Latest Technology News

The numbers of mobile users who can watch their TVs remotely has just grown larger, with an expansion by Sling Media in Motorola, Samsung, and other Windows Mobile devices supported by SlingPlayer Mobile.

After testing, Sling Media has announced nine Windows Mobile smartphones from AT&T, Verizon, and other suppliers that now meet the system requirements and work well with its SlingPlayer Mobile software for remote TV viewing. Free trials are available.

In an SEC filing yesterday, the CPU maker disclosed that it will incur a slightly larger restructuring charge than earlier estimates, due to its need to trim about 600 employees from its roster starting this quarter, rather than 500.

At some point, there should be a turnaround for struggling AMD, but it's not here yet. Last month, the company announced it would have to trim 500 positions worldwide from its corporate payroll, in a restructuring effort connected to its workforce reduction plan of 1,600 announced last April.

During the summer, South Korean CE maker LG debuted the first streaming Netflix-enabled Blu-ray player. Today, the company announced its Blu-ray players will receive content from more streaming partners.

LG's network-connected Blu-ray players will be receiving an upgrade in early 2009, endowing them with features similar to the latest broadband TiVo DVRs: Users will be able to access CinemaNow and YouTube content.

Worlds.com, which launched its first 3D avatar environment back in the mid-90s, has retained an intellectual property law firm and has filed patent infringement suits. Its first, against game developer NCsoft, was filed on Christmas Eve.

The company claims that NCsoft -- the publisher of Lineage and City of Heroes -- is infringing on two patents. The latest of the two, "System and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space" (US Patent 7,181,690), was filed in August 2000 and awarded in February 2007. It describes a method for displaying other avatars and non-avatar objects (e.g., background items) to multiple users.

Despite the G1, iPhone, and upcoming announcements such as LG's GD910 smartphone wristwatch, smartphones won't outshine PCs at CES 2009. For starters, Sony will reportedly launch a netbook PC with a choice of hard or solid state drive.

With all the hype surrounding devices like Apple's iPhone and the Android-enabled G1, you'd almost think that smartphones will replace PCs as the main attraction at CES. But how close will smartphones come to stealing the PC's thunder? Not as close as you might suppose -- this year, at least -- despite the growing capabilities and shrinking price tags of the pocket-sized devices.

Download AnyDVD HD 6.5.0.3 from FileForum now.

With its usual ostentatiousness, the makers of the media disc backup program AnyDVD HD released a new version that it claims decrypts "all commercial Blu-ray releases," including those which feature the latest BD+ copy protection.

Yesterday, discount retailer Wal-Mart began selling the iPhone 3G, and as if to welcome customers to their new devices, AT&T suffered a substantial network outage.

AT&T representative Meghan Roskopf told the Chicago Tribune that at 9:30 am Eastern Time, only a matter of hours after Wal-Mart locations opened for business, the Bloomfield, Michigan AT&T facility experienced a power outage, causing "intermittent disruption of mobile services for customers in some Midwest states."

The primary research and development arm of the Department of Homeland Security will operate under a fresh set of privacy principles for research projects, as per a report delivered to Congress this month.

DHS presented Congress with its "Data Mining: Technology and Policy" summation in December, explaining how it handles the sensitive aspects of data mining. The main body of the report covered progress or lack of it for the Automated Targeting System (ATS), best known as the group that gifted America with the no-fly list; the Data Analysis and Research for Trade Transparency System, which looks into money laundering and the like; and the Freight Assessment System (FAS), TSA's watch-the-ports endeavor.

Rather than wait a week, Hewlett-Packard is hoping the post-Christmas bargain hunters are out an about this week, as it unveils its latest MediaSmart home server at a potentially attractive price.

There's no question that there's a respectably healthy niche market in the field of home servers -- computers that fulfill the function of a small business server, only with a more turnkey-style management approach. They're a way of leveraging another high-power CPU and high-capacity hard drive (maybe more than one) into a household that already has at least one of each, and probably more. And since home servers don't require monitors, their package price doesn't have to be "rounded up" by two hundred bucks or so.

Screenshots and user-uploaded videos of OS X 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard) have been popping up as the first quarter of 2009 inches ever closer.

During WWDC last June, Apple's Jordan Hubbard gave a presentation which included a slide saying that Snow Leopard was slated for a Q1 2009 release. The OS update is comprised mainly of un-flashy improvements that are geared toward increased performance and optimization of the new hardware architecture of the latest Macs.

Although it might have a tough time locating the perpetrators and collecting the loot, Verizon has been awarded $33.15 million in a court judgment touted as the biggest in cybersquatting history.

Verizon has won $33.15 million in a lawsuit against OnlineNIC, in which the San Francisco-based domain registrar was accused of both trademark infringement and cybersquatting.

Download Mozilla Fennec Alpha 2 for Windows from FileForum now.

Apple's Safari for iPhone truly did raise the bar for the Web browsing experience for mobile devices, though it may not have redefined the way browsing should work there. Mozilla Fennec continues its work on that goal.

In a departure from some other recent activities around tech exec job flight, RIM is suing Motorola for allegedly impeding its plans to hire current and laid off Motorola staffers.

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) has filed a lawsuit against fellow electronics manufacturer Motorola seeking to officially invalidate a pact between the two companies not to solicit one another's employees.

As 2008 winds down, we at BetaNews would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude for all of the support we have received from our devoted readers, software authors and downloaders over the past twelve months.

This has been a difficult year for many, but one that has also inspired a generation to stand up and participate in a way that hasn't been seen in decades. The arrival of 2009 brings promises of change, and hope that better days are ahead, that we can fix the problems caused by years of bad governing and a corrupt financial system.

It may not cover all of the good boys and girls in Manhattan, but Google Earth's 3-D option has bulked up enough to make a virtual traveler feel a little like an airborne Santa.

The 3-D-layer option in Google Earth is old news, but it wasn't very thickly populated in its early incarnation. However, a data increase earlier this month adds thousands of photo-textured buildings to the original set, which included pretty landmarks such as the Empire State Building and the Woolworth Building, but not more prosaic locales such as, say, the intersection of First Avenue and 65th Street.