Court: Fifth Amendment protects suspects from having to decrypt hard drives In a ruling that could have broad ramifications for law enforcement, a federal appeals court has ruled that a man under investigation for child pornography isn't required to unlock his computer hard drives for the federal government, because that act would amount to the man offering testimony against himself. The ruling Thursday appears to be the first by a federal appeals court to find that a person can't be forced to turn over encyption codes... The Wall Street Journal

The Verge Interview: Marty Cooper, father of the cellphone Marty Cooper quite literally invented the cellphone during his tenure as a division manager at Motorola, demonstrating it for the first time in April of 1973 when he famously called his chief rival – Bell Labs' Joel Engel – to personally deliver the news that he'd been beaten. In the years since, he's been a successful entrepreneur several times over, most recently working with his wife on GreatCall, the company that offers the simple Jitterbug phone targeted at seniors. The Verge

Penn researchers build first physical "metatronic" circuit The technological world of the 21st century owes a tremendous amount to advances in electrical engineering, specifically, the ability to finely control the flow of electrical charges using increasingly small and complicated circuits. And while those electrical advances continue to race ahead, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are pushing circuitry forward in a different way, by replacing electricity with light. University of Pennsylvania

A visit to the only American mine for rare earth metals That big hole in the ground? It's a pit mine at the Molycorp Mountain Pass rare earth facility in California's Mojave Desert. Metals mined from pits like that were used to make the cell phone in your pocket and the computer screen you're staring at right now. I visited Molycorp two weeks ago, as part of our investigation into the sources and consequences of consumer electronics manufacturing. The Atlantic

DDR4 makes its debut at ISSCC 2012 DDR4 RAM is almost ready for the primetime and will be available next year, if the roadmaps presented this week at ISSCC 2012 are to be trusted.According to the JEDEC roadmap, DDR4 will make a break into the server market with the ECC variant of the new memory standard, with densities of up to 32GB per DIMM, 1.2V and zooming along at 2133MHz, right where DDR3 gave up the ghost. TechEye

Apple CEO hints company will part with some cash Apple CEO Tim Cook says he believes the world's most valuable company has more money than it needs. His next challenge is to figure out whether Apple should break from the cash-hoarding ways of his predecessor, the late Steve Jobs, and dip into its $98 billion bank account to pay shareholders a dividend this year. Associated Press

Aussie woman scammed Nigerians: court A Brisbane woman fleeced Nigerian scam artists by stealing more than $30,000 from their internet car sales racket, a court has been told. Sarah Jane Cochrane-Ramsey, 23, was employed by the Nigerians as an "agent" in March 2010 but was unaware they were scam artists, the Brisbane District Court heard today. Courier Mail

The dark side of digital distribution As a concept, digital distribution – particularly of videogames – is a wonderful thing. It should, and sometimes does, reduce prices dramatically by cutting out the need for physical manufacture, stock inventory, distribution and retail middleman. (Which in turn can also make niche genres economically viable.) Wings over Sealand

Judge awards iPhone user $850 in throttling case When AT&T started slowing down the data service for his iPhone, Matt Spaccarelli, an unemployed truck driver and student, took the country's largest telecommunications company to small claims court. And won. His award: $850. Associated Press