From the article: "After this upcoming weekend, you have to ask your phone company if you want to use the phone you (kind of) bought from them on any other carrier's network. You used to be able to ask for, or purchase, or hack your way to an "unlocked" phone, but that will be illegal after Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013. The Librarian of Congress believes cellphone companies are doing a good enough job of fostering competition in their market, so the era of third-party unlocking is coming to a close." [ITworld]

From the article: "The key to the discovery is a new molecule developed by chemists at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) in Kolkata. It allowed researchers to build magnetic memory with fewer layers of material, making it thinner, less expensive, and more usable at normal temperatures. The reward for consumers and enterprises could be storage that holds 1,000TB per square inch." [ITworld]

The public war of words comes after HP said it would take a multibillion writedown due to alleged accounting fraud by Autonomy [via ITworld]

Windows PCs have a long history of coming packed with space-hogging and performance-crippling crapware. Check out this list of the crapware that comes with new PCs, according to the OEMs themselves. [via ITworld]

Emergency crews and gear in place will help operators respond, but some portable phone-charging stations will go offline temporarily [ITworld]

A few days ago, Microsoft released a preview of the ASP.NET Fall 2012 update to Visual Studio 2012. This update adds some really useful new features to MVC and Web API projects (along with some minor updates to Web Forms) that should save .NET developers a lot of time. ITworld

French security company Vupen is selling a vulnerability in Microsoft's latest operation system and browser [ITworld]

Notices will be sent out to developers of up to 100 mobile apps that are not compliant with California privacy law, starting with those who have the most popular apps available on mobile platforms, the office of the state's attorney general Kamala D. Harris said Tuesday. ITworld]

Confused (and saddened) by the recent split between Anonymous and WikiLeaks? Allow us to help explain it all. [ITworld]

A seeming leak of iOS/Android plans from a Microsoft office in the Czech Republic seems like confirmation. But it’s really just confusion, and not just because Steve Ballmer called it 'not accurate'. [ITworld]

If you have an IT + math + business background, there's a Big Data job for you [ITworld]

A new survey finds that the more women executives that are involved in a startup, the more likely it is to succeed. Here's one theory why... [ITworld]

Let's leave programming to programmers and reality-TV hosting to Ryan Seacrest. [ITworld]

Verizon's hunger for spectrum space, and add-on fees, led instead to a flourishing unofficial tether and hotspot market. [ITworld]

One of Steve Jobs’ wishes, to have Apple employees wear a uniform, seems to have come to fruition and was on display yesterday. But would he approve? Do you? ITworld

Do you trade higher pay now for the potential of having a harder time finding a job later? That's an over-simplification, to be sure, but which path did you choose? [ITworld]

In an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt, Mark Zuckerberg said that one of the company's biggest mobile missteps was 'betting on HTML 5 instead of native.' [Watch the interview on ITworld]

If you want to work for Hashrocket, you'll need to provide a resume, references and a week of your time. [ ITworld ]

Corporations are people too, my friend. [ITworld]

Speaking at Nokia's launch of their Windows 8-powered Lumia 820 and 920, Steve Ballmer gets numeric with prediction. [ITworld]