Google sees erosion of its $1B AOL investment
Google has admitted to the SEC that its 2006 investment in AOL could be "impaired," meaning that its 5 percent stake in AOL might now be worth considerably less than the $1 billion the company paid in 2006.
For Google, this assessment might bring a substantial charge against future profits, although the highly profitable company -- which earned $2.55 billion during the first half of 2008 alone -- seems likely to be able to absorb the loss rather handily.
Apple pulls $1,000 App Store 'gem' after eight downloads
Armin Heinrich, the developer of the 'I Am Rich' application that sold for $999.99 and does essentially nothing, isn't sure why his submission was pulled from the App Store as it was done without warning.
Eight people are said to have downloaded the program, including six in the US, one in Germany and another in France during the day it was live. Using the App Store's revenue split, Heinrich would have made nearly $5,600 in revenues from an program that essentially does nothing.
Facebook's response: Worms are not our problem
The response from representatives of social networks impacted this week by the discovery of a type of worm that targets them specifically, appears to have come straight out of West Side Story. They're playing it cool, boys, real cool.
In a company blog post late yesterday, whose timing is the main indication of its being a response to concerns raised earlier this week over Kaspersky Lab's discovery of a worm being disseminated through social networks, Facebook's head of security, Max Kelly, advised users that if they really think they have a worm or virus on their computers, they should contact Microsoft or Apple.
IPhone feature could enable Apple to kill apps remotely
11:10 am EDT August 8, 2008 - Another technical writer has disagreed with author Jonathan Zdziarski's and the media's initial suppositions about the whether the list he discovered on his 3G iPhone truly is a blacklist-in-waiting.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball points out that its a Core Location blacklist, and that the "clbl" in the called URL stands for exactly that. Applications who use that portion of the iPhone code must follow some very strict rules for privacy reasons.
Mozilla Labs considers grafting IM onto Firefox
Download Snowl 0.1 alpha from FileForum now.
When a company's lab typically comes forth with an idea for the general public, it already has a proposition in mind for why that idea is necessarily good. This morning, one of Mozilla Labs' latest ideas actually leaves that question open.
Ubuntu attracts the lion's share of LinuxWorld's smaller crowds
Download Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) Alpha 3 from FileForum now.
Even though attendance was a bit sparse during this year's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo when compared to previous years, the Canonical booth -- where the latest Ubuntu Linux software was being shown off -- still managed to draw a crowd.
IBM VP urges open source devs to make Linux less like Windows
If Linux is going to make bigger inroads on the desktop, developers need to stop cloning Microsoft Windows and instead produce more unique user interface designs, according to Bob Sutor, IBM's VP of open source and standards.
Sutor made these remarks today at the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas, a day after IBM issued the latest in an eight-year series of Linux announcements, joining at LinuxWorld with Linux distributors Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical in an initiative to build "Microsoft-free PCs for business."
LinuxWorld shows off the latest data center-in-a-truck
Talk about your portable servers. Rackable Systems brought its ICE Cube Modular Data Center to LinuxWorld, demonstrating how companies can literally ship their data centers from city to city, even overseas, in cool comfort.
SAN FRANCISCO (BetaNews) - Self-contained, fully portable, modular servers are becoming more popular because they help reduce data center costs, and these all-in-one data centers can be moved from location to location with ease. Over the past few years, at least two companies have created their modular centers in shipping containers that can be transported by road, rail or air.
Toshiba doubles its embedded flash capacity to catch up with Samsung
Thumb drives and portable music players may continue their rapid capacity increase, thanks to #2 flash supplier Toshiba introducing 32 gigabit chips this fall. It's a big gamble, though, for a catch-up player in a declining market.
Just 16 months after the company said it was ready to begin sampling 16 gigabit (Gb) NAND flash memory for embedded devices, using its 56-nanometer lithography process, Toshiba announced late this morning that it would begin sampling 32 Gb embedded flash devices using its 43-nm process in October.
Merged Sirius XM sees growth for sat radio, despite low stock price
Sirius XM shareholders shouldn't be too glad right now about Sirius' merger with fellow satellite radio provider XM, admitted company CEO Mel Karmazin, who later said he had been expecting court opposition to the merger.
"The only group that should not be pleased so far is our shareholders," Karmazin told analysts yesterday.
BitTorrent calls reports of staff layoff 'inaccurate'
7:18 pm EDT August 7, 2008 - In a statement this afternoon which Valleywag ran in its entirety, a representative of BitTorrent called allegations that the company laid off most of its sales and marketing department "inaccurate," "irresponsible journalism," and "outright false."
However, the statement did say that employees were laid off. "Contrary to published reports, we reduced less than 20% of our team and those impacted were distributed across our organization, rather than focused on a single department," stated BitTorrent representative Lily Lin. "Also contrary to published reports, the layoffs were unrelated to any ongoing discussions to divest a portion of our business...While it is our policy to not comment on rumors, the company has indeed been involved in strategic discussions with potential partners who are interested in the BitTorrent online store. These discussions continue."
How did Dell get 'carbon neutral?'
To become the first "carbon neutral" computer company this week, Dell took steps ranging from buying "green" energy in the Round Rock, Texas area to investing in a Madagascan forest, according to a Dell spokesperson.
Launched in 2006 by the Inter-American Development Bank (IAB), the "carbon neutral" initiative calls on companies to voluntarily help squelch the harmful impact of carbon emissions on Earth's climate by undergoing a four-stage process of calculating, reducing, offsetting, and communicating about their own emissions.
Could open source be the solution to the e-voting debacle?
The chaos from the 2000 presidential election in Florida, and subsequent e-voting controversies, has left voters skeptical. So a former engineer from Intel and Borland has designed a new, open system to give voters peace of mind.
SAN FRANCISCO (BetaNews) - Engineer Alan Dechert and his team have created the Open Voting Consortium, an organization aimed at creating and offering open voting systems that can be trusted by voters. Rather than attempt to tinker with a voting machine already in use, Dechert and company created their own voting system from the ground up.
Report: Unhackable e-passports hacked within minutes
Tests by The Times of London indicate that new passports aimed at curbing forgeries and claimed to be unhackable can be cloned and pass as legitimate documents.
Officials who had been pushing for adoption of the new microchip-equipped passports lauded them as a way to cut down on terrorism. Under the old paper-only system, the documents could easily be forged.
What's behind AT&T's Synaptic 'cloud' initiative?
The term "cloud" as a metaphor for parts of the network that users don't need or want to comprehend, may have been coined by AT&T's own labs. So when the company said this week it's entering the "cloud computing" business, what did it mean?
What sets AT&T's Synaptic Hosting apart from other "cloud" initiatives? Jim Paterson, VP of product development for hosting and application services, said that Synaptic is using technologies ranging from VMWare to virtual local area networks (VLANs) to let AT&T move to an "on demand," pay-as-you-go approach with its existing Web hosting, storage, software as a service (Saas), and network management services.
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