The Pirate Bay has been down for about the past 24 hours, and says it has been hit by a "quite big" distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The controversial website for torrent downloaders confirmed the attack on its Facebook page, saying "We don't know who's behind it but we have our suspicions."

Just last week, the Pirate Bay criticized the Anonymous hacking group for running a DDoS campaign against Virgin Media. "We do NOT encourage these actions," the Pirate Bay said, also on its Facebook page. "We believe in the open and free internets, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us. So don't fight them using their ugly methods. DDOS and blocks are both forms of censorship."

Preinstalled trial versions of useless software have been slowing down new PCs for years, and Microsoft is finally offering a solution: bring your PC into a Microsoft Store and pay them $99 to install a clean copy of Windows.

The new program is an outgrowth of Microsoft's "Signature" PC initiative, which sells bloatware-free versions of PCs from Microsoft's partners in Microsoft stores. AllThingsD reports that Microsoft is now offering to change any computer into a Signature PC if customers bring it into the store and pay the requisite fee.

German security firm Avira yesterday issued a service pack for its antivirus software that crippled an unknown number of Windows machines, with one customer calling the gaffe "catastrophic" to his company.

Today, Avira updated the software to sidestep the problem.

"Following the release of Service Pack 0 (SP0) for Avira Version 2012, the ProActiv feature blocked legitimate Windows applications on customers' PCs," Avira acknowledged on its support site. "We deeply regret any difficulties this has caused you."

Google just pumped out another stable release of its web browser as Chrome 19 sees the light of day. It seems as though new browser releases are becoming an almost daily occurrence these days, so what can you expect from Google’s latest offering? Well the big new feature to be found in this release is tab syncing -- and this is as self-explanatory and awesome as it sounds.

In many regards Chrome is playing catch-up with Firefox here, as Mozilla’s web browser has featured the ability synchronize tabs for some time now. Chrome 19 takes very much the same approach so that whenever you are signed into your Google account any tabs you have open are automatically synced to the cloud. When you switch computers you can then access any tabs you had open on another machine by accessing the Other devices menu of the new tab page.

Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel Corp. said that the company had begun to work on 7nm a 5am process technologies. The company's plans now are to equip its Oregon, Arizona and Irelands fabs to make chips using 14nm fabrication processes.

"Our research and development is quite deep, I talk about ten years," said Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel.