Tim Conneally

Beginning today, five AT&T stores nationwide will be showing off Microsoft Surface, the innovative technology where a sensitive tabletop interacts with the user in ways he never considered.

Though early reports mentioned T-Mobile's participation in the program, it's AT&T that will be first letting customers play with Microsoft's touch interface system. Atlanta, San Antonio, San Francisco and two stores in New York City are scheduled to unveil surface displays today.

TrafficLand, a site providing free access to a network of over 6,000 cameras, is now offering its live highway feeds as embeddable widgets. How much closer will this widget make users feel to their Facebook buddies?

Whether it's for travel or event-planning purposes or simply for the morbid possibility of witnessing a live car accident, TrafficLand's cameras, which are in place in over 60 worldwide markets, can now be placed in Facebook and other sites.

Google Earth 4.3 for PC, Linux, and Mac has been released in public beta, with an official release expected in a few weeks. Some of the additional features include real-time day and night lighting effects and enhanced POV controls.

The unofficial Google Earth blog notes this is not a major release, but it still shows off some eye-catching tweaks. The real-time lighting effect illuminates the Earth according to the time of day, and actually creates a sunrise and sunset effect on other layers at appropriate times when turned on. Skies change colors, and rendered buildings cast shadows on one another.

Is it still a UMPC, or is it just a decent version of a shrunken laptop? While very small form factors have often failed, Asus may have found the perfect niche, and is exploiting it for all it's worth.

Yesterday in Hong Kong, Asus launched the newest version of its Eee ultra portable PC, the Eee PC 900.

Microsoft has made Vista Service Pack 1 available in all of the company's 36 supported languages, where there had previously only been five: English, Spanish, French, German and Japanese.

x86 and x64 versions are available for manual install through Windows Update or from the Microsoft Download Center as a standalone installer, and DVD images are available to TechNet Plus and MSDN subscribers as well as those with a volume license. The two standalone installers can be downloaded here: x86, x64.

International video game company Ubisoft has entered into an agreement with mobile games company Gameloft to acquire its development studio in Pune, India.

The facility, with a staff of 120 developers and testers has been responsible for creating games for both the PSP and the Nintendo DS, notably releasing the DS version of Assassin's Creed. Ubisoft said it intends to increase the staff to 200 by the end of this year, and looks to have as many as 500 working at the facility in the future.

Research in Motion and the Indian Ministry of Telecommunications have yet to reach a decision upon the security concerns raised by the BlackBerry's system of communication.

Indian security officials are reportedly wary of the lack of traceability of BlackBerry-delivered messages. The government's need for an unencrypted BlackBerry message scheme was reported by many to have been delivered as a threat to shut down the network if a solution wasn't reached. These rumors were promptly dispelled by India Telecoms Secretary Siddhartha Behura, who said a ban was out of the question.

The mobile search field is still anyone's game, and AOL looks to be approaching it by tailoring its search to one of the most popular devices of the last five years: the Apple iPhone.

AOL Mobile Search for iPhone was designed for the mobile Safari browser also found in the iPod Touch. The site's AJAX technology is built around the multi-touch interface of Apple's devices and is currently in public beta, powered by Google. Google itself has had a mobile Safari-customized search site since late last year.

On Friday, Toshiba's Japanese-language Dynabook dedicated site announced a delay in availability of its 128 GB solid state drive for the SS RX model ultra portable. Then, on the company's European site, a Portege R500 (the Dynabook's western counterpart) appeared to be configurable with a 128 GB SSD.

Most other features are standard for the Portege line, an Intel Core 2 Duo ULV U7700 processor, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, 12.1-inch backlit LCD display, a 7mm dual-layer DVD superdrive, all weighing in at a meager 1.72 pounds.

Qualcomm today brought the era of video entertainment on the road one precarious step closer to reality...thankfully for the backseat. As if typing on your BlackBerry and eating yogurt while driving wasn't enough of a pre-occupation.

At NAB in Las Vegas, Qualcomm is showing off a proof-of-concept display of a MediaFLO in-car entertainment system.

It had to happen sometime: Microsoft announced today DRM is making its way onto the Silverlight platform, powered by none other than the company's elusive PlayReady content access technology.

Silverlight, Microsoft's cross-platform answer to Adobe's Flash, was unveiled last year just two months after their PlayReady "cross platform" DRM was announced.

In the interest of keeping the individual identities of the whole family of Acer properties alive, Gateway has announced an expansion of its notebook lines.

During the launch of Acer's Gemstone, analyst John Spooner of TBR remarked to BetaNews that the company looked to be positioning itself at the high end of the market, above Gateway and Packard Bell. If that is the case, then today's announcement makes Gateway look appealing to the "top 2/3" gamer/enthusiast market. All models will include Windows Vista SP1, with some offering an upgrade to Vista Home Premium 64-bit Edition SP1.

Under government orders on Tuesday, Indonesian ISPs blocked sites that shared Dutch anti-Islamist Geert Wilders' 16-minute film Fitna. The ban on these sites has reportedly now been lifted.

The Jakarta Post reported that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had banned Dutch politician Geert Wilders' film Fitna for disturbing social harmony in Indonesia. Subsequently, 146 ISPs and 30 network access providers were asked to block Web sites that hosted the controversial film. The list of blocked sites included YouTube, MySpace, and Rapidshare.

The Federal Communications Commission has exacted fines on retailers found to not be fully advising customers about the DTV transition, including Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Circuit City, and Target; as well as a number of CE manufacturers.

Wal-Mart/Sam's West, Circuit City, Fry's, Target, Sears, K-Mart, and CompUSA were all found to have violated a federal rule on labeling analog TV-related merchandise sold either in-store or on their Web sites, resulting in a total of $3,928,000 in forfeitures.

In response to unconfirmed reports that Sling Media's SlingCatcher would be delayed until late this year, the company told BetaNews SlingCatcher will ship when it's good and ready.

Slingbox is a piece of hardware that saw a lot of hype last year that connects to a user's television and the Internet, allowing TV programs to be viewed in the SlingPlayer from anywhere the user signs on.