It has been confirmed that Austin, Texas will be getting the elusive Google Fiber. Austin, TX will be just the second city to get access to Google's super-fast 1Gbps fiber internet connection and TV service. Kansas City, Kansas and Missouri is the other city to have access to Google's fiber ISP.

It's probably not enough to draw most people to move to Austin, but it could certainly help the start-up scene. Austin, Texas is already home to the South by Southwest conference and start-ups wouldn't have to travel if they were already based in Austin.

This morning a Taiwan news station reported that the Queen of England, Queen Elizabeth, had passed away. However, we are happy to report that the Queen is alive and well. The report headline said (as pictured below): "Queen of England passes away, and we will miss her." It appears that the passing of Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was confused with the Queen.

Margaret Thatcher served the UK as prime minister from 1979 until 1990, and holds the title as England's longest serving politician, and nicknamed the "Iron Lady" because of her uncompromising politics and leadership style. As prime minister, she implemented conservative policies that have come to be known as Thatcherism.

While we at TweakTown are sad to hear of Baroness Thatcher's passing, we are happy to report that the Queen is doing just fine. In general I hold all media sources to the highest standards and as a journalist myself, I fact check everything I post before hitting that submit button.

Facebook Home, the new launcher for Android by the social networking giant, releases this Friday, and will officially be available for the HTC One, HTC One X/X+, Samsung Galaxy SIII, Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung Galaxy Note II and the new HTC First.

This morning MoDoCo.com has published a set of three APK files that appear to be the components that make up a pre-release beta of Facebook Home. The only requirements for installing the beta is that the device has a maximum resolution of 1280x768, as well as the ability to completely remove or uninstall the existing Facebook app.

I was able to install all three apps to my aging Motorola Photon 4G, but all I got upon launch was a black screen. Home does not appear to actually reconfigure the home screen, but it remaps the home button to the Facebook Home wall. Pressing the back button allowed me to return to my normal Android home screen, and I was then able to delete the APKs through the normal app removal method.

Last month I reported that digital comic book startup comiXology would be offering the entire Marvel first edition catalog for free to users of its app. Unfortunately that is where the good news began and ended.

Just minutes after going live, the site was inundated with overwhelming traffic and their servers began to melt down. The site was unreachable for several days even after the download links were taken down. This lead to the CEO sending a mass email to members stating that they would get their free downloads, but for the time being, the company had to upgrade the network.

I was one of those subscribers, I tried to download several comics and failed to do so every time. This morning I received an email from comiXology that said they will begin delivering on their promise of free first editions beginning this Thursday. It appears that the process will be rolled out to members in phases and will only be accessible via a custom link that will be emailed to you.

If you're after a gigantic SSD, Crucial's upcoming M500 in 960GB might do the trick. The mammoth-sized SSD was teased a couple of months ago at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but it looks like the drive is about ready to drop.

Upgradeable.com.au has it for sale, at AU$875. This is much more than Crucial teased at CES, where they promised the "First terabyte-class drive available for under $600" But, we're also talking about an Australian retailer, so we have 10% for GST bringing the price down to under $800, and AU retailers nearly always charge more than US retailers - so $600-$650 in the US isn't much of a stretch.

What does Crucial's M500 SSD in 960GB provide? Well, you'll see some sustained sequential read/write performance of 500MB/sec and 400MB/sec, respectively. 4KB random read/writes are both up to 80,000 IOPS. The controller doing all of the work inside the Crucial M500 is the Marvel 88SS9187 controller with "Micron Custom Firmware."

We've seen leaps and bounds in graphics over the years, helped by each iteration of DirectX. But, after games started being made for, and optimized for consoles, the push of graphics started to sink.

It has gotten to the point where AMD's vice president of global channel sales, Roy Taylor, stated during an interview with German publication Heise.de, that AMD don't believe we'll see a DirectX 12 API. We won't be seeing DirectX 12 with Windows 8, or Windows Blue either.

Taylor was responding to a question about next-generation GPUs and technologies that they can be built around, where Taylor replied they'd normally build them around new DirectX versions to help the next-generation GPU architectures, but there won't be a DirectX 12, which means AMD's next-gen GPUs will integrate other technologies.

Reuters is jumping out of the gate, with fresh news that former News Corp president, Peter Chernin, who now runs The Chernin Group, has made a $500 million bid to buy Hulu. We heard that Hulu jammed a 'For Sale' sign into their front garden a few weeks ago, but this news is now much more official.

