Digital activist and cofounder of Reddit, Aaron Swartz died on Friday after committing suicide according to a relative of Swartz. Along with co-founding Reddit, Swartz was the founder of DemandProgress.org, co-creator of the RSS 1.0 standard at the young age of 14 and was a strong proponent of Internet freedom.

Swartz was arrested in 2011 for accusations of stealing more than 4 million documents from MIT and JSTOR consisting of articles, book reviews and academic partner journals. He would have faced as much as $2 million in fines and as much as 50 years in prison if convicted. Swartz pled not guilty in September of 2012.

The news of Swartz death comes only two days after JSTOR announced that it will be releasing more than 4.5 million articles to the public.

According to an analyst from Piper Jaffray, Apple’s next big thing might be wearable technology such as a Smart Watch pictured here. “We believe that wearable computers will ultimately be a major future trend,” said Gene Munster in a note released on Wednesday.

Munster also made a number of other predictions for technology in the coming years. Aside from wearable tech he is expecting Apple to sell a TV with Siri and Facetime built in, an update the Apple TV, an Apple radio service and Retina display to the iPad mini and the MacBook Air.

LA Times

Sony’s Playstation 2 game console has practically been a staple with gaming retailers for years, and is likely found in homes of most gamers throughout the country. After nearly 13 years of production, despite newer Playstation generations, it looks like Sony is calling an end to the production of the PS2 game console, according to Famitsu.

Even though the PS3 launched in in late 2006, Sony continued to keep the PS2 alive with a major design update and a few game launches here and there, not to mention the large library of existing titles. This announcement is announcing the end of production for the PS2 console in Japan with a plan to sell of the remaining production stock, and a stop to production in the US and other countries is …

This is the first post in a while. We’re just trying to fire this up again….

IBM’s Watson computer triumphed over its human competitors on Tuesday’s special episode of Jeopardy. The computerized trivia-playing machine finished out with a total of $35,734 in winnings with the next runner up at $10,400 and 3rd place at $5,000. One more day of competition will determine an overall winner to a $1 million prize.

The man vs machine competition has drawn quite a bit of attention with two Jeopardy! champions taking on the IBM supercomputer named ‘Watson’. The first special episode which aired Monday night turned out to be the highest rated episode since early 2007 and the second most program of the night.

Adobe announced today in Barcelona at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona that Flash 10.2 will be hitting Android smartphones and Android tablets within just a few weeks. What this brings you is more frames per second and better graphics in Flash animation on your devices, just on the heals of the 10.2 release for Windows and Mac.

Adobe says that devices with dual-core processors such as Snapdragon they are scaling 1080p resolution video and seeing it at 30 frames per second. All this combined with a lower hit to battery life when viewing the video. Pushing the new, faster and more efficient version of the Flash player out to more handsets is a big move for Adobe to bring more popularity to website using Flash technology. Users might not necessarily choose a devices based on its Flash-playing capabilities, but it is something that those producing the devices can add to their list of features to bring more popularity.

Amazon.com released an announcement on Wednesday bragging up sales of its new generation Kindles along with touting earlier-than-planned shipping which started Wednesday, two days ahead of schedule. Unfortunately Amazon didn’t exactly say how many of the new Kindles they have sold, but they seem to be pretty sure it’s a lot.

What they did say is that they’ve sold more of this new version in the first four weeks of pre-sales than they have with any other new version. Amazon also reports that the Kindle was still the best-selling item for Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk overall. No doubt this must be partly because the Kindle seems to be the most advertised item on Amazon’s home page.

Amazon says the newest version of the device is smaller, lighter, turns pages faster, can hold twice the number of books and …

The coffee peddling behemoth Starbucks announced today that it will not be outdone by independent coffee houses nor other national chains and will begin offering unlimited free WiFi to it’s customers. Starbucks has had WiFi available for some time now, for a fee, and has most recently offered 2 free hours per day to cardholders but now is giving the service away to all.

