Stories by: Nancy Weil

Nokia fired the latest salvo in its ongoing patent dispute with Apple, saying Tuesday that it has filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission charging that Apple infringes its patents "in virtually all of its mobile phones, portable music players and computers."

It was a week where competition regulators danced with IT industry behemoths: the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed an antitrust lawsuit against Intel, while the European Commission gave approval to Microsoft's proposed browser "ballot screen" and pushed the proposed Oracle-Sun Microsystems deal forward. Meanwhile, a French court slapped down Google for what it saw as a copyright grab in a book-scanning case.

No doubt, a leading IT story in 2010 will be the role that sector will play in the expected economic recovery, as well as how IT markets themselves recover. OK, so that's a no-brainer to predict, but we're latching on to some more specific details in that regard, and we've found a limb or three to walk out on as well. In no particular order we present the 2010 edition of our annual predictions.

As the year draws to a close, we thought about the memorable quotes related to IT and offer, in no particular order, 15 that stuck with us.

Well, we can all sleep a little easier now that Microsoft and Yahoo have finally announced details of the search deal they have worked on for months (and that has kept some of us on the edge, as tidbits of the story had an unsavory habit of breaking on weekends). All of the details, and then some, can be found by following the links in this week's top entry. Otherwise, with the Black Hat conference under way, there was a load of security news, with DefCon to follow this weekend (no rest for the weary).

IBM and Sun Microsystems are close to a deal under which IBM will acquire Sun Microsystems for about US$9.50 per share, The New York Times reported in its online edition Thursday afternoon.

Human error caused a glitch that returned the message "this site may harm your computer" for all Google search results for about an hour Saturday morning, the company said, but the mistake was Google's and not StopBadware.org's.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has a hormone imbalance that is causing him to lose weight, he said in a letter posted Monday morning at the company's Web site in an attempt to squelch rumors about his health.

Well, we blew it a year ago on the prediction that last month's US presidential election would lead to historic turnout -- it didn't quite hit that mark -- and unprecedented problems with e-voting systems. The problems, it turns out, were for the most part precedented. On the positive side, we nailed the result, forecasting the election of Barack Obama. Not inclined to rest on that laurel (and a few others we also accurately foretold), we've set forth again to find out what industry analysts are forecasting for 2009, and we've talked to sources as well as to our geekiest friends and colleagues to come up with our own set of predictions for 2009.

Amazon.com had its best holiday sales season ever, providing a scarce optimistic report as online sales from November and December were tallied. U.S. online sales over the holiday period showed "relative strength" but were still down and online shopping in the U.K. was markedly off compared to a year ago, according to final reports of the season.