Scott M. Fulton, III

Yahoo Claims it Isn't Building an Online Library

In its response November 20 to a subpoena it received in October from Google, seeking information Google claims is relevant to its defense against two lawsuits concerning the legality of its plans for developing an electronic library of literary works, attorneys for Yahoo argue that their client is not actually developing a competing project.

Instead, the legal brief claims Yahoo is merely financially backing a project in which plaintiffs in the case against Google are involved, and does not exercise any authority over that project. Though the brief does not state so explicitly, language scattered throughout also implies that Yahoo is not necessarily the online host of this project.

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Help Find CNET's James Kim and Family

A member of the technology press community and his family have been missing since November 25, and they need your help in locating them and seeing them home safe.

James Kim is a CNET senior editor, and contributor to the Crave technology blog. For the Thanksgiving holiday, they left their home in Noe Valley, San Francisco on November 17, traveling by station wagon to Seattle. They were expected to return home on November 27, and were last seen in Portland, Oregon, on the early afternoon of November 25, where they had brunch with a family friend. Kim and his family were last seen driving a silver Saab station wagon with personalized California plates: DOESF

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The Jury is Out on AMD Quad FX Performance

Word on the official name of AMD's '4x4' double-dual-core platform, now 'Quad FX,' leaked out yesterday a day ahead of schedule. But even the first reviews of the new processor leave open some key questions.

Since last July, processor enthusiasts have been waiting for AMD to make its move, the response to Intel's Conroe (Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Extreme) that the company had promised. AMD's fans are looking for the Quad FX series - its new dual-socket computer platform - to even the score with Intel, and help the company recapture the price/performance crown it appeared to lose for the first time in several years.

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Sprint Adding SEVEN E-mail to Basic Service

For Sprint and Nextel cellular phone customers, a basic cellular e-mail client software package is now being added to the regular tier of service at no additional charge, for select phones capable of sending text.

The move comes as competitors Verizon Wireless and Cingular continue to work toward providing similar software to consumers, but for a monthly fee.

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HP Sells More PCs Than Dell, But Faces Lawsuit

The same company whose board of directors now faces the prospects of civil lawsuits from shareholders regarding their recent conduct in investigating the source of boardroom leaks, is now the world’s leading PC producer in both shipments and sales, according to hardware analysis firm iSuppli.

You wouldn’t think it was the same company. According to the latest iSuppli report released this morning, HP’s worldwide unit shipment growth over the third quarter of this year was 16.7%, to 9.86 million units. This gives HP a 16.5% market share in shipments versus Dell’s 16.3% share, with 9.78 million units shipped.

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Fujitsu Hard Drives: Toward 1 Tb per Square Inch

A laser capable of being focused to a spot on a rotating disk just 80 nanometers across is what Fujitsu needed to be able to beat competitors Toshiba and Seagate in the race toward terabit areal densities. Yesterday, Fujitsu announced they'd achieved that goal.

While Toshiba and Seagate have been in competition with one another to drive up the areal density of hard drives using new perpendicular recording technology, the scientists at Fujitsu -- whose own consumer drives have had to play catch-up recently in the quality department -- have been planning to leap-frog their competitors in one fell swoop. There's a physical maximum, they found, to how densely data can be packed even with perpendicular mechanisms.

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BitTorrent Partners with Fox, Paramount

The company behind one of the most prominent P2P file-sharing protocols is partnering with more movie studios today, in an effort to make its service commercially viable. Meanwhile, its CEO states he's not leaving the company.

Whether the movie industry is prepared to finally "embrace" P2P technology is yet to be seen, but it certainly can't ever do so if it doesn't take the first steps. Today, Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, and the MTV Networks unit of Viacom were among the list of major content producers joining Warner Bros. in backing the BitTorrent protocol, in partnerships that will apparently to the development of a new commercial service around P2P downloading.

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Do You Believe in Cyber Monday?

Online shopping traffic certainly increased on Monday over the previous Friday, according to sources directly involved in generating that traffic, though surveys show shoppers may not be spenders.

UPDATE 7:15 pm ET November 29, 2006: This afternoon, comScore Networks made it official: Cyber Monday lives! US online retail holiday spending last Monday was 26% higher than for the Monday after Thanksgiving 2005, totalling $608 million versus $484 million. Earlier, comScore had predicted US online consumers could spend as much as $2.74 billion this week alone, and it looks now like we're well on our way to achieving that figure.

