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A college student who thought he was doing a good deed by reporting a security flaw in the software used by his college was expelled. The college has stood behind their decision to expel the obviously talented college student. The company behind the software has come out to offer the student a scholarship and part-time job in IT security.

"We will offer him a scholarship so he can finish his diploma in the private sector," said Edouard Taza, the president of Skytech.

The student union has also asked the school to reinstate him as a student: "Hamed is a brilliant computer science student who simply wanted to help his school," said Morgan Crockett, the union's director of internal affairs and advocacy. "Dawson College should be thankful for his talent and foresight. They must immediately reinstate Hamed, refund the debt he has incurred as a result of his unjust expulsion and offer him a public apology."

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found evidence that the 57 mile wide, 1.4 mile deep McLaughlin Crator once was filled with water that flowed from an underground source.

The evidence lies in the bottom of the crator where there are layered, flat rocks which contain carbonate and other minerals that form only in the presence of water. Small channels in the crator wall also resemble something you might find in a dried up lake bed here on Earth.

The findings were published in the latest edition of Nature Geoscience, and lend even more evidence that Mars could have once been a habitable planet. "This new report and others are continuing to reveal a more complex Mars than previously appreciated, with at least some areas more likely to reveal signs of ancient life than others," said Rich Zurek of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

MSI, following suit of other hardware manufacturers this year, has released a new budget 7-inch class Android tablet that will cost roughly 129 euros ($172 USD). Named Enjoy 71, the new tablet is no slouch when it comes to performance while running Ice Cream Sandwich.

Under the hood, the Enjoy 71 sports a dual-core 1.5GHz ARM Cortex M9 8726 processor, Mali-400 GPU, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. A micro SD slot supporting up to 32GB cards, 2MP rear and 0.3MP front cameras, USB and HDMI ports round out the features.

The display is a 1024 x 600 IPS type that is on par with the Nexus 7. A 3200mAh battery gives the device a decent run-time as well as keeping things light weight. Unlike other cheap 7-inch tablets, the Enjoy 71 is housed in a metal frame. No information has been released on when the tablet will be available in the US.

Today Micron is unveiling their new P400m SSD. This SSD is designed for data center servers and storage platforms and increases Microns impressive enterprise SSD portfolio. This 25nm MLC NAND SSD provides surprising endurance from standard MLC, with up to 10 full drive writes per day for five years.

This provides an overall endurance of up to 7PB of lifetime data written to the drive depending upon the capacity utilized. Micron is backing up this endurance promise with a five-year warranty for this new product. The P400m is geared for a multitude of applications including Cloud, VDI, bootstorm management, social media and logging applications.

This terrific endurance is due to Microns implementation of their proprietary XPERT (eXtended Performance and Enhanced Reliability Technology) drive management. This suite of highly optimized firmware algorithms and hardware enhancements increase the endurance of MLC NAND and provides full data path protection. As part of their approach Micron utilizes the same RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent NAND) technology that we have seen utilized in their P320h PCIe SSD. Additional facets of the XPERT approach include Adaptive Read Management/Optimize Read (ARM/OR) and DataSAFE technology.

We just heard that LG's Optimus G will be finally reaching the rest of the world, which we think is a little late, but now we're hearing about a new device from LG which is slightly bigger, and slightly better.

The LG Optimus G Pro sports a 5-inch, 1080p-capable display and was unveiled by Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo. The 5-inch screen has a 440 pixel per inch (ppi) display, compared to the older version which featured a 4.7-inch display and 312 ppi. The market is beginning to get crowded with large, high-res smartphones, and I'm not hearing anyone complain.

LG have begun their 2013 smartphone campaign by announcing that their Optimus G handset will launch in 50 new countries. The Optimus G is currently available to people in the US, Canada, Korea and Japan, and has been for many months now.

