Apple announced Thursday that it will release its new laptop on October 14th. The laptop, code-named “Brick” may mark Apple’s first foray into the budget-laptop market, as it is rumored to be priced at $800.

The new laptop is said to be made from single sheets of aluminum – hence “Brick” – carved with a laser and water-jet system, which would reduce manufacturing prices and also make the laptop sturdier.

Last month, Morgan Stanley’s Kathryn Huberty said that budget computer (under $1,000) was the only current computer growth market. Apple has always been known for the high price of Macs, letting PCs dominate the budget computer market. At $800 dollars, the price is still much higher than most budget PCs, but Apple’s nurturing of a cache market has shown to provide underwhelming market performance.

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An Internet censorship specialist revealed on Wednesday that TOM-Skype, the Chinese partnership of eBay’s Skype, is monitoring and storing text chats. Skype is a widely used messaging and voice chat service that identifies itself as being secure for communication due to its encryption technology. China’s government set keywords to flag messages on the service, where they would be analyzed for IP addresses and usernames. This information was stored insecurely, leading to its discovery by Canadian researcher Nart Villeneuve at the University of Toronto.

“Skype encryption ensures that no other party can eavesdrop on your call or read your instant messages.” says their security page , but has a policy of responding to “lawful requests from relevant authorities.”  The FBI wants telephone tapping laws on communication services like Skype, but these do not apply to instant text messages that skip the phone system entirely. The Chinese version of Skype allows surveillance of messages with flagged keywords, some of which include “democracy” and “Tibet.”

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Starting Friday, consumers in Japan can rent a robot suit that increases human strength by up to 10 times. The Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL) attaches to the legs and reads electrical signals from the brain to provide limb assistance. The invention will be extremely beneficial for disabled and elderly persons who have difficulty walking.

HAL works by detecting faint bioelectrical signals on the surface of the skin that result from the brain’s communication with the leg muscles. The signals are subsequently calibrated by a computer that is attached at the waist. The result is a hybrid of human and robot movements, also known as a cyborg. Cyberdyne, the company behind the invention (but with no relation to the Terminator movies), plans to widely produce HAL for the global public.

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A study of 8,500 Australians aged 18-64 reports that the Internet is one of men’s primary sources of happiness.  The Happiness Index study by business consultants The Leading Edge shows that women prefer many things over the Internet, but men, just a few.

For women, the Internet was at the bottom of the top-ten list, rest and relaxation number one. While entertainment was the number one activity preferred by men, using the Internet was third.  52 percent of male respondents were happiest on the Web, whether just surfing, playing online games, or social networking. Only 39 percent of female respondents answered similarly. And, yes, the study did make the Venus/Mars comparison.

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The rapidly growing area of international money transfers via mobile phone could reach a level of 100 million users by 2013. A recent study from Juniper Research examined the potential for support of this mobile technology over the next few years by the remittance system of migrant workers. This system is already in place with more traditional means of wire and bank transfers. Much of the money traffic backtracks the migration routes of the Philippines to the Middle East, and of Mexico to the United States.

The study’s author, Howard Wilcox explains: “The vast increase in migrant workers globally has fueled the number of remittances being sent home to friends and families regularly. The mobile phone will become a vital enabler in developing countries because often many more people have phones than have bank accounts. The [Global System for Mobile communications] Association Mobile Money Transfer global initiative emphasizes the importance that is attached to this across the mobile industry as a whole.”

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Princeton University security researchers have released a report revealing that four popular sites were recently attacked by CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery or ’seasurf’) exploits.

The vulnerabilities were discovered in The New York Times, MetaFilter, YouTube, and ING Direct. The New York Times exploit used the Time’s ‘email story’ feature, which compromised user email addresses. The MetaFilter exploit allowed attackers to take over a user’s account, and the YouTube hack could have pretty much done anything to a user’s profile.

The most serious attack was ING’s, what the researchers believe is the first published attack on a financial institution.

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You have awakened on a friend’s couch with an outstretched hand in a crumpled bag of stale tortilla chips. On the coffee table, a laptop rests against a near empty bottle of Maker’s Mark. Your groggy eyes come into focus—one drunken email to Myrna Minkoff: a treacherous ex-wife from the past.

If only there had been a friend or family member to navigate you. If only you had the proper safeguards. If only you had Google’s new software “Mail Goggles.”

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After a strong second half Monday, tech stocks continued their free fall Tuesday. We’re really starting to get an idea of how analysts erred on the side of optimism believing the technology sector was insulated from the market’s troubles.

At the 4:00 pm trading deadline, Dell had dropped 6.39%, from 15.04 to 13.55. Apple fell 9.15% to 89.16, Microsoft dropped 6.74% to 23.23, and Cisco ended the day at 18.84, down 7.92 from Monday’s close.  Sun Microsystems dropped 10.45%, from 6.61.

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EBay announced Monday that it plans to cut its global workforce of 16,000 by 10%, which is expected to save the company around $150 million a year. This is the first time they’ve had to lay off employees, though rumors of impending layoffs have been circulating for nearly a year.

Silicon Valley Insider calls these cuts “long overdue.”

“Unless the company can rapidly begin to reaccelerate gross merchandise sales, moreover, more cuts should follow.”

EBay shares closed at $17.89 Monday, their lowest in nearly six years.

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Representing nearly 100 nations and a half a million exhibits, the CeBIT conference is held at Hanover Fairgrounds, the largest exhibition center in the world. Many consider the event to be the paramount trade show for technology and telecommunications, including Austrian native and Californian Arnold Schwarzenegger. In his visit last week to Intel Headquarters in Silicon Valley, the governor ostensibly postured about the importance of the European event, also disclosing important information for startup companies that are interested in attending this Spring.

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