Latest Technology News

Yesterday, Verizon Wireless issued a statement that "a number" of its employees accessed US President-Elect Barack Obama's personal cell phone account without authorization.

"The account has been inactive for several months. The device on the account was a simple voice flip-phone, not a BlackBerry or other smartphone designed for e-mail or other data services," Verizon Wireless President and CEO Lowell McAdam said, "All employees who have accessed the account -- whether authorized or not -- have been put on immediate leave, with pay. As the circumstances of each individual employee's access to the account are determined, the company will take appropriate actions. Employees with legitimate business needs for access will be returned to their positions, while employees who have accessed the account improperly and without legitimate business justification will face appropriate disciplinary action."

REDMOND, WASH. - As seen by Microsoft, the good news is that the future includes music from Frank Sinatra, the book "Goodnight Moon," grandmothers' visits, koi, comfortable couches -- a 360-degree vision of middle-class America at home.

The bad news is that Clippy will be there, and will also have 360-degree vision.

REDMOND, WASH. - Microsoft has been working for years to be your TV-time buddy, while yearning also to forge deep relationships with Hollywood and other content providers. But Microsoft wants you to know it's always liked you better.

At a Media Center-centric event here Wednesday, Microsoft's new Media Center marketing manager Mike Seamons, charged with demonstrating the charms of the Windows 7 version of Media Center, said that "Microsoft has always preferred DRM-free" content, adding that the company nonetheless understands the need for protections.

The Roadrunner supercomputer now runs more than 1.1 thousand trillion floating-point operations per second. But what's an "operation" really? By the time the next Top 500 list comes out, the definition could change.

At a presentation at the SC08 semi-annual supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, an engineer with Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee who is an expert on the Linpack benchmark, suggested that the methodology used to determine supercomputer performance using Linmark may be behind the times. Specifically, Jack Dongarra -- the man credited with introducing the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark to the Top 500 program -- suggested that as supercomputers get bigger and can store more data, their lag times increase exponentially. This implies that making existing supercomputers bigger and faster eventually leads to a point of diminishing returns.

Another work stoppage by SAG could hit by January. Among other things, the TV actors now seek union protection for all Internet-only productions, regardless of budget.

Less than a year after its earlier work stoppage in January, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) looks likely to go out on strike again, this time strictly over union rights around Internet TV.

Lean, not-mean, and sustainable is the way to take on the current economic climate and the Feds too, say Mozilla reps who posted the project's audited financial statements and tax forms for 2007 and gave a glimpse ahead...to today.

The relatively peaceful era of 2007 went well for Mozilla in both Foundation and Corporation forms. Revenues were up about 12%, mainly from their Google search-functionality arrangement, though search revenue didn't keep pace with Firefox's user base growth. Revenues were $75 million against expenses of $33 million, mainly for staff (Mozilla employs around 150 full- and part-time employees) and, to a lesser extent, infrastructure. Assets were $99 million, with unrestricted net assets at $82 million.

AOL has begun open beta testing of AOL Sync, a feature that allows Outlook contact and calendar updates to be synchronized wirelessly with a user's address book and calendar both in his AOL account and on his mobile device.

Powered by Funambol's open source SyncML push/sync software, AOL sync should be instantly compatible with more than 17 different brands of handset, including the iPhone, 27 different types of BlackBerry, and the multitude of Windows Mobile devices.

NEW YORK, N.Y. - At the "Future of Television Show" Wednesday night, top brass from NBC and MTV said their companies now plan to stream full-length TV shows to iPhones and G1s. But other speakers argued in favor of shorter clips for phones.

Apple's iPhone and T-Mobile's Android-based G1 are turning into big catalysts for mobile TV development, speakers agreed. But the experts differed over what kinds of TV content will go over best on mobile phones.

Blasting Google as, if not the perpetrator, then certainly the beneficiary of the failure of the online content industry, Microsoft's chief IP attorney called upon British publishers to bring about change they can believe in.

In a clear contrast of his company's position on business models and strategies for content providers against those of Google, Microsoft's chief intellectual property attorney Thomas Rubin this morning, in a speech before the UK Association of Online Publishers transcribed by Microsoft, called on online publishers to find fair prices for their content. This instead of continuing the policy of giving content away for free, in hopes that a fair business model will eventually congeal itself into existence, around advertising or some other subsidiary platform.

Not even five months into the project, Google's Lively Team announced that the gadget-based mini-metaverse will be discontinued at the end of December.

"Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it's the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people's lives. But we've also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off," the team's official announcement said, "It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business."

Microsoft announced today that its subscription music service for the Zune will now allow users to download 10 tracks per month to keep forever.

A Zune Pass subscription costs $14.99 a month, and like other services, offers unlimited music downloading for the duration of the subscription. Now, users can download 10 DRM-free tracks a month to keep irrespective of their subscription status.

In an effort to build national and multi-national pride in the cultural, artistic, and literary products of Europe throughout its vast history, the EC this morning cut the red ribbon around Europeana, its central online library.

Problem is, when you declare something "open," people do tend to come in. As of mid-afternoon GMT (mid-morning on the US East Coast), Europeana's would-be one-stop-shop for the vast collection of literary material considered the collective property of Europe's many peoples, was either completely unresponsive or too slow to be useful, perhaps due to an influx of traffic. Even pings timed out to the site's Netherlands-based IP address.

It's a feature which could be ubiquitous in more data centers if it could just get out of the labs: the ability to move running virtual machines between platforms with next-to-zero downtime. Now, it's being done cross-platform.

Up to now, the ability for a data center to move a running virtual machine between active processors while giving the user little or no visible downtime, has mainly been possible under a limited set of circumstances: The VM platform needs to be managed by VMware ESX, and the CPUs involved need to come from the same manufacturer.

An apparent licensing issue has rendered Columbia Pictures movies unwatchable through New Xbox Experience's Netflix instant queue, for reasons Netflix is describing as a "natural ebb and flow" of licensing.

AOL gaming blog Joystiq reported that Instant queues in their advance access to the New Xbox Experience had been updated with a "Notes" column, where many movies were listed as "Not available on Xbox."

In the next stage of what has turned out to be a more successful project than even its creators envisioned, the public beta of Moonlight -- a runtime library for Linux supporting sites that expect Silverlight -- is expected within days.

Microsoft and Novell made their joint announcement this morning in acknowledging the two-year anniversary of their historic, and still talked-about, partnership agreement. It effectively confirms the timeline put forth by Moonlight's parent organization, the open source Mono Project, which is also responsible for building open source versions of the .NET Framework runtime for Linux, Mac OS X, and yes, for Windows as well.