The Windows 8 Consumer Preview—notably it's not being called a "beta"—will be launched on February 29th. Microsoft will launch it at an event it's hosting in Barcelona to coincide with Mobile World Congress.

Taking full advantage of the opportunity afforded by the leap year, the release will just hit Microsoft's previously announced "late February" date. Redmond has no comment (yet) on whether the event will be Webcast.

Releasing the Consumer Preview of a desktop operating system at a conference for cellular communications might seem strange. But with Windows 8's tablet ambitions and the leaked information that Windows Phone 8 will probably use the Windows 8 kernel, this is a desktop operating system that won't be confined to the desktop.

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Music distribution service TuneCore has described the royalties from as "magic money that Apple made exist out of thin air for copyright holders," signaling early support of the service from one part of the music industry. TuneCore CEO Jeff Price made the proclamation in a on Tuesday, making the first iTunes Match royalty payments sound like nothing less than a miracle. Without any details on how much individual musicians are taking home, however, it's not clear whether iTunes Match pays better or worse than similar services.

TuneCore is a service and artists that allows them to distribute their music on major music stores like iTunes and Amazon. The idea is to use TuneCore's resources—instead of the artist's limited resources—to achieve wider distribution to a major audience, and for what amounts to as a minimal cost to the musician. TuneCore isn't the only service that does this—CD Baby is another popular option—but it remains one of the larger collectives of indie musicians online.

The Darkness II is one of the most unabashedly and gleefully gory games of this generation, reveling in its own torrents of blood and shredded viscera. While bullets exploding heads and tearing through flesh aren’t anything new in the video game world, the brutal Darkness executions take the virtual carnage to a whole new level. Bodies are regularly torn in half (both crosswise and lengthwise), skulls and spinal columns are torn out through mouths, bodies are impaled with thrown objects, and entire digestive tracts are forcibly removed through enemies' nether regions.

Given that, it surprisingly never makes the player feel like they’re in need of a shower when the bloodshed is over. Games like Rogue Warrior and Soldier of Fortune were just as brutally violent, yet their uber-serious undercurrents simply made them feel like exercises in virtual sadism. Last year’s Bulletstorm, on the other hand, was so over-the-top and silly that the blood and guts really didn’t make any impact at all. The Darkness II manages to strike the right balance between the two extremes, not only making it a better game than the ones mentioned above, but also making it superior to its predecessor in many ways.

February 8, 2012 -- Julie Samuels, a laywer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation talks to the WHIR about the organization's work to help legitimate Megaupload users recover data lost when the company's servers were seized last month.

IT security experts have long loved to troll through hacker forums to gather intelligence on emerging threats and even (as in the ill-fated case of HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr) try to profile the hackers themselves. But as a report from IT security firm Imperva shows, many of the so-called hacker portals out there are more hangouts for newbie hackers (and possibly a few budding FBI informants) looking at how to get started in the game.

Facebook launched a major 4.0 update to its iOS app late Tuesday, finally offering a native iPad interface. Before the update, users were either stuck with either running the iPhone interface in a tiny window (or blown up to a pixelated mess), or using the regular website—clearly not made with touch input in mind—in Mobile Safari. The original iPad launched nearly two years ago, so a native iPad interface has been a long time coming.

We dug into the new app on an iPad 2 to see if the two year wait was worth it, and put together a quick tour of the clean, simple, iPad-native interface.

Oracle said this week that it's building a cloud service to host many of its key software products, including Java, database, middleware and CRM. As if anticipating concerns that the aptly named Oracle Public Cloud might be another vehicle for locking customers into Oracle software, though, CEO Larry Ellison tore into rival Salesforce.com, claiming Oracle will differentiate itself with industry standards and support for “full interoperability with other clouds and your data center on premise.”

The Oracle Public Cloud is a broad mix of platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service, and a potential competitor to Salesforce, Microsoft, and others. The Oracle Fusion CRM Cloud Service and Oracle’s workforce management tools are already available, while the database and Java services, as well as a new business-focused social network, will be released “under controlled availability in the near future,” Oracle says. Oracle boasts the Public Cloud will provide “all the productivity of Java, without the IT,” and “the Oracle database you love, now in the cloud.”