ATaRH.com

If you’ve somehow managed to avoid the avalanche of controversy pouring down on Medal of Honor, here’s the gist: you can play as Taliban in the game’s multiplayer. Not “the insurgents.” Not “the guys who look suspiciously like Taliban but totally aren’t, no really.” Nope. This time around, Medal of Honor’s ripping its inspiration straight from the headlines. That, however, didn’t fly with GameStop’s stores in military bases.

Toshiba is now recalling thousands of T130 series laptops owing to overheating concerns, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced Thursday. The models covered under the voluntary recall program are the Satellite T135, Satellite T135D and Satellite ProT130. The company issued the recall after being  inundated with reports of the said “notebook computers overheating and deforming the plastic casing area around the AC adapter plug.” While Toshiba has received 129 complaints in all, there have been only two instances each of minor burns and minor property damage.

Developers anxious to see how the webOS platform will evolve under the new leadership of Hewlett Packard (HP) can catch an early glimpse. Members of Palm’s Early Access program can now download the first beta release of webOS 2.0, the next-gen version of Palm’s mobile operating system.

Give credit to Amazon and Barnes & Noble for sparking an eBook reader price war, or give a shout out to the emerging tablet market, which undoubtedly has played a role in the recent market adjustment. Either way, it’s you, Joe Consumer, who is benefiting from price cuts across the board.

Microsoft’s legal battle against Canadian firm i4i has been a complete disaster from the very outset. Last August, Microsoft was ordered to pay i4i $290 million in damages by a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas after certain versions of Word were found to be  infringing on an XML-related patent held by the Canadian firm. The fine was accompanied by an injunction barring the sale of infringing versions of the popular word processing software.

My NAS Box has a first name, it’s s-l-o-w

How do you spell slow? P-X-N-A-S-2, according to Plextor. It’s not a proud achievement, but this one-terabyte network-attached storage device is one of the slower devices we’ve ever hooked up to our network. Transferring files is slow. Accessing the Web-based user interface is slow. Formatting the drives to a new storage type is slow. Slow, slow, slow.

Most computer users have probably found themselves at the wrong end of a malware-infected USB flash drive at least once. In fact, as US Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III recently revealed, even the mighty US military has firsthand experience of the damage a rogue USB flash drive can cause. Their ubiquity has made portable storage devices the ideal carriers for computer worms. But how popular exactly are they among malware authors? Panda Security’s research arm PandaLabs claims to possess the answer.

Laptop Cooling 101

Modern day laptops are loaded with powerful, heat producing components that can often lead to overheating, especially if you’re asking your laptop to do some heavy lifting. If your laptop ever feels particularly hot in certain spots, or sometimes randomly shuts off, there’s a good chance that overheating is to blame.