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Canadian Networks Consider End to Broadcast TV

Faced with the impending obsolescence of US-based analog television, Canada's broadcasters must decide how -- or whether -- to continue expensive transmitter upgrades to meet the requirements of the digital era.

Since before Canada was declared a sovereign nation, the country's telecommunications services were intended to be compatible with those of the United States and Mexico. Today, its AM and FM radio bands are the same, its telephone system of area codes is compatible with that of the original Bell System, and its VHF and UHF analog broadcast television channels basically use the same spectrum.

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Reverse Engineering DRM on CDs Deemed Lawful

The US Librarian of Congress is recommending that Congress officially recognize that engineering intended to expose flaws in DRM schemes on audio CDs to be non-infringing.

Every three years, advisors to the US Library of Congress meet to determine whether certain technological measures that could be considered circumventions of copyright - and thus, running afoul of "fair use" provisions - are actually necessary in order to further the lawful use of copyrighted works.

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Motorola Unveils 9mm Entry-level Phone with E-Ink Display

For the past few years, mobile phone development has followed a PC-like, “top-down” model, where new technologies and concepts are tried at the high end first. For Motorola’s next act, however, it’s trying the reverse angle: a sweeping new architecture for significantly lower power consumption, using the same display technology that premiered in the Sony Reader device, in a form factor that could deliver as much as 450 minutes of continuous talk time or 400 hours of standby, on a single charge.

At just 9mm thick, Motorola’s new Motofone series debuts today, with the first F3 models to be connected to India’s GSM network. It’s important to note that this is a basic phone, although it does include texting.

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'Cyber Monday' Ain't No Christmas Myth

The first raw data on Internet usage yesterday indicate shoppers rode heavy on the net. But there's one important question outstanding: Were those shoppers also purchasers?

If ever you happen to be up to your neck or deeper in snow, you could say you didn't see any avalanche. Despite some early anecdotal indications that "Cyber Monday" either fizzled or was a non-event, nay-sayers awoke from a prematurely long Christmas nap to find some raw numbers that spoke otherwise: According to estimates from corporate Web services provider Akamai Technologies, North American Internet traffic yesterday to the 270 major retail sites tracked by the company was 19% higher than for the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2005, and global traffic was 14% higher.

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EC Confirms it Received Microsoft Docs on July 18

In a statement issued Thanksgiving Day -– perhaps timed appropriately, since the holiday is celebrated mainly in the US -– Microsoft said it had released all 8,500 pages of its technical documentation for interoperability, as requested by the European Commission, back in July.

The implication was that the company did not withhold or fail to complete documentation, contrary to the EC’s argument one week prior. At that time, the EC issued an ultimatum demanding what it characterized as the remainder of its documentation package, or else face a fine of as much as €3 million per day, retroactive to July 31.

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EU, US Laws Clash Once Again on Personal Privacy

Last Wednesday in Brussels, a working group comprised of leading European information privacy officials concluded that a major global financial transaction processing organization based in Belgium may have violated EU law in complying with subpoenas from the US Treasury Dept. for information.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) operates one of the Internet’s principal services for transactions that take place specifically between banks, with an exclusive and secret chunk of Internet namespace devoted exclusively to its own purposes. Following the terrorist attacks of 2001, the Treasury Dept. sought information from multiple sources on international transactions of all kinds, with the stated intention of sifting through them in hopes of isolating transactions that relate to terrorist financing.

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Online Retailers Facing Huge 'Cyber Monday'

Online shopping may not seem to have existed long enough for researchers to detect year-to-year patterns, yet if the past few years are any indication, the Monday following the Thanksgiving holiday tends to be the day of heaviest traffic for Internet-based retailers. And if "Black Friday" - the wee hours of the morning after Thanksgiving - represents the beginning of a trend this year, servers should expect a tremendous flood.

According to raw data from comScore Networks released this morning, US consumers spent nearly $2 billion online in just the past week alone. For the month of November leading up to last Friday, consumers spent $8.31 billion - a 24% jump over 2005. Black Friday spending, according to comScore, rose 42% over the prior year. While comScore does not generate forecasts, a simple linear analysis based on its data would indicate that, if this trend holds out, US consumers could spend another $2.74 billion just this week, resulting in a huge "Cyber Monday" for retailers.

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