Californian courts have been busy this week, first we had the Samsung vs. Apple patent infringements, and now we have a Californian jury decreed that Toshiba is guilty of conspiracy involving other Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese LCD manufacturers to keep LCD panel prices artificially high between 1999 and 2006.

The jury found that Toshiba is liable for $87 million in damages, $17 million to businesses, and $70 million to consumers. Under antitrust law, defendants can be assessed damages of three times the jury's ruling, so in this case, $261 million. Toshiba was the only defendant in the suit, and have claimed they've done nothing wrong.

Spokesman Julius Christensen said in an e-mail statement: "Toshiba plans to pursue all available legal avenues to correct that finding." He adds that Toshiba has "consistently maintained that there was no illegal activity on its part in the LCD business in the United States."

Ever wondered what the interior of a ship from the super-famous first-person shooter Halo would look like, if rendered using Crytek's CryENGINE 3? Well, a DICE artist currently working on Battlefield 3 has put together a mockup, and what a mockup it is!

See that? That to me, is amazing. That to me, is next-gen gaming. The lighting, the detail, the anti-aliased everything, is just perfect. If this could be done with next-gen physics, particle effects, A.I. and a flat 60fps minimum, I'd be excited for gaming again.

Halo 4 will end up looking good, but it won't look anywhere near this good. 343 Industries should be able to squeeze a few extra goodies out of the now aged Xbox 360, but if it were to look like this, it'd have to debut on the next-gen Xbox.

The rumor of an iPad mini from Apple have been around for quite a while now, even as far back as October last year. We've reported on them many times, and it is the perfect path for Apple to take to combat the impending Google Nexus 7 tablet, as well as the Amazon Kindle Fire, and upcoming next-gen Fire.

The latest reports are coming in from the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg, both claiming anonymous sources with "knowledge of the plans" confirming a screen between 7- and 8-inch in diameter, and the component suppliers in Asia are preparing for a mass production of this new product in September.

The WSJ reports that screen suppliers will be LG Display and AU Optronics, with a rumor yesterday stating that Sharp would be supplying IGZO (indium gallium zinc oxide) displays, measuring at 7.85-inches, which would give a better image on a thinner screen, with a potential pixel density of 330 ppi. One of the most interesting bits of this new information is the speculation that Apple may choose not to use the iPad name, in order for the company to avoid flack for contravening to late co-founder Steve Jobs' assertions that 7-inch devices are "tweeners - too big to compete with a smartphone, and too small to compete with the iPad".

The flick has been switched for the most powerful GPU supercomputer, Emerald, at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire, U.K., the two systems working together "will give businesses and academics unprecedented access to their super-fast processing capability".

The insane amounts of power will allow researchers to run simulations that range from health care to astrophysics. The supercomputer combo will be used to look at the Tamiflu vaccine's effect on swine flu, Square Kilometre Array project data, climate change modelling and 3G/4G communications modelling. The official launch of the e-Infrastructure South Consortium took place at the same time, coinciding with Emerald's unveiling.

This is a consortium of four U.K. universities, Bristol, Oxford, University College London and Southampton, who will collaborate with RAL and work with the supercomputers. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded the supercomputers with a £3.7 million grant. The EPSRC press release has a tonne of details and specifications for the supercomputers, and also states:

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have done it, after more than 30 years of experimentation, and billions upon billions of dollars in research and the use and construction of the Large Hadron Collider, have found the Higgs boson, or "God particle".

Some might dismiss this as nothing, but this is considered an absolutely mind-blowing achievement for all scientists, researchers and everyone in between. The Higgs boson is a subatomic particle which is thought to give everything in our universe, mass. Mass is a physical property which gives matter its weight here on Earth, and other bodies which exert gravity.

But, you don't just stumble upon this, and when you do, you require some serious confirmation before you make these types of claims. Scientists are 99.99999999999-percent certain, and this is about as close as one can get. The scientists were able to calculate that the new particle is very near the "five-sigma" level of significance, meaning that there is less than a one in a million chance that their results are a statistical fluke.

