Sony's PlayStation 3 sales dropped 19% in November, but with the public availability of Home, the console has increased in value.

Silicon Alley Insider's Eric Krangel posted an op-ed today calling the PlayStation 3 a "sinking ship."

At CES 2009, companies will talk up at least four different standards aimed at transmitting HDTV wirelessly over home networks. But a lot of this technology isn't yet ready for prime time, some analysts say.

Vendors are already out there pitching their plans to demo products at CES aimed at sending HDTV wirelessly throughout the home. According to some industry analysts, however, at least some of the four competing wireless approaches are still "incipient."

The Web site representing the French Embassy in China has reportedly been weathering a DDoS attack, not four days after Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister He Yafei said France "grossly interfere[d] in China's internal affairs."

A spokesman from the Chinese Foreign Ministry has denounced the attacks, saying that any links drawn between China and the action are purely speculation, and reports should be based upon solid proof of culpability.

Yahoo on Wednesday revised a controversial severance plan -- first adopted to defend against a Microsoft buyout bid -- to the point where the plan will no longer apply if a sale of Yahoo's search business does occur.

The plan created in February -- often referred to as Yahoo's "poison pill" -- gives full-time Yahoo employees, including top executives, financial guarantees in the event of a "change in control."

AT&T has simplified the 3G iPhone acquisition and activation process, allowing the iconic device to be purchased pre-activated online.

The iPhone 3G's activation process has earned criticism since the device's launch in July. It differed from its 2G progenitor in that it had to be activated in-store, an aspect which caused immediate delays in availability due to over-stressed AT&T and Apple infrastructure. Many who eagerly waited in line for the iPhone 3G found themselves in line a second time for activation, others were sent home with printed instructions on how to activate the device from home. Home activation proved to be just as much of a hassle.

Sure, the US government has been in favor of expanding access to free "broadband" service to the masses. But the current administration is opposed to mandates, and there's still enough time to make that opposition stick.

In an open letter to US Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin yesterday, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez repeated the current administration's opposition to the idea of mandating that a portion of the Advanced Wireless Services AWS-3 spectrum being auctioned off next year, be exclusively set aside for businesses that wish to operate no-fee nationwide broadband services.

One of the only sources of hard information yesterday about an IE remote code exploit that Microsoft only knew about circumstantially, now says not only is the Web full of misinformation about it, but it blames itself.

Just how many online news sources have to repeat a piece of information before it becomes, by default, true? That's the question faced by literally everyone, including BetaNews, who reported on Microsoft's revelation earlier in the week of what was believed to be the existence of new attacks affecting its Web browsers.

The Federal Information Security Act of 2002 caused concern over cybersecurity in government entities that hadn't shown much of it previously, lighting fires under folks who needed warming. So what's all this talk of burning FISMA down?

FISMA's birth certificate is fairly petite -- the section of the E-Government Act of 2002 that created FISMA weighs in at a readable 16 pages (PDF available here). It outlines a set of mandatory processes for compliance for information systems used by or on behalf of the US federal government.

On July 15, the IRS will launch a 45-state data-sharing initiative, but according to the GAO, there's almost no evaluation data indicating whether or not it works correctly. There's not even data on how to evaluate the data.

Data-matching's not a new concept to the IRS, but the State Reverse File Match Initiative (SRFMI) moves the data in the other direction -- that is, from the states to the federal agency. The goal of the program is, as one might expect, to figure out who's not paying her share and to get that money, thus helping to close the estimated $345 billion gross federal tax gap.

The largest COPPA settlement to date was handed down Thursday when Sony BMG agreed to pay out $1 million for having collected and used without parental consent personal information on tens of thousands of kids under 13.

The violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act involved 196 fan sites for musical acts such as Good Charlotte, Kelly Clarkson, Chris Brown, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. According to the US Federal Trade Commission complaint, Sony BMG's sign-up process for viewing and participating in such sites required the user to enter their name, date of birth, email address, mobile phone number, gender, city, state, and country.

Psystar can no longer accuse Apple of breaking the Clayton and Sherman antitrust acts. But the Mac clone maker continues to take the offense in its defense against Apple's charges of IP violations.

After its previous claims against Apple were thrown out of court, Psystar this week morphed its accusations against Apple in several other directions, including a complaint that Apple is causing Mac OS to crash when the operating system detects it's running on non-Apple hardware.

Until this week, China was widely considered immune to the economic woes surrounding the rest of the globe. But now, the nation's Baidu search engine is experiencing some similar sounding financial strains.

Historically successful Chinese Internet search company Baidu.com Inc. shocked NASDAQ investors this week by slashing its fourth-quarter revenue outlook by $20 million (USD). Aside from the economic slowdown impacting just about every other corner of the globe, the Chinese search engine is now up against its own set of antitrust and other legal concerns.

Download Google Chrome for Windows XP and Vista from FileForum now.

Perhaps in response to a wave of blog posts commenting about how many Google products have remained officially in "beta" for so long, its Chrome browser release no longer has that moniker attached.

The nation's third largest mobile provider took a hit on its stock price Thursday after Moody's Investors Service downgraded Sprint Nextel's senior unsecured debt rating to Ba2, known more commonly as the "junk" rating.

Sprint's stock has dropped 84 percent since the beginning of 2008. It traded at a low of $1.35 in late November, though it's currently back up to the low $2 range. (At press time, shares were trading on the New York Stock Exchange at $2.09, down $0.33 on the day.

Facebook has been translated into dozens of foreign languages, but a hate group on the site in Serbian was left completely unmoderated, despite a tremendous user outcry against it.

The group "NOŽ ŽICA SREBRENICA!!" is a "Just for fun - Fan Club" of fugitive war criminal General Ratko Mladic, who was accused of genocide and crimes against humanity by an International Criminal Tribunal in 2004. Mladic commanded the Army of the Srpska Republic in the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre of over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims.