Ed Oswald

Google has taken some time to dispel concerns about its expanded partnership with AOL. With the clarifications, however, it now looks like the deal was not so sweet, with the only real positive for Time Warner's online unit being the $1 billion dollar investment by the search engine.

Google vice president of search Marissa Mayer posted the clarifications to the Google Blog on Thursday night. "The recent announcement of the AOL partnership has been the source of a lot of rumors and misconceptions. We'd like to clear some of those up," Mayer wrote.

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The courts have blocked yet another state law preventing the sale of violent video games to minors. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte found that California's video game law unfairly restricts the First Amendment rights to freedom of expression.

The law made it illegal for a retailer to sell a game to a minor that included the "killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being."

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The French Parliament voted Wednesday night to legalize file sharing of music and movie files, a move that is sure to anger the entertainment industry. The French government has also come out against the legislation, and vowed to fight it. If the bill survives, France would be the first country to legalize such P2P usage.

A law would also make it nearly impossible for media companies to sue file swapers within the country. However, the government can attempt to overturn the legislation by reopening it for debate, or getting it turned down by a no-vote in the upper house. The intent of the law, legislators say, is to allow the sharing of such files when they are used privately. Laws against the public use of copyrighted material would still stand.

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Mozilla on Thursday asked Firefox users to create a 30-second broadcast quality television ad for a contest called "Firefox Flicks." The company said that winning ads could possibly be used in global marketing campaigns for Firefox 1.5, the newest version of the open source browser.

The ad contest is the second phase of a full-court press by Mozilla to continue increasing the browser's market share. After an initial surge, the company has found it harder to generate interest through its traditional means.

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Often looked at with a suspicious eye from left-leaning groups for its pro-Republican executives and skewed campaign donations, and already being investigated elsewhere, Diebold was told Wednesday by the State of California that it could not certify the company's e-voting systems without further review.

This isn't the first problem for the polling machine manufacturer. Last week, Leon County, Fla. Officials dropped Diebold after it was discovered memory cards in the company's optical scan machines could be easily tampered with.

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Those looking into the accuracy of Wikipedia following several high-profile cases that showed some may be editing their own entries or intentionally posting false information found even more fodder this week.

An investigation by Rogers Cadenhead of the technology Web log Workbench uncovered that Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, had changed his own biography 18 times. This included edits to remove references to former Wikipedia employee Larry Sanger as a co-founder of the site. He has also made changes to the entry for Bomis, a search engine he helped create.

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Ending a nearly four month dispute between the two companies, Sprint Nextel agreed to purchase affiliate Nextel Partners in a deal worth $6.4 billion. The two sides had wrangled over a purchase price after the merger between Sprint and Nextel was finalized in August.

Under the terms of its agreement with, Nextel Partners reserved the right to demand the wireless carrier purchase the remaining 68 percent of the company it did not already own in the event Nextel was acquired or merged with another wireless carrier.

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Stephen Ward, the IBM executive who helped engineer the merger deal between Lenovo and the venerable PC maker, said Tuesday that he would step down and remain as a consultant to the company. Replacing Ward is former Dell Asia chief William Amelio.

In comments to the press, the company was quick to assure that the decision was Ward's own, and he was not asked to resign nor was he fired. Ward's resignation was expected eventually, although some found the announcement surprising as many analysts viewed him as a key part of the combined company.

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A flaw within Symantec AntiVirus could open users' computers to the execution of arbitrary code when a specially crafted RAR file is scanned, independent security researcher Alex Wheeler said in an advisory on his Web site Tuesday.

Wheeler's work centers on looking for remote stack, heap and buffer overflows, mainly in antivirus products. In the case of this particular flaw, the problem is a result of unchecked 16bit length fields in RAR sub-block header types.

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The Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday that the CAN-SPAM Act has worked, and was effective in protecting consumers from unsolicited e-mail. The agency publicly released a report at a press conference in Washington that studied the effectiveness of the law.

Also announced were three new lawsuits against spam operators who were attempting to sell prescription medication, mortgage offers and a product called Fuel Saver Pro. According to the FTC, Microsoft has provided assistance in all three cases.

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With 2005 almost over, it's time for the yearly Google Zeitgeist, a look at what users of the popular search engine were most commonly searching for during the past 365 days. Heading this year's list were pop star Janet Jackson and Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in August.

"We chose a few key events and phenoms to study, and predictably found the patterns to be amusing or bemusing, challenging or heartening -- kind of like the year itself," Google Zeitgeist team member Karen Wickre explained.

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Despite the fact that fewer consumers will be replacing their computers in 2006 and lagging economic growth, the overall PC market is expected to continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace. The industry is expected to expand by 10.5 percent in 2006, which would be down from 15.8 percent this year.

Low cost and portable PCs will lead growth in the sector, research firm IDC said in its Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker report Tuesday. In the current quarter, IDC now expects shipments to grow about 15 percent, up from earlier expectations of 12.6 percent growth.

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Three Los Angeles area men have been charged with copyright infringement after authorities discovered one was modifying original Xbox consoles to allow pirated games to run on them, then turning them around to be sold at the video game store of the other two.

A complaint was filed against the men in federal court charging the three with conspiracy. The U.S. attorney's office says the three were attempting to conspire to break the copyright protection of the console, and then profit from that action.

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Apple grew the fastest in terms of traffic among the top ten Web brands in the month of November, according to a survey by Nielsen//NetRatings that was released Tuesday. The company's Web site saw a 57 percent increase in traffic year-over-year, driven by its iTunes Music service.

Google and Amazon also recorded significant growth, with increases of 29 and 16 percent, respectively. However, the biggest Web property on the list is still Yahoo, with 103.9 million visitors and ten percent growth in traffic.

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IMLogic warned Tuesday that a new instant messaging worm that attempts to get users to visit an apparently harmless Santa Claus site was making the rounds of the AOL, MSN and Yahoo networks. When users visit the site, a rootkit is delivered to their computer, often named gift.com. Upon execution of the file, it attempts to shut down antivirus software and collect personal information.

Infected users will also spread the worm to people on their buddy list, as it will automatically send the URL to all contacts. IMLogic recommends that users check to make sure their antivirus software is up to date, all current security patches have been applied, and IM clients that are not up to date have been blocked from accessing the network.

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