MobileMe users targeted by new phishing scam

While the service may have fixed its downtime issues for the most part, it now appears that phishers are attempting to trick subscribers into divulging personal information.

Some subscribers are receiving an e-mail that looks like a legitimate e-mail from Apple. Towards the end, its text reads, "We were unable to process your most recent payment. Did you recently change your bank, phone number or credit card?"

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Alltel lurches toward its acquisition by Verizon

The United States' fifth largest wireless carrier, with the largest network by area looks to be simply holding on until Verizon takes over, leaving open questions as to where its new customers will go.

Alltel has not gone into great detail about how the acquisition will affect its customers, since the

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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)."

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