The departure of one of America's leading antitrust attorneys from his law firm, and his subsequent hiring by the US Dept. of Justice, suggests very strongly that the DOJ may be preparing for its most serious antitrust offensive in years.
Sanford Litvack, who was antitrust chief during the Carter administration and former Vice Chairman of the Walt Disney Company, has reportedly been hired by the US Justice Dept., apparently to look over Google's ad deal with Yahoo. This follows weeks of depositions and subpoenas in the DOJ's investigation of the deal, which began last April and which recently became a formal inquiry.
As a first step toward serving as an Internet "launchpad," AOL now lets users view Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and Hotmail from AOL.com. Then, over the next two months, the company intends to "open up" to additional third-party content and services.
AOL.com is finally letting down the walls of its proverbial "garden" a bit, moving more in the direction of an Internet portal or starting point -- first by giving access to external e-mail services, and next with links to outside social networks and other non-AOL content.
Sony's PlayStation Network, while considerably less mature than Microsoft's Xbox Live, especially in terms of software support, will soon grow with the release of banner online titles for the Christmas season.
For annual subscribers to Qore, the PlayStation online magazine, and North American customers who pre-ordered Resistance 2 from retailer GameStop, a beta of the online FPS has begun. The title is the sequel to the popular PS3 first person shooter Resistance: Fall of Man.
While Verizon Wireless has been busy with its ongoing campaign to convince you that "it's the network," Sprint -- whose network has not been its strong point in recent years -- is placing new bets today that it's really the phone.
Just in time for the CTIA show, Sprint has officially confirmed that it is adding two of the most intriguing new Windows Mobile-based HTC Touch phones to its lineup of 3G touchscreen smartphones, which already includes the original HTC Touch and the best-selling Samsung Instinct.
While the current beta edition of Chrome currently runs on Windows only, open source developers -- including some from Mozilla -- are now working on getting Google's new browser to operate on Linux and Mac, too.
The developers' site for Chromium, an open source project rolled out by Google at the time of its launch of the Chrome browser, also contains build instructions for Windows, Linux, and Mac. There, in addition to making the source code for Chrome available under a BSD license, Google explains how to submit patches and submit bug reports. The source code for Chrome's high-performance V8 JavaScript engine is also downloadable.
Download iTunes for Windows 8.0 from FileForum now.
While Apple is pushing a major update to its client software filled with several new features, easily the biggest new one appears to be its music recommendation engine, called Genius.
Responding directly to Microsoft's statement to BetaNews earlier this afternoon, VMware spokesperson Melinda Marks told us, "Live migration has nothing to do with unplanned downtime. For unplanned downtime, VMware has VMware HA. Live migration solves a completely different set of business issues and is where Microsoft offers a solution called Quick Migration. VMware VMotion (live migration) allows businesses to perform planned maintenance and dynamic load balancing across an entire cluster without any end-user disruption.
The latest platform innovation from Google enables advertisers to place bids for on-air commercial time that Google has already purchased. Now that time will come at a higher premium, with the entry of NBCU into the mix.
Google launched TV Ads last year, a means for businesses to selectively purchase television ad inventory using similar tools to what Google AdWords provides its clients for text ads, complete with minimum bids and budget maximums. After airing, customers can measure the efficacy of their campaigns. Google even provides the an Ad Creation Marketplace to assist in the creation of the commercial.
Tired of watching your laptop batteries conk out after two hours, even though the brochure promised four? Next month, HP expects to ship an EliteBook 6930p notebook that promises a phenomenal 24 hours of battery life without recharging.
Only about a month after Dell's rollout of Latitude notebooks with 19 hours of battery life, Hewlett-Packard has announced plans to ship its own high-end business laptop -- the EliteBook 6390p -- complete with a high capacity battery option able to deliver a full day of battery operation, without recharging.
As Nokia debuts new services and acquires yet more developers, we're beginning to see the global cell phone leader emerge as a fully-fledged software producer. This from a company whose executives had set its sights on the Internet.
While its strategy to establish itself as a viable name in the Internet services field appears to be gaining a foothold, Nokia also appears -- if inadvertently -- to be attempting to trump Microsoft in the "unsellable name" department. Where Microsoft tends to have comically long and overcategorized product names (yesterday's announcement by Microsoft of "System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Enterprise Server Management License" immediately comes to mind), Nokia's nomenclature route has veered toward the nonsensical.
We've seen Microsoft patch vulnerabilities in Windows that we swear we'd seen before, and sometimes they all look so much alike that they tend to run together. But this one really is a classic: a buffer overrun triggered by a fake image file.
Who can forget the tumultuous days of 2004, when what was then considered a major threat to Windows loomed large: a way to easily trigger a buffer overrun in GDI+, Microsoft's once-improved Graphics Device Interface library? While patches were finally distributed that September, it seemed the company's eventual solution -- a completely new graphics foundation, WPF -- couldn't come too soon.
Download iTunes for Windows 8.0 from FileForum now.
After a pullout last year appeared to pit two of America's most resplendent, rainbow-colored properties at odds with one another, NBCU's Jeff Zucker had his chance to make a Steve Jobs-like play for the Apple faithful.
Through a series of blog posts, topped off by two announcements this week about retaining user-related data, Google is inching along toward alleviating the concerns of many users and privacy groups, trumpeting each step along the way.
In one blog post on Monday, a Google legal and engineering team announced a "significant" shortening of Google's IP retention policies, involving plans to start anonymizing users' addresses on servers after nine months instead of the previous 18 months.
At a press event in San Francisco Tuesday morning, CEO Steve Jobs took the gift wrap off Apple's holiday line of iPods, calling them the "strongest holiday lineup yet" -- stronger in part because of a backing that's not shiny plastic.
The rumors of Steve Jobs' death, the CEO himself proclaimed this morning, were greatly exaggerated; but the rumors of the new iPod nano form factor appear to have been spot on.
Today, Amazon announced its indie publishing service CreativeSpace is now tied with its MP3 shop, allowing independent artists and labels to release DRM-free materials in Amazon's MP3 store.
Artists can set up an account on CreateSpace and sell their materials with no upfront charges; however, accounts are arranged in such a way that money is not directly distributed to artists. Instead, royalty checks are given out with expenses subtracted.