This announcement no doubt will come as great news to frequenters of the coffee houses and bad news to anyone trying to sell WiFi within the vicinity. Please note however that the free service is only for Starbucks stores operated directly by the corporation, and not to licensed locations commonly found in airports or grocery stores.

Microsoft has officially announced today that its Kinect game system will go on sale starting November 4th, just in time for the holidays and to wage war on rival Nintendo. The new motion-sensing system will work with the Xbox 360 and consists of a 3-camera appliance that plugs into the console. The system will allow players to interact with games using body gestures and voice commands, taking it one step further than the motion controllers of the Nintendo Wii.

Microsoft has also disclosed 15 games that will be available to work with the motion-sensitive Kinect system, all involving exercise and physical play. Titles include Zomba Party, Game Party in Motion, Motionsports, Kinect Adventures, The Biggest Loser: Ultimate Workout, Kinect Joyride, Kinect Sports, Adrenalin Misfits, Deca Sports Collection, Dance Central, Dance Masters, Sonic Free Riders, Kinectimals, EA Sports Active 2.0 and Your Shape: Fitness Evolved.

A space probe launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is expected to land in the Australian outback late Sunday after a seven-year journey to a nearby asteroid. Scientists hope the probe will be carrying a sample from the asteroid which will mark the first time a spacecraft has returned to Earth with samples other than from the Earth’s moon.

The probe named Hayabusa landed on the asteroid Itokawa two times in 2005 and after its long return journey will be landing a remote desert in Australia. Among the team to find and recover the probe will be indigenous Aboriginal elders to ensure that the landing of the device did not damage any sacred grounds.

We’ve seen our share of G-Shock watches come down the pipe but never one designed quite like this. The new GA110DR-1A from G-Shock gets its primary-colored Lego design from New York fashion designers Dee & Ricky.

Although the watch has a toy-esque look to it, it still holds true to the G-Shock name with durable features including magnetic resistance, 200M water resistance, LED light, the ability to track time in 48 different cities, alarm, calendar and more.

We hadn’t heard anything from D-Link and their Boxee Box in a while and they were coming towards the end of the expected Q2 release when they made a blog post announcing the delay of release. Apparently the Q2 time frame “proved overly ambitious” according to the post and a new release date for the US and Canada has been set to ship sometime in November.

The Boxee Box boasts the ability to bring many different types of streaming media to your HDTV from multiple online sources or connected directly through local media storage devices. Pandora, last.fm, shoutcast, We are Hunted, flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Flash 10.1 and most recently My Damn Channel are some of the media tied into the box.

Right on the heels of the new iPad release, Apple has announced an event for later today to discuss the release of “the future of iPhone OS” and what will be coming in the iPhone OS 4.0. What new features will be available with the updated OS is anyone’s guess at this point but as usual there is plenty of speculation leading up to the 10AM PST event.

If history is any teacher this announcement will be to set things up for a release later in the year, probably closer to the Apple Developers Conference, and Apple will use this opportunity to release features that it might not have in the past when it didn’t have as much competition from things like Google’s Android.

Blogger Bob with the TSA announced recently that electronic items smaller than the standard size laptop should not need to be removed from their bag or case when going through airport security. They didn’t say specifically what that standard size is, but did name a few items specifically that would fall below the size threshold have having to be removed, namely iPads, Kindles, Neos, Nooks, Sony Readers and Netbooks.

This certainly doesn’t mean that you don’t need to take things out of your bag if asked when going through security, but it is good news to hear since removing and donning all your gear again is sometimes tough enough.

TSA via Engadget

Just in case there were any doubts, the folks from Blendtec blenders did prove this week that the new Apple iPad does in fact blend. It wouldn’t actually fit inside the blender in its original shape and took a slight pre-modification, but in the end it did succumb to the powers of the blender to result in a lot of “iPad dust”. Check out the video after the jump: