Class action suit hits Facebook and affiliates with breach of privacy
The biggest and most significant legal action against now-leading social network Facebook was filed on Tuesday, and will actually test the theory of whether its Beacon behavior sharing program constituted a criminal conspiracy.
On Tuesday, a group of 18 California residents including some who publicly complained last year that Facebook's controversial Beacon feature was sharing too much of their personal online habits with the rest of the world, sued Facebook and many of its more prominent Beacon partners, including Blockbuster and Overstock.com. They're not only claiming Facebook and its partners conspired to invade their privacy, but they're citing a California penal code that may have been originally intended to outlaw information-gathering Trojan horse programs, in a move which could leave Beacon's participants criminally liable.
Microsoft launches its own blog for 'Windows 7'
The official marketing channel for the next edition of Windows was opened this afternoon, as Microsoft quietly raised the curtains on what it's positioning as an open channel for ideas regarding what the company should add to its next OS.
In their initial post to the "Engineering Windows 7" blog this afternoon, its two hosts -- Windows senior vice presidents Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky -- acknowledged that their company will indeed divulge the first engineering details about Windows 7, as it's still being called, on October 27 at the Professional Developers' Conference in Los Angeles.
Sprint to discontinue its PCS Mail service
In another apparent effort to streamline its services to focus on revenue, wireless carrier Sprint will stop providing the servers for e-mail service for its PCS phone customers, although it will let customers pick their own providers.
As a notice on its Web site indicates, Sprint will stop providing PCS Mail service on December 31. Giving customers plenty of time to make the transition, it's set up instructions and support for moving e-mail accounts, contacts, and even existing messages to Google's Gmail, AOL Mail, Yahoo Mail, or Windows Live Hotmail.
Appeals court upholds validity of open source licenses
When a developer distributes a modified version of open source code as his own without attribution to the original author, is that a copyright violation? Earlier, a district court said no. Yesterday, an appeals court strongly disagreed.
A typical copyright violation is the variety where someone makes money from the sale of a product or service whose idea or whose content belonged to someone else. The usual reason someone would license an idea or content to anyone else is in order to share in the proceeds. In the open source community, the motivation is different: The author seeks only credit, some measure of validation, and for others not to claim his work as their own.
Both houses of Congress to debate nationwide free broadband
While the FCC continues to stall and postpone its debate over holding yet another auction for free broadband service spectrum, two bills certain to be debated in both houses of Congress may just get its attention.
After the US Federal Communications Commission's tremendous 700 MHz auction concluded earlier this year, some congresspeople were disappointed that it had not achieved one of its originally promised outcomes: the creation of a free, nationwide broadband service for public safety providers, and even for everyday consumers.
Licensing bug brings down VMware ESX data clusters
Could everyone's VMware licenses really have expired on August 12? That's the question hundreds of major data centers found themselves asking, right after midnight when they realized they weren't rebooting or resuming.
In what appears to be a fault with its license validation, virtualized data clusters worldwide running on VMware's ESX hypervisor found themselves unable to boot yesterday. Admins received messages saying their licenses had expired, whether or not they actually had.
Eleven major soft spots addressed by latest Patch Tuesday
The full effect of yesterday's round of patches from Microsoft is just now being felt. This time, it's not the worldwide DNS flaw that's the big issue, but the typical stuff that afflicts Microsoft products, including and especially Office.
One of the "critical" vulnerabilities addressed yesterday affects older versions of Microsoft Word, and was acknowledged by the company last month. It involves intentionally malformed documents that, when parsed by Word, cause it to crash but also leave memory corrupted. Within that corrupt memory can lurk remnant code that could then be executed to give a remote, malicious user unauthorized privileges.
Two key Icahn 'dream team' members may join Yahoo's board
If the door is going to be left open for a possible future merger of Yahoo and Microsoft, someone's going to have to volunteer to plant their feet there. Today, it appears a Microsoft favorite and Viacom's former CEO may do the honors.
