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• Sony Hunts for Hardcore Gamers With New Vita Handheld
  Sony officially launched its PlayStation Vita handheld gaming console in the United States on Wednesday, a week after it was made available online in a premium bundle. The WiFi-only version of the console is available at $250; the 3G/WiFi version goes for $300. Several games have been made available, and Sony on Wednesday added apps for Netflix, Flickr and LiveTweet to the mix. The apps are available at no charge. There have been questions about the PS Vita's future, as critics contend that it's arrived in a market that's already spiraling downward.
• When in the Cloud, Trust - but Verify
  Quite a lot has been written about the importance of due-diligence in a cloud environment. Sometimes the importance of security and compliance-related vetting in the cloud is easy to justify, like when you're evaluating an off-premises public cloud hosted at a new service provider. Other times, executives might take some convincing, like when you're talking about an internally maintained private cloud, before they see the value. Either way though, most organizations that have gone through a cloud deployment have probably put some level of effort into due diligence.
• Will Microsoft Open a Branch Office in iPad Land?
  A sighting "in the wild" of Microsoft Office for the iPad set speculative tongues wagging Tuesday, even as the Redmond crew denied the existence of the app. The software's interface contained elements of Microsoft's only app for the iPad, OneNote, and its Metro interface found in the company's mobile operating system Windows Phone 7 and its upcoming Windows 8 OS, according to the report. Microsoft said the report was based on inaccurate info.
• WordGrinder: Good, Old-Fashioned Text Editing Power
  If you spend endless hours at a keyboard crunching words, avoiding distractions is essential. Sometimes, the worst offender in causing distractions comes from all the bells and whistles in the word processor itself. That is where WordGrinder comes to the rescue. In today's Linux world of GUI-filled desktops, using a text editor that runs within a terminal window may seem like a big step backward. It did not take me very long to discover that writing with WordGrinder is actually a big step in a better direction.
• Is Anonymous Plotting a Power Play?
  The United States National Security Agency has cautioned that the Anonymous hacker community might be able to cause a limited power outage through a cyberattack, according to a recent report. NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander has warned of the potential attack during meetings at the White House and in other private sessions, according to the report. However, he expects Anonymous to need one to two years to develop this capability. "The one-to-two-year timeframe does not make sense to me," Darren Hayes, CIS program chair at Pace University, told TechNewsWorld.
• Microsoft Calls Google a Cookie Monster
  Google is tracking users of the Internet Explorer Web browser without their knowledge, Microsoft has asserted. After news emerged last week that Google had bypassed the privacy settings of Apple's Safari browser, Microsoft researchers began looking into whether the search giant was also playing fast and loose with IE's settings. However, IE 9 has an additional privacy feature called "Tracking Protection" that blocks the method Google is using, Microsoft said. Users without IE 9 or who have the feature turned off may be susceptible.