Intel have reportedly notified their partners that they will "fully release" Thunderbolt technology in April of next year. Intel are said to be preparing to launch Thunderbolt-supported motherboards, notebooks and desktop PCs at that time.

Intel and Apple originally partnered on Thunderbolt which became a standard across Apple's MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac mini and iMac lines. The cost of Thunderbolt technology is said to drop in the second half of 2012, which will allow for much more market penetration.

Apple may offer Thunderbolt-equipped goods, but the first Thunderbolt products have been limited to the relatively high-end market. Widespread adoption of Thunderbolt should help accessory makers for not just the PC, but the Mac market. Intel have always said that they see USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt as complementary technologies and have plans to support both in their motherboards in 2012.

I've covered SOPA-related news for the past few days, as it is getting quite serious with GoDaddy being hit hard. It has just been announced that Jimmy Wales decision to find a new home for Wikipedia, away from the SOPA loving hands of GoDaddy.

Wales is quite unhappy with GoDaddy's position on the Stop Online Privacy Act, by announcing the shift in the following tweet:

I am proud to announce that the Wikipedia domain names will move away from GoDaddy. Their position on #sopa is unacceptable to us.

Apple's cloud-based iTunes Match launched last month in the U.S. and while it has lagged behind a little, they've finally launched a website that is purely dedicated to iTunes Match. The new iTunes Match website tries to clear up most of the confusion that has risen since it was announced.

Apple thoroughly explain the basics of iTunes Match, quoted below:

With iTunes in the Cloud, the music you buy from the iTunes Store automatically appears on all your devices.1 And for music you haven't purchased from iTunes, iTunes Match is the perfect solution. iTunes Match is built right into iTunes on your computer and the Music app on your iOS devices.2 It lets you store your entire collection in iCloud, even music you've imported from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes. When it's in iCloud, it's available on all your devices. So you can enjoy all your music anywhere, anytime - on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, PC, or Apple TV.

We've all seen the reviews on the spectacular AMD Radeon HD 7970, but what about its slightly younger brother? Well, we have some leaked specifications on the Radeon HD 7950 now, so let's see.

While the HD 7970 is based on the "Tahiti XT", the HD 7950 is based on the "Tahiti Pro". According to a slide posted by Donanim Haber, the Radeon HD 7950 sports 4 compute units disabled when compared to the HD 7970, which brings the number of stream processors down from 2048 to 1792.

These will be joined by 112 texture units, but the 384-bit memory interface and 3GB of GDDR5 memory remain unchanged. AMD also retain the same display output configuration with one dual-link DVI, one HDMI 1.4a, and two miniDisplayPort 1.2 outputs.

Bad Robot, the company behind Lost, Alias, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, and Super 8, have just released a free iOS app called Action Movie FX. Action Movie FX lets you shoot a small video, and then layer in some special effects such as a Missile Attack or Car Smash.

The app comes with two free effects, the above mentioned Missile Attack and Car Smash, but for $0.99 you can download extra effects such as Chopper Down, Tornado, Air Strike and Fire Fight.

Some of the effects look crappy, but there are a couple there that wouldn't look too bad if you shot the video well. There will be more effects added in the future, and the app works on the following devices: iPhone 3GS, 4, 4S, iPad 2 and fourth-generation iPod Touches.

Andrei Krivorukov, wherever you are, stop what you are doing right now, buy eleventy million lottery tickets and bunker down. Andrei received quite the strange Christmas present yesterday, a Russian communication satellite crashed directly into his house, with Andrei escaping death by mere meters.

The Russian satellite was a Meridian, which is used for both civilian and military communications. It was destroyed when a Soyuz-2 rocket exploded in mid-air, just a few minutes after launch. The Soyuz-2 rocket had an excellent track record until then, with hundreds of launches since the 1960s.

The explosion sent several pieces over Siberia, near the city of Tobolsk, and as far as 100km from the city of Novosibirsk. One of them was the 5kg titanium ball that fell through Andrei's roof, landing where he was just minutes before. Andrei is lucky as he decided to go out into his hard to grab some wood for his fireplace.

Anonymous don't rest during the holidays like most people, they've donned their Santa hats and hacked their way into thousands of credit card numbers and other personal information belonging to clients of a U.S.-based security think tank, Stratfor.

One of the hackers said their goal was to take the funds from individuals' accounts to give away as Christmas donations. Anonymous boasted of stealing Stratfor's confidential client list, which includes entities including Apple, the U.S. Air Force, and even where Dexter Morgan works, the Miami Police Department. They mined it for more than 4,000 credit card numbers, passwords and home addresses.

Stratfor is an Austin, Texas-based company which provides political, economic and military analysis to help clients reduce risk, according to their YouTube page. They charge subscribers for its reports and analysis, which are delivered through the web, e-mail and videos.

Microsoft is preparing a new way to log into tablet PCs with Windows 8, by allowing a user to perform gestures on a screen instead of typing in letters or numbers. For example, you can use a photo with some personal meaning to you, create a sequence of taps, lines, and circles that must be performed in the right order, in order to unlock the computer.

It is a new form of an unlock procedure, and will have three paths chosen for it: people will love it, people will hate it, or Apple will sue Microsoft for some form of patent rip-off. Microsoft does acknowledge that the new gesture unlock puts smudges on the screen, and recording devices could theoretically allow the gesture password to be compromised, but says the risks are very low.

Not everyone agrees with Microsoft, though. Kenneth Weiss, inventor of RSA's SecurID token who now runs a three-factor authentication business called Universal Secure Registry, told Network World that it's not "serious security," that the gestures someone makes upon a screen can easily be recorded from a distance.

2011 was relatively quite for GPU releases, it featured more next-gen CPU and APU launches than anything else. We had a few different cards come out, but nothing revolutionary, until last week with AMD's launch of their Graphics Core Next (GCN) and the launch of the AMD Radeon HD 7970.

The new 28nm-based "Tahiti" chips have taken the world by storm, and have been a very impressive GPU, considering early drivers and whatnot. AMD are planning to launch a dual-GPU card codenamed "New Zealand" and will carry the AMD Radeon HD 7990 moniker, launching in Q1 2012.

This means we'll see AMD's dual-GPU beast before April Fools next year. Since Tahiti/HD 7970 is so energy-efficient, dual-GPU efficiency should be quite the sight to see. We should see two Tahiti GPUs sporting the same power of the single-GPU HD 7970's, with 6GB of total graphics card memory (3GB per GPU system).

In what could look like a pre-alpha video for Battlefield 4 (face it, COD:whatever comes next will feature the same engine as previous games), the U.S. Army has been financing a "game" called Dismounted Soldier Training System, commissioned by the government in May of this year for $57 million.

The contact was awarded to RealTime Immersive Inc. The simulator is said to be cutting edge, with the director of strategic programs at Intelligent Decisions, Floyd West, stating:

With CryEngine 3 being used for Crysis 2 and the capabilities that game engine provides, it allows us to make the most realistic simulation possible. We're able to transport soldiers to accurately recreated locales like Afghanistan and Iraq, where we can simulate everything from visuals to 360-degree sound.