. Ackroyd was given a 30-month sentence.

Cleary also pleaded guilty to possession of child abuse images following a second arrest on 4 October, 2012. He will be sentenced separately.

LulzSec put a fake front page on The Sun's website claiming News International chief executive Rupert Murdoch had died. It also leaked details of 500,000 Sun readers. Ackroyd was known as 'Kayla', while Davis was the main spokesperson known as 'Topiary'.

Ackroyd was arrested in September 2011, while Davis was charged with unauthorised computer access and conspiracy to carry out a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in August 2011. ASl-Bassam was not named until he pleaded guilty, due to his age.

The ringleaders were outted to the FBI by LulzSec leader Sabu, who was revealed to have been working as an informant for the bureau in March 2012.

Ryan Cleary was arrested in June 2011, while he was not a member of LulzSec he owned a botnet of 100,000 PCs used by the group. He was sentenced to 32 months in jail.

Judge Deborah Taylor said that the name LulzSec encapsulates their desires to cause embarrassment and disruption, while keeping their own identities hidden.

She said that the accused each played a role during a seven-month online campaign, "using your technical abilities to cause catastrophic losses for amusement".

One thing that the LulzSec hackers are probably relieved about is the fact that they were not arrested in the US - where they probably would have been lucky to have been out of prison in this lifetime. 

On Thursday shares of AMD were down 14.4 percent, after Goldman Sachs analyst James Covello cut his rating to Sell from Neutral. Although Covello identified some positive trends, such as the console design wins, he went on to conclude that AMD is overpriced and very likely to lose market share in 2014..

“The stock is trading at 22X our new 2014 CY EPS estimate as the gaming opportunity only partially offsets the continued secular challenges in the company’s core PC business (we estimate that the PC business will generate 45% of the company’s 2013 revenue),” Covello wrote. 

Although Covello noted that AMD would probably do well in graphics, the rest of the business is facing serious problems. He believes AMD will continue to lose market share in the core PC market to Intel, while at the same time facing more pressure from ARM outfits such as Qualcomm in the low-end. 

“We assume AMD’s share of PC client processors declines to 13% in 2014 from 17% in 2012. We believe our view on AMD’s share in the PC client business is below consensus. We expect AMD will lose further share in the performance areas of the market to Intel,” he concluded. 

Covello thinks that global gaming revenue in 2014 could hit $960 billion and that overall revenue in 2014 could pass the $5.5 billion mark. The figures aren’t all that bad. In fact, Covello raised his projected revenue for 2013 from $4.57 billion to $4.92 billion. Some of his numbers are above the Street’s consensus. 

However, not everyone shares Covello’s gloomy outlook. Dan Niles of AlphaOne Capital Management told Barrons that AMD is in a much better place than last year. Niles was short on AMD all last year, but now he is long again. 

“If they’re saying the valuation is too high, that’s a bet I’ll take every time,” he said. 

Niles also pointed out that AMD has switched to TSMC for much of its production, which means Intel doesn’t have much of an edge in manufacturing. GlobalFoundries (GloFo)  is still in the game and AMD is sitting on six years worth of high-volume, low-margin console deals. 

One of the reasons AMD might be looking so much worse than Intel is the fact that its market expectations are more realistic. Intel expects the PC market to rebound this year, while AMD thinks we’re looking at a one to two percent decline in PC shipments. If recent PC shipment figures are correct, AMD’s pessimistic numbers are probably closer to reality.

Moshe Vardi, a computer science professor at Rice University, traces the evolution of the idea that artificial intelligence may one day surpass human intelligence, from Turing to Kurzweil, and looks at the current rate of progress.

Early predictions were rubbish and it has taken 15 years to go from Deep Blue beating Kasparov at chess to self-driving cars and Watson beating Jeopardy champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

According to The Atlantic,  Vardi thinks it's reasonable to believe intelligent machines may one day replace human workers almost entirely and put millions out of work permanently, just as the world's food runs out.

What he is suggesting is an economic singularity, after which the labour market as we know it will cease to exist. Historically the labour market has evolved and adapted. Accelerating technology over the last few centuries has consistently erased some jobs only to replace them with others but the question is if the machines have replaced our brains what is there for us to do?

Vardi thinks that the world in 50 years either will be a utopia or a dystopia. Either we will solve the problem before it happens or things will get very very nasty.

He is not optimistic. If machines can do almost all of our work, then it is not clear that even 15 weekly hours of work will be required. He does not find the prospect of leisure-filled life appealing.

"I believe that work is essential to human well-being and our economic system would have to undergo a radical restructuring to enable billions of people to live lives of leisure," he said.

The unemployment rate in the US is currently under nine percent and is considered to be a huge problem.

"We cannot blindly pursue the goal of machine intelligence without pondering its consequences," Vardie added. 

Now let's be clear about this. Page has had his medical condition for nearly a year and no one has been able to get a clear statement about it. He began skipping public appearances in July last year due to a problem affecting his vocal chords, but at the time didn't disclose the precise nature of the problem. Now that he has decided to come clean, he thinks that other people should be more open about their medical histories.

According to IT World he said that after he disclosed his voice problem, he had so many thoughtful emails from people and advice.

Page said he had originally thought his own medical information should be very private, but the response he got from his blog post caused a rethink.