The Chernin Group owns stakes in Pandora Media Inc and the related production company Chernin Entertainment, who has produced films and TV shows such as New Girl, Terra Nova and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Hulu is currently jointly owned by News Corp and Walt Disney Co. Peter Chernin actually had some word in building Hulu back in 2007 when he sat on the website's board.

Reuters has reported that the owners of Hulu "reached out to potential buyers in March [of 2013] after initially contemplating a deal in which one [News Corp. or Disney] would buy out the other. It is not clear whether that transaction is still being contemplated."

The time is nearly upon us, when we get to see what the fourth-generation Core processor from Intel can do. Haswell, as it's otherwise known, has begun "shipping to customers now and will launch later this quarter" according to a source of CNET's.

Intel is expected to make a statement at the IDF Beijing conference next week, and should arrive in June for Computex in Taipei. Haswell is a special chip, as it is a next-generation processor that will scale incredibly well, from Ultrabooks to smart devices, right up to the high-end desktop and more. Intel CEO, Paul Otellini, has said that Haswell's new micro architecture will deliver "the single largest generation-to-generation battery life improvement in Intel history."

The chipmaker has confirmed the USB bug attached to chipsets, known as errata, will be "in production" during the initial ramp which happens later this month:

It looks like Acer is preparing a new form-factor tablet, something that will compete with the popular iPad mini among other smaller slates. Acer's Iconia A1-810 would feature a 7.9-inch IPS panel with a resolution of 1024x768.

This display slaps it right on iPad mini territory, but loses out to the Nexus 7 ever so slightly. We should expect Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, an 1.2GHz MediaTek MT8125 ARM Cortex-A9 quad-core processor. The usual suspects will also make an appearance, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS. The A1-810 also features an micro HDMI port, 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, VGA front-facer, and a 3250mAh battery.

1GB of RAM will be included, as well as 16GB of on-board storage. The Acer Iconia A1-810 weighs 460 grams and measures in at 208.7 x 145.7 x 10.5 mm. We should expect a price of around $250 and it should ship sometime in June.

What was originally thought of as a huge April Fool's Day joke has turned into an actual serious tease of the upcoming Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon from Ubisoft. A bunch of screenshots have made their way to the official Xbox.com website, which has gamers talking.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon goes down a very different path to the usual DLC, where we should expect some seriously fun first-person shooter fun. Here is the official synopsis from the game's website:

This morning we covered a back and forth between Microsoft's Adam Orth and Xbox fans over Always-on DRM. Orth was quite disrespectful and in my opinion, very unprofessional. This afternoon, Microsoft issued an official apology to Xbox fans over the tirade.

The statement from Microsoft reads:

It looks as though the Austin, Texas could be getting Google Fiber. Google and the City of Austin have an announcement planned for this Tuesday, April 9. Sources in the city seem to think that the announcement relates to broadband, most likely meaning Austin will be getting Google Fiber.

There are definitely other explanations than Google Fiber. Google could be planning to test out same-day delivery, open a new office, or any number of things. But Google Fiber is somewhat likely. Austin did fairly well in the original contest for Google Fiber and Google has contemplated expanding outside of Kansas City.

Every now and then a story comes along that makes you laugh out loud. For me, this is certainly one of those stories. Google has started receiving takedown requests of pages that contain a copyright holder's original takedown request. These robotically-generated requests are submitted because the original takedown request features the URL that was originally taken down.

It's rather hilarious and also ironic. In the picture above, you can see one of the takedown requests submitted by Fox asking for a ChillingEffects.org link to be removed. That link points to a previous Fox takedown request.

The system is clearly broken. Google is now handling over 20 million takedown requests per month and it shows no sign of slowing down. But just how we fix the DMCA isn't clear. Both Google and the movie studios have their own ideas and they are, of course, mostly contrary to each other.

GSMAreana has received some pictures from a tipster that are allegedly of the upcoming iPhone 5S. The pictures depict a radical departure from the current iPhone 5. They actually line up with a patent application approved by the US Patent Office last week, which could indicate they are real. Or the "tipster" could have crafted some pictures to match the application. First, the application picture:

As you can see, the patent application features a curved screen and curved back. Noticeable absent is the typical Home button. Now, take a look at the pictures sent in:

We encourage you to not take these pictures as the iPhone 5S that will be launched this summer. This could be a prototype or it could be the real thing. It could also be a render that someone has made from the patent image.

A new malware has been discovered by Kaspersky labs. The new malware spreads through Skype and turns the victim's computer into a Bitcoin miner. The victim's machine is then fully loaded to mine Bitcoins which is how the malware author makes money from the software.

