The recent agreement between Google and various litigants has caused Harvard to walk away from its longstanding partnership on Google Book Search -- at least where copyrighted works are concerned.

The two will continue to work on scanning books that have entered the public domain. No books already scanned by the project will be affected. Harvard's been on board the search project since its pilot days in late 2004.

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In a unanimous decision late Tuesday, the FCC gave its approval to public access to the "white spaces" of the wireless spectrum, after the tally was pushed back by an earlier vote today in favor of the $28.1 billion Verizon-Alltel merger.

A 5-0 vote by the Federal Communications Commission today in favor of opening up the white spaces followed months of lobbying by Google, Microsoft, and other Wireless Industry Association (WIA) members on behalf of the measure and by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) against it.

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One of Mac OS X's most successful features has been its zooming apps dock, which has been mimicked in third-party utilities for Windows. Windows 7's new taskbar looks more similar, but its changes are already themselves being changed.

The "pre-beta" edition of Windows 7 handed out at PDC 2008 last week appears on the surface to contain only a slightly revised version of the Windows Vista taskbar, if only temporarily. But developers were actually given hints that an early build of the Win7 taskbar was hidden behind a protective barrier.

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The search site named for the whooping sound of fun and excitement is having not much of one and way too much of the other again.

The company confirmed via blog yesterday that Yahoo Live, the video-streaming social site that's been in the works for most of the year, will be shut down early next month. The service didn't get much attention after its initial rollout in February, though its group video chat feature was well-liked by many. In an interesting twist, the service will be commemorated tomorrow (Wednesday) in the service's Town Hall area.

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Online movie rental service Netflix has been evolving on an almost daily basis. Following a number of developments in its streaming video category, it announced yesterday it will soon cease selling previously viewed DVDs.

On the official Netflix blog yesterday, community leader Meghan wrote, "As you know, our core business is delivering great movie rentals to you on DVD by mail and instantly to the computer and TV, so we've decided it makes sense for us to focus exclusively on that. This means we will stop selling previously viewed DVDs through the Web site. We're sorry for any inconvenience for those of you who regularly purchase DVDs at Netflix, but we're excited about being able to spend the extra time focusing on continually improving our core rental business for you."

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In an announcement yesterday, Dash Navigation said it is strategically reducing the size of its workforce as it shutters its dedicated device division and shifts into the position of a software and services company.

Dash made a connected personal navigation device (PND) as a sort of "next gen" for the extremely popular devices, including live traffic reports and support for location-based information through Yahoo's Fire Eagle middleware.

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Senior Vice President of Apple's iPod division, Tony Fadell has stepped down from his leadership position, and is being replaced by former IBM exec Mark Papermaster.

Fadell is regarded as the progenitor of the iPod ecosystem, bringing to Apple in 2001 the idea of a portable media player with its own dedicated online marketplace. Though The Wall Street Journal says he will be keeping a consultancy position, Fadell's Apple Bio has been removed.

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It's difficult to make the case for conspiracy against the competition when XM and Sirius had no competition prior to their merger. Still, a shareholder plows ahead with his campaign against the merged entity, despite a global crisis.

In recent days, analysts have speculated on various ways that US satellite radio provider Sirius XM can complete the funding of its merger and stay afloat, including issuing more stock and even possibly taking the company private. While all of that remains in the realm of speculation, a Sirius XM shareholder whose name is all too familiar to executives who hail from Sirius, has amended his lawsuit in US District Court in California, in an effort to stop what he describes as a conspiracy to monopolize the satellite radio industry by eliminating existing competition and erecting barriers to new competition.

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Finnish mobile-phone giant Nokia will drop up to 600 employees as it reorganizes operations, closes a plant, and contemplates global poverty.

In its ongoing effort to address the global digital divide, Nokia is launching both new low-cost handsets in the New Delhi market and a service for rural areas of India, other parts of Asia, and Africa.

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During a visit from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Korea-based LG gave more than a hint that it plans to expand its projects with Microsoft, despite belonging to Google's Open Handset Alliance and the Nokia-backed Symbian Foundation.

LG Electronics has made an official vow to keep working with Microsoft on mobile technology, in the face of growing competition to the Windows Mobile operating system from Google's Android, Apple's iPhone, Symbian, and RIM's BlackBerry platform.

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In teaming up with MySpace this week, is MTV owner Viacom deviating all that much from YouTube around user uploads of TV show clips? Like YouTube partners CBS, EA, and Universal Music, Viacom now stands to make money from online ads.

After starting a highly controversial lawsuit against YouTube last year, and then getting smacked by a boycott from angry YouTube users last summer, MTV owner Viacom is now adopting a new approach to video content through a deal unveiled with the MySpace social network and tech start-up Auditude.

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Finally, after several international false starts and domestic delays, the 3G BlackBerry Bold has premiered at AT&T stores and online in the US, with an offer of free Wi-Fi at some AT&T hotspots.

AT&T has announced that Research In Motion's BlackBerry Bold is now available for purchase, and like other AT&T exclusive smartphones, it receives free Wi-Fi at AT&T hotspots nationwide when accompanied with an unlimited data plan.

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With unprecedented turnout expected for Tuesday's elections, a number of efforts are underway to use the net and allied technologies to monitor voting glitches or irregularities.

Individuals connected with many vote monitoring efforts have already gotten their marching orders. Calls went out this summer for geeks of all sorts to step up as election site workers and e-voting machine technicians; Premier, Hart InterCivic, ES&S, and Sequoia all posted multiple calls for tech folks to serve as on-site tech support on November 4. As for observers, groups such as Mobilize.org were signing up younger and perhaps more tech-aware poll workers. And outspoken BlackBoxVoting.org has published a 78-page guide (PDF available here) to monitoring every step of the current elections.

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The industry isn't sure how much to charge (yet) for SaaS applications. We know that. But the uncertainty's even helping to wreck pricing for traditional software, according to a new report.

Accenture has released a report examining the current state of growth in the software market. If the picture it paints was actually a piece of representational art, it would show a forest overwhelmed with undergrowth, tangled with clinging vines and thickets of trees long overdue for a culling. (And there would be a lot of squirrels...with quarterly quotas.)

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A USB memory stick containing the source code and passwords to a UK government database of 18 million citizens was found in a bar parking lot, thought to be accidentally left behind by an IT employee.

The source code and internal passwords are believed to be part of the Government Gateway system, which handles a huge range of government services, from jobs and pensions to driver's licensing, to taxes, to agricultural affairs. With the data on the USB stick, the personal data of over 18 million Britons could have been compromised.

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