The police have asked that Congress consider adding a requirement that wireless service providers keep copies of text messages for two years. Because, after all, you never know when you may need to data mine them during a future criminal investigation. There are a few problems with a requirement of this length, however.

Consider, for a moment, the sheer number of text messages sent every single day. Got a number? 6 billion. Last year more than 2 TRILLION messages were sent, so storing that many text messages would take up a huge amount of storage. Carriers would be required to save text messages for two years, so they would be storing upwards of 4 trillion text messages.

That would be roughly 500 terabytes of data storage. Not an unheard of amount, but certainly a burden on a company. The police would like this new requirement to be added into an update of a 1986 privacy law that is currently being discussed. A new draft of the bill sees it being updated for the cloud computing era with a requirement that police obtain a warrant to read e-mails.

Marvell, a fabless semiconductor company, makes a plethora of wireless chipsets and other integrated electronics. Today, they are touting that they have the industry's first 802.11ac 4x4 wireless solution. Marvell says that it is "built to improve the throughput of enterprise and retail access points (APs) and the robustness of wireless video distribution."

"I believe that with Marvell's new breakthrough 802.11ac 4x4 Wi-Fi solution, we are positioned to change the landscape for enterprise-class network infrastructure and carrier grade video applications, further empowering the entire spectrum of always-on devices. The new era of the digital lifestyle requires superior wireless connectivity which serves as a critical pillar for delivering live content across all screen sizes and 'Smart Furnishings' for connected consumers," said Weili Dai, Co-Founder of Marvell. "I am very proud to see our dedicated team of engineers continue to build ground-breaking wireless technologies that support the latest industry standards, significantly improving network capacity, performance and reliability for Wi-Fi devices accessing the cloud infrastructure. Working with the industry's largest and most innovative global carriers and OEMs over the last decade, Marvell has established a successful track record of delivering world class wireless solutions for enterprise, consumer and mobile applications."

The new chipset, the 88W8864 SoC comes with the latest Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ac, which is the fastest wireless so far. It provides throughput up to 1.3Gbps. Beamforming is also supported by the 88W8864, which allows a stronger link to be formed by directing the beam in the direction of the device. The highlights are as follows:

I'm sure nearly all of our readers will remember when BPI earned a court order in England which forced ISPs to block The Pirate Bay. Well, that same court order is now being used to block The Promo Bay, a site ran by the same people as The Pirate Bay but operated on completely different servers and completely within the law.

That's right, the BPI, someone who would have an interest in preventing independent artists from making in the world is using a court order to block a site that helps promote independent artists. The Promo Bay is a legal promotional platform that seeks to help independent artists reach notoriety.

Virgin Media, BE broadband and BT and currently blocking the perfectly legal site. BT and Virgin Media say that the domain promobay.org is on the list of sites to be blocked under the court order. Virgin Media's spokesperson: "Promobay.org is included on the list of URLs Virgin Media is required to block under UK law following the ruling of the High Court against the Pirate Bay."

Our little Curiosity rover is all grown up now. Sitting on the surface of Mars, it has gone to work analyzing soil samples collected from a drift known as Rocknest. The sampling at this location served two purposes. One, it tested the equipment and provided data. Two, the fine sand particles were used to scrub the equipment of any lingering substances that came with the rover from Earth.

"We have no definitive detection of Martian organics at this point, but we will keep looking in the diverse environments of Gale Crater," said SAM Principal Investigator Paul Mahaffy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"We used almost every part of our science payload examining this drift," said Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "The synergies of the instruments and richness of the data sets give us great promise for using them at the mission's main science destination on Mount Sharp."

2012 was quite the year for those hungry for knowledge to learn about Apple's iPhone 5 as well as information regarding this year's elections in the United States as Yahoo has revealed its top 10 searches of the year. The election took the first spot in their list, while the iPhone 5 came in second place, which is one spot down from the iPhone's previous #1 spot on Yahoo's 2011 popular searches list.

Kim Kardashian, Kate Upton and Kate Middleton rounded up the top 5 popular searches of 2012, which just goes to show no matter how hard people search for worthwhile content, there's going to be a swarm of folks searching for the latest celebrity gossip.

