So, word on the street is that AT&T is looking to buy T-Mobile USA so it can either acquire sufficient spectrum assets to remain operational and save T-Mobile USA from imploding or it wants to remove a robust and viable competitor from the market, torture puppies and burn the Constitution.

Despite how it may appear, I do try to avoid bringing Apple into every one of my WOTW columns, though by doing so I make this job harder than it needs to be. I mean the company is such an integral part of the decisions that many in this industry make that to not include them is really a job itself. Plus, with names like “iPad” it seems Apple products and decisions are ripe for some ribbing.

Wow! Now that was a crazy week for the mobile device market. First Google went all crazy in announcing plans to acquire Motorola Mobility to the chagrin of it seems just about everyone; and just yesterday Hewlett-Packard went even crazier announcing it was basically shuttering its mobile operations including the WebOS business it acquired along with Palm last year for more than $1 billion.

Just a few hours ago the UK’s police force announced they had arrested a member of hacking collective LulzSec in Shetland, an island off the north coast of Scotland (not, as Fox reported in the US, in London).

As a mobile news site which thrives on rumor and gossip, we love it when the industry springs a leak and spews out information not quite ready to be released, and today was just such a day.

Yesterday Apple held their quarterly earnings call to announce their revenues for the last three months and, somewhat unsurprisingly, they managed another quarter or massive growth, huge profits and all-round good times.

Recently-disbanded hacking collective LulzSec, who made waves this summer by hacking high-profile organisations such as the FBI, Sony and the US Senate, have apparently reformed to join the backlash currently engulfing Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

A few months ago Amazon surprised the world by launching its Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, a music locker service that allowed users to upload and store their entire music collection (well, up to 5GB of it) to stream and download as they wished.

Over here in the UK a long-running investigation has been taking place into the actions of the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid the News of the World. Around two years ago it was discovered that the paper had hired private investigators to hack the phones of celebrities in order to extract salacious gossip – however in the past 72 hours the spat has exploded into a full-blown national emergency.

For a little over a year Microsoft has been extracting license fees from HTC for their use of Google’s Android operating system, on the basis that Android infringes several of Microsoft’s patents. While their claims have yet to be tested in court, Microsoft has been dangling the threat of lawsuits in front of other Android manufacturers, including Motorola and Barnes & Noble.