Ed Oswald

One of the largest clients of RIM's BlackBerry service has stepped in and asked that a court ensure the network keeps running for its employees: the U.S. Government. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that lawyers had filed a "statement of interest" on the government's behalf in a U.S. District Court in Virginia.

NTP, the firm that owns the disputed patents in the RIM case, states that any halt to BlackBerry service would only apply to non-government users. However, lawyers for the U.S. Government want more than just a promise to ensure e-mails continue to flow.

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Although it has repeatedly denied any widespread problem with scratching on its diminutive music player, reports appeared on the Web Friday that Apple has begun adding a protective sleeve to new iPod Nano shipments.

"The case we ship with the new 5th generation iPod has received great feedback from customers and we are including a similar case with the iPod nano," Apple spokesperson Steve Dowling told BetaNews.

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Feel like you're not getting a good deal on that moose head you just bought from eBay? The popular auction site unveiled a new feature Thursday that will assist both the buyer and seller in understanding what the going price is for items sold on the service over the past three months.

The premium offering, called Marketplace Research, will allow any user to see both in graphical and text form trends in listing, bidding and pricing of items. Analysts say the service will give prospective sellers an idea of the eBay value of their items, as well as giving buyers a hint at how much they should expect to pay for an item they may want.

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RealNetworks patched two significant vulnerabilities that affect most versions of its Real Player software. One flaw, marked as a "high risk," allows a skin file to be downloaded and applied to the player without the user's permission. The file could contain data that causes a heap overflow, according to eEye Digital Security.

The other more serious flaw involves specially formatted .rm movie files. An attacker could use the file to trigger a direct stack overwrite and thus open up a backdoor to execute malicious code. "RealNetworks has received no reports of machines compromised as a result of the now-remedied vulnerabilities," the company said in an advisory, but pointed out that it "takes all security vulnerabilities very seriously." The patches are available through Real Player's built-in update mechanism.

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Microsoft has put to rest another legal problem. The company announced on Friday that it had reached a settlement with South Korean Internet portal Daum.

Daum had complained to the South Korean Fair Trade Commission in 2001, accusing Microsoft of breaking the law by tying its instant messaging software to Windows. A lawsuit on the same grounds was filed in 2004.

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A U.S. District Court judge granted a temporary injunction against Michigan's violent video games law Wednesday while it is examined for constitutionality. Governor Jennifer Granholm signed the bill into law in September, and it was slated to take effect December 1.

The law would have made the sale of violent video games to minors illegal, and imposed fines of up to $40,000 and three months jail time for those who sell the games, or pose as a parent or guardian to purchase a game for a minor.

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In an effort to create a unified front against Microsoft as well as spur Linux development, five companies joined forces on Thursday to create the Open Invention Network. The company is in the process of gathering patents surrounding the open source OS and will make them available to developers royalty-free.

Three electronics companies are involved: IBM, Philips and Sony, and two Linux software companies: Red Hat and Novell.

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Instant messaging continues to grow as a medium for online communication, according to details of a study released by America Online on Thursday. Instant messaging is up 19 percent, and 38 percent of all users say they now send more IMs than e-mails.

The survey also found that one-third of users connect to instant messaging networks through their mobile phones. This is nearly twice the number recorded last year, when only 19 percent said they used such services, and over three times as high as in 2003, when the number stood at 10 percent.

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Palm CEO Ed Colligan has reiterated his company's support for the Palm OS, responding to the recent barrage of Internet posts suggesting the company may be abandoning its namesake operating system.

In a letter sent to developers Tuesday, Colligan said that the PDA market is "not a zero-sum game" and the company will be producing handsets based on both Windows and Palm OS platforms for the foreseeable future.

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The future of BlackBerry e-mail devices became even cloudier Wednesday. A U.S. District Judge overseeing the case between NTP and RIM said he would not wait for the U.S. Patent Office to review disputed patents before deciding whether to uphold an injunction that would halt the sales of the popular device.

It is not clear if NTP's patents have any merit after an initial rejection by the patent office. However, a final decision on the matter could take up to two years.

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Alibaba.com, the company that now controls Yahoo's Chinese offerings, announced Wednesday that it was relaunching the Yahoo site to focus on search. The site currently holds second place in the country with a 32 percent search share, five points behind market leader Baidu.com.

The Chinese company took control of Yahoo! China in August, as part of a deal in which the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company purchased a 40 percent share in Alibaba.

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Verizon Wireless announced on Wednesday that it had filed a lawsuit against a Florida-based private investigative firm over what it said were attempts to fraudulently access confidential information about Verizon Wireless customers.

According to the carrier, Global Information Group (GIG) made "thousands of attempts" by impersonating Verizon Wireless employees or customers. On Monday, Hillsborough County, FL officials seized information that GIG had gathered.

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Microsoft is not about to take the Web 2.0 revolution sitting down, says Bill Gates. In an internal e-mail sent out October 30 and obtained by BetaNews on Wednesday, Gates writes that Microsoft must change to take advantage of the evolution of computing from a software-based to a Web-based model.

The venerable leader of the Redmond company harkened back to his Internet Tidal Wave memo in December 1995. In that missive, he correctly argued that the Internet was about to change everything about computing, and Microsoft risked being left behind if it didn't adapt.

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AMD appears to be making serious progress at chipping away Intel's dominance of the PC industry, as the company was able to narrowly beat out its larger rival in terms of systems sold at retail during the month of October, according to data from research firm Current Analysis.

The chipmaker had a slight lead in the desktop space in September, but was able to increase its strength this past month and overtake Intel overall. In total, 49.8 percent of retail systems included an AMD processor versus 48.5 percent running an Intel chip.

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Apple's headaches over early issues with its popular iPod Nano player went international last week after lawsuits were filed on behalf of owners in the United Kingdom and Mexico, according to court documents made public on Monday.

Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, LLP, of Seattle, will represent the plantiffs in both cases. This same law firm is also pursuing a class action lawsuit against Intel, claiming the processor maker has coerced customers into not dealing with competitor AMD, and is involved in assembling a class action suit against DRAM manufacturers over artificially inflated memory prices.

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