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Fan anger after Nintendo confirms it will profit from advertisements placed on gameplay videos uploaded by gamers.

What happens when an insect undergoes metamorphosis? Scientists from the University of Manchester used micro-CT scanning to take a look.

The D-Wave Two. D-Wave

D-Wave's quantum optimizer has found a new customer in the form of a partnership created by Google, NASA, and a consortium of research universities. The group is forming what it's calling the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab and will locate the computer at NASA's Ames Research Center. Academics will get involved via the Universities Space Research Association.

Although the D-Wave Two isn't a true quantum computer in the sense the term is typically used, D-Wave's system uses quantum effects to solve computational problems in a way that can be faster than traditional computers. How much faster? We just covered some results that indicated a certain class of problems may be sped up by as much as 10,000 times. Those algorithms are typically used in what's termed machine learning. And machine learning gets mentioned several times in Google's announcement of the new hardware.

Machine learning is typically used to allow computers to classify features, like whether or not an e-mail is spam (to use Google's example) or whether or not an image contains a specific feature, like a cat. You simply feed a machine learning system enough known images with and without cats and it will identify features that are shared among the cat set. When you feed it unknown images, it can determine whether enough of those features are present and make an accurate guess as to whether there's a cat in it. In more serious applications machine learning has been used to identify patterns of brain activity that are associated with different visual inputs, like viewing different letters.

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Both IDC and Gartner recently provided their smartphone market insight for the Q1 2013 as the Samsung/Apple duopoly continues on. The question is, who is No.3 – Windows Phone or BlackBerry?

The search giant's new Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab will be home to a new supercomputer from D-Wave Systems.

The internet giant Google has been challenged by MPs over the way it reports its income for tax.

Kepler's mission to find strange new worlds may be at an end after serious technical failures afflict NASA's famous space telescope.

So far this year's Google I/O has been very developer-centric—perhaps not surprising given that I/O is, at the end of the day, a developer's conference. Especially compared to last year's skydiving, Glass-revealing, Nexus-introducing keynote, yesterday's three-and-a-half-hour keynote presentation focused overwhelmingly on back-end technologies rather than concrete products aimed at consumers.

There's still plenty to see. All this year we've been taking photos to show you just what it's like to cover these shows—we've shown you things as large as CES and as small as Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference. Our pictures from the first day of Google I/O should give you some idea of what it's like to attend a developer conference for one of tech's most influential companies.

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I/O is held in the west hall of the Moscone Center, and between the giant Google signs and this real-life Google Maps pin you'd be hard-pressed to miss it.

Andrew Cunningham

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Victor Perez

The same judge who handed Viacom another defeat in its copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube last month has denied class-action status to a huge population of video copyright owners whose works were posted on YouTube without their permission.

In a case running parallel to the infamous Viacom v. YouTube suit the English Premier League, French Tennis Federation, and various music publishers sued the Google-owned YouTube in 2007 "on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated," and in 2010 formally asked to be certified as a class. The proposed class would contain people or entities whose copyrighted work was posted on YouTube on or after April 15, 2005 without their permission.

To be eligible for the class victims of infringement must fall into one of two subclasses. One subclass would include victims of repeat infringers such as people who asked YouTube to take videos down but said videos either remained on the site or were taken down and then posted again. A second subclass would include just music publishers who were victims of copyright infringement on YouTube when the service "knew or should have known" about the infringement because of a notification from the copyright holder, "or because [YouTube] otherwise identified, tracked or monitored it, or could have identified it, including through tools offered to owners of sound recordings of musical compositions."

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Former hacker on creating chaos online

When Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's home was raided in January 2012, US authorities were hoping they'd see him stateside, in court, pretty quickly. It hasn't worked out that way. Dotcom has been smiling on magazine covers and throwing unusual parties to herald his new cloud storage service, Mega.

The legal action moves ahead, however, with the US keeping Megaupload under indictment wit its assets frozen, as arguments over Dotcom's extradition move forward. Last word on the extradition trial was that it had been delayed until August 2013.

In order to mount what they call a proper defense to the extradition claims, Dotcom's lawyers have been asking to see the US evidence against their client. So far, they've been denied; New Zealand government lawyers have been arguing, on behalf of the US, that he should not be given the right to see those documents and that the extradition issue should be decided without lengthy discovery.

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Former LulzSec hacker Jake Davis, who has received a 24 month sentence for computer hacking, talks to Newsnight's Susan Watts about his time as part of the group.

Over half of Americans believe that there’s considerable disagreement among climate scientists about human-caused climate change—perhaps because they've heard that from industry advocacy campaigns and politicians. With so much controversy in the media many assume that the same controversy must exist in the scientific community.

In most situations people agree that it’s sensible to go with the majority of relevant experts whether that's in accepting that protons are real or a given medical treatment is effective. Those decisions depend critically on an accurate understanding of expert consensus.

Several attempts have been made to shine a light on expert opinions relating to global warming. One such study surveyed about 1,000 active climate scientists, finding that 97 percent of them accepted the evidence for the consensus position that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are largely responsible for the warming observed over the last century.

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British hackers who were behind a series of high profile cyber-attacks in 2011 have been sentenced at a hearing in London.

Bell Labs shut down in 2006. Today, Alcatel-Lucent uses patents that originated at the labs to file lawsuits. Lawrence Aberle / Wikipedia

In 2011, Alcatel-Lucent had American e-commerce on the ropes. The French telecom had sued eight big retailers and Intuit saying that their e-commerce operations infringed Alcatel patents; one by one they were folding. Kmart, QVC, Lands' End, and Intuit paid up at various stages of the litigation. Just before trial began Zappos, Sears, and Amazon also settled. That left two companies holding the bag: Overstock.com and Newegg, a company whose top lawyer had vowed not to ever settle with patent trolls. 

Then things started going badly for the plaintiff. Very badly. Instead of convincing the East Texas jury to hand Alcatel the tens of millions it was asking for—$12 million from Newegg alone—the company got a verdict of non-infringement. And as for the one patent Alcatel had argued throughout trial was so key to modern e-commerce—US Patent No. 5,649,131—the jury invalidated its claims.

Alcatel-Lucent was scrambling. The company's patent-licensing operations were contentious but lucrative and Alcatel surely had plans to move on from those eight heavyweights to sue many more retailers. The '131 patent, titled simply "Communications Protocol" and related to "object identifiers," was its crown jewel.

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iBuypower’s own custom-built low-profile gaming machine is completely designed top to bottom to be a versatile but slim gaming machine.

A service allowing fans to club together to pay bands to play gigs at their request has been launched.

Riot Games founders and League of Legends creators Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill have encountered bad behavior in massively multiplayer online games since the days of Ultima Online and EverQuest. In all that time, the typical moderator response to the all-too-common racial epithets, homophobic remarks, and bullying that borders on psychological abuse in MMOs has been to simply ban the players and move on. League of Legends definitely could have afforded to go the same route, bleeding off a few bad apples from its 12 million daily players and 32 million active monthly players (as of late 2012) without really affecting the bottom line.

But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn’t an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference.

Prior to the launch of the formal initiative, Riot introduced "the Tribunal" to League of Legends in May of 2011. The Tribunal is basically a community-based court system where the defendants are players who have a large number of reports filed against them by other players. League players can log in to the Tribunal and see the cases that have been created against those players, viewing evidence in the form of sample chat logs and commentary from the players who filed the reports.

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How Estonia was converted into E-stonia

A $15m computer that uses "quantum physics" effects to boost its speed is to be installed at a Nasa facility.