The Nintendo 3DS launched in Japan in late February and held the top spot for sales, easily, for the first three weeks.

VG24 has reported this week, however, that for the week ended March 27th, the PSP has taken the top spot, following the launch Final Fantasy IV Complete.

The PSP (Go and 3000) combined for 51,095 unit sales while the 3DS saw 50,710.

Sony's victory this week looks like a clear anomaly as year-to-date (YTD) figures have the 3DS at 792,954 to the PSP's 584,585. The 3DS has only been out for a month.

Final Fantasy IV Complete was the major factor behind the sales, as the game moved 104,000 copies, tripling up on the next best-selling game, Dynasty Warriors 7.

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In late March of last year, the Windows Phone team showed off their application platform and developer tools.

This weekend, Brandon Watson of Microsoft has posted some relevant stats for the operating system:

1.5 Million - The Windows Phone Developer Tools, consisting of Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone and Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone have been downloaded over 1.5 million times. Put differently, the number of downloads equates to the size of the entire population of Philadelphia.

36,000 – People are talking a lot about the number of developers in their ecosystem. It would be easy for us to say that we had 1.5 million given the developer tools downloaded, or we could talk about the number of people we have on mailing lists, but we won't. We'd rather give a nod to the 36,000 members of the AppHub community who have voted with their wallets and become members of the Windows Phone developer community.

"The number:" 11,500 – What is an app? It's a question that really begs some scrutinizing. For us, from the beginning, we have always been focused on quality over quantity. We recognize the importance of getting great apps on our platform and not artificially inflating the number of actual apps available to customer by listing "wallpapers" as a category, or perhaps allowing competitor's apps to run on the platform to increase "tonnage." We also don't believe in the practice of counting "lite" apps as unique quality content. In reality they only exist because developers can't have a Trial API and must therefore do extra work. Finally, we don't double and triple count apps which are submitted in multiple languages.

We respect that determining what is or is not a quality app is subjective, for example eBooks as titles will probably find their way onto the platform en masse. Still, we believe we have the standards and processes in place to continue ensuring that customers have the ability to quickly and easily locate and acquire quality apps and games that extend the value of their phone.

We've been very focused on the quality of the apps in the Marketplace since we first announced the platform one year ago, and we've done this by doing what we do best for developers; giving them great tools, tons of sample code and unparalleled support through our incredible Developer & Platform Evangelism team. As a result, we've got apps; thousands of them. In fact our ecosystem generated 10,000 apps faster than anyone else, without padding the stats.

7,500 – It's great to have a platform full of apps, but most developers we speak to are concerned with making money. That's going to be a function of a few things. You might think that the primary driver is number of handsets in market. Based on the conversations we are having with some of our developers, many are telling us that they are seeing more revenue on our platform than competing platforms, despite the fact that we cannot yet match the sheer number of handsets being sold. For them it's about truly setting their own price and the ability to get noticed. So far, we have nearly 7,500 apps that are paid in our Marketplace.

1,200 – While the 36,000 registered developers are nice to talk about, the 1,200 newly registered developers we are adding every week is incredibly encouraging. Developers are pragmatists and they are going where there is ample opportunity.

1,100 – Speaking of ad funded apps, there are now 1,100 apps that are generating developer revenue using the Microsoft Advertising Ad Control. Even more impressive is the double digit growth rate of new ad funded apps that are being added to the Windows Phone Marketplace every month. Check out how two student developers and a part-time hobbyist turned their apps into lucrative revenue streams.

12 – Customers love our apps. Love them. Windows Phone customers download an average of 12 apps each month. Considering that the phone has only been widely available for around 4 months, that's very healthy demand.

1.8 – Nothing upsets developers more than not knowing what is going on with their app during certification. Since opening the Marketplace for application ingestion developers have experienced an average time to certification of 1.8 days. Certification can yield a pass or fail, but developers get an answer on average in days – not weeks, nor months.

62% - When developers are given clear and prescriptive guidance about what is expected of them and their app, it's only fair to assume that apps will make it through certification quickly. They do. 62% of all apps pass certification on their first attempt. We know that we don't have it perfect yet and we continue to work with our community to find out how we can be better. For example, when we updated the policy regarding the requirement to provide a support alias based on developer feedback, pass rates grew by almost 10 full percentage points. We will continue to listen to our developer community to ensure that they have a voice in the vetting process while still delivering high quality apps to our collective customers.

44% - Of all the paid apps in the Marketplace, 44% of them include access to a Trial version. Our developers rely on the Trial API available for Windows Phone 7 to drive consumer confidence in their purchases. Trying before you buy…what a concept.

