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Nintendo didn't make a formal statement about the Legend of Zelda's latest delay; instead, the company tucked that news into a game release-date list. (credit: Nintendo)

Nintendo's annual fiscal-year earnings release went live on Wednesday via an announcement from its Japanese arm, and with that release came a very modestly tucked bit of giant news: the firmest launch-window announcement yet for the company's next, still-unnamed game system.

"For our dedicated video game platform business, Nintendo is currently developing a gaming platform codenamed 'NX' with a brand-new concept," the report said in its "outlook" section. "NX will be launched in March 2017 globally." The earnings release did not offer any explanation or clarification about what that "brand-new concept" will be, in spite of recent, patent-related hints about twists such as a new controller.

In even more surprising news, expectations that Nintendo would unveil the NX in time for June's Electronic Entertainment Expo were dashed by a statement from acting Nintendo CEO Tatsumi Kimishima, who confirmed in a Wednesday investor phone call (as reported by The Wall Street Journal's Tokyo bureau correspondent Takashi Mochizuki, that the system will not appear at this year's E3. Nintendo will instead focus its E3 attention "on the new Zelda," Mochizuki reports.

Platinum mass & well-formed crystals from Russia. (public display, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA) (credit: James St. John)

Microsoft's Windows Defender Advanced Threat Hunting team works to track down and identify hacking groups that perpetrate attacks. The focus is on the groups that are most selective about their targets and that work hardest to stay undetected. The company wrote today about one particular group that it has named PLATINUM.

The unknown group has been attacking targets in South East Asia since at least 2009, with Malaysia being its biggest victim with just over half the attacks, and Indonesia in second place. Almost half of the attacks were aimed at government organizations of some kind, including intelligence and defense agencies, and a further quarter of the attacks were aimed at ISPs. The goal of these attacks does not appear to have been immediate financial gain—these hackers weren't after credit cards and banking details—but rather broader economic espionage using stolen information.

Microsoft doesn't appear to know a great deal about the team doing the hacking. They have often used spear-phishing to initially penetrate target networks and seem to have taken great pains to hide their attacks. For example, they've used self-deleting malware to cover their tracks, customized malware to evade anti-virus detection, and malware that limits its network activity to only be active during business hours, so its traffic is harder to notice. Redmond suggests that the adversary is likely a government organization of some kind, due to its organization and the kinds of data it has sought to steal.

Apple's two biggest moneymakers, the iPhone and iPad, are down year-over-year. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple has just released its earnings report for the second quarter of fiscal 2016, which runs from the beginning of January to the end of March. As CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri warned in last quarter's earnings call, iPhone sales were down year-over-year for the first time since the product's launch in 2007. Since the iPhone accounts for around two-thirds of Apple's revenue, this means that Apple is also reporting its first year-over-year quarterly revenue decline since 2003, something CEO Tim Cook referred to as a "pause in [Apple's] growth." iPad and Mac sales are also down, though the Services and "Other products" categories ticked upward.

Apple made $10.5 billion in profit and $58 billion in revenue, compared to $13.6 billion in profit and $58 billion in revenue in Q1 of 2015. Its gross margin was 39.4 percent. These results beat the low end of Apple's guidance for the quarter, which predicted revenue between $50 billion and $53 billion and a profit margin between 39 and 40 percent.

The company predicts that the year-over-year quarterly decline will continue next year—Apple expects it will make between $41 and $43 billion in revenue in the third quarter of fiscal 2016 with profit margins between 37.5 and 38 percent. This is well below the $49.6 billion in revenue that Apple made in Q3 of 2015.