This week Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is preparing to face off against Nokia Oyj in the in front of the International Trade Commission this week. Nokia claims that Apple is in violation of intellectual property. This is a similar case that HTC and Motorola filed against Apple. To prepare for the lawsuits, Apple has hired some of the top patent lawyers across the country.

According to a source with Vator.tv, Google has acquired Groupon for $2.5 billion. They said that Google nor Groupon could be reached for comment, but Vator.tv says that their source is reliable. Rumor about Google making offers to Groupon has been around since November 19th when the search giant offered $2-$3 billion. Then supposedly Yahoo! was considering to spend $4 billion to buy out Groupon.

The leaked WikiLeaks cables started to arrive yesterday. Earlier I reported about how the leaks related to Google. While the documents will be uploaded to WikiLeaks.org over the next several months, the organization has created a visualization on the where, the when, and the how of the cables. Below is an infographic [click to enlarge].

A lot of people that have switched to the Google Chrome browser have done so because Mozilla Firefox seems to run slower. It turns out that there is a fix that helps Firefox run a bit faster. You can have the cache load from your memory instead of loading cache images and data from the hard drive. Here is how you do it:

Thomson Reuters Corporation (NYSE:TRI)? has announced tonight that they have acquired GeneGo. GeneGo is a San Diego based company with offices in Moscow and Michigan that provides biology and disease information and analytics to pharmaceutical companies for research and development purposes. GeneGo will be integrated into Thomson Reuters’ Healthcare & Science business. GeneGo’s flagship product is called MetaBase, which is a knowledge base of all GeneGo’s products.

Thanks to you big spenders, U.S. online Black Friday spending hit about $648 million. In the first 26 days of this month, about $11.64 billion was spent on buying goods online. This is a 14% increase compared to the same time last year. The $648 million figure for Black Friday is a 9% increase from last year. On Thanksgiving Day, about $407 million was spent online. Below are a couple of charts as tracked by comScore (Note: Amazon.com did very well this year):

Many of you have seen the “Free Public WiFi” option that appears in their wireless connection options on their Windows powered laptops. This connection is especially common at airports and coffee shops. This connection is not a free WiFi connection for you to use.

DecorMyEyes.com owner Vitaly Borker is one aggressive businessman and he used it for his advantage. Borker bullied his customers into leaving him tons of negative reviews on consumer review and watchdog websites. As more people linked to him, his business increased in Google rankings.