DDR4 is coming, and it'll be here sometime in 2014. At the same time, we should expect GDDR6 to arrive, the memory that gets slapped onto our GPUs. But, first off, in order to enable the complete platform qualification made up from processor, motherboard, chipset, memory modules and more, Samsung have begun sampling the key industry vendors with DDR4 memory modules.

Enter the first DDR4 server module which arrive as "Registered Dual Inline Memory Module" sporting no less than 16GB (128 Gbit) of RAM. DDR4-2133 is what it should arrive as, and it brings quite the performance crown with it, providing 2.1 billion transfers per second. Power consumption has been reduced, by as much as 40-percent, with the operating voltage dropping from 1.35V to just 1.2V, with Amps remaining the same.

Samsung have said that the initial DIMMs will be made on a 30nm process node, but the shipping DIMMs should feature 20nm DDR4 DRAM. As soon as 20nm hits, Samsung should be able to offer 8GB, 16GB and 32GB DDR4 modules. This should mean that Intel's Haswell-EP and Haswell-EX platforms should support 256GB of memory per CPU, or 1TB on a single quad-socket motherboard. Impressive, isn't it?

Research in Motion may have hurt BlackBerry lovers last week, announcing the delay of the BlackBerry 10 OS until 2013, but between now and then, there's sure to be tonnes of news to keep us happy. A leaked hardware roadmap has been leaked, and gives us a good idea of what to expect from BlackBerry 10-based devices in 2013.

But, before 2013, we should see a release of the BlackBerry PlayBook 4G which should be launched in Q4 of this year, perfect timing for the holiday season. This device does pre-date the BB 10 launch, so there shouldn't be much to do hardware-wise with the PlayBook 4G.

Q1 2013 is where the fun begins for RIM, with the launch of BB10 and the first full-touchscreen BlackBerry device, which is the BlackBerry London/L-series device. After the London/L-series device launches, we should see the BlackBerry Nevada/N-series, sporting a full QWERTY pad.

Spam e-mail is nothing new. Most users have figured out ways to combat it either through the use of spam boxes or spam blockers on the e-mail servers themselves. This spam is traditionally sent out via compromised computers that have been pulled together into a botnet. The botnet can be ordered to do whatever nefarious activities its commander wants.

With Windows becoming more secure, however, it has been harder for hackers to gain these computers for botnets. Terry Zink of Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog on the MSDN noticed something interesting about the spam he has been receiving lately. At the bottom of the message it says "Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android."

Furthermore, he examined the headers of the e-mail and found "Message-ID: 1341147286.19774.androidMobile(at)web140302.mail.bf1.yahoo.com" I'm sure you can see where this is going. A spammer somewhere has a botnet that lives on Android devices, much like the rumors we've all heard. What's even more interesting is where these devices are located.

According to an ex-SCEA R&D director's LinkedIn profile, the next generation PlayStation has been in development since August 2010. His profile has a listing citing his work on the "Next Generation PlayStation" from August 2010 to April 2012. His work on the PS Vita is listed separately which implies that the "Next Generation PlayStation" he is referring to is the PS4.

"In 1998 I started as the first engineer in the Playstation US R&D," reads Vass' profile. "I worked on graphics ( COLLADA, PSGL ) and a lot of network related technologies ( advertising, telemetry, PVRs ) for the Playstation2-x, PSP, Vita and Next Generation platforms. Platform security was occupying most of my time at the last years... "

SCEA boss Jack Tretton also recently let loose some information on the next generation system when he said that "we've never been first, we've never been cheapest, it's about being the best. If you can build a better machine and it's going to come out a little bit later that's better than rushing something to market that's going to run out of gas for the long term."

Once again, Apple's OS X is being confronted with a security risk. The latest backdoor has been discovered by Russian security firm Kaspersky Labs and is being used as part of a Advanced Persistent Threat campaign. This is just the latest in a series of security risks present in the Mac OS X operating system.

Kaspersky researchers found that Uyghur activists in China were being targeted by hackers. These hackers sent e-mails with a compromised attachment that was in the form of a JPEG. The code hidden inside the JPEG was a new form of the MaControl backdoor and is compatible with both the PowerPC and i386 Mac variants.

Costin Raiu, Director of Global Research & Analysis at Kaspersky Lab: