[WEB2] Congressman to Comcast: Stop interfering with BitTorrent
[WEB2] Hot deal: Canon PowerShot SD1000 Elph for $170
Canon SD1000 Elph (Credit: CNET Networks) As a back-pocket backup, the Elph series is well respected and widely enjoyed. Canon left off the manual controls on this snapshooters' favorite, but for what it is, it's a sound product and a great deal. It started out on the market earlier this year at $220 or higher, and sellers are starting to lower the price. On Thursday, Amazon's winning the race to the bottom, especially since in most cases they offer free shipping for this item. According t...
[WEB2] Coming next week: A tax on your e-mail?
When the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill last week extending a ban on Internet access taxes, it may have opened up the possibility of previously forbidden taxes on paid e-mail and other Web services. That's what a Congressional Research Service attorney concluded in a two-page memorandum (click here for a PDF) released on Thursday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the author of the original tax ban in 1998. The CRS is a federally funded sort of "think tank" charged with c...
[WEB2] Who else has stopped caring about the Blu-ray/HD DVD war?
The Blu-ray winner(Credit: CNET Networks) Am I the only person who couldn't care any less about the HD DVD/Blu-ray war? For a while, I was captivated by the prospect of a Sony format winning the format war or the possibility of another Betamax debacle. At one point, I actually cared who won the format war and told everyone which format I believed would win. But with Wednesday's news that cited figures showing Sony's Blu-ray format had outsold HD DVD by almost 2-to-1, I finally had enough....
[WEB2] Ford flying high with futuristic Boeing UAV
Boeing's HALE (high altitude long endurance) unmanned aircraft runs on hydrogen fuel.(Credit: Boeing) Boeing is reporting progress in simulation tests of its HALE (high altitude long endurance) aircraft, an unmanned plane that runs on hydrogen. While it has not yet gone aloft, the propeller-driven HALE aircraft was able to run for a total of three days in a chamber that simulated flight at 65,000 feet. The eventual goal is to get it to fly for more than a week at a time with a one-ton payl...
[WEB2] Microsoft's first quarter: A blowout
Updated 2:00 p.m. Microsoft reported a strong jump in first quarter revenue and earnings on Thursday, as the company benefited from Windows Vista and the launch of Halo 3. The software maker said it took in $4.29 billion in profits, or 45 cents per share, on revenue of $13.76 billion for the three months ending September 30. As for Vista, the company said it saw double-digit growth in multi-year agreements by businesses and saw "the vast majority" of consumers opting for a premium version ...
[WEB2] Digging into Facebook's ad future
The fireworks have faded, the champagne has been uncorked and drunk, and now it's time to get down to business: Now that Microsoft has acquired a $240 million stake in Facebook to expand its advertising partnership, how is either company going to profit from the deal? "That's the question that has surrounded social networks for the past few years," said Debbie Williamson, an analyst at eMarketer. "Right now, a lot of (the revenue) is from old-fashioned banner advertising that's not very targe...
[WEB2] Robot development conference hits Silicon Valley
SAN JOSE, Calif.--I'm down in the Valley on Thursday for the Robo Development conference, and, having been to a few other robotics events, something seems very different. In the past, I've been to RoboNexus, a show aimed at presenting kids and adults alike with the latest developments in robotics technology. And I've been to RoboGames, a display of pure robot-on-robot battle fury. And there's no doubt that Robo Development is different. For one, it's smaller. For two, there's no pervasive...
[WEB2] Vonage, Verizon settle patent spat for up to $120 million
Updated at 2:53 p.m. PDT: Vonage on Thursday said it had resolved an ongoing patent dispute with Verizon Communications at a price tag of up to $120 million, ending what has been a mostly gloomy saga for the struggling Internet phone company. The announcement comes about a month after New Jersey-based Vonage, which has yet to turn a profit, lost the bulk of an appeal regarding three voice over Internet protocol patents held by the nation's second largest telephone compan...
[WEB2] Yahoo supporting wind power in India, hydropower in Brazil
Yahoo is purchasing offsets from wind turbines in India and investing in hydropower projects in Brazil, according to India news portal Sify.com. Yahoo is planning to make up for the 250,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases it emitted last year, committing to become "carbon neutral" by the end of this year. That amount of greenhouse gases is roughly equivalent to driving 35,000 cars for a year or lighting the Las Vegas strip for two months, said Christine Page, director of climate and energ...