It will first land in Singapore, then start floating over to other countries in the weeks following. This model of the Optimus G will sport LTE connectivity in any country that includes LTE. LG is pushing the fact that their LTE technology and knowledge is great, and hopes that the impact of launching the same device with the fastest network capabilities will be huge. The Optimus G will include Jelly Bean out of the box, with LG stating it will be running "the latest Jelly Bean OS and improved software".

Now let's get onto the serious talk - why? Why now LG? The also LG-made Nexus 4 is a phenomenal device, sporting virtually identical specs to the Optimus G sans LTE capabilities. I don't see how LG are going to make any impact with the Optimus G, as most retailers and telcos are going to be selling this at the usual pricing. Considering you can get a Nexus 4 for under $300... LG will have to make the Optimus G seriously cheap if they want it to be popular.

Every cloud has a silver lining and for gamers, that silver lining in THQ's bankruptcy is the THQ Mega Pack. Bankrupt THQ is selling a THQ Mega Pack for just $25. The THQ Mega Pack is available on Amazon and comes with a large selection of THQ's games. Nearly every major game released by THQ is part of the pack.

All of the above games come in the THQ Mega Pack. Noticeably absent from the list above is the line of wrestling titles produced by THQ. This is likely due to licensing deals with the WWE. Saints Row The Third is worth the $25 alone, so you're basically getting 18 games for free.

Atari, a pioneer in the video game industry, has filed bankruptcy in the US. Unfortunately, it seems that the parent company, Atari SA, is debt-laden and this move is a way to free the company from the parent. By doing this, Atari is looking to continue as a company, just on its own.

Atari is selling off assets in the next three to four months, including its iconic logo. The company that emerges from the other side of bankruptcy is slated to be a company focused on the digital and mobile platforms. Atari has already been gearing up towards Android and iOS development since 2010.

Atari has reportedly received a debtor-in-possession investment of $5.25 million so that the company is capable of continuing to operate during the bankruptcy process. The plan is to seek a private buyer after the bankruptcy process, though that could be hard if they have sold off their iconic franchises and logo.

As much as the RIAA and MPAA would like to convince lawmakers and citizens that pirates and people who illegally download movies and music are harming the industry, study after study suggest quite the opposite. Take, for example, a study commissioned by Google, which shows that US P2P users buy 30 percent more music.

Google commissioned Columbia University's American Assembly research center to survey Americans on file sharing and copyright enforcement. In the survey, data suggests that Americans are generally against the use of bandwidth throttling and disconnection as punishment for illegal downloading.

The most important piece of information to come from the study is the finding that US P2P users tend to buy 30 percent more music than their non-sharing brethren. More studies are needed, however, but this study can join the pile of others that show file-sharing doesn't harm sales.

If you happened to be living under a rock over the weekend, you might have missed the small news story about Kim Dotcom's launch of the new file sharing service Mega. For the rest of the world, you did not miss it - you were just unable to use it.

Mega, the replacement of Megaupload, has been long anticipated, and has been expected to be a major success from the beginning. On Saturday the service went live worldwide, and users were able to sign up for an account, which included 50GB of free cloud storage to get you started. That is about all that most were able to do as the service has for the most part, been extremely slow and plagued with outages.

All of this is of course due to is wide, err... mega popularity. Everyone is flocking at once to check out the new encrypted file sharing service, and that is killing the servers. Dotcom has announced that over one million accounts were created in the first 24 hours alone. We expect that things will cool down in the next week or so as the initial rush begins to settle down. Did you sign up for Mega on launch day? What has your experience been like so far? Let us know in the comments below.

Ahmed Al-Khabaz, a 20 year old computer science student at Montreal's Dawson College, recently identified a major security flaw in the universities computer system. Instead of being thanked, or given a pat on the back, the student was expelled from the school.

Al-Khabaz was working on a mobile app that would gain students easier access to their college account, when he discovered what he described as "sloppy coding". The coding flaw allowed easy access to anyone wishing to find student's personal information stored in the system.

