Mozilla has paid 12-year old Alex Miller $3000 this week, thanking him for finding a critical buffer overflow and memory corruption flaw in the popular Firefox browser.

The company pays out prizes to security researchers (or kids) who disclose vulnerabilities.

Miller says he became motivated to find a security hole in the browser after Mozilla bumped up its prize from $500 to $3000 earlier this year.

The 12-year old says he spent 90 minutes a day, for 10 days straight, until he found the critical flaw.

His 15-hour crusade netted him $3000.

TechSpot says the "flaw can be exploited to crash a victim's browser and potentially run arbitrary code on their computer."

Mozilla patched the exploit with the release of Firefox 3.6.11.

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Sony has finally retired the Walkman cassette player, citing lackluster demand for the outdated device.

The company says they produced their last batch of the device in Japan in April and once that inventory clears out, the Walkman will be retired to the history books.

A Chinese company will still produce some units after Sony's supply is exhausted but it is hard to believe they will continue to produce for the foreseeable future.

Sony began selling the Walkman in 1979 and has seen 220 million units sold over the past 31 years.

Walkman sales have been in steep decline since the introduction of portable CD players and even more so with the launch of portable MP3 players earlier this ddecade.

Sony will continue to use the "Walkman" brand, however, in phones and media players.

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The Japanese Nikkei has reported today that Sharp is officially out of the PC business, pulling the plug on their personal computing operations.

Sharp has not put out a new PC in the last year.

Additionally, the report says that Sharp will now re-focus on "marketing its Galapagos tablet devices coming out in December, along with providing content such as e-books, music and video for these products."

Sharp is a big player in the HDTV, LED, LCD and solar markets.

Many major computer makers have shifted their focus away from PCs towards tablets and other mobile devices.

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Amazon has revealed today that the latest generation of Kindle e-readers are the fastest selling Kindles of all-time, as well as the top selling products on both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

The new Kindles, which saw a significant price drop along with slimmed down hardware, have already outsold all Kindle device sales from the fourth quarter 2009, Amazon's strongest quarter due to increased demand for the holidays.

"It's still October and we've already sold more Kindle devices since launch than we did during the entire fourth quarter of last year--astonishing because the fourth quarter is the busiest time of year on Amazon," says Steve Kessel, Senior Vice President, Amazon Kindle. "Readers continue to choose Kindle for its all-new electronic ink screen with 50 percent higher contrast, readability in bright sunlight, long battery life of up to one month, light 8.5 ounce form, flexibility to read their books across all major LCD devices and platforms, and low $139 price. It's clear that this is going to be the biggest holiday for Kindle yet--by far."

Furthermore, Kindle e-book sales continue to "overtake print," even though print book sales continue solid growth.

"For the top 10 bestselling books on Amazon.com, customers are choosing Kindle books over hardcover and paperback books combined at a rate of greater than 2 to 1. Kindle books are also outselling print books for the top 25, 100, and 1,000 bestsellers--it's across the board," adds Kessel, via MarketWatch. "This is remarkable when you consider that we've been selling hardcover and paperback books for 15 years, and Kindle books for just 36 months."

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According to @AndroidDev, the Twitter account for the team that is working on mobile operating system Android, the Android Market has officially hit 100,000 apps.

Number of apps in the Market have increased 300 percent over the last year, hitting new milestones at an increasingly fast pace.

Reads the status, simply: "One hundred thousand apps in Android Market."

During a recent interview, vice president for engineering at Google Andy Rubin said there are now 270,000 developers writing software for the operating system.

Including apps that have been pulled by their developers over the course of Android's history, Rubin confirms the number is over 100,000, as well.

For comparison's sake, Apple's App Store has just hit 300,000 apps available while the BlackBerry store has just over 10,000.

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Pioneer and Buffalo have introduced the world's first Blu-ray writers with BDXL support, the standard that was approved by the BDA in June.

BDXL discs are quad-layer 128GB Blu-ray discs. The standard also allows for triple-layer BDs with 100GB capacity.

Available soon, the companies have shown off the external BRXL-6U2 and the internal BRXL-6FBS-BK.

Both writers can handle up to quad-layer discs at 4x speeds for the higher capacities.

Support for BD-R/BD-R DL and BD-RE/BD-RE DL are standard.

On the downside, there are no mainstream players that support the standard with only Panasonic and Sharp even introducing players, all of which cost over $2500. There is no word on pricing for the writers.

For now, the format is targeted at professional applications such as archiving and medial imaging.

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Citing multiple sources, Kotaku is reporting today that the much anticipated PSP 2 handheld will reach consumers in the fall of next year.

The updated console will sport a touch panel on its back, along with dual analog sticks, the most-wanted PSP feature since its inception.

Sources describe the touch panel as "looking like a big mouse trackpad." It is still unclear how it will be used in-game, but developers are already in early stages of developing games that incorporate it.

Furthermore, the display will offer a higher resolution and sharper picture whilst being about 1-inch larger, as well.

Sony has called the screen "HD" during internal meetings although it is also unclear what is implied there.

The main issue, according to the site, is that system is overheating, thanks to the ramp up in power from past models.

Sony does not comment on speculation.

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Sony has announced today that is slashing the price of the PSPgo handheld in the United States and in Japan.

The move comes as the holiday season approaches and on the heels of even more PSP 2 rumors.

Rival Nintendo is set to launch their highly-anticipated 3DS handheld before the summer of next year.

In the U.S., Sony will drop the price of the "go" to $200 from $250 and in Japan the price will drop to 16,800 yen ($207 USD) from 26,800 ($330 USD).

Overall, Sony has sold 60 million PSP units, although it is widely expected that the PSPgo has sold very poorly, no matter what market.

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