[WEB2] Yahoo opening up home page to outside sources
Yahoo is changing its home page to add links to outside sites for the first time as part of its move toward more openness and focus on being the front door to the Internet for most people. The company "turned on" its new main page to the general public on Thursday. It looks the same, except the items in the Featured section in the center of the page now include links to news and other items located on outside sites. The items are chosen by editors. In testing, the site has linked to The Wa...
[WEB2] SCO hopes selling Unix will raise $36 million
The SCO Group, working to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, hopes to sell its Unix assets to York Capital Management for up to $36 million, the company said this week in regulatory and bankruptcy court filings. Through the deal, York would provide SCO with $10 million in cash; up to $10 million in credit to fund its Linux-related legal fight and to get 20 percent of revenue from that action; $10 million for a 20 percent stake in the company; and $6 million to license the Hipch...
[WEB2] NetApp founder brushes off Sun threat
A day after Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz said his company will sue to have Network Appliances' file-server products removed from the market, NetApp's founder Dave Hitz brushed off the threat and took issue with Schwartz's open-source reasoning. "This sounds like Sun's broad threats when they sued Azul, but in the end, Sun didn't put Azul out of business or even stop them from shipping products. I'm quite confident that two years from now--or however long it takes thi...
[WEB2] Sun countersuit: NetApp violates 12 patents
A month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun Microsystems, alleging the server and software company's ZFS file system infringes seven NetApp patents. Sun on Thursday fired back with a suit that claims NetApp violates 12 of Sun's. Sun's suit also argues that NetApp's patents are invalid and that it doesn't infringe them anyway. And it requests an injunction prohibiting the company from selling any products that infringe Sun's patents. Patent suits are often expensive and acrimonious procee...
[WEB2] Security features expected within Mac OS X Leopard
In advance of Friday's general release of Apple Mac OS X Leopard, Apple has posted a variety of preview pages, one of which details new security features. In Apple's preview, the Cupertino vendor cites 11 specific enhancements that should make Leopard more secure than Tiger. Library randomization: This is huge. The technology behind this, address space layout randomization (ASLR), randomly arranges the positions of key data areas. This prevents malware authors from predicting the targeted...
[WEB2] LG goes small with latest plasma
(Credit: LG) It's not often--if ever--that a TV maker brags about a smaller model these days, unless it's talking about some type of new technology. Yet that's just what LG is doing this week in announcing what it calls "the world's only 32-inch plasma." There are a lot of reasons for this, one of them being that this size is the fastest-growing segment in the industry primarily for price but also for the "second TV" market, as noted by Slippery Brick. And LG and other plasma makers are r...
[WEB2] Palamida: Rival snitched open-source database
Unfettered sharing is one of the hallmarks and touted virtues of open-source programming, but even companies closely allied to the movement can grow uncomfortable with such liberal principles. Case in point: Palamida and Black Duck Software, two rivals that offer software and services to help companies ensure open-source and proprietary software aren't inappropriately intermixing. On Monday, Black Duck announced its Open Source License Resource Center, described as "an online guide o...
[WEB2] Peak oil projections from Chevron's CTO
REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--How much conventional oil is there left in the ground? Close to 2 trillion gallons, according to Don Paul, Chevron's chief technology officer. The "geological endowment" of conventional oil--that is, the amount of oil in the Earth--once totaled about 3 trillion gallons, he said during a presentation at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations conference here. We've used about 1.1 trillion. Oil companies with current technologies can't get it all out of the ground, so...
[WEB2] Ezmo promises legal music sharing
Today is the official U.S. launch of Ezmo, a Norwegian Web service that allows users to post and share their entire digital music collections through a simple Flash application. I was actually playing around with the service last week--I pretended I was from the U.K., where Ezmo's been available for some time--and the user experience is very straightforward. You can post music from any folder directly through the site, or you can download a small Uploader application that will automatica...
[WEB2] Piper Jaffray: AT&T paying Apple $18 per iPhone, per month
The exact details of AT&T's revenue-sharing agreement with Apple have not been disclosed, but one analyst thinks that over the two-year life of a user contract, the amount exceeds the actual price of the iPhone. Silicon Alley Insider spotted a research note from Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster estimating that Apple is receiving $18 per month for each iPhone subscriber, under the revenue-sharing agreement between the two companies. Apple has confirmed that such an agreement exists, but has not ...