The Samsung DVD formula has been high speed with reduced noise and lowered power consumption, according to a high-ranking official. Three new 22X internal DVD burners, which start shipping today, join an external model in the same series.

Samsung is today adding three new internal 22X DVD burners to the Super-WriteMaster S223 series first launched with the SH-223F external DVD burner released earlier this year.

With US elections four weeks away, visions of glitches past and present are dancing in the heads of tech observers bracing for November 4. It may not help that one judge is suppressing the results of an e-voting machines test.

A New Jersey judge has ruled that testing results from Sequoia e-voting machines used in that state are not to be released until further notice.

The nation's highest court today shut the door on EchoStar's and Dish Network's petitions for a final appeal of their patent infringement case. Now all they can hope is for mercy from TiVo, if they are to continue producing DVRs in the US.

After the US Supreme Court declined this afternoon to hear the appeal of Dish Network and its former parent EchoStar in a long-running patent infringement case, EchoStar decided it had no other option: It's paying TiVo $104 million, in hopes that this will settle the companies' disputes over whether Dish Network software infringed on TiVo patents.

Stock market news got you down? Perhaps smacking small round objects in a beautiful setting would soothe your nerves.

World Golf Tour, which enters beta today, is so well-behaved that this reviewer felt like breaking her clubs over her abominable skills rather than the gameplay, and the high-def graphics made me appreciate that she was not on lovely Kiawah Island stinking up a course that gorgeous.

Components of a National Security Agency case study designed to demonstrate that open source, high security and cost effectiveness can all co-exist have been turned over to the open source community.

Tokeneer manages access control for a biometric ID verification tool. It's based on the SPARK subset of Ada developed by the UK's Praxis and was funded by the US National Security Agency, which chose to make information on the development and research available.

Sometimes when investors get the feeling in advance that it's going to be a bad day in the markets, it doesn't take too much bad news to validate their fears. This morning, some relatively minor bad news had a magnified market impact.

Early this morning, Netflix made some admissions that, on a normal business day, would be viewed as a minor downtick in an otherwise healthy company. It missed its nationwide subscriber goal for the past quarter by 3,000. No, not three million -- three thousand, with 8.672 million subscribers at the end of the third quarter.

Nokia's upcoming mobile music service may be called "Comes With Music," but the question many of its charter subscribers will be asking -- especially those who've already been burned out on DRM -- is, will the music stay put?

When the first word in the text of a contract is qualified with an asterisk, it's generally a sign that the document should not be taken at face value. And when that first word is "lifetime," "unlimited," or "free," it's a safe bet that it was placed there more as bait than a statement of fact.

IBM is fending off a constellation of competition in "cloud computing" with a set of new services for developers and business customers, including "Bluehouse," a Web-based collaboration service which entered public beta today.

IBM announced today that "Bluehouse" -- a new Internet-based collaboration and social networking service based on technology from its Lotus division -- has emerged from private beta testing and is now in the open public beta phase.

As the US Dept. of Justice appears to be preparing for an extensive investigation into the two search leaders' cooperative deal, Yahoo and Google have decided that another delay in their implementation is unavoidable.

October 11 was the date in which Yahoo was expected to begin making portions of its search ad inventory available to Google's AdSense. This was based on reports citing comments from both companies, although the exact timing of every event in Yahoo's new AdSense partnership with Google has only been known for certain to government agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, since the public version of Yahoo's notice was redacted.

After some re-organization in parent company IAC, perennial runner-up search engine Ask.com today announced it had also re-organized its search technology.

In August, Match.com's Jim Safka became CEO of Ask.com in a reorganization that saw parent company IAC spin off into three sub-companies, the "New IAC", LendingTree, and Interval Leisure Group. Now, the company is hoping users will hop on and try out Ask's proprietary search mechanisms.

Online auctioneer eBay today announced plans to cut 1,000 jobs, while at the same time spending about $1.3 billion on three acquisitions: electronic payments business Bill Me Later and Danish Web sites dba.dk and bilbasen.dk.

Today's job reductions, amounting to 10 percent of eBay's work force, follow an earlier round of cuts amounting to 125 jobs in North America and Europe, including 70 at its headquarters in San Jose, CA.

Download Mono 2.0 for Linux from FileForum now.

Microsoft has said from the very beginning that it wanted .NET to potentially be a cross-platform environment, but it's letting the open source community tackle that problem instead. This morning, that community celebrates a major milestone.

Security threats to businesses vary according to what sort of businesses ar targeted, according to a study covering over four years and 230 million compromised records.

Verizon originally issued its general Business Data Breach Investigations report back in June, but drill-down data on four industries -- financial services, technology, retail and food and beverage services, which together composed about 82 percent of the original survey -- merited a supplemental analysis this week. Some of the highlights:

The FCC will start to investigate video content-blocking technologies, if a bill just passed by the US Senate clears the House, including not only the V-Chip but other technologies that don't work hand-in-hand with ratings systems.

Now that the US House of Representatives has passed the nation's economic bailout bill, legislators in that branch of government may have the opportunity to consider another measure already approved by the US Senate. By unanimous consent this week, the Senate gave its okay to a bill that would force an FCC investigation of content-blocking technologies ostensibly aimed at use by parents in screening video content across multiple distribution platforms.

Yesterday evening, Sony officially announced its third generation Reader e-book, equipping the over two-year-old product design with an upgrade that includes tactile sensitivity.

Competition in the e-reader market is getting exciting as we approach 2009. One by one, companies are rolling out their latest offerings, each incrementally building the list of standard features in the devices.