When brought to the attention of university officials, Al-Khabaz was promised that he would work with Skytech, the creators of the software in which the flaw was found, to resolve the issue. That call never came however. Two days later, Al-Khabaz ran another security check to see if the flaw had been fixed. It hadn't. A few minutes later he got a call from Edouard Teza, the president of Skytech. It was then that Al-Khabaz was accused of a cyber-attack and threatened with legal action.

OWC has announced their newest SSD in their venerable Mercury line, the OWC Mercury Viper SSD. This 3.5" behemoth sports impressive specifications of up to 600MB/s. This SSD bucks the current 2.5" trend by going with the 3.5" form factor, relegating it to desktop and server applications.

The truly impressive 600MB/s in sequential throughput will place this SSD firmly at the top of the SSD heap, with no other single SSD on the market able to match this top speed. 600MB/s is bumping up against the limits of the 6GB/s interface, and further numbers, such as random performance, will be released in the coming weeks. This large form factor also allows for huge capacity, with the range starting out at 240GB and topping out at a massive 2TB. This large capacity will be well suited to professional usage models.

OWC is also announcing the Jupiter mini-SAS DAS/SAN Scalable Storage Solution, which would be a great pairing with the above mentioned Mercury Viper. This series of enterprise class storage solutions continues OWCs expansion into the enterprise space. The series consist of JBOD and expansion racks, PCIe HBA cards and switches. The attraction of using the mini-SAS specification lies in its high performance, up to 48GB/s, and its relatively low cost when compared to competing fibre channel solutions.

There are leagues of fans of Band of Brothers and The Pacific, but now HBO have confirmed that producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg are on-board for a third series set during WWII.

The duo will reportedly tap Donald L. Miller's Masters of the Air as their source material, with the miniseries currently not titled. Miller's book is a narrative non-fiction work which tells the story of American bombers in their air campaign against Nazi Germany, focusing on the "Mighty Eighth" Air Force.

There's no ETA on the miniseries, but we should expect the production budget to be absolutely huge. Band of Brothers had a mammoth production budget of $125 and The Pacific blew its budget out to $200 million. So we should expect some big things from the third miniseries and I for one can't wait for it.

A source close to CVG are claiming some huge news from Sony's research and development department that they've been busy playing with more than one controller design for the next-generation console from Sony. We should expect it to launch as the PlayStation 4, but things can still change before release and we could see it released as simply "PlayStation" - something I believe has some weight to it.

These controller designs are said to be including an LCD touchscreen, as well as biometric sensors on its grips. Biometric technology on console controllers would be interesting, as it is capable of reading data from a gamer's body, which includes gamers' heart rates, temperatures and more.

This information isn't just a huge leaked rumor, as sources from Eurogamer are mirroring the same info, stating that Sony have been testing a PS4 controller with a touchscreen and biometrics functionality for at least six months, in which the designs reportedly change every month. This would be a huge departure from the DualShock controller which was introduced with the original PlayStation in 1997, and we've seen an iteration of the DualShock controller with every new PlayStation.

It looks like the Pirate Bay is about to get a little bit harder to find on the Internet, thanks to a bunch of malware alerts sent to Google have resulted in sites on the Pirate Bay being flagge by their content advisory service.

If you're like me and rocking Google's Chrome web browser, the advisory is alarment and displays the phrase "visiting this page now is very likely to infect your computer with malware'. Sitting on the Firefox side of the browsing fence will display it an attack page, stating "many are compromised without the knowledge or permission of their owners".

The team over at the Pirate Bay have told TorrentFreak is in relation to one of their ad partners who have "screwed up". There should be no malware threats now, and the warnings should eventually fade away from their side. These automated tools are slipping, and banning certain sites because of the ads, as they're made to target specific items and flag them. TPB getting flagged is another one of those "automatic" anomalies.

We already heard that the next-generation PlayStation 4 was set to be more powerful than the next-generation Xbox, but now we have found some better details on the exact hardware being baked into the next-gen console from Sony.