Early reports this morning from multiple sources, including The Wall Street Journal, indicate that the two individuals Yahoo agreed with Icahn Partners to allow for nomination to its Board of Directors, will be former Universal Studios and former Viacom CEO Frank Biondi and former Nextel chief and founder John Chapple. Carl Icahn himself would not be nominated.
Few hours remaining in ZoneAlarm ForceField one-day giveaway
You have until 3:00 am EDT 9:00 am EDT Wednesday morning, August 13, to download ZoneAlarm's ForceField browser virtualization envelope and receive a license key good for a one-year subscription to the product on one PC.
The basic premise of ForceField is to build a kind of virtualization envelope around the active Web browser, where essentially anything to which a browser would normally connect is divided from the operating system by one layer of abstraction. When a malicious tool tries to leverage a security hole in some other product by way of communicating with the browser -- as was the case with last year's exploit of Apple QuickTime, which relied on Mozilla Firefox -- it won't find that hole because it doesn't appear to exist within the abstraction layer.
Facebook users unite in outrage over changed layout
Some don't like it when others clean out their houses while they're gone on vacation, and a few might hate it when someone else cleans up. Facebook is now cleaner, brighter, and whiter, and tens of thousands are unhappy.
Nearly 140,000 Facebook accounts have been entered into a group in support of an online petition opposing, for one reason or another, the service's new Web site layout unveiled late last month. And that's just one group; another, entitled "People Against the New Facebook System," has garnered close to 33,000 accounts; and another, "The New Facebook Layout Sucks," gathering nearly 8,000 as of Tuesday afternoon.
New Dell Latitudes promise 10 to 19 hours of battery life
In an announcement that harks back to Dell's roots, when during the 1990s it tested a number of its laptops during four-hour flights, the company said its new Latitudes will add continuous battery life for as long as 19 hours straight.
At a Dell press event in San Francisco this morning, its Senior Vice President for the business products group, Jeffrey Clarke, filled in the biggest missing element in Dell's description of its completely redesigned Latitude product line to this point: Dell, he says, has developed a proprietary power cell technology that will enable Latitudes to run continuously while unplugged for at least 10 hours, and intermittently for as much as 19 hours straight.
New Visual C++ refresh has tools for Office, IE 'look and feel'
Download Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 from FileForum now.
This contains the latest Feature Pack for Visual C++, which updates the "refresh" of the final beta, which was released last April.
Visual Studio 2008 SP1, .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 released
Download .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 from FileForum now.
This is the redistributable package for Windows users to be able to run .NET programs.
This afternoon, Microsoft unveiled a slate of new enhanced releases, including an updated .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 that had been in beta only since February, and the first service pack for Visual Studio 2008 only six months after its premiere.
Cablevision DVR ruling bumps Internet Radio decision to September
Last week, an appeals court determined that Cablevision wasn't liable for copyright infringement if their customers chose they programs it recorded. Could that ruling present a new loophole for Internet streaming radio?
In a completely unanticipated twist due to unforeseen repercussions, the Copyright Office of the US Library of Congress extended its hearing for public comments on the viability of copyright law for Internet radio into next month. This after it was determined that an appeals court decision last week in favor of cable TV provider Cablevision, ruling that its proposed remote DVR technology was not in violation of copyright, may have an impact on current copyright law regarding Internet streaming radio.
Intel readies the world for 'generation 7' of its CPUs
In 1993, Intel blanketed the world with advertising that stopped just short of placing a "TM" in front of the number "5" in the public conscience. This morning, the company has sent out an advance warning: Prepare for an onslaught of "7."
In advance of its annual US Developers' Forum next week, Intel today formally announced its branding for the generation of processors we've been calling by its code-name, "Nehalem." Rather than stay the current course of emphasizing the number of cores -- in which case, it might have been "Core 4" -- Intel will formally christen its desktop version of Nehalem with the new brand nomenclature "Core i7."
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