The guys over at the E-Sports Entertainment Association had a great idea to help fun some of their upcoming tournaments, add a bitcoin client into their E-sports software and have their users mine bitcoins for them with their spare CPU and GPU cycles. Seems harmless right? Well, the guys at E-Sports forgot to tell everyone about their plan and in the end stirred up quite a controversy and people are understandably mad at them now. Arstechnica has more details on this story.

Competitive video gaming community E-Sports Entertainment Association secretly updated its client software with Bitcoin-mining code that tapped players' computers to mint more than $3,600 worth of the digital currency, one of its top officials said Wednesday.

The admission by co-founder and league administrator Eric ‘lpkane’ Thunberg came amid complaints from users that their ESEA-supplied software was generating antivirus warnings, computer crashes, and other problems. On Tuesday, one user reported usage of his power-hungry graphics processor was hovering in the 90-percent range even when his PC was idle. In addition to consuming electricity, the unauthorized Bitcoin code could have placed undue strain on the user's hardware since the mining process causes GPUs to run at high temperatures.

The new numbers are in from the IDC showing tablet sales and it looks like Apple might be losing some of its steam thanks to all the cheaper alternatives out there. Apple is still growing, just not as fast as Samsung, ASUS, and Amazon, which are all showing huge growth thanks to their impressive sales figures on smaller tablets. Apple is still the leaders, but that lead is slowing disappearing. CNET has more details.

While Apple is still the world's No. 1 tablet maker, Samsung is No. 2 and growing at a faster rate. Looking specifically at year-over-year growth from first quarter numbers, Apple grew by 65 percent -- not bad. But, Samsung grew by 282 percent, Asus grew by 350 percent, and Amazon grew by 157 percent.

The question is: Is this part and parcel of a bigger problem? Is the rest of the market getting smarter and better -- and also less expensive?

Google+ might still be a distant second to Facebook, but it is still growing according to a new report from GlobalWebIndex. Google+ apparently now has 359 Million active users (Facebook has over 1 Billion) but those numbers aren't bad and are still growing. In fact, Google+ is growing faster than Twitter and could eventually become the #2 social media site. Phys.org has the details on this new report and a bunch of fun Google+ facts.

When Google launched its social networking service, Google Plus, during the summer of 2011, tens of millions of people clamoured to sign up for an account.

But within months, critics had panned the new service, pointing to user pages bereft of meaningful content and exchanges. They said the new social site just wasn't, well, social. It seemed as though Facebook had cornered the market—Google was too late to the party.