• And here’s Google with a timely reminder of the kind of problems they’re causing. When Google was breached in 2010 by Chinese hackers, it appears they may have been able to access a database of information on targets of U.S. surveillance.

• See also: Anonymous, who have pledged to “disrupt activities” at Guantanamo Bay, prompting the military to shut off Wi-Fi access entirely.

• Apple’s CEO testified in front of a Senate committee on Tuesday about its tax practices—put simply, the utilization of loopholes that saved them billions in taxes. (The New York Times’ liveblog of the hearing is here) Cook was apparently effective at easing tensions, and pushed hard for corporate tax reform, a set of laws that’s become so riddled with loopholes that numerous tech companies are able to avoid huge tax burdens without technically breaking any laws. Central to this strategy is Ireland, through which many companies route a lot of money to take advantage of a favorable tax rate, resulting in ire all over the world.

• While Apple’s Tim Cook was testifying in the Senate, Microsoft was revealing its new Xbox. Wired’s Peter Rubin has an excellent run-down on what you need to know.

• Is 3-D printed food the answer to world hunger? NASA thinks so: they just awarded a $125,000 grant to build a prototype of a “universal food synthesizer.”

• Remember Watson, IBM’s robot Jeopardy winner? It’s already being utilised in the medical industry, and now IBM hopes it can help with customer support too.

Apple faces a Senate hearing over the $100 billion cash it has overseas—an arrangement that helped it avoid around $9 billion in taxes—this week. Ahead of the hearing, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook gave a rare interview with Politico in which he talks about the impending hearing and his plans for it. Lots of interesting details, including Apple’s plans to go “very deep” on US manufacturing. Google and Amazon have also faced fresh attention over their tax practices.

Tom Wheeler’s Conflicts of Interest

Tom Wheeler, who will probably replace Julian Genachowski as head of the FCC soon (Nicholas Thompson at The New Yorker did a great exit interview with him), has about a million dollars in holdings in AT&T, Verizon, and various other companies that represent conflicts of interest in his new position. Wheeler is still waiting for sign-off from the Senate, but said he will divest all of his conflicting positions, which currently contribute to a salary of at least $1,105,189.

The FBI Knows Who You DDoS’d Last Summer

Did you know there are websites that let you buy your own personal DDoS attack using Paypal? One of those is ragebooter.net, which Brian Krebs recently profiled and found a Memphis, Tennessee resident who claims his site is not illegal and operates with the FBI’s blessing, and a backdoor letting them monitor who uses it.

Now You Can Print Your Solar Cells

Researchers in Australia have developed a printer that can print 30 feet of flexible solar cells per minute, a major breakthrough in solar technology. And in a month, Harvard will also release a list of compounds that can be used for printing solar cells. The technology is still relatively inefficient and expensive (one of those printers will set you back about $200,000), but the findings and impending database are expected to have useful effects on the cost and efficiency of printing solar cells.

Google Glass Still New

There are few useful or interesting things I could tell you about Google Glass at this point that you haven’t already heard, and the tech is so expensive that it barely matters to most people. But these things are ostensibly the future, and so far the future has pretty crappy apps. But at least people that wear prescription glasses will be able to take advantage of them.

• Key senators are divided on the immigration bill, preventing it from gaining the critical mass of support it needs to pass the Senate. The AFL-CIO is arguing to protect provisions in the bill requiring Americans to be recruited for openings before immigrants, which the tech industry calls “unworkable.”

• A new report released today says the internet wiretap technology proposed by the FBI poses “serious security risks.” By creating backdoors for the FBI to use it opens the same holes to malicious intruders.

• Kayla, Topiary, tflow, and Viral—more commonly known as Lulzsec—were sentenced to jail today, with sentences ranging between 20 and 32 months, for their 50 day hacking spree in 2011.

• Google teamed up with NASA to study artificial intelligence using a quantum computer.

• The Center for Copyright Information—the group behind the “six strikes” program—has had its company status revoked, meaning it can no longer do business in the United States. France, meanwhile, is dropping its equivalent three strikes program, following a recommendation for automated fines of 60 euro for infringement instead. Lawmakers there are going to review the recommendations and revisit it during Summer.

• Here’s a good summary of the Marketplace Fairness Act, the so-called online sales tax bill, that does a good job of explaining some of the finer points of the act, and explaining why retail companies are divided.

• The Verge has a cheatsheet and lots of details on what Google announced at its I/O conference keynote on Wednesday. Unified messaging, subscription music, a new phone, and much more.

• Hollywood claims its bottom line is suffering from piracy, but it has some of the highest paid execs.

• Those meters that grade the strength of your password have overrun sign-up forms on the web, but do they work? Sometimes.

The hits keep coming for FWD.us, with even Silicon Valley best friend Techcrunch describing the group as “reviled” this week. The latest is that Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors, among other things, has pulled his support, along with David Sacks, chief executive of Yammer. Neither FWD.us or the departed has elaborated on their reasoning yet (or how much money they’re taking with them), but it’s not too hard to make an educated guess.

More “Cyberattacks” for U.S. Corporations

The New York Times is reporting that a “new wave of cyberattacks” is under way, targeting mostly energy companies. Where intrusions in the past have seemed to focus on cyberespionage, anonymous officials said this time they’re looking for ways to get control of their processing systems. As of Sunday, the unnamed officials either don’t know or won’t say the source of the attacks, confirming only that they’re coming from the Middle East. (Complete speculation, but Iran is likely the primary focus, having successfully deployed malware that wiped a bunch of computers and making an appearance in the most recent National Intelligence Estimate as a country with “nothing but upside” if they decided to target American infrastructure.)

Leftovers

• Thousands of Social Security numbers have escaped again, this time from the Washington state Administrative Office of the Courts, in a data breach that happened months ago and was only just discovered. The information “just happened to be on a server in an area that was accessed,” said the director of the courts’ information services division, very helpfully.

• Julian Sanchez for Wired on the FBI’s wiretap proposal: “criminals, rival nation states, and rogue hackers routinely seek out and exploit vulnerabilities in our computers and networks … much faster than we can fix them. We don’t need to add wiretapping interfaces as new and “particularly juicy” targets to this cybersecurity landscape.”