Made in America: could your next phone be homegrown? [ENGADGET]

For the past score or so, the issue of manufacturing in America has been a prevalent one. Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs in America have been lost in the realms of textiles and furniture. But recently, the political scope that typically dodges the world of consumer electronics has found its sights set squarely on a field that we as gadget journalists cover. Some might say that Apple’s recent dealings with Foxconn helped to bring the issue to light, but honestly, those jobs were being shipped elsewhere long before the iPod came to fruition.

Megaupload founder goes from arrest to cult hero [THE NEW YORK TIMES]

In an e-mail interview, Mr. Dotcom said he had been treated badly by the New Zealand police and the government, which he said he believed was simply kowtowing to U.S. requests. “Two helicopters and 76 heavily armed officers to arrest a man alleged of copyright crimes — think about that,” he wrote. “Hollywood is importing their movie scripts into the real world and sends armed forces to protect their outdated business model.”

Facebook mines its own network for acquisitions [THE WALL STREET JOURNAL]

Facebook’s interest in acquisitions may be an incentive for some entrepreneurs. But it also carries the risk of alienating the developers who have made Facebook a robust marketplace for apps. These choices are part of Facebook’s evolution to a profit-maximizing enterprise. Facebook is especially concerned with ramping up its efforts to make money from its mobile site, where it currently only has limited advertising opportunities.

EA is “going to be a 100% digital company, period” says Gibeau [GAMESINDUSTRY.BIZ]

The company recently had its first year of digital revenues over one billion dollars, and now EA is expecting that number to jump closer to $2 billion (guidance of $1.7 billion in digital revenues this year). For EA Labels boss Frank Gibeau, the business is clearly at a tipping point. He told GamesIndustry International recently that EA clearly will be 100 percent digital in the near future.

How Anonymous picks targets, launches attacks, and takes powerful organizations down [WIRED]

For the next eight months, Sabu continued to rage across the Internet as a core member of AntiSec, a blackhat hacking group within Anonymous. He helped to deface government and corporate websites and even helped bring down the private intelligence firm Stratfor—all, apparently, with the FBI’s blessing as it quietly gathered logs on Monsegur’s fellow “anons.” Law enforcement officials later told Fox News that Monsegur was working out of the FBI offices “almost daily” in the weeks after he pleaded guilty in August and then from his own home thereafter, with an agent watching his activity 24 hours a day.

NPD: Tablets to overtake notebooks by 2016 as the most popular mobile ‘PC’ [TECHCRUNCH]

Tablets, and specifically the iPad from Apple, have been one of the big drivers for growth in mobile in the last couple of years, but figures out today from NPD indicate that their popularity is going to get even bigger: the market for tablets, its researchers predict, is set to boom from 121 million shipped tablets today to 416 million devices by 2017, when they will overtake notebooks to become the most popular mobile PC device, driven by a drop in costs and a rise in features. Overall mobile PC shipments will reach 809 million units by 2017, from 347 million today.