Latest Technology News

The new Windows Live profile features that were recently announced have begun to take effect, turning the formerly sterile Windows Live into a more cohesive portal for online content consumption.

New versions of Live Home, Spaces, Events, Skydrive, Groups, and Photos have been pushed out to users, joined by the Windows Live header bar. Since Microsoft is pulling together a number of disparate services, however, there is still a feeling of disconnection throughout the site.

As Microsoft's annual MSDN Developers' Conference nationwide tour begins next week, attendees will be among the first to receive a DVD of Windows 7 Beta 1, according to an online invitation the company posted yesterday.

Every year, Microsoft sends a handful of its most popular conference presenters on a nationwide tour, at special MSDN events that are usually held in small conference arenas or hotels, or sometimes rented movie theaters. Attendance is $99 for the one-day event, and with this tour, attendees are promised a big giveaway package that includes Windows 7 Beta 1.

Sling Media has launched the beta of Sling.com for watching online video content or remote Slingbox content from a user's home. It's not nearly as splashy a beta as when Joost first arrived on the scene.

Sling.com is one part destination video site, and one part remote access to home Slingbox content -- sort of like Hulu for Slingbox owners. In fact, a majority of the programming initially available on Sling.com comes directly from Hulu -- at some points, the content actually says so in the lower right corner.

Bloggers who may be too pressed for time to find relevant links and images for their posts can now turn to technology. The Zemanta plug-in sifts through possibly relevant material (possibly) for things bloggers can attach to posts.

The Zemanta service, currently in alpha version 0.5.1, shares with many semantic-language products the quality of parsing English like a Roomba vacuum -- getting the job done, more or less, but in a way that'll make you nuts if you watch too closely.

A study in the works from J. Campana & Associates indicates that public- and volunteer-sector enterprises -- schools, government agencies, non-profits and such -- account for well over half of all info-security breaches.

But how can we be sure? We can't, according to Joseph Campana, because it's rather hard to trust that smaller organizations such as community groups or small towns can recognize a breach when one occurs, or follow proper reporting procedures if they do notice.

Social butterflies who like the Tweetdeck columns-and-groups model for keeping track of one's connections but need FriendFeed's ability to keep an eye on on other social networks will enjoy PeopleBrowsr, currently in open alpha.

The goal, as PeopleBrowsr's FAQ says, is to bring all one's online identities to one place. When we visited, that meant Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Flickr, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Photobucket, Seesmic, and YouTube. FaceBook support is explicitly mentioned in the QuickTour but wasn't available for our purposes.

Not one half-hour after Microsoft responded to BetaNews' inquiry, the company reversed its position, effectively announcing that the first public betas of Vista SP2 not in February, but next Thursday.

The word of a December 4 public beta release officially came from Microsoft Corp. Vice President Mike Nash at 4:23 pm this afternoon, moments after our story about rumors of a Q1 2009 beta release went live.

NEW YORK, N.Y. - Even though most downloads from YouTube still consist of user-generated content, the service's top priority for 2009 is to acquire more premium content from the likes of NBC and MGM, said the man in charge of putting those deals together.

Jordan Hoffner, YouTube's head of content partnership, spoke this afternoon before attendees of the annual OnScreen Media Summit, produced by Broadcasting & Cable magazine.

In the EU's long-running front against cyber-crime, the Council of Ministers has proposed a five-year plan to tackle the problem, including collaboration with regional law enforcement branches and the implementation of remote searches.

Citing problems such as information and identity theft, spam, and child pornography as growing threats to society, the Council's new plan involves setting up a single communications network to allow EU member nations and Europol to pool information on offenses and their perpetrators.

Outspoken European Commissioner Viviane Reding has received backing on her group's move to end "roaming rip-offs," with the Council of EU Telecoms ministers agreeing to place limits upon roaming text messages and data charges.

In the ever-important interest of keeping competition fair and affordable in the EU, regulators sought to bring down the price of text messages sent from a member nation other than the sender's homeland, and to ensure transparency in billing. In 2007, the European Commission enacted similar regulations on roaming voice calls.

Oracle today announced that it has contributed code to the Linux kernel aimed at alerting IT administrators to "silent data corruption" that might interfere with the accuracy of database queries, turning up wrong answers.

The 2.6.27 Linux kernel got bolstered today by "block I/O data integrity infrastructure" code which is seen by Oracle, the code's contributor, as a first for any operating system.

Mobile phone maker Nokia today took a big step toward establishing the open source Symbian Foundation, a group that will enhance the Symbian OS to compete with Android and other mobile OS.

In announcing today that it's closed a deal to buy Symbian Ltd, mobile phone maker Nokia called the completion of the acquisition a "fundamental step" in creating the Symbian Foundation, a multi-vendor group that will bolster the Symbian OS to take on Android and the LiMo Foundation's emerging OS as a mobile open source environment.

Perhaps one of the sternest reprimands of a US corporation in history, handed down last year, may be chopped in two and watered down as a result of a federal appeals court decision yesterday.

A decision rendered by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals late yesterday in the perpetual intellectual property dispute between Broadcom and Qualcomm, around which much of the health and well-being of the entire semiconductor industry now directly depends, once again has both sides claiming victory this morning.

The WiMAX activities of Sprint and Clearwire in the US might seem skimpy in comparison to what's happening in Africa, where wireless providers are bringing broadband data connectivity and phone services to underserved areas.

With much of the vast African continent still unconnected to the Internet, wireless providers are now trying to fill the gap with dozens of WiMAX deployments. Three mobile operators outlined plans for countries ranging from Morocco to the Congo during a webcast sponsored by Canadian-based analyst firm Maravedis.

Mobile phone leader Nokia posted a countdown timer that ticked away the seconds until the company officially unveiled its newest mystery product. Early this morning, it was revealed to be the latest N-Series device, the N97.

As with the other N-series devices, Nokia calls the N97 a mobile computer rather than a handset. It runs S60 5th edition and offers 32 GB of on-board storage which is expandable as much as 16 GB via MicroSD. Communication protocols for the device are HSDPA, quad-band GSM, GPS and A-GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.0.