UnknowingFool writes “For consumers who had hoped that Microsoft would greatly upgrade their recent entries into the tablet market, leaks and rumors have said that both machines will receive modest hardware changes. Surface Pro 2 will sport new Haswell processors which will increase battery life to 7 hours. RAM is expected to increase from 4GB to 8GB. Surface (formerly RT) will get Tegra 4 processors. The only other confirmed change will be new kickstands that have 2 positions instead of one.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Surface Pro 2 and Surface 2: Now With New Kickstand!
Facebook has just unveiled a new feature that allows multiple users to share one photo album. Now, up to 50 different “contributors” can each upload up to 200 photos into one, collaborative album—contributors can only edit their own photos while moderators get absolute power. In other words, let the public shaming commence. Read more… 
An anonymous reader writes “The U.S. Dept. of Justice has announced that Panasonic and its subsidiary Sanyo have been fined $56.5 million for their roles in price fixing conspiracies involving battery cells and car parts. The fines are part of a larger investigation into the prices of auto parts. Interestingly, 12 people at various companies have been sentenced to jail time, and three more are going to prison. Since the charges are felonies, none of the sentences are shorter than a year and a day. Criminal fines targeting these companies has totaled over $874 million. ‘The conduct of Panasonic, SANYO, and LG Chem resulted in inflated production costs for notebook computers and cars purchased by U.S. consumers. These investigations illustrate our efforts to ensure market fairness for U.S. businesses by bringing corporations to justice when their commercial activity violates antitrust laws.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
First time accepted submitter Dave Knott writes “The BBC has announced that Matt Smith will be leaving ‘Doctor Who’, after spending the last four seasons in the titular role of The Doctor. Smith will remain for the upcoming 50th anniversary special, where he will star alongside a majority of the other actors who have taken on the character, and will exit following the yearly Christmas episode. No actor has yet been cast as the twelfth incarnation of The Doctor, although there was a teaser involving John Hurt at the end of the most recent season of the show.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
The wait is over; diegocg writes “Linux kernel 3.7 has been released. This release adds support for the new ARM 64-bit architecture, ARM multiplatform — the ability to boot into different ARM systems using a single kernel; support for cryptographically signed kernel modules; Btrfs support for disabling copy-on-write on a per-file basis using chattr; faster Btrfs fsync(); a new experimental ‘perf trace’ tool modeled after strace; support for the TCP Fast Open feature in the server side; experimental SMBv2 protocol support; stable NFS 4.1 and parallel NFS; a vxlan tunneling protocol that allows to transfer Layer 2 ethernet packets over UDP; and support for the Intel SMAP security feature. Many small features and new drivers and fixes are also available. Here’s the full list of changes.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
pigrabbitbear writes “Things aren’t looking awesome for Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm, who’s currently under lock and key in a newly built jail about 15 minutes north of Stockholm. Svartholm’s mother Kristina says that her 28-year-old son is being held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day without any human contact other than his interactions with the guards. It’s been nearly two months since Svartholm was arrested in Cambodia, where he’d been living for years, and extradited back to Sweden, where he’s due to spend a year behind bars and pay a $1.1 million fine for copyright offenses related to his role at the Pirate Bay. But that’s not why Sweden’s being so tough on him in prison. Authorities believe he may have played a role in the hacking of Logica, a Swedish technology company with ties to the country’s tax authorities. They haven’t charged him with any crimes yet in that case, however.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.