Online auctioneer eBay today announced plans to cut 1,000 jobs, while at the same time spending about $1.3 billion on three acquisitions: electronic payments business Bill Me Later and Danish Web sites dba.dk and bilbasen.dk.

Today's job reductions, amounting to 10 percent of eBay's work force, follow an earlier round of cuts amounting to 125 jobs in North America and Europe, including 70 at its headquarters in San Jose, CA.

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Download Mono 2.0 for Linux from FileForum now.

Microsoft has said from the very beginning that it wanted .NET to potentially be a cross-platform environment, but it's letting the open source community tackle that problem instead. This morning, that community celebrates a major milestone.

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Security threats to businesses vary according to what sort of businesses ar targeted, according to a study covering over four years and 230 million compromised records.

Verizon originally issued its general Business Data Breach Investigations report back in June, but drill-down data on four industries -- financial services, technology, retail and food and beverage services, which together composed about 82 percent of the original survey -- merited a supplemental analysis this week. Some of the highlights:

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The FCC will start to investigate video content-blocking technologies, if a bill just passed by the US Senate clears the House, including not only the V-Chip but other technologies that don't work hand-in-hand with ratings systems.

Now that the US House of Representatives has passed the nation's economic bailout bill, legislators in that branch of government may have the opportunity to consider another measure already approved by the US Senate. By unanimous consent this week, the Senate gave its okay to a bill that would force an FCC investigation of content-blocking technologies ostensibly aimed at use by parents in screening video content across multiple distribution platforms.

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Yesterday evening, Sony officially announced its third generation Reader e-book, equipping the over two-year-old product design with an upgrade that includes tactile sensitivity.

Competition in the e-reader market is getting exciting as we approach 2009. One by one, companies are rolling out their latest offerings, each incrementally building the list of standard features in the devices.

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With the DOJ expressing skepticism over Yahoo's agreement to sell search ad space to its biggest competitor, a letter from a key US senator urging action could be preaching to the choir. What's interesting is that senator's theory.

In a letter to the Justice Department's antitrust chief yesterday, Sen. Herb Kohl (D - Wisc.), chairman of the Senate Antitrust Committee, advised the Dept. to maintain a close watch over Google and Yahoo as they initiate their search advertising deal, for two reasons: The first is something discussed quite often, that the deal could be used to drive up the price of contextual search advertising.

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Good news: Steve Jobs did not have a major heart attack this week. Bad news: A serious "citizen journalism" misfire may have caused several heart attacks for investors anyway.

The "Steve Jobs heart attack" rumor, which started with a single post on the iReport site owned by CNN and spread rapidly through the blogosphere and parts of the mainstream media, illustrates the downside of throwing the doors of a news site open to anyone -- even as the week's financial and political news showed how effective and intelligent reader news gathering and commentary can be when it's done right.

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In what is supposed to be a fast-moving industry, a security hole in an encryption system for global banking has been open for seven years. Yesterday, finally, a standards body mandated that the hole must be closed by 2010.

In its latest amendment to its security standards document, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council has agreed to finally discontinue the promotion and use of an encryption standard for wireless communications whose integrity was shown by security engineers to be easily penetrated seven years ago.

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Both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have approved a bill that will give all cellular customers coverage in the Washington DC Metro transit system.

Several years ago I lived in Washington, DC, and relied exclusively on the Metro (DC's equivalent to New York's Subway, Boston's "T", and Chicago's El) for transportation to and from Northern Virginia for work. While it always seemed like I had a wireless signal in New York's subway, any time I was underground on the DC Metro, either on trains or in stations, I would be without signal. Those scant moments when the Blue Line trains were above ground while heading into Springfield, VA were the only times I could use my phone.

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In defending itself against antitrust allegations, Apple has filed a motion in US District Court denying counterclaims by Doral, FL-based Psystar that Apple is a "monopolistic power," and seeking a dismissal.

As previously reported in BetaNews, in the David vs. Goliath legal case, Apple has accused clone maker Psystar of copyright and trademark infringement and breach of contract. Apple charges, too, that Psystar made modifications to the Mac OS code that allowed the software to run on Psystar's hardware.

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3:46 pm EDT October 2, 2008 - In a move reminiscent of a different CEO named Steve, Microsoft's chief Wednesday expressed the idea of a future service for deploying applications "in the cloud." But perhaps speculators are confused by the "Windows" name.

Until the Professional Developers' Conference convenes in a little over four weeks' time, Microsoft will very likely say nothing of consequence about a concept its CEO publicly called "Windows Cloud" during a developers' meeting in London yesterday. That's by design, of course; Steve Ballmer is, for once, successfully deploying a Steve Jobs tactic of tossing a new concept to the masses like fresh meat to the wolves, and occupying their attention up until the final date of revelation.

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Skype's Josh Silverman admitted yesterday that a security breach enabled Chinese Skype users' instant message conversations to be recorded and made accessible on public Web servers.

"It is common knowledge that censorship does exist in China and that the Chinese government has been monitoring communications in and out of the country for many years," said Silverman. He went on to cite Skype's public disclosure in 2006 of putting text filters in place to block certain words the Chinese authorities found "offensive."

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While Motorola is engaged in device development for the Android platform, the company's Good Technology Group software arm has now garnered US Defense Department certification on a secure e-mail system for Windows Mobile devices.

What's happening right now at Good Technology Group (GTG), the Motorola division formed through Motorola's buyout of a RIM rival called Good Technology, Inc.? For one thing, Good's Secure S/MIME technology has now jumped the last hurdle for becoming the first secure mobile message system deployed among US Army troops, said Ravi Iyer, group product manager at Good.

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The recording industry's efforts to compensate for lagging CD sales by promoting hikes in royalties rates, suffered another serious setback yesterday in the US as a panel of judges ruled mechanical royalties rates should stay put.

Apple's threat earlier this week to shut down its iTunes service cast a brighter spotlight on the Copyright Review Board's royalties review process than at any time since 1909. As of this morning, the CRB hasn't actually publicly announced its decision yesterday, although the Associated Press learned from sources who participated in the meetings with the three-judge panel that it decided not to raise the rates for mechanical reproduction royalties above the current base rate established in January 2006.

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"Big Four" music label EMI and fourteen affiliate labels sued MP3Tunes as a company and its CEO Michael Robertson personally last year for alleged copyright infringement. A judge has tossed the personal lawsuit.

On Thursday, New York Southern District Court judge William Pauley III dismissed EMI's personal suit against Robertson, who is most frequently remembered as co-founder of MP3.com.

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