Latest Technology News

Sony has informally announced its PlayStation Portable handheld console will be receiving another firmware upgrade, conspicuously, the announcement came on the same day as news that the "unhackable" PSP 3000 had been hacked.

October was a busy month for Sony's PlayStation Portable. In rapid succession, the US enjoyed the release of the PSP 3000, the latest chassis redesign of the handheld game system, a firmware upgrade that added wireless access to the PlayStation Store, and a slightly redesigned XrossMediaBar.

A much faster USB specification is finally about to be implemented, replacing the eight-year-old USB 2.0 standard for connecting printers, mobile phones, drives, and other consumer devices.

The USB 3.0 Promoters Group this week officially confirmed a new USB specification with a maximum speed touted as ten times higher than the currently implemented USB 2.0.

A federal judge yesterday dismissed Psystar's claims that Apple is violating the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts. But the Mac clone maker is not yet entirely "down for the count" in court.

Is Apple engaging in monopolistic practices to keep other companies from selling machines running Mac OS X? A federal judge this week approved Apple's motion to throw out a lawsuit making this claim, levied by Mac clone maker Psytar.

On what could possibly have been the worst possible day for the company to throw a party, yesterday Yahoo lifted the veil on its new suite of open source services designed to work like browser add-ons.

It could actually be a very good idea: Rather than build a competitive suite of Web services that are deployed like pages, or URLs that one "goes to," Yahoo's plan is to develop services that people can figure out how to use more simply and directly, by plugging them into their browsers of choice as though those services were native functionality.

In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange commission yesterday, DVR pioneer TiVo showed that it is reducing the size of its work force to cope with the economic turmoil.

TiVo's plan to reduce operational expenses relies almost exclusively on layoffs, as the company said in its SEC filing yesterday. TiVo expects to incur around a million dollars in severance and outplacement costs. It says economic conditions, and a "rapidly evolving retail consumer market" have necessitated the reductions.

Microsoft's Zune 3.0 lineup, which was launched only two months ago, has received a price cut this week, knocking the 4 GB model below $100 for the holidays.

The still-new flash-based Zune 3.0 line was officially released on September 16, debuting the media player's fresh "Buy from FM" feature and wireless connectivity to Zune Marketplace. The launch was at about the same time the iPod refresh, which has become September protocol for Apple.

After leveraging Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail to help get elected, Barack Obama will face new challenges around Internet communications as US president -- most notably, a law dubbed the Presidential Records Act.

The transition team for President-Elect Barack Obama has now set up its own video channel on YouTube. But Mr. Obama's Twitter and Facebook pages have fallen silent since the election. Whether he'll give up e-mail and his BlackBerry as president is turning into a topic of much debate.

A Harvard Law School class led by the head of the school's Berkman Center for Internet and Society is pursuing a counterclaim against the RIAA after it targeted a Boston University graduate student for alleged illegal downloading.

Charles Nesson heads the Berkman Center, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. Students in his CyberOne class have taken up the cause of Joel Tenenbaum, who stands accused of downloading seven songs and making 816 "available for download."

Although only five of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers ran Windows -- the same number as last June -- the fastest among them has finally claimed the #10 spot.

A cluster of 30,720 AMD Opteron cores built by Dawning for the Shanghai Supercomputer Center has posted an Rmax score of 180,600, enough to land it among the world's top ten fastest supercomputers. Last June, the #10 cluster on the University of Mannheim's Top 500 list only had to score 112,500.

Harris Poll results released this week give an overview of who in the US is online, where they log in, and who's still lagging.

The poll, conducted by telephone during the latter half of October and the first days of November, reached 2,020 adults who were doubtless glad that the pollsters weren't asking about McCain and Obama. Of those polled, 81% say they log in from at least one location; 75% from home, 43% from work, and 32% from "other" (libraries, cybercafes and the like). respondents spent an average of 14 hours per week online, three hours more than they did a year ago.

Exactly one year after it re-announced the commercial subscription edition of its anti-malware service for individual Windows users, Microsoft announced it will discontinue Windows Live OneCare, replacing it with a free alternative.

The new service, which has yet to be formally named but which is being referred to by its code-name "Morro" (perhaps named after a famous Spanish fortress) is said to be constructed around the current anti-malware engine used as part of the Live OneCare service, though with a smaller footprint. The aim is to enable the new service to be used in devices with smaller memory and resources, probably including netbooks.

Terence V. (Terry) Milholland started a new job as the Internal Revenue Service's chief technology officer on Monday. No worries; he's already been CTO of organizations handling your money.

Milholland, a graduate of the University of Maryland and George Washington University, was previously executive vice president and CTO of Visa International. Before that, he served as CTO and CIO of EDS, around for the early days of the just-completed EDS-HP merger; before that, he was a 21-year veteran of Boeing, finishing his time there in 1999 as chief information officer.

Yesterday, the US District Court for the Middle District of Florida placed a temporary restraining order on CyberSpy Software's RemoteSpy keylogger, acting on a complaint from the Federal Trade Commission.

The FTC's complaint (PDF available here) says CyberSpy violated the Federal Trade Commission Act for improperly advertising a product that is both deployed and installed without consent from a computer's owner with the express purpose of collecting and disclosing the personal information of unsuspecting victims.

Today, Amazon entered beta with CloudFront, an expanded cloud service aimed at taking the company into the same league as Akamai and Limelight. As with other cloud services, customers will be charged on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The first beta of CloudFront from Amazon promises a service designed to add content distribution network (CDN) capabilities to the company's existing cloud in order to enable faster download times for users storing large files such as graphics and video. Through CloudFront, users will replicate content files from elsewhere in the cloud to the "edge servers" closest to their own physical locations.

In what the company happily proclaimed to be "one of the largest patent infringement claims ever filed," flash patent holder Spansion Inc. has filed infringement suits against Samsung in federal court and before the USITC.

A boilerplate lawsuit filed against flash memory market leader Samsung in US District Court in Delaware yesterday simply lists six patents which deal with different aspects of the production and manufacture of high-quality flash memory, and asks for whatever damages the court sees fit to impose. In a press release yesterday, however, Spansion notes that it estimates Samsung's global revenues from the sale of devices such as MP3 players and cell phones containing this memory, to exceed $30 billion -- leading many to say today that Spansion has filed "a $30 billion lawsuit."