Normally when we talk about EA it's to tell you about how they've come up with a new way to make their customers angry, but not today. EA has announced that they are going to discontinue using their Online Pass program which disabled online features of a game if you borrowed it from a friend or bought it used and if you wanted to play online you had to pay and additional fee. Sony and Microsoft has also discontinued their use of similar programs which is probably why EA is doing the same but in the end this is good news for gamers. The Verge has more details.

Electronic Arts has a reputation to rebuild, and today the video game company is making one important gesture: VentureBeat reports that EA is getting rid of its oft-loathed Online Pass program. Basically, Online Pass was an attempt to allow Electronic Arts to profit even from second-hand game sales using a form of DRM: it would restrict multiplayer and other online functionality only to users who bought a brand-new copy of the game, or specifically paid EA for a code after their used game purchase.

Google hosted their 2013 I/O keynote yesterday and announced some of their new products for the upcoming year. Google+ has a few new updates, Android has a few new features like a music service to take on Spotify, and there will be a special version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 (without all the Samsung software) released. People who were hoping for a new Nexus 7 tablet or Nexus 4 phone will be disappointed but overall the new products announced yesterday seems decent enough. The Verge has more details over here.

I/O is Google’s biggest event of the year, a three-day soiree for the company and its developers to talk about the present and future of Google’s products. It’s also the week Google tends to make its biggest announcements — from the Nexus 7 to Google TV, Chrome to Glass and everything in between, Google plays its biggest cards every year in the middle of May.

IBM has announced that they are going to be retiring the Lotus brand and their famous product Lotus 1-2-3 (IBM acquired Lotus a few years back now). If you've been around personal computers since the beginning you will remember Lotus 1-2-3 and how it probably blew your mind when it was first released. Products like Excel has rendered Lotus 1-2-3 obsolete and it was just a matter of time until it was retired, but it had a good 30 year run. ZDNet has more on the legacy of Lotus 1-2-3.

This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same.