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Remember WikiLeaks? It's still around, it's still somewhat leaky, and it's still very much loved by the amorphous hacker entity known as "Anonymous." Anons and WikiLeaks both generally enjoy breaking down barriers of secrecy and scattering what they find into the public view, though they may tend to work with different styles ...

Apple finally pushed out a much-anticipated raft of new products this week. Its new desktop OS, OS X Lion, had been promised for a July release last month at the Worldwide Developers Conference, and some Mac followers had been getting downright antsy for a new MacBook Air, which also touched down. Meanwhile, Apple's little Mac mini is still going strong, and Cupertino also showed off an enormous display that'll set you back about as much as a new Apple computer...

More than a week after Google+'s launch, millions of socialnetworkers are still crying out in vain for their invitations. Naturally, though, the tech industry's cultural elite arealready inside the door, checking things out and getting an advancelook-see ...

Google made a very socially awkward move with its rollout of Google Buzz last year. It was Google's attempt to build a social network in part by stringing together various existing pieces of its infrastructure -- your contacts from over here, your Gmail account over there, Google Reader if you use it, so on. ...

Many more verses have been added to the ballad of LulzSec lately. The hacker group has partnered with Anonymous for an agenda of world cyberchaos, vowed revenge on other hackers who disrupted an online gaming network -- this is after Lulz itself shot down a couple of other gaming networks -- and flipped off authorities who claimed to have caught one of their members...

The hacker group LulzSec has been carrying out a security-busting blitzkrieg across the Web over the last few weeks, and its targets are getting bigger and bigger. You can tell where it's been by the path of sites left shivering in a fetal position -- sites belonging to organizations like PBS, Sony, Bethesda Softworks, and even the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency...

The WWDC keynote has come and gone, but strangely enough, Apple gaveus no new toys to go out and buy. There were no new iObjects gracingthe stage this time around at the opening of its developer conference-- guess iPhone 5 will just have to wait until fall. But WWDC istechnically a software conference, and there was a lot Apple wanted totalk about in that category...

Rivers of drool run down Wall Street every time a plausible rumor about a Twitter or Facebook IPO comes around. It still hasn't happened -- both are still private companies -- but it's been a topic of conversation for years, and it speaks to investors' hunger to pump money into the world's top social networking sites ...

One of these days we may see a real public clash between Facebook and Google - a huge bidding war, or maybe the launch of a real Google social network that will have the other one fighting for its life. For now, though, we get a silly little PR disaster that's left Facebook looking like it's lost its Machiavellian mojo ...

Sony's great big data leak could go down in history as the company'smessiest mess of all time -- even worse than the CD rootkit disaster ...

After suffering a massive network failure for more than a week, Sony's PlayStation division had the distinct pleasure of revealing to users it had been hacked -- deep and hard -- by cybercriminals who may have been able to pilfer some very valuable information. Before this happened, PlayStation's PR condition was already pretty frail on account of it suing its customers. But I hesitate to call this new failure "karma in action" because it looks like the main victims of Sony's mistake will be, once again, Sony's own customers...

Let's talk about privacy. Is it a violation of your privacy if your phone knows where you are at all hours of the day and keeps detailed records without your telling it to? What if the phone never tells anyone else -- doesn't beam your location to Steve Jobs or Larry Page or the Pope or anyone at all? OK, maybe it will tell your computer where you've been, but only when you sync up. Or maybe it will tell Apple where you've been, only the data's been anonymized so they don't know it's you, they just know it's somebody. Is any of this OK with you?...

Remember that rumor from a couple weeks ago that Sprint and T-Mobile were getting together? That's not happening. T-Mobile USA actually wants to get in with AT&T, which has agreed to buy the company from Deutsche Telekom for US$39 billion. Maybe those talks with Sprint really were going on simultaneously, but it looks like they didn't end so well for Sprint...

The new iPad 2 has arrived, sort of. It made a brief appearance last Friday in Apple stores and a few other retailers. But by Saturday the only place you could find one was either chained to an Apple store table as a demo model or clutched in the hands of a neighbor who decided that getting up in the wee hours to stand in line on Day One was a sensible thing to do.

Video rental stores made it so you don't have to go all the way to a theater to watch a movie, then online video channels like Netflix and iTunes made is so you don't even have to leave the house. The next step will be that you won't even have to leave the warm, squishy embrace of Facebook in order to watch movies on demand. ...

The iPad 2 has made its entrance, and by next week it'll go up for grabs. There's been a lot of anticipation for what Apple would do with its next tablet now that rivals have showed up with their own tablets that beat the original iPad's specs -- granted, they were mostly demo units ...

If you nauseate easily at the prospect of non-stop Apple announcements, right now might be a good time to take a long hike in the woods, weather permitting. Apple's given developers a brand-new preview of OS X Lion; next week we'll see an announcement that's almost certainly going to be all about iPad 2; and there are rumors that iOS 4.3 is just around the corner.

Did Apple just save the publishing industry? Or did it just get sohungry for burgers that it butchered its own cash cow? ...

Just after the Verizon iPhone went on pre-order last week, the carrier boasted record-setting numbers of sales. Some estimates pegged the number at half a million units in only a few hours. ...

If you believe Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg's version of events, his company's wireless division wasn't even in the running for the iPhone years ago when Apple was first shopping the device around to carriers. Other reports tell a different story, but either way, the fact that Verizon had to wait nearly four years to offer its customers the iPhone had its advantages and disadvantages. On the down side, it really gave a customer boost to its biggest rival, AT&T. On the upside, though, the competition did motivate Verizon to invest in a strong competitor to Apple's platform, Android, which it's helped become a major force in mobile...