Google's Nexus 7 has topped the sales charts in Japan over the recent holiday season, effectively knocking the iPad out of the number one spot.

Nikkei market research firm BCN in reporting from a survey of 2,400 stores in Japan that Google's 7-inch tablet accounted for 44.4% of all tablet sales in the country. Sales of Apple tablets, including the iPad Mini, only made up 40.1% of tablet sales over the same time period. It is however, unclear if Apple stores were included in the survey.

Google's plan of offering a smaller, yet still very capable tablet is working better than expected. In Japan the Nexus 7 costs around 19,000 yen ($212 USD, while the iPad and iPad mini cost 42,000 yen ($470) and 28,800 yen ($322 USD) respectively. Market research firm IDC estimates a total of 3.6 million tablets were sold in Japan during 2012.

The Federal Aviation Administration have announced that all Boeing 787s in the US are to be grounded after yet another lithium-ion battery failure has caused a fire in Boston following one in Japan.

Just hours previous, a 787 had to make an emergency landing in Japan after a fire broke out on the aircraft and had smoke filtering into the cabin. The FAA will now run an investigation into the 787s to ensure that the batteries are indeed safe for the planes to be operational again.

On January 7, a fire broke out in a 787 at Boston's Logan Airport, preventing the plane from taking off. Today's announcement comes just days after the FAA launching an investigation into the Dreamliner's design, manufacture, and assembly. The investigation is set to look over the various issues the 787 has faced over the last year since it first took into the skies.

Java seems to be one of the most exploited pieces of software running on a computer. Unfortunately, most computers are running Java for websites and other interactive features online. Just earlier this week, Oracle had to rush out a patch for Java that secured up a critical bug that allowed hackers to run code on a victim's machine.

An administrator for an exclusive cybercrime forum posted up Monday an offering for a new zero-day exploit that has yet to be patched by Oracle. It also has yet to be rolled into one of the exploit kits, some of which rent for upwards of $10,000 a month. The starting price for the exploit? $5,000.

New Java 0day, selling to 2 people, 5k$ per person

AT&T has been slowly reducing restrictions on Apple's FaceTime. The latest reduction in regulation comes in the form of AT&T allowing iPhone 4S users on a tiered data to use FaceTime over their cellular data. Previously, AT&T would not let non-LTE devices use FaceTime over the network. This change also means that other smartphone devices that don't feature LTE will be able to video chat over cellular data, again, provided that they are on a tiered data plan.

AT&T Mobility VP Mark Collins:

When FaceTime over Cellular launched in September 2012, we explained that we wanted to roll it out gradually to ensure the service had minimal impact on the mobile experience for all of our customers.

The Empire State Building wants you to be the one to choose the official standard of colors for its new LED tower lights. The lighting system designed by Phillips Color Kinetics, allows customized lighting schemes from a pallet of over 16 million colors.

Starting tonight through Jan 20th the building will be shining a different shade of the same color on each of its four faces. The colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and pink will be used giving you a total of 28 choices. Those interested in helping choose the colors can head over to the buildings official Facebook page to cast your vote.

The Empire State Building often uses its lighting to celebrate or highlight certain events. In case you're wondering, @esb_lights is an unofficial Twitter account that explains the meaning of ESB's lighting on any given day. The final seven colors will be announced the week of Jan. 21, 2013.

A developer working at an anonymous "critical infrastructure company" has been terminated because he was caught outsourcing his entire job to China. The trickery was highlighted in a recent study in which Verizon was asked to complete about some suspicious network traffic.

The employee who is called "Bob" in the study, was caught when someone noticed suspicious activity on the company's VPN log. "We received a request from a US-based company asking for our help in understanding some anomalous activity that they were witnessing in their VPN logs. Plainly stated, the VPN logs showed [Bob] logged in from China, yet the employee is right there, sitting at his desk, staring into his monitor", the study reported.

Bob had hired Chinese developers to complete all of his task, while he sat back and browsed Facebook, Reddit and LinkedIn for most of the day. If you did not think that this story could get any better, Bob was actually running this same ruse with several other full-time employers which was earning him a combined salary of several hundred thousand dollars a year.

For those super early (and lucky) developers who were able to get their hands on early access to a Google Glass unit - for a cool $1500 - are now invited to two hackathon events which are dedicated to the wearable augmented reality unit.

The events will take place on January 28 and 29, which will be held at Google's San Francisco office, but on February 1 and 2 the Glass Foundry in New York will house the second, and last hackathon. Registration opens on January 18 and I'm sure those seats will be snapped up quite quickly. Developers will learn about the Google Glass Mirror API, but Google engineers will also be there to help out and answer questions.

The full letter is below:

It warms my heart to see that there are still developers out there who state they're looking after PC gamers, and then actually follow through with it. Crytek are notorious with Crysis 2 for slapping PC gamers in the face, but BioShock Infinite developer, Irrational Games, has PC gamers' backs with their latest first-person shooter.

Irrational Games' Technical Director, Christopher Kline, admitted that the precious BioShock titles didn't have great PC-specific features, which he cites is due to the studio not being able to spare the resources required to amp up the PC version, and not because they didn't want to please PC enthusiasts.

BioShock Infinite turns things around, and Kline says that the studio has a special team which is responsible for identifying and implementing features that are important for PC gamers, as this time around, they had the resources spare to apply them. DirectX 11 will be included, as will HD Ambient Occlusion and Diffusion Depth of Field, EyeFinity and Surround Vision support, as well as huge amounts of graphical options and support for Steam Cloud and Big Picture.

We had a rumor less than a couple of days ago regarding pricing on the next-generation of consoles, which would be just $400 at launch. Now we're hearing from Sony's Vice President of Home Entertainment that we could see the PlayStation 4 unveiled sooner, rather than later.

Hiroshi Sakamoto recently talked to Chilean website Emol that Sony are working hard on the next-generation PlayStation, and that they are focused on showing it off at E3 in June, or even earlier. If Sony did jump first, they would beat Microsoft to the punch with their next-generation console which is expected to be unveiled at E3 in June.

The PlayStation 4 being announced ahead of the next-gen Xbox won't do much, but it will certainly have press sites going crazy, and thus, readers wanting to know more. Sony unveiling the PlayStation 4 would work for them, but against them at the same time - as it would give Microsoft E3 all to themselves and their next-gen consoles.

Wireless is a funny thing, it pretty much controls most people's everyday lives, and because it is mostly invisible, there's never an afterthought. If it 'just works', then that's fine. Well, a new wireless standard is on its way as the IEEE have adopted a new standards known as 802.11ad.

802.11ad will boast some incredible speeds of 7Gbps over 60GHz frequencies and should be baked into consumer devices as soon as 2014. The consumer-friendly marketing name that will find its way plastered all over 802.11ag is going to be WiGig. WiGig won't be replacing your wireless network, it will be complimenting it.

The hopes of the new technology will be that it'll provide an insanely fast, direct link between devices. The reason behind this is because of the 60GHz frequency it finds itself surfing along. As higher radio frequencies are used, they aren't so good at penetrating solid objects like walls, fridges, desks and more. High frequencies are really only good at shorter ranges, so WiGig will have its place in the market, but not where you'd like it to be.