The malware currently has a low detection rate. Kaspersky now identifies the malware as Trojan.Win32.Jorik.IRCbot.xkt. The malware is downloaded from a server in India. Once on the victim's machine, it pulls down more files from Hotfile, one of which is a Bitcoin mining application.

Bitcoin mining, explained more in-depth by Bitcoin, is a processor intensive task. The victim's CPU will be fully loaded mining Bitcoins, which are then given to the author of the malware. These Bitcoins are then used to turn a profit.

Microsoft's next generation Xbox has long been rumored to feature Always On DRM protection, and after recent events with SimCity and Diablo 3, many gamers are seeking to put an end to that sort of DRM. Yesterday Microsoft Employee Adam Orth took to Twitter to vent his frustrations with the anti-DRM crowd.

Orth, a Creative Director at Microsoft, went on a tirade blasting opponents of Always On DRM saying "Sorry, I don't get the drama around having an "always on" console. Every device is now "always on" that is the world we live in, ending the tweet with the hashtag, #dealwithit. This led some people to point out the debacle that EA recently went through with SimCity and asking what happens when the internet goes out.

Orth replied, "Electricity goes out too." This led to a follow up reminding Orth that some locales such as rural areas are often not well connected and do not have internet connections at all. One tweeter said: "You've lived in LA, SF, Seattle... Very Connected places. Try living in Janesville, WI or Blackberg VA." This prompted a kind of insulting reply from Orth of, Why on earth would I live there? He then set his Twitter account to private.

Crowd funding website Indiegogo was hit by a DDOS attack by an unknown source after YourAnonNews posted up a fundraising campaign. YourAnonNews (YAN) is attempting to raise funds to develop and host a new website that is similar to a newswire for Anonymous news. Apparently someone didn't like the idea.

It's not clear where the DDOS attack originated from and Indiegogo hasn't been exactly forthcoming about the attack. Slava Rubin, founder of Indiegogo, apologized for the outage and offered an extension to any campaigns ending this week: "Any campaigns scheduled to conclude this week will have the option of extending until Sunday by contacting our 24-7 Customer Happiness team."

Universal Pictures Australia which launched Steven Spielberg's 1993 action/adventure Jurassic Park 3D in select cinemas across most of Australia yesterday (but not my home state of Tasmania) have announced to retailers the impending home video release of the movie on 3D Blu-ray.

The movie, which has received a new transfer and full restoration before 3D conversion by Burbank studio StereoD, will be released in Australia on June 6th, some five weeks after the U.S. Blu-ray release. The sole new additional feature, an eight minute featurette entitled "The World of Jurassic Park" is joined by the film in 2D on the second disc, along with an Ultraviolet digital copy.

Based on the best-selling book by Michael Crichton, the production ushered in the digital age, with dinosaurs convincingly brought to life by George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic facility which was sold to Disney at the end of last year. The movie, once the highest grossing picture of all time before being surpassed by James Cameron's Titanicin 1998. Whilst ticket pre-sales have been strong, the first grosses are yet to come in.

At today's Facebook Home event Mark Zuckerberg and crew debuted Facebook Home, a new home-screen UI designed for Android devices that completely transforms your smartphone experience. Instead of focusing on apps, the new Facebook Home lets you focus on staying connected to people.

Chat head solves the age old problem of do you answer that text you just got or finish what you were doing. Chat head displays a little circular icon over your content that notifies you when a friend messages you. By tapping on your friends face, it will open the chat dialogue over your current "window."

Once you are finished with the message, simple tap again and it will return to the bubble-like icon. Chat head works with both Text Messaging as well as Facebook Messenger and which service you are using is denoted by the color of the chat's text bubbles. Green signifies a SMS conversation while blue represent a Facebook Messenger chat - just like how messaging works with Apple iMessage.

It looks like @evleaks was spot on once again. At the Facebook Home event, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook has teamed up with AT&T and HTC to design a smartphone that was based around Facebook Home. HTC's Peter Chou stepped up on the stage and proudly presented the HTC First.

The HTC First is a very sleek and very minimalist looking Android phone that was solely designed with Facebook Home in mind and will come in four colors. "It's the only phone that has Home pre-loaded and optimized. That means you're going to have a unique experience", said Chou.

AT&T's Ralph de la Vega then took the stage to talk about AT&T's role in the Facebook Home experience. "This is going to be the best Facebook mobile experience ever, and it's going to be people-centered. We bought into that," he said. "What I like about the First is that it's an LTE device, as you would expect. This phone has the most immersive experience I've ever seen."