The CPU that will find its home in the new PS4 is said to be sporting a new "Jaguar" technology from AMD, which features low-power processor cores that are designed for the entry-level laptop and tablet market. This is a perfect solution as console power consumption is a huge problem, and it looks like it'll be solved by the hardware in the PlayStation 4. The PC bound Jaguar technology from AMD is headed to the consumer market in a quad-core design, but consoles are looking to amp this up with some customizations to the overall design.

The PlayStation 4, or 'Orbis', will aos feature a high-end Radeon GPU solution. We should be looking at the mobile side of AMD's GPU plans, with the "Pitcairn" design, or the Radeon 7970M design. The 7970M is clocked at 850MHz, and feature 20 "Graphics Core Next" compute units, but the Orbis will take 10% off those specs - reducing the GCN compute unit count to 18, and the clock speed down to 800MHz.

If you have been putting off upgrading to Windows 8 cheaply, your time is running out. At the beginning of February the price of an upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 Pro will cost you $200 instead of the introductory offer of $40.

Redmond is claiming that it has already sold a whopping 60 million copies of Windows 8, but there is no word on how many of those licenses have actually been activated.

Like Windows 7 there are several editions of Windows 8 which will be priced as follows: Pro will be the top dog at $199.99, Windows 8 upgrade edition at $119.99, and Windows 8 Pro Pack at $99.99. If you have any interest in upgrading to Windows 8, I highly suggest you jump on the current $40 offer.

If you are a media junkie and a computer geek like me, you have most likely heard of XBMC, the Xbox-born open source media center software. Also if you are like me, you have used XBMC for years to shuttle your digital media from servers to televisions. Then like me, you will be glad to hear that XBMC has released a "user friendly" version of the XBMC app for Android.

While we have had access to the official app for a while now, it has been complicated to get working properly on most Android devices, leading to hours of frustration for not so tech savvy users. XBMC has announced that a stable, user friendly version of the app is now available for download. Details on how to get everything up and running can be found here.

This is especially exciting news for Android based set to box owners because it completely negates the need for a dedicated HTPC at each TV if you want to run XBMC. I own a Pivos XIOS DS Android box and have been using the PLEX app while a more stable release of XBMC for Android comes out. Making things even cooler is that XBMC will now sync up with my existing PLEX server and populate all of my media content into the XBMC interface.

A popular gaming website is reporting that the PlayStation 4 will be significantly more powerful than its rival, Microsoft's Xbox 720. VG247 has said that their developer sources who possess intimate knowledge of the PS4's specs as well as the Xbox 720 have confirmed the rumors.

VG247 says that the PS4 will clock in at around 1.84 teraflops of run-capability which is significantly more than the mere 1.23 teraflops possessed by the Xbox 720. The Xbox however, will sport 8GB of RAM over the PS3's 4GB, according to the source.

The website is also reporting that the new Xbox will have Blu-ray playback capabilities this time, which should come as no surprise because developers will need the extra disc space to fit all of those high-end graphics on. We will know for sure which console wins the power race in March when both companies are set to make announcements. Until then we'll keep reporting on developments on the subject as they come to hand.

Diane Franklin, a Missouri-based representative, has proposed a new sales tax on violent video games, in which she thinks "would finance mental health programs and law enforcement measures to prevent mass shootings."

The Entertainment Software Association told Joystiq in response to the proposal that "the U.S. Supreme Court ruled only 18 months ago that laws penalizing video games are unconstitutional. Taxing First Amendment protected speech based on its content is not only wrong, but will end up costing Missouri taxpayers."

I don't see how pushing in some new taxes is going to somehow curb mass shootings - guns don't kill people, people, kill people. I don't think video games are the cause of all of this, and if they're going to be targeted as a source, then I think we should be looking at the bigger picture. Is it society? Parenting? The influence within movies, music, TV shows?