Ed Oswald

A California resident has sued ringtone company Jamster over what he claims are misleading advertising practices that lure younger users into paying for text messages by advertising it as a "free ringtone." Charles Ford filed the lawsuit in a San Diego court, saying he was charged $1.99 plus normal carrier SMS fees.

Jamster is owned by VeriSign, a company that specializes in commerce applications and security. In recent weeks, ads have appeared more frequently in AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger, causing some users to complain about the ads' obtrusiveness. "I don't know what they're thinking, I'd never buy anything from such an annoying company," one user named Loren recently wrote in his Web log.

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It has been over two years since the last time a space shuttle has taken off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and early Thursday morning the Space Shuttle Discovery arrived at the launch pad - a full month ahead of its scheduled departure into space.

Shuttle commander Eileen Collins said, "It's a great sight to see Discovery rolling out to the launch pad. We know we are getting close."

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At a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on digital music Wednesday, there was one party notably missing: Apple. The company, which has a solid grip on 75 percent of the music download industry, reportedly declined to appear in front of the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property.

The snub angered Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, subcommittee chairman.

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Nintendo on Thursday announced plans to open a retail outlet in Manhattan this spring, following in the footsteps of companies like Apple and Sony. According to Nintendo, the store will be the first one to open, and will have two floors. It is replacing the Pokemon Center in Rockefeller Center.

Like storefronts from Sony and Apple, the Nintendo World Store will showcase all of Nintendo's hardware, as well as provide visitors previews of unreleased games for its consoles. In recent months, the gaming wars have heated up once again with Sony's release of the PSP, and the expected debut of next-generation consoles from all major manufacturers at E3 this May.

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While today marks the day that both MSN Spaces and Messenger version 7 are released to the public, it also marks the start of a risky strategy by Redmond to better monetize the two services.

Users will find ads in places they wouldn't have seen them before, including in their personal Spaces and at the beginning of video chats initiated through the Messenger client.

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Incoming freshmen at Duke University need not expect a new iPod from the North Carolina private school this fall. The university has decided to scale back its pilot project that provided iPods to all incoming freshman, and now only certain courses will be given the popular music player.

Last year's offering cost the school $500,000. The purpose of the program, according to university officials, was to allow students to use them to record and playback lectures, as well as listen to language-training files.

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After initially announcing that its product was put on hold indefinitely, the makers of CherryOS posted a note Wednesday saying that, "Due to Overwhelming Demand, CherryOS Open Source Project, Launches 5.1.2005." CherryOS is a Mac emulator for PCs that allows the user to run Mac OS X in a Windows environment.

As reported last month by BetaNews, CherryOS caused a stir after the programmers of the open source Mac emulator PearPC claimed the code behind the program was stolen. Public scrutiny, as well as tests by BetaNews, seemed to confirm PearPC's suspicions, although Arben Kryeziu, creator of CherryOS, has denied any similarity.

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Locked in a battle to be the first chipmaker to release a dual-core processor, AMD and Intel are both stepping up efforts to bring their chips to the market faster than originally anticipated.

AMD, which originally was planning a mid-year release of its dual-core processor, has hinted to the media that it may make a major announcement at an event later this month to commemorate the two-year birthday of the Opteron.

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Teachers in Pennsylvania will soon have the help of Microsoft to integrate technology into their curricula. This is all thanks to a five-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) that was signed today in the capitol city of Harrisburg.

Through the agreement, Microsoft will contribute up to $2 million to help devise a plan to better integrate technology in everyday learning across the commonwealth. The company has also agreed to continue to innovate on software solutions and build a library of resource material for the schools.

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Sony showed off the latest addition to its line of Walkman digital music players Wednesday, the NW-HD5. While it is the fifth hard drive player to be released by the company, it will be the first to see worldwide distribution.

One major difference, however, is in the design. Unlike Sony's previous units, the NW-HD5 is designed to stand upright, similar to Apple's iPod. Users will have the option to use the player on its side if they wish.

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Security firm Secunia has discovered a "moderately critical" security flaw in the most recent versions of Firefox and the Mozilla Suite. According to the advisory, a problem in the handling of JavaScript could potentially allow a remote user access to sensitive information.

"The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the JavaScript engine, as a 'lambda' replace exposes arbitrary amounts of heap memory after the end of a JavaScript string," Secunia said in the advisory.

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Instant messaging is increasingly becoming a target for spammers, phishers, and hackers according to a new report issued Tuesday by instant message security firm IMLogic. The report says that in the first quarter of this year alone, threats jumped an astounding 250 percent.

A little over eight of every ten reports received by the company had to do with viruses or worms, while 14 percent hijacked the file transfer capabilities and another 11 percent took advantage of client vulnerabilities.

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Napster reported that it had added 143,000 new subscribers to its Napster To Go service in its inaugural quarter. Napster now boasts 410,000 members, although 56,000 of them are non-paying university subscribers. As a result, the company raised its fourth quarter estimate to between $16.5 to $17.5 million.

"Our innovative Napster To Go marketing campaign has lead to a very strong increase in consumer awareness as music fans are 'doing the math' and discovering the incredible value and excitement of a Napster subscription," Napster CEO Chris Gorog said in a statement. "We were also delighted to see that our new Napster To Go subscribers exhibited a strong appetite for purchasing pay-per-download music."

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In a possible sign that relations between satellite television provider DirecTV and DVR-maker TiVo may be improving, details of a new advertising agreement between the two companies were made public Tuesday. The deal extends the previous agreement, and allows for both companies to leverage TiVo's "advanced advertising capabilities" on DirecTV TiVo units.

Each company will keep the revenue they generate from sales of advertising on the service. In recent months, DirecTV has made moves to use its own DVR technology, and showed off a protype of an HD-ready DVR at CES 2005. TiVo has also endeavored to become less dependent on DirecTV of rusbscribers, recently penning a deal with cable-provider Comcast.

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Bloggers in the San Francisco area may soon have to watch what they say politically - or they may face mandatory registration of their Web logs and be forced to report all related costs to the city’s Ethics Commission.

The news comes after city supervisor Sophie Maxwell introduced legislation late last week that requires any person engaged in "electioneering communications" to report their activities, including payments received and/or made.

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