40% - The statistic that gets me the most excited and speaks the most to the work my team has yet to do is the percentage of registered developers who have published their apps. 40% of the fully registered developer population has published an app or game, yet 60% have not yet published. That's incredibly exciting when you consider the amount of creativity which is still forthcoming.

1 – It only takes one idea. One idea to get you started down the path of building an amazing app or game, reaching millions of people, or maybe just showing off to your friends. It only takes one.

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Ericsson has sued Chinese-based ZTE today over patent infringement relating to mobile phones and network technology.

The suits were filed in the UK, Italy and Germany.

Ericsson says it made multiple attempts to get ZTE to sign a patent licensing agreement, but the sides could not come to terms. The company says it has been trying for years to get the deal signed and that the suits are "a last resort."

The UK and Italian suits are solely over handset patents while the German one includes handset and network patents.

Ericsson would not reveal which specific patents were up for debate.

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9to5 has reported this weekend that Sony's CEO Howard Stringer has implied that the Apple iPhone 5 (or another Apple iOS device) will be getting an 8MP camera.

Said the CEO:

Our best sensor technology is built in one of the (tsunami) affected factories. Those go to Apple for their iPhones…or iPads. Isn't that something? They buy our best sensors from us?

At the moment, Apple doesn't buy any sensors from Sony, but there have been rumors that the company has been looking to drop OmniVision in favor of a different supplier.

The likely sensor is the new Exmor R, which is in the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc and features improved technology for low light situations.

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GFI, the company that owns the VIPRE security products, has apologized for its part in a claim made earlier this week that Samsung pre-installed keylogging software on new laptops.

The headlines of Samsung pre-loading spying software on its laptops made waves online on Wednesday and through Thursday. The claim was originally published by NetworkWorld.com through a guest contributor, Mohommad Hassan. Some contributions were also made to the articles by Mich Kabay.

Original Reports - Disocvery

The two part report from Hassan and Kabay separates the story into the discovery of the keylogging software, and then Samsung's response and alleged admission to it being there.

Some problems with the claims were immediately noticeable. Firstly, on the discovery article, Hassan claims to have been alerted to the presence of the threat on a new Samsung R525 by a "commercial security software" he installed on the system. Hassan never names the security product that fingered the threat, which is bizarre by itself in such a report, and taking into account the gravity of the accusation against Samsung.

Nevertheless, the security product did flag the C:WindowsSL directory as the "StarLogger" keylogger, a commercial tool used for spying on activities. This was also the case for a second Samsung laptop, R540, that he got weeks later after experiencing problems with the video display driver in the R525.

Hassan interpreted the presence of the same alleged threat on two Samsung laptops, discovered by the same security software, as supporting his own position that the manufacturer had placed it there. He ruled out a false positive since he had been using the tool that discovered it for six years and never experienced one.

This turned out to be a disastrous assumption on his part. After contacting Hassan, Samsung did its own tests and quickly confirmed that there is no keylogger on either laptop. Instead, VIPRE security software incorrectly reported the C:WindowsSL directory as the StarLogger program.

GFI apologizes for false positive

Using a company blog, Alex Eckelberry, general manager of GFI Security, posted an apology. He acknowledged that VIPRE did produce a false positive for a directory used for the Slovenian language with Windows Live products. Unfortunately, the same directory is also known to be used with StarLogger.

"The detection was based off of a rarely-used and aggressive VIPRE detection method, using folder paths as a heuristic. I want to emphasize 'rarely', as these types of detections are seldom used, and when they are, they are subject to an extensive peer review and QA process," Eckelberry wrote.

"We apologize to the author Mohamed Hassan, to Samsung, as well as any users who may have been affected by this false positive. False positives do happen, it's inevitable and like all antivirus companies, we continually strive to improve our detections, while reducing any chance of a false positive. This one (admittedly, an incredibly embarrassing one) made it through our processes, and I have met with the senior managers in the area this morning to handle what happened and to continue to improve our processes."

Samsung admission of guilt?

According to a NetworkWorld.com article posted on Thursday, it was this reliance on the accuracy of VIPRE's scan results and "oral confirmation" that ultimately led to the mistake. The oral confirmation refers to an alleged admission that Samsung does install the software on its laptops to, "monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used."

This admission allegedly comes from a supervisor of Samsung Support, which Hassan was transfered to by tech support staff. "The supervisor who spoke with me was not sure how this software ended up in the new laptop thus put me on hold. He confirmed that yes, Samsung did knowingly put this software on the laptop," Hassan wrote.

