Latest Technology News

While it's just as easy to locate a 15-year-old page in HTML 1.0 as a blog post published this afternoon, the front page of last Friday's BetaNews is as gone as 49-cent gas. Enter Zoetrope, aiming to track Web information over time.

Time keeps on slippin' online -- but wouldn't it be cool to actually happen in something faster than real-time?

A 96-page report released Monday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies paints a gloomy picture of where America stands in the matter of infowar. (Hint: "Stands" may be too optimistic a verb.)

The report is blunt: We're in trouble, our laws are out of date, we need leadership from the White House, and money (public and private) must be applied to the problem. Only a plan that respects privacy and civil liberties will do, and only a comprehensive policy covering both domestic and international situations will work.

The Mobile DTV Alliance is hoping to speed up the adoption of phone-based consumption of TV by lightening up on its support of struggling format DVB-H.

Mobile TV is still waiting to be embraced in the US. We've come around to having YouTube available on our phones, and there are plenty of options for streaming radio, but Mobile broadcast TV is just not sticking.

An impending Wal-Mart ad leaked this week indicates that the iPhone will indeed go on sale at Wal-Mart -- except that it'll probably be the 8 GB version, and for $197.

While none of three companies involved is publicly commenting yet, an increasing body of circumstantial evidence suggests that Wal-Mart really will start selling the iPhone 3G on December 28 -- but that Wal-Mart's iPhone will be the 8 GB version, priced at $197, only $2 less than AT&T's price tag of $199 with a two-year service contract.

During last week's touring WinHEC conference in Beijing, attendees were treated to the latest Windows 7 build running in a virtual machine. Trouble is, someone apparently pilfered a copy of the VHD, and now it's loose.

The security around uninstalled copies of Windows 7 is fairly tight. But the security around a copy that has been installed to a PC's virtual machine, might not be tight at all. So an attendee at last week's Beijing WinHEC conference was apparently able to copy the VHD file for the virtual machine to a thumb drive, before uploading it to a Web file host, and providing the link to a very popular Chinese beta news site (not affiliated with BetaNews).

In an effort to ease the burden its traffic puts on the Internet at large, BitTorrent has announced that it'll use uTP, not TCP, as the transport protocol in its next uTorrent client.

Discussion of the switch from TCP to uTP began late last month, and is set to officially begin in earnest with the 1.9 alpha 13582 build. The exodus from what's essentially the Internet's primary transport protocol could change attitudes toward the popular but bandwidth-intensive BitTorrent, and could have an impact on the great debate over net neutrality.

An AT&T spokesperson today denied widely published reports that AT&T plans to offer a single OS for smartphones. A founding member of the Symbian Foundation, AT&T will also keep supporting Mac, Windows, BlackBerry, and perhaps Android.

In a rash of press and blog reports last week, remarks made by an AT&T executive about AT&T support for mobile OS were "taken out of context," an AT&T spokesperson told BetaNews today.

In what appears to have been an amicable agreement for most involved, Bose Corp. announced today that its legal battle over QuietComfort noise-canceling headphone patents has officially come to an end.

Last year, sound technologies maker Bose filed notice with the US International Trade Commission (PDF available here) that Phitek, GN Netcom (later Jabra), Audio-Technica, Creative Labs, Logitech, and Panasonic were infringing upon Bose's patents for noise-canceling headphones.

At CES next month, attendees will get a close look at interoperable media streaming across multiple DLNA-compliant devices from myriad vendors, across home networks enabled by WiFi, coax, and Ethernet.

After four years of existence, the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) specification for digital media sharing on home networks seems ready to start kicking into higher gear, especially with an announcement by chip maker Broadcom today of plans to showcase a multi-vendor demo at CES.

Download Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 for Windows (all versions) from FileForum now.

The public beta of Mozilla's first Web browser to incorporate a private browsing mode, is being made available to the general public today, although as before, the organization has yet to make it official.

Online metrics company comScore has released its updated set of holiday e-commercial sales figures, showing an increase in Cyber Monday spending over last year, with a notable lift in Consumer Electronics sales.

The recession has had a marked effect on consumer spending, with the average price of individual gifts dropping by some 5%. This caused an overall slowdown which some predicted would mean this year's total holiday sales would actually be less than last year's. However, comScore data showed that the "Cyber Monday" spike in online sales was 9% higher this year, bringing total 2008 holiday sales to just about the same level as 2007.

This morning, the Netflix service was officially made available to users of TiVo Series3, and TiVo HD XL users with the updated software and an existing Netflix subscription.

On Friday, the TiVo 11.0 software began to roll out, but other than a slight rearrangement on the main menu and the "11.0" insignia, there was little to speak of in the update. However, this meant that the updated boxes were primed for the Netflix On Demand service, which was announced at the end of October.

So which is it? Last week, the candle in Carl Icahn's window appeared lit, while Steve Ballmer's was snuffed out. This week, after Icahn put out his candle publicly on nationwide TV, Ballmer appears to have lit his again.

In an exchange of semi-counter-proposals that has seen more flip-flops than a 2004 Republican campaign rally, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made it clear this morning through his mouthpiece of choice, The Wall Street Journal, that his company may be interested after all in a deal with the search engine component of Yahoo.

According to a study released this morning, troubled times and sloppy security may prove a mighty temptation for hackers or even disgruntled employees -- and companies' overly high opinions of their own security don't help.

The Enterprise Strategy Group, which conducted the Database Security Controls study in conjunction with Application Security Inc., spoke in October to 179 IT decision-makers working in enterprise-class organizations (meaning those with 1,000 employees or more). The 27-item questionnaire inquired about security budgets, breaches, controls and audits.

The world's second Android phone, the Agora, is on the way from Australian-based Kogan, and the device -- which features a full QWERTY keyboard -- will be available globally early next year.

Australia-based Kogan Technologies is now accepting pre-orders for the Agora mobile phone -- the second Android phone after HTC's G1 -- with worldwide shipments to start on January 29, 2009.