Lenovo only just whipped out its card to buy Motorola Mobility from Google for $2.91 billion last week, but now the Chinese giant is reportedly in talks with Sony about a possible joint venture to take over Sony's struggling VAIO PC business.

Japanese broadcaster NHK is behind the juicy news, with Sony saying in a statement: "Sony continues to address various options for the PC business, but the press report on a possible PC business alliance between Sony and Lenovo is inaccurate". Sony says it has plans to revamp its VAIO line of devices, which has been slammed by the smartphone and tablet business.

But with Lenovo earning around 80% of its revenue from PCs, this rumor could turn out to be a very interesting one going into 2014.

Just a few hours away from the Super Bowl between the Denver Broncos and Seattle Seahawks, TV viewers will have the ability to watch the game in standard definition, high-definition, and ultra-HD (4K). FOX Sports will use six Sony 4K cameras to broadcast the game in UHD, utilizing five F55 and one F65 cameras, which will be used for the FOX "Super Zoom" technology.

The cameras will be position down each sideline and in both end zones, along with one located above the field, providing overall field video.

"It's all about the clarity of the replay and giving viewers the best possible look at a play, and that's what we can do with these cameras," said Jerry Steinberg, FOX Sports SVP of Technical Operations, in a statement. "Since we're starting with such a high-resolution image, we can zoom in multiple times on a shot and still get a completely clear picture with zero pixel degradation. You see everything in extreme detail, in fact with an extra amount of detail you wouldn't see in a traditional replay."

A point-of-sale malware designed to steal debit and credit card information has been found on systems in 11 different countries, according to security company RSA. Dubbed ChewBacca, the malware was first discovered in late October, and has been found on in-store POS, directly blamed for stealing at least 49,000 account numbers to date.

The Tor-based malware threat communicates with the Command and Control (C&C) server using the anonymous Internet network - protecting the IP addresses of controllers. ChewBacca has proven successful in encrypting traffic and slipping through network-level detection, despite being a relatively simple piece of malware.

In-store POS threats, typically malware to steal customer information, typically go unnoticed, but consumers are becoming more aware of current threats. Criminals want to do whatever is necessary to steal data that they can either use, trade, or sell to other criminals - at the expense of retailers and consumers.

Automaker Ford is using the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset to aid in development of new cars, including vehicle color, materials, design, and possible modifications. Ford reportedly is using three systems in Detroit, and plans to expand the next-generation engineering platform to new facilities in the near future.

Working inside a 3D program, engineers are able to visualize vehicles while manipulating the environment to make improvements. Ford worked with Vicon, a company specializing in motion-capture technology, which captures engineer position and orientation from installed motion-capture video recorders.

Each system has an estimated cost of about $30,000, making it a fairly affordable design platform that has great potential for Ford - and other automakers will certainly follow Ford's progress.

The upcoming iOS 8, Apple's latest mobile operating system due to be delivered later this year, is rumored to be health-centric. The headlining feature of the new operating system is said to be "Healthbook", an app that will function similar to how Passbook functions, but will be all about tracking a user's health-related data.

It's likely that the Healthbook app is being designed to interface with the long-rumored iWatch that Apple is reportedly developing. The Healthbook app will reportedly be able to track numerous different aspects of a person's health, in addition to the usual steps walked and calories burned. The iWatch/Healthbook combo is rumored to be able to track blood pressure, hydration levels, heart rate, and possibly several other blood-related data points. Users can also enter information about medications and the software will remind users to take medication at appropriate times.

Of course, this is just a rumor, so take it with a grain of salt. The source also warns that health integration could be removed for the final cut of iOS8. However, it's fairly likely that the iWatch will make a debut sometime in 2014.

AT&T has recently filed for a patent that would institute a credits-based system. The new system is designed to allow AT&T to lower the bandwidth allotment for file-sharers, but the implications of the patent go much further than that. The new patent could have a chilling effect on content distribution networks, including Steam, Origin, and Netflix.

