Two apps that access the Google Voice service have now appeared in the iPhone App Store, marking the first time such GV-related apps have been seen in the store since July 2009, when the official GV app was declined by Apple.

The two apps are GV Mobile + and GV Connect, approved after Apple revised its App Store Review Guidelines earlier in the month.

Google's own official Voice application has still not been accepted, however.

Last year, Apple did not accept Google Voice into the App Store, without actually rejecting it. The company just kept Voice "in consideration."

That "in consideration" stage lasted for almost a year, including an FCC inquiry into Apple's App Store application process.

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Good Old Games, the European gaming company that gives gamers the chance to download old PC games that are very hard to find legally or have been abandoned, has shut down this week, just two years after going live.

The company provided titles from as far back as the early 80's in a downloadable format that was completely DRM-free. The games were also reasonably priced, ranging from $5.99 to $9.99 per title.

Additionally, once you had purchased the title, you could download it whenever you wanted, all the times you wanted.

A statement on the site now says: "We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We've debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we've decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form."

While the service is now closed, the owners seem to leave some optimism for the future of the company.

Reads the end of the statement: "This doesn't mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We're closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await."

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Intel has begun testing a new way to fleece consumers of their money, selling "upgrade cards" that will allow buyers to fully unlock CPUs they have just purchased.

The first CPU added to the program is the cheap Pentium G6951 processor, which for an $50 upgrade card, can be unlocked to a full 1MB of L3 cache and HyperThreading support.

Each of those features are on the chip from the get-go, but stay hidden unless you buy the upgrade codes.

Once you purchase the upgrade code, you head to Intel's site, enter the code and run some software to unlock the full features.

Intel says it is currently only "testing this upgrade mechanism at the budget end of the market in selected markets."

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China Unicom has said it will begin selling the popular Apple iPhone 4 in China beginning this coming Saturday, the 25th.

The carrier says it has already taken 50,000 pre-orders for the smartphone.

In separate news, the carrier began selling the iPad tablet on Friday, with Apple Stores being bombarded by consumers.

Apple's store in Beijing had fans waiting since Tuesday to be the first to get the device, and a similar line is expected for the iPhone.

Says David Han, one of the first to get a tablet: "I came straight here from work on Tuesday to be first in line. I could have bought an imported gray-market or pirated iPad, but I waited to buy the iPad directly from an Apple Retail Store."

So far, Apple is only selling the Wi-Fi model of the iPad with the Wi-Fi/3G model listed as "coming soon."

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Since Friday night, the group "Anonymous" has taken down multiple websites relating to anti-piracy firms, starting with the MPAA and AiPlex Software and taking down the RIAA just a few hours ago.

Dubbed "Operation Payback," the protest revolves around DDoS attacks on the firm's main sites, located at MPAA.com, MPAA.org, RIAA.com and Aiplex.com.

As of writing, all the sites listed except for MPAA.org are still down.

While the RIAA and MPAA are well known, AiPlex was not until recently when they announced they had been hired by the movie studios to take down The Pirate Bay, the world's largest public tracker.

According to tweets and other notes from the group, it appears the BPI may be the next target for the DDoS attack.

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According to a source speaking to TC, Facebook is currently working on a smartphone, one that they hope will rival Android and iOS devices.

Facebook is developing the mobile OS and UI, then working with a third-party to build the actual hardware.

The source says it has become apparent to the social networking giant that iOS and Android are becoming very powerful platforms, and that Facebook's official apps may not be enough to stay competitive.

Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos, two of Facebook's highest-level employees, are said to be working on the project, which would deeply integrate the many social networking features of the site into user's contacts lists.

Hewitt was on the original team that created Firefox and was on the team working on "Parakey" before Facebook purchased it in 2007. Parakey was supposed to be a "Web-based OS." He has also created Facebook's "mobile" and "touch" versions, and the native iPhone apps.

Papkipos was working on the Google Chrome OS until he jumped ship to Facebook this year.

From this point on, everything else is speculation but it should be interesting to see if this "Facebook Phone" comes to fruition, and when.

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Intel has said this weekend that it will sue anyone who uses the HDCP "Master Key" that was recently leaked to the Web.

The crypto key can be used to break the HDCP tech that limits users from recording digital TV streams and Blu-ray discs.

The technology giant, which developed HDCP, says: "There are laws to protect both the intellectual property involved as well as the content that is created and owned by the content providers. Should a circumvention device be created using this information, we and others would avail ourselves, as appropriate, of those remedies."

Earlier in the week, Intel confirmed that the "master key" was authentic, and could be used to break the content protection scheme.

The HDCP master key, which is 28200 letters and numbers, can be used to create "device keys," thus making all current and future devices "HDCP-free" given the right hardware.

It is unclear how the "master key" was deciphered, but Paul Kocher, the chief scientist at Cryptography Research, gives a possible reason. Kocher says "somebody in the business of making HDCP-compatible devices, who had access to at least 50 individual device keys, would have been able to reconstruct the master key by analyzing "mathematical similarities" in the individual device keys."

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PatentlyApple has discovered a few new patents Apple has filed for this year, and one stood out from the rest.

The Accessory Transceiver would allow iPod Touch owners to make phone calls.

iPod Touches could use the transceiver to connect directly or wirelessly, using the device to enable phone calling.

Apple filed for the patent in the first quarter of 2010 but it has not been granted yet.

It is also important to note that large corporations like Apple have thousands of patents, many for accessories and devices that never come to fruition.

Last month, a Chinese company released the Apple Peel 520, a dock for the iPod Touch which adds a SIM card slot and other functions, for $59.99.

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Motorola Co-CEO Sanjay Jha has said today that their much-anticipated Android tablet will be released in early 2011, slightly later than most expected.

Says Jha: "Just as Droid was competitive I think with iPhone, we want to make sure that any tablet that we deliver is competitive in the marketplace. We will only deliver that when that occurs. Hopefully that's early next year."

Sources close to the project (via Bloomberg) say the tablet will be around 10 inches, just like the rival iPad.

The upcoming tablet will have a TV service built-in, marketed with Verizon.

Motorola's tablet will feature at least Android 2.2 (and possibly 3.0), meaning Adobe Flash playback will be native, giving it another feature not available on the iPad.

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