Tim Conneally

Today, standing up as one of the three mystery partners Netflix mentioned at the end of the first quarter, Roku has released the first Netflix set top box.

At the beginning of this year, Netflix showed that it had a firm grasp on the future of home video market, giving DVD (hard copy media) until about 2013 before it becomes irrelevant, and emphasizing the company's future in streaming on-demand video.

AMD has launched a labeling campaign that differentiates PCs capable of supporting the latest in high-end gaming and media from the rest.

The labels AMD Game! and AMD Game Ultra will act as easy identifiers for systems that can handle the more demanding games.

This week's Society for Information Display conference is under way, and the latest advances in display surfaces are being shown off. Perhaps one of the more intriguing examples looks a little bent...literally.

Early this year, the public was treated to its first peek into the latest developments in the field of panoramic monitors, such as Alienware's "Ultimate Gaming Display", a 2,880 x 900 pixel DLP curved monitor, and NEC's prototype 42-inch CRVD-LMD with the same specs. Shortly after, Polymer Vision announced production had begun on its Readius 3G "e-book phone" with a foldable 254 ppi monochrome screen that has been in development for almost four years.

A brute force SQL injection onslaught that began on May 13 has infected a reported 10,000 servers, infecting thousands of Chinese and Taiwanese sites with malware.

Originating from 1,000 servers in a single Chinese facility, the attackers are said to be using automated queries to Google's search engine to identify Web sites with exploitable vulnerabilities. Furthermore, the attacks do not target a single vulnerability, but have shown up through more than ten different holes: MS06-014 (CVE-2006-0003), MS07-017 (CVE-2007-1765), RealPlayer IERPCtl.IERPCtl.1 (CVE-2007-5601),GLCHAT.GLChatCtrl.1 (CVE-2007-5722), MPS.StormPlayer.1 (CVE-2007-4816), QvodInsert.QvodCtrl.1, DPClient.Vod (CVE-2007-6144), BaiduBar.Tool.1 (CVE-2007-4105), VML Exploit (CVE-2006-4868) and PPStream (CVE-2007-4748).

Today in a press conference launching the Japanese language Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed his company's dispute with Google's Friend Connect and the ensuing blog duel, saying he wants to "make it work."

It began last week when Facebook, MySpace, and Google all announced similar plans to share user information seamlessly with other sites. The so-called "walled garden" nature of socially-oriented sites -- where members' information and activities are kept within one property -- was what these three groups were looking to change. In order to do so, they have no choice but to work together.

After scrapping its citywide Wi-Fi deployment project for Portland, Oregon, municipal wireless company MetroFi is planning to liquidate its network assets or close down entirely.

In addition to Portland, MetroFi has free, ad-supported networks in place in Concord, Cupertino, Foster City, Riverside, San Jose, Santa Clara, and Sunnyvale, California as well as Aurora, Illinois. In a private e-mail from MetroFi CEO Chuck Haas to Wi-Fi Networking News editor Glenn Fleischman, he says if no buyers turn up for these networks, his company will gradually shut them down.

With the smallest subscriber base of the top five wireless carriers (13.3 million) in the US but one of the biggest networks (in 34 US states and parts of Canada), ABI Research thinks Alltel has picked a winner by aligning its future development with GSM-based Long Term Evolution (LTE).

Alltel yesterday announced that it is committed to LTE for the future of its network. Following Verizon Wireless' path, Alltel is now the second CDMA carrier to commit to LTE instead of Qualcomm's Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) or Mobile WiMAX, championed by Intel.

In 2006, Texas game controller company Anascape filed patent infringement suits against both Nintendo and Microsoft. On Wednesday, Nintendo was ordered to pay $21 million to the company.

The company's complaint was that both Microsoft and Nintendo infringed upon some twelve patents for various game controller designs.

5:30 pm ET May 15, 2008 - In a blog post today, Facebook developer Charlie Cheever said Facebook will be blocking Google's Friend Connect, citing a revelation about how it distributes users' private information.

Cheever remarked, "Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we've had a chance to evaluate the technology. We've found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users' knowledge, which doesn't respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.

Google's all-seeing eye may bother US citizens, but the search company faces repeated difficulty even getting its technology adopted by other nations. This time, the European Union is skeptical about Street View.

Though a development in Google Street View identity obfuscation was announced only this week, the European Union's data protection agency is still hesitant to let Google's ominous-sounding Street View vans comb European streets.

Download Mozilla Thunderbird for Windows 3.0 Alpha 1 from BetaNews FileForum now.

A developer preview release of Mozilla's next version of the Thunderbird e-mail client has been made available to the developer and tester community.

Plaxo, the social address book service, has announced today that it signed an agreement to be acquired by former partner Comcast for an undisclosed sum.

Last Year, Comcast partnered with Plaxo among others, to provide its "SmartZone" centralized communications portal to Comcast subscribers, set to launch later this year. Building upon that collaboration, the cable company now plans to fully integrate Plaxo's properties -- which include social networking site Pulse -- into its own Web services Comcast.net, Fancast, and Fandango.

Today Adobe Systems launched the public beta for Flash Player 10, the company's ubiquitous runtime graphics platform. Added features include 3D animation and transformation support, new effects and filters, as well as new rich text layouts.

Flash developers can download the Pixel Bender toolkit at no further charge, and run it in conjunction with Flash Player 10. These together add the ability to create custom filters and animated effects similar to those found in Adobe After Effects.

Web traffic analyst comScore is reporting that Yahoo's Buzz social news service has already overtaken Digg in unique visitors per month, even though the social news site is still only in beta.

Yahoo Buzz had an explosive first few months, showing that it could generate 90% of the traffic that three-year old Digg could in only a matter of weeks. Furthermore, users of Buzz have been found to be more likely to comment on Buzzed stories.

The next version of the up-and-coming graphical browser -- a popular alternative to what phone manufacturers typically supply -- has emerged from beta and is available free.

The latest iteration of Opera Mini, which has already been ported over to Android, promises an all-around faster experience on the mobile Web. In addition to intelligent text-completion for entering URLs to speed the browsing process, Opera Mini's servers have been upgraded to expedite page loads. In-text searching ("Ctrl-F") was also added to streamline content location.