He thinks he should have done it sooner and he wonders why people are so focused on keeping their medical history private. The winner in the privacy stakes had to be Apple CEO Steve Jobs who battled and ultimately lost a fight with cancer without telling anyone he was sick until he was legally required to.

Page has had his condition since age 14 with a nerve problem that has caused his left vocal cord to be partially paralyzed. A cold last summer affected his second vocal cord, leaving him unable to speak. While his voice has returned, it's much softer and quieter.

He thinks that people are forced into silence because of insurance reasons and they are worried that they are going to be denied it. He said that the rules around insurance should be changed so that they have to insure people.

But there are some other reasons that Page might want people to be more open about their medical history. He mentioned how he was frustrated with laws that were preventing Google from doing some experiments. Health records were just one such area where legal restrictions ultimately led to the closure of its Google Health service.

Humanity has not built mechanisms to allow experimentation. There are many things, exciting things that you could do that you just can't do because they are illegal or they are not allowed by regulation. And that makes sense, we don't want our world to change too fast, he said.

We guess those are the sorts of laws which prevent you from building creatures from the bodies of the dead and then activating them with lightning bolts when they strike your castle in the Valley. 

The letter features eight questions and asks Page for a response by 14 June, reports the New York Times.

“We are curious whether this new technology could infringe on the privacy of the average American,” the letter said. 

The lawmakers, members of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, point out that the actual product has not been released yet, hence there are a number of unanswered questions Google needs to address. On the other hand, perhaps this is their way of getting a free sample to play around with.

Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, wants to know how Google plans to collect and store data from Google Glass, and how it will make sure that the data doesn’t end up in the wrong hands, much like some AP phone records and IRS tax returns. 

Of course, Google is trying to downplay the concerns. It insists that there is nothing really scary about Google Glass, apart from its appearance. Google maintains that it followed all its privacy and data collection policies and built in more tech to prevent privacy violations. It makes perfect sense, since few people will be willing to buy Google Glass unless they are absolutely certain that an embarrassing episode from their personal life won’t go viral. It is in Google own best interest to make it very, very secure.

In related news, Congress is currently facing its lowest approval ratings in history. Congress is now less popular than root canals, head lice, colonoscopies, carnies, traffic jams, France, Donald Trump, cockroaches and used-car salesmen. However, it did manage to beat out the Ebola virus, North Korea, meth labs, and gonorrhoea.

Of course you will still be able to run Firefox in Ubuntu 13.10 it is just that it will not be the default. The reason is that the Ubuntu Touch stack is being powered largely by Chromium/WebKit so they now have a vested interest in its success.

It was not an automatic choice.  According to Phoronix, some felt that data migration from Firefox isn't too obvious, extensions don't migrate between browsers, and Chromium isn't supported on all architectures.   Chromium doesn't work with the Orca screen reader and doesn't integrate well for accessibility reasons, there is no native PDF plug-in, and Chromium is said to have worse performance under memory pressure. There were also some concerns expressed about differences with WebApps in Chromium.

But Chromium currently provides a better user experience for the desktop and surpasses Firefox in its features and performance.  It is not a unilateral change.  Ubuntu developers are planning a discussion on an Ubuntu mailing list to solicit a more broad range of feedback on switching from Firefox to Chromium.

But as far as Firefox is concerned, it is another sign that it is slowly falling from grace with the IT community.

Increasingly, message boards are filled with complaints that Firefox has evolved into a “bloated resource chewing monster”.  After all, its existence was to provide a better browser than IE - but it is now a “memory hogging CPU killer” which hijacks the entire PC resources and “crawls along at the slowest pace” if more than four or five  tabs are in use.  It also does not give back memory after it has been closed down.

Since 2007, Gates has played number two to Carlos Slim who played telecom monopoly in Mexico, gaining Park Lane and Mayfair.

However Slim had a bad year and although he has not gone to jail he did fail to collect $2 billion as Mexico's Congress passed a monopoly-busting telecom bill that threatens his company America Movil's supreme rule of the market.

Meanwhile, according to Mashable, after a recent stock surge, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is once again the world's richest man. He is now worth $72.1 billion and about $550 million ahead of Slim.

It would appear that Gates' wealth has jumped 10 percent this year as Microsoft's shares have risen. This is despite Gates and his wife Melinda giving more than $28 billion to charity. The couple plan to eventually give away 95 percent of their fortune.  

Some seem at a loss to explain how Gates and Microsoft could be doing so well. After all, there have been so many stories about how poor sales for Windows 8 had been and how Vole had failed to make lots of dosh out of the mobile and tablet market.

Gates said he expects the OS to build momentum over time and that iPad owners are frustrated by the lack of a keyboard and Microsoft Office functionality, so maybe he is right. More likely he is laughing all the way to the bank, collecting nearly $8 for every Android phone made using Vole's patents. 

The Public Accounts Committee is investigating why corporations are not paying enough tax.

Chair of the committee, Labour MP Margaret Hodge, claimed she had documents from whistleblowers that showed Google transacted business in the UK. Google maintains that no money changes hand in the UK.

Under parliamentary procedures, "a person prevaricating or giving false evidence can be considered to be in contempt of the House".

Google's head of sales in northern Europe, Matt Brittin, maintains that the £3 billion in revenues is routed through Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland.

Hodge told Brittin that the committee will continue to investigate until it gets "to the bottom" of the matter.