A free and unassuming little video effects app tapped into my practical joker personality this holiday season, and I just have to share it: Action Movie FX by Bad Robot Interactive. What does it do? It lets you film a short scene and then apply big-action Hollywood movie special effects to it.

Source code for two security applications from Symantec has been stolen and posted on the Web. The hackers claiming responsibility, who call themselves the"Lords of Dharmaraja,"say they obtained code for the Norton Antivirus application. However, it appears they actually got their hands on code for two enterprise products, Symantec End Point 11 and Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.2 instead.

Last week, an announcement from Lenovo got me thinking of Rory Read, AMD's new CEO, who made some cryptic remarks about AMD going into ARM and no longer chasing Intel. Now, there are a number of hybrid or crossover products that will be coming out this year, with the most interesting being a cross between a notebook and tablet. This design will likely be the showcase for Windows 8.

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious,"a very wise man once said, and that's surely as true in the tech world as it is in the rest of life. Maybe that's why so many have been so intrigued by Canonical's cryptic announcement last week about its plans for this week's CES event.

A free and unassuming little video effects app tapped into my practical joker personality this holiday season, and I just have to share it: Action Movie FX by Bad Robot Interactive. What do it do? It lets you film a short scene and then apply big-action Hollywood movie special effects to it.

Corning will be at CES next week, but unlike most of the exhibitors there, it won't be debuting a sexy new gadget. Corning will be showing off Gorilla Glass 2 alongside the newest smartphones, tablets and other miracles in computing. Corning is not revealing much about the updated product other than to say it will address emerging trends in technology.

The arrival of the Amazon Kindle Fire gave Apple reason to worry, but it may have given Barnes&Noble a reason to completely freak out. Its Nook Tablet Android device arrived about a month after the Kindle Fire was announced, and the Nook may be in a much more vulnerable position than the iPad.

It's well-known that iPhone owners use lots of cellular bandwidth, but it seems that the iPhone 4S has taken bandwidth consumption to new heights. Owners of the iPhone 4S use twice as much data as iPhone 4 users and nearly three times as much data as iPhone 3G users, according to an Arieso report.

Researchers at Cornell University's School of Applied and Engineering Physics have demonstrated a way to cloak, or hide, an event in time. The phenomenon is similar to what happens when you remove frames from a film by cutting and splicing, except that instead of losing data about an event, you hide that information.

Researchers at Cornell University's School of Applied and Engineering Physics have demonstrated a way to cloak, or hide, an event in time. The phenomenon is similar to what happens when you cut and splice out an event from a videotape, except that instead of losing data about an event, you hide that information.