It's not April Fools Day, but if you're online at odd hours and perhaps a bit inebriated, Google's got a plan to keep you from making a fool of yourself.

Straight from the Gmail Labs (and, one might imagine, at least one in-house episode of tipsy oversharing), Google on Tuesday unveiled Mail Goggles, an e-mail option designed to keep you from doing online what a good wingman keeps you from doing if you're wearing beer goggles after too much fun at the club. (Technically, in that case, the function should be called Mail Wingman. Not that we'd know anything about that.)

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In a costly loss in US District Court in Alexandria yesterday, a jury found all of Verizon's claims that Cox Communications infringed upon its VoIP-related patents to be without basis, and even invalidated two of eight patent claims.

Back in January, Verizon filed a patent infringement suit against a Virginia division of Cox Communications, which was establishing VoIP service in that state. It was a boilerplate case that asserted its claims to eight US patents in the field of Internet-related voice telephony. Those patents were mostly acquired by Verizon on account of mergers and acquisitions, having been originally issued to such one-time giants as MCI and Bell Atlantic.

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11:45 am EDT October 7, 2008 - Developments in Universal City Studios Productions LLP v. RealNetworks Inc. published online yesterday reveal that Real made its RealDVD product unavailable over the weekend because of a temporary restraining order issued by District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel.

The text of the filing begins: "Defendants have already caused significant irreparable harm to Real by prevailing upon this court to institute a temporary halt to sales of RealDVD since the evening of October 3, 2008..."

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In an effort to avoid embarrassment, Rambus sought to end a high-profile patent infringement squabble with competitor Samsung. A district court judge ruled Samsung couldn't let it go, but today the highest court says it must.

The US Supreme Court refused yesterday to hear memory maker Samsung's appeal in a case involving competitor Rambus -- an appeal which would have had wider ramifications on the market at large had it been heard.

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Two Abu Dhabi investment firms, both arms of the Emirate's government, have helped the AMD in its "Asset Light/Asset Smart" stragegy, and with their investments, may have changed the path of the struggling company.

Mubadala Development Company, which took an eight percent stake in AMD last year, now holds almost 20 percent of AMD, and the Government of Abu Dhabi (as ATIC) has become a 50/50 partner in AMD's spun-off fabrication company.

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The Samsung DVD formula has been high speed with reduced noise and lowered power consumption, according to a high-ranking official. Three new 22X internal DVD burners, which start shipping today, join an external model in the same series.

Samsung is today adding three new internal 22X DVD burners to the Super-WriteMaster S223 series first launched with the SH-223F external DVD burner released earlier this year.

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With US elections four weeks away, visions of glitches past and present are dancing in the heads of tech observers bracing for November 4. It may not help that one judge is suppressing the results of an e-voting machines test.

A New Jersey judge has ruled that testing results from Sequoia e-voting machines used in that state are not to be released until further notice.

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The nation's highest court today shut the door on EchoStar's and Dish Network's petitions for a final appeal of their patent infringement case. Now all they can hope is for mercy from TiVo, if they are to continue producing DVRs in the US.

After the US Supreme Court declined this afternoon to hear the appeal of Dish Network and its former parent EchoStar in a long-running patent infringement case, EchoStar decided it had no other option: It's paying TiVo $104 million, in hopes that this will settle the companies' disputes over whether Dish Network software infringed on TiVo patents.

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Stock market news got you down? Perhaps smacking small round objects in a beautiful setting would soothe your nerves.

World Golf Tour, which enters beta today, is so well-behaved that this reviewer felt like breaking her clubs over her abominable skills rather than the gameplay, and the high-def graphics made me appreciate that she was not on lovely Kiawah Island stinking up a course that gorgeous.

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Components of a National Security Agency case study designed to demonstrate that open source, high security and cost effectiveness can all co-exist have been turned over to the open source community.

Tokeneer manages access control for a biometric ID verification tool. It's based on the SPARK subset of Ada developed by the UK's Praxis and was funded by the US National Security Agency, which chose to make information on the development and research available.

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Sometimes when investors get the feeling in advance that it's going to be a bad day in the markets, it doesn't take too much bad news to validate their fears. This morning, some relatively minor bad news had a magnified market impact.

Early this morning, Netflix made some admissions that, on a normal business day, would be viewed as a minor downtick in an otherwise healthy company. It missed its nationwide subscriber goal for the past quarter by 3,000. No, not three million -- three thousand, with 8.672 million subscribers at the end of the third quarter.

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Nokia's upcoming mobile music service may be called "Comes With Music," but the question many of its charter subscribers will be asking -- especially those who've already been burned out on DRM -- is, will the music stay put?

When the first word in the text of a contract is qualified with an asterisk, it's generally a sign that the document should not be taken at face value. And when that first word is "lifetime," "unlimited," or "free," it's a safe bet that it was placed there more as bait than a statement of fact.

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IBM is fending off a constellation of competition in "cloud computing" with a set of new services for developers and business customers, including "Bluehouse," a Web-based collaboration service which entered public beta today.

IBM announced today that "Bluehouse" -- a new Internet-based collaboration and social networking service based on technology from its Lotus division -- has emerged from private beta testing and is now in the open public beta phase.

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As the US Dept. of Justice appears to be preparing for an extensive investigation into the two search leaders' cooperative deal, Yahoo and Google have decided that another delay in their implementation is unavoidable.

October 11 was the date in which Yahoo was expected to begin making portions of its search ad inventory available to Google's AdSense. This was based on reports citing comments from both companies, although the exact timing of every event in Yahoo's new AdSense partnership with Google has only been known for certain to government agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, since the public version of Yahoo's notice was redacted.

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After some re-organization in parent company IAC, perennial runner-up search engine Ask.com today announced it had also re-organized its search technology.

In August, Match.com's Jim Safka became CEO of Ask.com in a reorganization that saw parent company IAC spin off into three sub-companies, the "New IAC", LendingTree, and Interval Leisure Group. Now, the company is hoping users will hop on and try out Ask's proprietary search mechanisms.

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