Ed Oswald

The South Korean Fair Trade Commission said Friday it would finalize its ruling that Microsoft engaged in unfair business practices, a charge the company vehemently denies. Microsoft has since vowed to appeal the ruling within 30 days, and may request a stay.

A preliminary ruling fined Microsoft $32 million in December, as well as ordering the company to unbundled its Windows Media Player and Messenger software from the operating system. Microsoft was also mandated to link to competing software.

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A day ahead of a hearing that could decide the future of BlackBerry service in the United States, patent holding company NTP broke its silence on Thursday. The company said it was doing so to address "mischaracterizations" of the validity of its patents.

NTP also went so far as to accuse the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office of wrongdoing in the process where all five of its patents involved in the Research In Motion (RIM) case have been rejected in preliminary judgments. One of those patents was ruled invalid in a final judgment handed down Wednesday.

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The United States Patent and Trademark Office earlier this week granted design company Balthaser the rights to a patent that covers the creation of rich media applications on the Internet. While it may not seem like the news is of any consequence, the San Francisco-based company intends to demand payment from those using a range of Web technologies.

The awarding of the rights to Balthaser is sure to again stir controversy regarding the patent process, especially in light of recent patent fights involving companies such as Visto and NTP.

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Lenovo took the first steps into the United States Thursday, introducing its first branded computers outside the Chinese market. The company held press conferences across the world, as well as in Torino, Italy where the 2006 Winter Olympics is underway. Lenovo says it is used the event to heighten brand recognition outside of China.

The new computers would signify a reentry into a market that IBM, the company it bought, had previously exited. Small businesses and consumers would be the targets for two new desktop lines and a new notebook computer line, Lenovo said.

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Satellite television provider DirecTV will launch a broadband video service for users of its DirecTV Plus digital video recorder, the company said Wednesday. The service would start out with 2,000 videos and debut by the end of the year. A user would need their own high-speed Internet connection to download content.

While pricing was not announced, the downloaded videos would be available for viewing for 24 hours. Customers will either have the option of purchasing the content through the DVR or on the DirecTV Web site.

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Microsoft's MSN division inked two new content deals on Wednesday, including an agreement to rebroadcast the Bob Marley Festival in Miami as well as a deal with Billboard to run a music site on the MSN Latino service.

The 13th Annual Bob Marley Festival "Jam Rock" would be rebroadcast live on Saturday from 7pm to 11pm ET on MSN Video. Scheduled to perform at the concert are Damian Marley, Stephen Marley, Julian Marley, Kaymani Marley and Mother Cedella Marley Booker, along with Toots and the Maytals, Maxie Priest, Mos Def, and Dianah King among others.

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The United States Patent and Trademark Office said that it had found one of the five wireless e-mail patents owned by NTP invalid, and issued a final rejection notice to the patent holding company on Wednesday. The agency had previously rejected all five of NTP's patents in non-final rulings.

No further details about the decision were initially available. The patent was one being cited in an ongoing infringement case involving NTP and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion.

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Windows has narrowly edged out Unix as the top server operating system in terms of revenue, and IBM has surged to the top spot in the Unix market for the first time in nearly a decade. The findings were part of research firm IDC's quarterly and year-end Server Tracker report issued Wednesday.

The firm found that Windows sales accounted for $17.7 billion in 2005 compared to $17.5 billion for Unix. Windows Server sales were up 4.7 percent year-over-year, compared with a 5.9 percent decline in Unix sales.

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EarthLink said Wednesday that it had joined forces with Google to submit a proposal to build a public Wi-Fi network in the city of San Francisco. The plan calls for a two-tier business model, with a free network operated by the search giant, and a faster fee-based service operated by EarthLink.

Both companies had submitted proposals during a six-week period in August and September of last year. However, EarthLink planned to offer a paid service, as it will in Philadelphia and Anaheim, while Google proposed a free citywide network.

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Microsoft will have another legal fight on its hands after the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) announced Wednesday it had filed an antitrust complaint with the European Union. The group consists of several tech companies, including IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Nokia and RealNetworks.

ECIS claims that Microsoft's anti-competitive practices threaten choice for consumers. It asks the EU to stop the company from using its position in the marketplace to push out smaller competitors. It also pressed the EU to move faster in implementing the March 2004 antitrust decision.

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AOL said Tuesday that it would raise the price of its dial-up offering by $2 in an effort to encourage dial-up subscribers to sign up for broadband services provided by the company. Both its traditional service and its new broadband offering will now be priced at $25.90 USD per month.

The new pricing is set to take effect March 9. Not affected would be the company's 10-hour limited-use dialup and bring-your-own access plan, both priced at $14.95 USD monthly, and its annual prepaid plan, which retails for $239.40 with the option for a partial refund if the customer cancels early.

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A British auto insurance company said on Tuesday that in-car GPS navigation systems might be doing more harm than good by distracting drivers. Even more surprising, the company's findings suggest that navigation systems could be more disruptive than trying to read a map at the wheel.

The findings, released by Privilege Insurance, showed that 19 percent of drivers who used their GPS lost concentration while driving, compared to 17 percent of map readers.

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AT&T said Tuesday that it had reached a deal with Yahoo to bring its Yahoo! Go service to Cingular customers that live within the 13-state region AT&T serves. Also, select stores in Austin, Texas; Columbus, Ohio; and Los Angeles would be able to offer the service.

Consumers who are subscribers of both Cingular and AT&T Yahoo Internet would be able to access customized content through their mobile phone. The service will initially be available from Cingular through the Nokia 6682 mobile phone.

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German technology site Heise Online reported Monday that a serious flaw has been discovered within Mac OS X. The vulnerability could put users in danger of falling victim to a scripting attack, say security experts. But like the previous "virus" reported last week, manual interaction is required.

The danger exists in how a specially designed binary file is written. To the untrained eye, the file may appear as a normal QuickTime .mov for example, but will actually open up the operating system's Terminal application and execute scripting commands.

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Google admitted Monday that a security risk exists within the "Search Across Computers" feature in Google Desktop 3 for enterprise users, however it argued the function posed as much of a security risk as e-mail does.

The issue surrounds the way Google caches data on a remote server before sending it to the user's shared computers. In many enterprise environments, such an action would be considered an unacceptable security risk.

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