Latest Technology News

Let's pause for a moment to enjoy a moment of peanut butter without salmonella: peHUB today reports that Brad Garlinghouse, the former Yahoo senior VP who in 2006 compared that company's increasingly overextended efforts to a thinly-spread sandwich topping, is up to something.

In a better world (or at least a world better to Yahoo's put-upon shareholders), Garlinghouse's memo, which castigated company leadership for lacking a "cohesive, focused vision" for the dot-com pioneer and bewailed redundant projects, a bloated bureaucracy, and the "phoning it in" mentality then becoming ubiquitous, would have been the butt-kicking that got Yahoo straightened up and flying right. As it was, some activity ensued -- then-COO Dan Rosensweig put Garlinghouse in charge of thinking through how his suggestions might be put into practice -- but political struggles followed and the rest is history. Garlinghouse left the company in mid-2008.

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Psst! Hey buddy! Wanna buy a Snoy TV, an Appel Mic, or a bottle of Vaigra? Probably not -- not only are counterfeit products inferior, they can be downright hazardous. Paul Kocher wants to help ensure you never do.

Kocher, known well to security geeks as one of the architects of the SSL 3.0 protocol (and one of the theorists behind differential power analysis as a crypto-cracking strategy), is working these days to quash piracy and counterfeiting. He was at CES with Cryptography Research Inc. earlier this month to talk about tech that integrates anti-counterfeiting technology into systems such as computers, televisions, and set-top boxes.

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Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems' co-founder and chairman, says that President Barack Obama has asked him to write a white paper on the benefits of open source technology.

In an interview with the BBC, McNealy contended that government should mandate the use of open source products to "improve security, get higher quality software, lower costs, [and obtain] higher reliability -- all the benefits that come with open software."

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Google has been steadily shrinking the number of users it lets access a business' free Google Apps account. When the service first launched, it allowed up to 200 users per business. Then, Google announced its $50 per-user premier platform and the the user limit on free accounts was reduced to 100. Now, Techcrunch reports that the number has shrunk yet again, hitting the 50 mark. Google says there are over 1 million businesses using Google Apps for their collaborative online workspace.

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After the scuttling of Kogan's Agora smartphone earlier this month, will Huawei be the next to enter the world stage with an Android phone?

Many published reports this week have pointed to the mention of a "smart mobile phone based on 'Android' platform" on Huawei's Mobile World Congress (MWC) Web page as proof that Huawei will show its previously announced Android phone at the international trade event in Barcelona next month.

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Sharpcast began rolling out the 1.5 version of its cross-platform synching service SugarSync today. The upgrade includes the new "shared folders" feature, which adds a document collaboration aspect to the nearly one-year old sync service.

SugarSync is a subscription cloud service that makes documents and files remotely accessible through synched Windows and Mac PCs or through mobile handsets including iPhone and BlackBerry. Current subscribers may not receive the SugarSync Manager upgrade until Monday or Tuesday, but the shared folders feature in the Web interface is available to all immediately.

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Adobe Labs has made Photoshop Lightroom 2.3 and Photoshop Camera Raw 5.3 release candidates available for download. Both release candidates provide additional raw file support for the Nikon D3X and Olympus E-30 cameras. Lightroom 2.3 also fixes a memory leak that was discovered in the 2.2 release.

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Yesterday, HTC officially unveiled the updated Touch Cruise that had leaked to the Web as "Lolita." Pushed more as an update rather than a full-blown new phone, the new Touch Cruise features many of the same features found in AT&T's Fuze, and the previous Cruise model.

Connectivity is WCDMA/HSPA: 900/2100 MHz, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps, and then there's the requisite 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, and GPS/A-GPS. The operating system is once again Windows Mobile 6.1 with HTC's TouchFlo interface, but the noteworthy inclusion this time is the new HTC Footprints.

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MSN Mobile Music, a browser-based music shop designed for mobile handsets and completely unrelated to Zune marketplace was formally launched in the UK this week. Microsoft may have taken a step backward by protecting downloads with DRM.

The store is run by VidZone Digital Media and features .WMA downloads, ringtones, and video content from three of the "big four" major labels (Universal Music Group is not yet in.) Single songs cost £1.50, videos cost £2 and ringtones go for £3.

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Today, Google and YouTube announced the launch of www.youtube.com/vatican, the YouTube channel dedicated to the activities of the Pope and events in the smallest state in the world, Vatican City.

Footage on the channel comes from Centro Televisio Vaticano (CTV) and Vatican Radio (RV), so the primary language is Italian, but there will be information in Spanish, English, and German as well.

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Having written three books on programming in a series that was called "By Example," I know first-hand that sometimes several hundred pages of written text doesn't really beat the ability to see something for yourself, tweak it, and find out what happens.

Not that Google has ever really been that big on documentation anyway; but this morning, it's unveiled something that's perhaps several hundred times better: Its new AJAX API playground lets JavaScript programmers not only sample all the major API calls in Google's toolbox in the context of functions, but tweak those samples and see the results live.

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Like the majority of its fellow electronics companies this week, Samsung today posted a loss for the fourth quarter of 2008.

The South Korean CE maker renowned for its displays and responsible for the much of the growth in the flash memory market lost $14.4 million for the quarter ending on New Year's Eve.

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Until President Obama's nominee for the next FCC chairman, replacing the departed Kevin Martin, is confirmed, current Commissioner Michael Copps will assume the temporary role of chairman of a temporarily four-member panel, the White House announced yesterday.

Copps had earlier been reported to be the only Democrat on Pres. Bush's list to replace former chairman Michael Powell. He is generally liked on both sides of the aisle, and yesterday, generally outspoken Commissioner Robert McDowell added his support for the appointment.

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It has been a hard uphill battle for memory maker Qimonda ever since parent company Infineon began its plan to spin it off in 2006. Today, that battle may have come to a premature end.

If America is ever to regain its footing in the field of microprocessor production outside the CPU, it needs a leg up from international leaders in that field. Three years ago, German memory producer Infineon gambled on producing an innovative DRAM subdivision called Qimonda, with a state-of-the-art production facility in Richmond, Virginia. Infineon would gradually spin off Qimonda, and retain a minority stake as the producer came into its own.

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Google's 18% revenue jump didn't come as any huge stunner, but execs revealed this evening how their company is weathering the financial crisis, through measures that include a new stock option plan aimed at employee retention.

Google's revenues for the fourth quarter of 2008 ending December 31 added up to $5.7 billion, as opposed to $4.83 billion the same period a year ago, the Google officials said in Thursday night's conference call with financial analysts.

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