Ed Oswald

Contempt of court proceedings against Kazaa owner Sharman Networks began Thursday in an Australian federal court in Sydney, with a judge suggesting that it would not be out of the realm of possibility that jail time could be doled out to Sharman executives.

The Australian music industry dragged Sharman back into court, accusing it of failing to follow a September 5 ruling that ordered it to prevent Australian users from committing piracy on its network. Sharman disagrees with that assessment, pointing to the fact that it was blocking users from the country through IP-filtering technology.

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UPDATED Just one day after it signed a licensing agreement with RIM rival NTP, wireless e-mail technology maker Visto announced on Thursday that it had filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft. The suit claims that Windows Mobile 5.0 is a "blatant infringement" on Visto technology.

Microsoft told BetaNews Wednesday that while it could not comment on the suit as the company had not yet reviewed the complaint, it wished "to underscore that Microsoft stands behind its products and respects the intellectual property rights of others."

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More changes are in store for Redmond as Microsoft plans to reorganize its entertainment division into four smaller groups to make it more competitive. Details of the split leaked out via an internal memo sent this week by Robbie Bach, head of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division.

Bach would control MSN Music after the split, and the group that handles relations with the entertainment industry -- previously under the Windows group -- would now be under his jurisdiction.

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Google on Thursday said it was launching a new music service that would make it easier for users to find information on artists, album titles and song lyrics. Google Music would also provide links to download songs if they are available from the major digital music services.

The search engine cautioned speculators from reading too much into the new feature, as it said it had no plans for a digital music service of its own, but rather sending traffic to other sites.

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A report released Wednesday by the Harvard Medical School may turn some common assumptions about computer usage on their head. According to the report, titled "Hands: Strategies for Strong, Pain-Free Hands," heavy keyboarding may not be responsible for incidences of carpal tunnel syndrome after all.

Carpal tunnel is caused when nerves in the wrist are pinched, however it's not caused by frequent use of a keyboard, claims the report. Instead, it is caused by heredity, body weight, fracture, or even pregnancy.

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IBM said that it was strengthening its partnership with Linux operating system vendors Red Hat and Novell on Wednesday, announcing it had added them to the company's strategic alliance program. The partnership is expected to make the Linux buying experience simpler and easier for customers.

Customers have been asking for packaged deals where they can deal with one entity for both its hardware and software needs, IBM said. It is hoped that the agreement will strengthen the company's position in Brazil, Russia, India, China and Korea by driving more open source deals in these developing markets.

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The European Parliament voted 378 to 197 with 30 abstentions on Wednesday to approve a plan that would give law enforcement access to telephone and Internet data to help combat crime and fight terrorism. The legislation means service providers would be forced to log messages and conversations.

Under the new rules, businesses would be required to keep a record of phone calls from landline and mobile phones, text messages, and Internet-based conversations for a period of up to two years.

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VoIP provider Vonage said on Wednesday that all of its nationwide customers now have access to enhanced 911 services. The news means Vonage can continue to sign up subscribers in all states. In the event local authorities cannot display the customers name or address through E911, it would offer basic 911 service.

The call would be answered by the local public safety answering point, or PSAP. As an additional service, Vonage will also create and staff a national 911 emergency response center to provide emergency assistance in the event that the 911 network fails or is unavailable. "Not only are we spending over $50 million, but we're working with public safety to create a framework to hasten this national deployment and remove any local roadblocks," said Vonage CEO Jeff Citron.

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Intel's next-generation mobile platform, codenamed "Napa", will use a quarter of the power, but still see boosts in performance, the chipmaker said on Tuesday. Facing fiercer competition from rival AMD, Intel is looking for ways to ensure it remains dominant in the processor industry.

The Napa chipset will be based on the company's new "Yonah" microprocessor, which is Intel's first dual-core mobile chip. According to tests, Yonha will use 28 less power while performing 68 perfect quicker than the Pentium M used in Intel's Centrino package.

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British tycoon Richard Branson's dream of a space tourism airline came one step closer to reality on Tuesday. Virgin Galactic, the company created for the project, announced it had struck an agreement with the state of New Mexico to build a $200 million "spaceport."

Virgin Galactic has agreed to locate both its headquarters and Mission Control within the state, which would be built on a 27 square-mile area of state-owned lands in southern New Mexico.

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Apparently taking cues from Microsoft, Google late Tuesday announced that it would allow users to personalize their homepage much in the way Live.com already works. The new feature would allow for drag and drop organization, as well as an API to build "modules" for use on the homepage.

Microsoft allows much of the same functionality through its Microsoft Gadgets framework. Both make use of RSS feeds, and can use various Web technologies to give the mini-applications functionality.

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Taiwan's Quanta has been selected as original design manufacturer, or ODM, for MIT's $100 laptop, the One Laptop per Child organization said late Tuesday. While the company may not be familiar to many, it has manufactured computers for Hewlett-Packard and Dell among other companies.

MIT has worked with Quanta before, signing a $20 million five-year research pact in April. The company has agreed to devote research resources to the project in the first and second quarter of next year, with the goal to release the first laptops in the fourth quarter.

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IBM on Tuesday is expected to announce a new software strategy that will allow supercomputing customers to leverage the power of the General Parallel File System (GPFS) across a mixed-vendor computer cluster for the first time.

First developed by Big Blue in 2001, GPFS is the commercial name for the Tiger Shark file system developed by the company's Almaden research laboratory. Orginally built for work on large-scale multimedia projects, it was later extended to parallel computing applications.

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The much-anticipated Motorola PEBL will launch with T-Mobile as a Web-only exclusive on Wednesday, BetaNews has learned.

The move by the nation's fourth largest carrier signifies the beginning of a more aggressive marketing campaign by T-Mobile USA to occur in 2006. This would happen through phone exclusives and a continuation of the company's philosophy of being the go-to wireless carrier for budget-conscious consumers.

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Honda on Tuesday debuted the second-generation model of its humanoid robot ASIMO, adding new features that for the first time could make the robot useful in real life situations.

Previously, the company rolled out ASIMO to entertain on stage at its press events, and it had been used as a symbol of the Japanese spirit of ingenuity. However, now Honda says the robot is ready for real world tasks.

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