This alleged confession is also very bizarre and it would be interesting to hear something from Samsung about this claim. Still, we're not entirely sure that the word of a tech support supervisor should have been used as actual evidence of guilt.

So what has happened since?

According to updates posted on NetworkWorld.com, Samsung handed over two fresh laptops for analysis, probably just to be thorough.

[UPDATE 3/31/11: Mich Kabay writes: A Samsung executive personally flew from Newark, N.J., to Burlington, Vt., carrying two unopened boxes containing new R540 laptop computers. These units were immediately put under seal and details recorded for chain-of-custody records. At 17:40, Dr Peter Stephenson, Director of the Norwich University Center for Advanced Computing and Digital Forensics, began the detailed forensic analysis of the disks. We expect results by Monday.]

It also seems that most outlets that reported the incident have since updated their articles to reflect the discovery that it was all just a false positive and nothing more. However, there are still some questions that need to be answered. I had pointed out in my original article about this that it was taking a very long time for NetworkWorld.com, the source of this false accusation, to update their articles about it, and had also posted a graphic they were using to advertise the story on their mainpage.

They did eventually remove the graphic and post an item stating that Samsung has been "cleared" of the accusation. Later articles include one about GFI's apology and explanation of the false positive, and the latest on the site now is titled, "Bad assumptions lead to false claim about Samsung laptops."

Even though the original article title has since been changed to "UPDATE: Samsung keylogger could be false alarm", it still is listed in NetworkWorld.com's "Most Read" list as "Samsung installs keylogger on its laptop computers" (as shown on the left).

This is somewhat disappointing, especially since GFI posted an apology to Hassan and Samsung for VIPRE's mistake. The point that should be made is GFI really doesn't have to apologize to either. Perhaps it owes Hassan an apology as a customer of his products for the mistake, but it does not owe an apology to Samsung (perhaps it does to Microsoft for flagging a folder used with Windows Live software, but a public apology even for that would be a bit much.)

False positives are just a reality that has to be dealt with when using security products such as VIPRE. GFI never made any accusation about Samsung installing any spying software on its laptops, and is certainly not responsible for Hassan doing so, Kabay contributing to it or NetworkWorld publishing and promoting it as fact.

This same stance is mirrored in comments on the NetworkWorld articles, as well as GFI's own blog. Readers point out that the ones left to apologize are the ones carrying sole responsibility for the mess.

Perhaps an apology will be made after the two laptops Samsung provided for "forensic" analysis is finished - by Monday. One has to question why Samsung even needs to prove its innocence any further than it already has, perhaps it just wants it to be as clear as possible. Either way, let's wait on the results of his forensic test. I don't there will be any surprises.

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Hundreds of thousands of websites have been hit by a code-injection attack that targets a problem with an unknown (so far) web application.

Websense has dubbed the widespread attack as "LizaMoon" after the website its researchers were initially directed to by the malicious code. The attack seems to have largely affected small website so far, with no reports of major corporate or government websites showing signs of being compromised.

Users visiting any hacked site are redirected to a prompt showing a bogus security warning, and may end up downloading "Windows Stability Center", a scareware application that provides fake scans and results on an infected system and gives the user a chance to buy a license to remove the fake threats.

Websense was contacted by people who found the code in their Microsoft SQL databases, using SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008. This does not mean there is a vulnerability in Microsoft SQL Server, Websense Security Labs stressed, but instead points the finger at a web application that is still, right now, unknown.

Mass code-injection attacks are not uncommon, but researchers are already calling this the largest of its kind. It is not likely to go away quickly either, as compromised sites will have to remove the malicious code and then update the vulnerable web application, whenever there is even a fix for it.

WebSense Security Labs posted the following video, which shows what happens to a system that is used to access a hacked URL.

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According to the Wall Street Journal, Dish Network Corp and investor Carl Icahn have submitted bids for bankrupt Blockbuster Inc.

The bids qualify both for an auction in federal bankruptcy court in Manhattan on Monday. Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last September, weighed down with debts of $900 million.

A group of hedge funds headed by Monarch Alternative Capital made a bid of $290 million for the rental chain in February, setting a mark for other bidders.

South Korea's top mobile carrier, Sky Telecom Co Ltd, also said it was considering an investment in Blockbuster.

Icahn has revealed interest in the past in buying Blockbuster, and Dish could find the brand very useful for its video-on-demand (VOD) services. It is not known how much each lodged bids at.

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