Here's Yahoo's top 10 searches for 2012:

In the world of online streaming video platforms, Netflix is still king even though it hasn't exactly had the greatest time with its customers in recent months. I mean, there's no way you forgot about Qwikster, right? That's why any new online streaming video service needs to be aggressive and offer as good as a service as Netflix currently does. If today's report turns out to be true, it looks as though Redbox may have quite the service in store for those looking for an alternative to Netflix.

According to GigaOM, it looks as though when Redbox's "Redbox Instant" is launched, it'll charge its customers $6 a month for its online streaming video service, which is $2 cheaper than Netflix currently charges. Not only will it offer unlimited video streaming, but it will also give its users some optional perks like paying $2 extra a month to keep their DVD rentals for four nights, instead of the usual $1.20 per night cost. Redbox also plans on offering on-demand rentals of newer movies at $.99 a pop.

Seeing as Redbox Instant won't have the massive, and somewhat lackluster, catalog Netflix has, I'm still curious to see what kind of catalog it will have. If Redbox offers more worthwhile films at a lower cost, then it could easily be seen as a serious competitor to Netflix's "grab anything that was released on film, no matter how terrible it is" catalog.

Do you have a Wii U sitting under your tree just waiting for its recipient to open it up this holiday season to then spend hours updating the console? We're sure your new Wii U owner will be using their console a lot over the next few months, which means they're going to be sucking up a whole lot of juice out of their GamePad and Pro Controller. That's why you need to consider checking out Nyko's newly announced Wii U power accessories.

Nyko has introduced five new power accessories that will help keep your Wii U GamePad and Pro Controller charged before and during use. Here's a rundown of the peripherals Nyko have made available for the Wii U:

UBoost - Add 2x the battery life to the Wii U GamePad with this simple clip-on extended battery. The UBoost attaches to the back of the GamePad controller, with no tools or modification to the GamePad required, and works in conjunction with the internal battery to prolong playtime upwards of 10 hours. A built-in stand also allows for easy viewing of streaming content on the device with no dock required. Users can easily recharge both the UBoost and the internal battery of the GamePad with the GamePad AC adaptor included with the Wii U, and even place it in the charging dock that ships with the Wii U

If you've got a Samsung Galaxy Note Ii and you're not impressed with its stock 3100mAh battery, then you do have yourself some options from Mugen Power.

The company have offered an extended battery that is a whopping 6400mAh beast, model number HLI-N7100XL. I wonder what the XL means? Nikolai Lebedovsky, marketing manager at Mugen Power Batteries has said that the company worked quite hard to jam pack as much power into the extended battery as possible.

The company's main goal was to keep its usability intact, but without the trouble of constantly charging, or walking around with a portable USB-powered charger:

If there's anything us parents want to do, it's keep our kids as safe as humanly possible - well, one dad has taken this step in a technologically driven direction for a change.

Paul Wallich would normally walk his son to the bus stop near their house - a 400m journey each and everyday. He did this to make sure his son safely got onto the bus and was on his way to school. 400m isn't a huge distance, but it can be an annoyance during the winter, or when he was super busy.

Wallich decided there had to be a way around this, and to watch his son get escorted to school from the comfort of his warm home. Wallich built a quadrocopter that sports a camera that streams a live feed directly to his PC. This process wasn't too hard, as quadrocopter kits are available at most hobby and electronics specialty shops.

If you thought that the Raspberry Pi models found in the cheap Model A and Model B offerings were great - well, things are about to get a whole lot Moore's Law-sy with Hardkernel's latest offering.

The product in question is the ODROID-U, which costs just $69 but sports a 1.4GHz quad-core Exynos 4412 CPU, you know - the same thing that powers Samsung's Galaxy S III and Note II smartphones. On top of its quad-core processor, it has 1GB of RAM, a quad-core Mali 400 graphics chip, micro-HDMI out, USB ports, a headphone jack and Ethernet connectivity.

One thing the ODROID-U doesn't have is on-board flash memory, Hardkernel have left this out and provided a microSD card slot instead. For an additional $20, you can get yourself double the ram at 2GB, and get the chip clocked up to a nice (and hopefully not toasty) 1.7GHz on the ODROID-U2 model.