In-car wireless Internet to become a reality with Chrysler
An EV-DO-enabled hotspot will be installed as an option in 2009 models of Chrysler, Jeep, and Dodge vehicles, as well as some earlier models, the auto maker announced yesterday.
Chrysler itself will not install the Mopar-produced devices direct from the factory, instead it would be made available at the dealership. The new router will be mounted in the trunk much like CD changers and satellite radio receivers already are, and hardwired into the car's electrical system. Users will be able to use Wi-Fi at distances from the car comparable to current home-based wireless routers.
Eleven major soft spots addressed by latest Patch Tuesday
The full effect of yesterday's round of patches from Microsoft is just now being felt. This time, it's not the worldwide DNS flaw that's the big issue, but the typical stuff that afflicts Microsoft products, including and especially Office.
One of the "critical" vulnerabilities addressed yesterday affects older versions of Microsoft Word, and was acknowledged by the company last month. It involves intentionally malformed documents that, when parsed by Word, cause it to crash but also leave memory corrupted. Within that corrupt memory can lurk remnant code that could then be executed to give a remote, malicious user unauthorized privileges.
Yahoo's Fire Eagle has landed, offering open mobile services
In March, Yahoo opened the beta of Fire Eagle, its location-based middleware that allows developers to build services tailored to the user's geographic area. Fire Eagle is now open to the public with 22 launch partners providing their services.
Fire Eagle begins by asking users for location data, which can be entered as vaguely as the country or as specifically as the global coordinates. From that point, Fire Eagle's job is done as far as the user is concerned, most of a user's interaction will take place through applications built upon the service.
Two key Icahn 'dream team' members may join Yahoo's board
If the door is going to be left open for a possible future merger of Yahoo and Microsoft, someone's going to have to volunteer to plant their feet there. Today, it appears a Microsoft favorite and Viacom's former CEO may do the honors.
Early reports this morning from multiple sources, including The Wall Street Journal, indicate that the two individuals Yahoo agreed with Icahn Partners to allow for nomination to its Board of Directors, will be former Universal Studios and former Viacom CEO Frank Biondi and former Nextel chief and founder John Chapple. Carl Icahn himself would not be nominated.
Best Buy becomes first US retailer to stock iPhone
The leading US electronics retailer will begin selling the hit phone on September 7 in 970 stores, including all the stores where Apple has launched its "mini-store" pilot program.
Best Buy said it would sell iPhones through its Best Buy Mobile shops that it has begun to open across a little over a dozen cities nationwide. Those smaller versions of the bigger retailer focus primarily on mobile phone sales.
Fire may have damaged key Apple R&D building
A three-alarm fire swept through a building at the Cupertino company, damaging the roof and the second floor of the building known as "Valley Green Six."
Approximately 60 firefighters battled the blaze, which was first reported to the authorities around 10:00 pm local time Tuesday. The fire was contained about 2 1/2 hours later.
PCIe bus boosts speed of new high-end, dual-GPU ATI card
Monday, AMD unveiled its latest and most powerful graphics card to date, the Radeon HD 4870 X2. It achieves its specs by running two RV770 GPUs in tandem that communicate efficiently instead of relying on a single, faster chip.
The GPU architecture differs from other dual-processor models in that will utilize a 5 GB/sec sideport to offload some bandwidth from the PCI Express bridge when hard at work. This new pathway, however, will not be opened until AMD releases a software update for the card in the coming months.
Few hours remaining in ZoneAlarm ForceField one-day giveaway
You have until 3:00 am EDT 9:00 am EDT Wednesday morning, August 13, to download ZoneAlarm's ForceField browser virtualization envelope and receive a license key good for a one-year subscription to the product on one PC.
The basic premise of ForceField is to build a kind of virtualization envelope around the active Web browser, where essentially anything to which a browser would normally connect is divided from the operating system by one layer of abstraction. When a malicious tool tries to leverage a security hole in some other product by way of communicating with the browser -- as was the case with last year's exploit of Apple QuickTime, which relied on Mozilla Firefox -- it won't find that hole because it doesn't appear to exist within the abstraction layer.
Internet firms admit to tracking users' behavior for advertising
Responses to a congressional inquiry into targeted online advertising indicate that some companies were indeed tracking their users without first asking their consent.
In letters to the House Energy and Commerce Committee released Monday, several companies admitted to the practice. Altogether, some 33 companies were queried last August 1 about their position and actions surrounding targeted advertising.
Old musicians want their download money
Four Allman Brothers band members sued Universal Music Group for more than $10 million in royalties from both hard-copy sales and downloadables.
Greg Allman, Jai Johanny Johanson, Butch Trucks, and Dickey Betts filed suit in the Southern District of New York saying that UMG has refused to pay the correct royalties for sales of songs contained on the "Capricorn Masters."
New iPhone app makes it a wireless storage device
With a multitude of applications now available from the App Store, few stand out. Vieosoft's DataCase may be one of those that does.
The $6.99 app was released on Monday, and essentially leverages the flash memory of the iPhone as a wireless storage device. Currently the application supports Microsoft Office, PDF, Text, image, HTML, audio, and video file transfer.
Facebook users unite in outrage over changed layout
Some don't like it when others clean out their houses while they're gone on vacation, and a few might hate it when someone else cleans up. Facebook is now cleaner, brighter, and whiter, and tens of thousands are unhappy.
Nearly 140,000 Facebook accounts have been entered into a group in support of an online petition opposing, for one reason or another, the service's new Web site layout unveiled late last month. And that's just one group; another, entitled "People Against the New Facebook System," has garnered close to 33,000 accounts; and another, "The New Facebook Layout Sucks," gathering nearly 8,000 as of Tuesday afternoon.
Liberty Media signals interest in AOL's dial-up business
Yesterday's Liberty Media Q2 earnings call was liberally dosed with rather frank disclosures from chairman John Malone about potentially big business moves, including swapping its majority stake in Time Warner for AOL's dial-up business.
During Liberty Media's second quarter earnings call Q&A yesterday, chairman John Malone was asked if he'd consider a transaction that may not have "strategic merits for the rest of the Liberty Enterprise, but makes financial sense in the context of LCAP (Liberty Capital Group, the company's non-interactive or entertainment properties)."
Twitter sets 'following' limits to combat spam
Twitter's new limits, which some are discovering just today, seems to have been made effective since the middle of last month, but don't appear to be fixed in stone.
The way Twitter works, each user's chain of posts may be "followed" by others, and a user selects the feeds, or "twitters," he chooses to follow. For the average user, it would appear the limit on the number of feeds he can follow is 2,000, although that number may increase as more users follow his own feed. Some with high traffic, but whose follow-to-follower ratio is more balanced, appear able to follow more feeds.
New Dell Latitudes promise 10 to 19 hours of battery life
In an announcement that harks back to Dell's roots, when during the 1990s it tested a number of its laptops during four-hour flights, the company said its new Latitudes will add continuous battery life for as long as 19 hours straight.
At a Dell press event in San Francisco this morning, its Senior Vice President for the business products group, Jeffrey Clarke, filled in the biggest missing element in Dell's description of its completely redesigned Latitude product line to this point: Dell, he says, has developed a proprietary power cell technology that will enable Latitudes to run continuously while unplugged for at least 10 hours, and intermittently for as much as 19 hours straight.
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