Obama Assassination. Hackers hit FoxNews.com's Twitter account to send fake messages that U.S. President Barack Obama had been shot dead at a restaurant in Iowa. The tweets included "@BarackObama has just passed. The President is dead. A sad 4th of July, indeed. President Barack Obama is dead." Hacking group Script Kiddies took credit and told Think Magazine, "Fox News was selected because we figured their security would be just as much of a joke as their reporting." The group is involved in the "anti-sec" movement, which aims to disrupt the computer security industry. The U.S. Secret Service said its investigation is ongoing.

Nokia Price Cuts. Nokia Oyj is still the world's largest maker of mobile phones by units shipped, but it has faced declining demand of its Symbian line and it is still due to start releasing its Microsoft 7 line of phones in the fourth quarter. Analyst firm CCS Insight told Bloomberg News that Nokia has cut its smartphone prices in Europe by as much as 15 percent to boost sales.

Bing's Boost. Microsoft Corp.'s Bing search engine hasn't been able to keep up with search giant Google. But Microsoft could have found a game changer in China. Baidu Inc. will start sourcing some results for users' English-language searches from Microsoft Corp.'s Bing search engine, the companies announced on Monday. According to Beijing research firm Analysys International, in the first quarter, Baidu's had 75.8 percent of revenue in the online search market in China while Google only had 19.2%.

Zynga's Sudden Wealth. Zynga, maker of "FarmVille," "CityVille" and other games played on Facebook, is aiming to raise $1 billion in an initial public offering. According to the Form S-1 registration statement, the company had a net profit of $90 million on revenue of $597 million in 2010. Assets totalled $1.11 billion and debts totalled $630 million. The risks factors identified in its prospectus include, "Many of our employees may be able to receive significant proceeds from sales of our equity in the public markets after our initial public offering, which may reduce their motivation to continue to work for us. Moreover, we expect that this offering will create disparities in wealth among our employees, which may harm our culture and relations among employees."

Google's Patents. Google's $900 million opened the auction for Nortel Networks' 6,000 smartphone and other tech patents. After four days of counter-bidding, $4.5 billion was the winning bid, which was from a consortium comprised of Apple Inc., Microsoft, Research In Motion Ltd., Sony Corp., Ericsson AB and EMC Corp. Note that RIM's Blackberry and Apple's iPhone have their own operating systems. Now Google is scrambling to buy patents to defend against lawsuits targeting its Android operating system, which has already emerged as the top OS for smartphones. "One of a company's best defenses against this kind of litigation is (ironically) to have a formidable patent portfolio," Google General Counsel Kent Walker said in April.

Apple's iPhone 5. DigiTimes, citing Taiwanese component suppliers it didn't identify, said that Taiwanese notebook manufacturer Pegatron Technology has received orders for 15 million iPhone 5 units from Apple, with the units to start shipping in September of 2011. Pegatron produced an estimated four million iPhone 4s for Apple in the first quarter of this year. Apple has unsurprisingly refused to confirm the report, has not provided ANY iPhone 5 announcement this year. Investors of Pegatron though appear to confirm that the DigiTimes report as Pegatron's shares rose the most in three weeks.

Facebook's Awesome. Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week the social network will be "launching something awesome" today, Wednesday. Ed Oswald, writing for PCWorld, says that possible announcements by Zuckerberg could be (1) "Project Spartan", a development platform for using HTML5 in mobile apps; (2) Facebook would finally commit to the iPad platform and release a native app for it; (3) Facebook will announce a photo-sharing app; (4) Facebook will announce a partnership with Skype for video chat. The Skype thing is not far from reality as Microsoft recently purchased Skype for $8 billion and Microsoft has a stake in Facebook.