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Qualcomm faces $853m fine for alleged antitrust violation • The Register : "It is not the first time the company has been whacked with fines. Last year China slapped a $975m penalty on the company for alleged antitrust violations, which Qualcomm did not contest." That's Trump and EU protectionism hardball, no doubt.

Raspberry Pi Foundation releases operating system for PCs, Macs • The Register : "PIXEL ships without Mathematica and Minecraft, as the Pi Foundation doesn't have licences for those applications on machines other than its own. System requirements are modest: Upton promises PIXEL “should run even on vintage machines like my ThinkPad X40, provided they have at least 512MB of RAM.”" One word, one meaning.

Supposedly leaked Apple documents peg three iPhones for release in 2017, top model codenamed 'Ferrari' : "Surfaced by a Sina Weibo user known for leaking information from Apple's East Asian supply chain, the supposed documentation suggests Apple plans to market three iPhone models designated D20, D21 and D22 in 2017" The bow from weibo.

Report: Apple’s Mac team gets a lot less attention than before | Ars Technica : "Meetings between Mac engineers and Jony Ive's design team, once a weekly occurrence, have reportedly become less frequent since Ive delegated some of his day-to-day tasks to other employees last year. " Maybe smartphones will last forever. The Mac has outlived Palm and Blackberry. Is there something to that?

Apple has 'great desktops' on Mac roadmap, CEO Tim Cook says : ""Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we're committed to desktops. If there's any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap," Cook writes. "Nobody should worry about that."" What would I do without it? Mac, that is.

Infosec bods: This is a backdoor in Skype for Macs. Microsoft: No. • The Register : "A security hole in Skype for OS X allowed installed apps to silently delve into the user's chat logs, record their calls, and leaf through their contacts." It really is a feature, not a bug. OK, it's a bug.

'Super Mario Run' tops Apple's highest grossing, free app charts hours after launch : "Less than 12 hours after its launch on Thursday, Nintendo's ultra-hyped "Super Mario Run" now sits atop two of Apple's Top Charts as the most popular free and top grossing app." Turns out software is just as valuable as hardware.

AMD’s Zen CPU is now called Ryzen, and it might actually challenge Intel | Ars Technica : "The first Ryzen-based part will be the Summit Ridge family of high-end desktop chips. Summit Ridge chips will feature an 8-core 16-thread CPU—which is a true 8-core chip using simultaneous multithreading instead of the much maligned clustered multithreading of Bulldozer—with the top-end part sporting a base clock of 3.4GHz. " Huggadah, huggadah!

Super Mario Run will require always-on internet connection to play | Cult of Mac : "Miyamoto confirms that the decision was made to protect against piracy, and says that, while initially they had thought about having one of the three game modes (presumably the free one) available for offline play, they realized this would be too difficult." It's Mario!

Who killed Pebble? Easy: The vulture capitalists • The Register : "Kickstarter, too, also enjoyed a halo effect. After being snubbed by VCs, Pebble collected more than $10m in its funding drive in 2012." Don't mess with a winning formula.

Erasure coding startup springs forth from Silicon Fjord • The Register : "Memoscale is a 6-person Norwegian startup, based in Trondheim, that has developed its own erasure coding (EC) technology. It says it's more efficient than classic erasure coding because it needs fewer hardware resources to run and enables higher storage capacity utilization." The future is parallel.

Fitbit surges as Apple Watch stumbles | Cult of Mac : "Apple Watch may be the most recognizable product in the wearables space, but it isn’t the best-selling." I can't really compare to anything. I narrowed it down to the Polar V800 and the Apple Watch, decided to go with the Apple Watch and all I can say is, the heart rate monitor and GPS are first rate, the battery life is great and nothing beats it for extending the functionality of the iPhone when you're working out. I love the fact I can check my emails at a glance before reaching to type on the iPhone. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED (Series 2)!!!

Exclusive: Team Trump's net neutrality guru talks to El Reg • The Register : "As the academic who has conducted more empirical work into net neutrality than anyone else, Dr Roslyn Layton finds herself in demand from telecoms regulators all over the world. This week she faced the full fury of the Democratic Party's netroots activists after becoming the third expert appointee of Trump’s Transition Team. Never mind that the transition people had tapped into somebody who knows what they're talking about. The sky was falling!" If Trump appointed her (or anyone else, even a Liberal), Liberals are aghast!