It's crowd-source funding fever! UK game industry trade group UKIE announced this week that it will be publishing a new crowd funding report that urges the government to pass new legislation that will allow game companies to take advantage of this financing model to fund their businesses or projects. The announcement was no doubt inspired by the success of Double Fine's Kickstarter campaign - which has raised over $1.3 million dollars so far.

Standard & Poor’s (S&P) has lowered Sony long-term credit and debt ratings from "A-" to "BBB+," according to an IndustryGamers report. That report also notes that the firm also removed the ratings from CreditWatch, where it dropped them in November of 2011.

The 15th annual Interactive Achievement Awards at the 2012 DICE Summit in Las Vegas have been announced, with Bethesda Softworks' popular action role-playing game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim taking home a total of five awards including Game of the Year. Skyrim won the Game of the Year, Outstanding Achievement in Story, Role-Playing/Massively Multiplayer Online Game of the Year, Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction, and Outstanding Achievement in Gameplay Engineering awards.

In 2011 AT&T warned its heavy data using mobile customers that it would reduce their connection speed if said usage inched in to the "top five percent." AT&T is defining that metric as anyone who uses more that 2.1 GB of data a month. As chronicled in this NYT blog post, one of AT&T's customers hit the 2.1 GB mark and had his connection throttled. The problem, that customer says, is that he has a data limit of 3GB a month because a legacy unlimited plan.

Double Fine's Kickstarter campaign for the "Double Fine Adventure" game project has surpassed $1 million. Originally they were asking for $500,000 in funding but within eight hours of launching the appeal they had raked in well over $800,000 for a point-and-click adventure game and a documentary to be filmed by 2 Player Productions. Earlier in the day Tim Schafer said that any money over the initial amount would be used to bring the game to other formats.

Bram van der Kolk, the lead programmer at MegaUpload, is out on bail today. The 29-year-old had a hearing in the North Shore District Court before Judge Pippa Sinclair, who sorted out what the bail conditions should be before his release.

U.S. Government Prosecutor Anne Toohey argued that der Kolk would try to set up a MegaUpload replacement as soon as he was out of jail. His lawyer, Guy Foley, called the prosecution's argument ridiculous because he would remain under heavy FBI surveillance.