Ed Oswald

Microsoft on Thursday strengthened its intellectual property protection for its partners developing devices based on the Windows Embedded and Mobile platforms. The expansion now offers these OEMs comparable IP protection to those offered for other Microsoft products.

Under the plan, the company would now provide protection of patent, copyright, trademark and trade secret claims in every country that Microsoft offers the Embedded and Mobile products and removes the monetary cap related to defense costs.

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Lawyers for the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust division said Thursday that Microsoft has agreed to disclose information on its Windows Server operating system. This effectively prevents any possible action by the government over concerns that Microsoft was not in compliance with the 2002 antitrust settlement.

These concerns first came to the forefront in October of last year, when U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly reprimanded the company for not moving fast enough in opening up the Windows platform.

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Google released a new version of its desktop search utility on Thursday, allowing searches across multiple computers, the ability to send Sidebar items to friends, deeper customization of Sidebar features, and password-protected search.

The new features will be part of Google Desktop, which includes a Google-like search function and Sidebar, a movable palette of various mini-applications.

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If Howard Stern is considered the King of all Media, Oprah Winfrey could very well be considered the Queen. Winfrey's Harpo Studios announced that it had signed a three-year, $55 million exclusive deal to produce a programming channel for XM Satellite Radio beginning in September of this year called "Oprah and Friends." The move would be the first major radio venture for Winfrey, who already has her daytime talk show, "O" Magazine, and the Oxygen television network.

"Together with my friends, we look forward to creating programming that will entertain, inform and inspire our listening audience on XM," Winfrey said in a statement. Several popular Oprah personalities will make regular appearances on the network, including Bob Greene, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Dr. Robin Smith, Marianne Williamson, Nate Berkus, and Gayle King. All programming would originate from a new XM studio to be built at Harpo Studios in Chicago.

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Blackberry maker Research in Motion released details of a software workaround Thursday, which would be implemented in the event it loses a February 24 injunction hearing. A decision is expected there that could shut down the service in the United States. The workaround would require users to download a software update, however it would keep the BlackBerry messaging system working.

Chairman and co-CEO of RIM Jim Balsillie said he remained optimistic that RIM and NTP could reach a settlement, however he warned NTP of making threats and said the workaround "will hopefully lead to more reasonable negotiations since NTP risks losing all future royalties if the workaround is implemented." According to RIM, the workaround has already been vetted for any legal issues and found that it would not infringe on any NTP patent.

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Gateway chief executive Wayne Inouye abruptly stepped down on Thursday amid the company's struggles to stay relevant in an industry increasingly dominated by Dell and HP. In Inyoue's place, chairman and director Rick Snyder would serve as the company's interim CEO. According to a statement from the company, Inouye left to pursue "other interests," but would serve in an advisory role until a permanent successor is named.

"On behalf of the Board, I want to thank Wayne for his efforts during the
past two years to stabilize and build the company," Snyder said in a statement. He also said he would continue Inouye's work on bringing the company back to profitability. A new permanent CEO is expected to be named by late summer, the company said.

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IBM on Wednesday announced that it would be using the processors it co-developed for the Sony PlayStation 3 in an upcoming server product aimed at those who require graphic-intensive and numeric applications.

"Today's announcement puts Cell into an IBM product for the first time, taking it outside of the gaming realm -- and indeed, the Cell solution announced today is the same chip used in PS3," IBM spokesperson Charles Zinkowski told BetaNews.

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Vonage filed for an IPO on Wednesday, hoping to raise a quarter-billion dollars in investment capital as well as announcing the hiring of a new CEO. Mike Snyder, formerly president of security firm ADT, will take over February 27 replacing founder Jeffrey Citron.

Niether the amount of shares nor a price range were offered in the company's SEC filing, however the announcement ends months of speculation that the company was planning to go public. The company has more than 1.4 million customers, however still has not turned a profit in the extremely competitive VoIP industry.

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Microsoft disclosed another Windows Metafile (WMF) vulnerability Tuesday, saying an attacker could execute code as the logged-in user. The company discovered four ways that the flaw could be exploited, however it stressed the latest flaw is very limited in scope.

Only users of Internet Explorer 5.01 Service Pack 4 on Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 and Internet Explorer 5.5 Service Pack 2 on Windows Millennium are affected by the problem, Microsoft said.

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In an effort to clean up its image, BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen is now looking into a plan that would begin to clamp down on the hundreds of sites and software programs using the trademark without permission.

Cohen is pushing for legal uses of the technology these days, and the open source license to use BitTorrent's work needs to change, the Inquirer reported Wednesday. Because of this policy, a large number of software titles have emerged who claim compatibility with the technology, which BitTorrent has little control over.

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The Internet is now the most common type of consumer complaint in New York, State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer said Wednesday. The Internet passed banking and automobiles and accounted for 15 percent of all complaints received in 2005. In total, 7,723 complaints were received, up 28 percent from 2004. 6,164 credit and banking complaints were filed, down eight percent, and automobile complaints totaled 5,514, down 12 percent. Altogether, the attorney general's office processed some 51,000 complaints during the year.

The most common complaints related to some aspect of online auctions or e-commerce along with computer spyware and spam. "The Internet has become the new Main Street of our society," Spitzer said. "It has brought great benefits, but also new opportunities for the unscrupulous."

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Sony Pictures set prices Wednesday for its Blu-ray disc titles that will be available in retail outlets later this year, while announcing a new strategy to market titles by bundling different formats together.

For example, Sony plans to bundle DVD-UMD combo packs of the same movie together starting in the end of March, priced at $28.95 USD. The cost would be over 40 percent less than buying the discs separately, and the studio plans to do the same for Blu-ray discs.

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In yet another symbol of Microsoft's softening dominance of the computer industry, news broke Tuesday that Google may be close to a deal with Dell to preinstall its software on new computers from the manufacturer.

According to the Wall Street Journal, quoting sources close to the matter, Google would pay Dell $1 billion over three years for the rights to place its software as the default applications on new Dell computers.

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If you think everyone and their mother has a blog these days, you're probably right. Web log aggregator Technorati released details of a study Monday that showed that the site now tracks some 27.2 million Web logs across the Web.

The site indexes 75,000 new Web logs every day, an average of one every second. The percentage of those bloggers still updating their sites three months after its creation remained about the same at a little over 50 percent. It also found that at least 2.7 million of them update their Web logs at least once a week.

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Microsoft Tuesday made public plans for its security package called Windows OneCare, which comes with anti-virus and anti-spyware tools as well as backup and other utilities. While the company plans to release another beta of the product at the end of this month, Microsoft will accept no new beta testers after the end of April in preparation for a June launch.

Windows Defender would be included with the product, although it is not expected to be integrated into the OneCare console until after the June launch. Annual subscription fees for the service would be $50 USD, although beta testers would receive a promotional price of $20 USD for the first year of service.

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