The patent, titled "Prevention Of Bandwidth Abuse Of A Communications System", would theoretically allow AT&T to create Internet plans that would only allow access to certain sites or protocols. The patent has a brief description:

The user is provided an initial number of credits. As the user consumes the credits, the data being downloaded is checked to determine if it is permissible or non-permissible. Non-permissible data includes file-sharing files and movie downloads if user subscription does not permit such activity. If the data is permissible, the user is provided another allotment of credits equal to the initial allotment. If the data is non-permissible, the user is provided an allotment of credits less than the initial allotment

The Open Compute Project (OCP) is an initiative started by Facebook to build the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost. OCP focuses on total control of the architecture, from custom-designed server components to software and operating systems. This has led to massive disruption in the enterprise space and the upending of the old model, which relied upon massive systems provided by a group of OEMs that were prohibitively expensive. The Open Compute Project relies heavily upon the open source model of information sharing and has drawn in the other titans of the computing world. Apple, Google, and Microsoft are among the 150 members, along with a bevy of hardware suppliers, that contribute to the OCP and their ideals.

The Open Compute Summit is the yearly meeting of the leaders of the movement, and a great forum to showcase the ideas and resulting hardware driving the movement forward.

This radical new way of thinking has saved tremendous amounts of both energy and money, with Facebook disclosing that they saved 1.2 billion dollars over the last three years, and also saved the equivalent of enough energy to power 40,000 homes and the emissions equivalent of 50,000 cars. Facebook's leading challenge revolves around how to store relatively cold data (data that is written once and seldom read) for long periods of time. Facebook intends to keep those pictures you shot five years ago forever, and storing all that data in a cost effective manner is their most pressing issue. Enter the 42U Blu-Ray storage cabinet. This robotic cabinet holds 10,000 triple-layer 100GB discs storing up to a petabyte of information, and future implementations will store an amazing 5PB per cabinet.

Google has released both its Q4 2013 and full year 2013 financial results, with the Mountain View-based search giant seeing increases in both revenue, and income.

For Q4 2013, Google saw revenues of $16.86 billion, up 17% year-over-year. Operating income for the three-month period was $3.92 billion, or 23% of its total revenues. Net income reached $3.38 billion, up from $2.89 billion from the same time last year. Google owned-site revenue was up 22% year-over-year to $10.55 billion, representing 67% of Google's total revenues.

Paid clicks were up around 31% for the quarter, with an 11% year-over-year decrease on cost-per-click. Motorola Mobility, which Google just sold to Lenovo for $2.91 billion, saw a $384 million operating loss for Q4 2013.

We were mostly alone when we posted a few stories from Edward Snowden's world-first interview with German TV outlet NDR, but that video was removed from YouTube a couple of hours ago.

Attempting to access the video results in the following message: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by ARD". That's ok though, because some sites have a full transcript of it. It doesn't take away from the fact that the video was removed, and then more so, it was cut down from the reported 6 hours, to just 30 minutes long. You can read the transcript of Snowden's startling video interview, here.

Ever since its GPU2013 event in Hawaii, AMD enthusiast have been chomping at the bits waiting to get their hands on the Mantle drivers for Battlefield 4, and today the patch finally came through. The update is here, and AMD has released the 14.1 Beta drivers for its GPUs for 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and 8.

At the moment, Mantle support for Battlefield 4 is only available on the R9 290X, R9 290, R7 260X and the latest AMD Kaveri APU's. Support for other cards and APUs will come as AMD works the bugs out of the system. Along with today's release, DICE has released the first performance numbers from Battlefield 4 running on Mantle. The first test was ran on a AMD A10-7850K APU with the game set to 720p at medium settings. Mantle gave the game a 14-percent boost in frame rates from 39fps to 43fps on the Singapore Beach map.

Up next DICE tested Battlefield 4 running an AMD FX-8350 CPU paired with a Radeon HD7970 at 1080p with settings set to ultra and MSAA set to 1x. While playing at these settings on Siege of Shanghai, Mantle increased performance by 25.1-percent taking the frame rate up from 53fps to 67fps. Finally, DICE tested the game on a Intel Core i7-3970x Extreme CPU paired with two R9 290X video cards, and the game set to 1080p ultra settings and MSAA set to 4x this time. Mantle increased performance again this time in the single player level, South China Sea, with frame rates being increased by a whopping 58-percent, going from 78fps to 116fps.