Latest Technology News

Music "mixtape" sharing site Muxtape has been pulled offline, with a notice saying it has to "sort out a problem with the RIAA." Its blog today contains the glib but equally nebulous statement, "No artists or labels have complained."

The message on Muxtape's main page predicts Muxtape will only be down "for a brief period." But the message contained in the site's Tumblr blog is slightly more foreboding, saying, "The site is not closed indefinitely."

Inexplicably, for the second time in four days, Palm has leaked and then pulled information from the Web about its (still forthcoming?) Treo Pro (a.k.a. Treo 850) smartphone, a product originally slated for announcement today.

Last Thursday, Palm briefly posted an entire Flash presentation about the new phone on its own Web site. A few minutes later, the whole presentation was taken down, but not before being captured by various bloggers for redistribution all over the Web.

Since March 2007, when the Copyright Royalty Board exacted a per-performance, per listener fee on streaming online services, pundits have declared a deathwatch on Internet radio. Recently, Pandora's founder expressed the same dire outlook.

This weekend, Pandora founder Tim Westergren told the Washington Post that his service is nearing the point where shutting down is the only feasible option. Despite the fact that Pandora is among the top 200 most popular United States Web sites (and climbing), and that the Pandora iPhone application is among the App Store's 10 most downloaded, Westergren said his company is still losing money.

In a scenario reminiscent of the fairy tale about the fellow who cries "wolf" too often, security engineers are actively wondering whether Firefox' "blowing of the whistle" on self-signed certificates is a) frightening, and b) fair to developers.

One of the oft-touted improvements in Mozilla's Firefox 3.0 Web browser has been its improved handling for sites that authenticate their own identities using SSL certificates -- the kind used to initiate encrypted transactions with HTTPS protocol. For instance, a site whose authentication is verified will be indicated in Firefox's address bar by having its icon expanded to a full name, printed on a green background. Supposedly, this is to reassure the user that everything's copacetic.

Subscribers who have remained with MobileMe through its continued growing pains will be rewarded with another 60 days free, bringing the total free time to 90 days.

To be eligible for the new extension, customers must be enrolled members by midnight Tuesday. Those who have already enrolled will see their free trial periods extended another 60 days.

Finally giving up the last vestiges of its exclusive support for the HD DVD format, Microsoft has quietly launched a beta test of Windows-based mastering software for Blu-Ray discs.

Microsoft's new Image Mastering API update for Blu-Ray media is now available for download from the Microsoft Connect Web site as part of Windows Feature Pack for Storage, a software package in pre-release for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server platforms.

The country's Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry said Tuesday that it had received two additional reports of iPod nanos that caught fire after overheating.

The incidents involve the following model numbers: MA004J/A, MA005J/A, MA099J/A, and MA107J/A, which encompass about 1.81 million units sold in Japan between September 2005 and September 2006. Neither of these most recent events caused injury, although earlier incidents were to blame for at least two cases of minor burns.

Continuing an unprecedented public dialog on the future of Windows begun last week, a Microsoft senior vice president admits that the request he's hearing most often from users is pretty simple: Speed it up.

Though we won't make it a point to post a story every time a Microsoft Senior Vice President, such as Steven Sinofsky or Jon DeVaan, issues an utterance about the next edition of Windows on its newly launched corporate blog, one statement from Sinofsky this morning will raise eyebrows: In response to the blog's inaugural call for ideas from the general public about what features they'd like to see in "Windows 7," he surprisingly acknowledged that many were more interested not so much in features but in behavior.

The US Transportation Safety Administration's recent relaxation of rules on removing laptops from luggage at airport checkpoints, carried an announcement of soon-to-be available TSA pre-approved bags. This fall, we should see the first.

"The Checkpoint Flyer" by Tom Bihn adheres to TSA guidelines as presented in the group's five-month design challenge. To achieve this, it integrates a protective laptop sleeve into a messenger-style bag that allows the two to be separated for scanning in "less than three seconds" (re-attachment times were not included).

Just two weeks after the initial update to the iPhone's second generation firmware, another has appeared with promises of more "bug fixes."

At a little under 249 MB, the latest iPhone firmware update, version 2.0.2, is about the same size as the previous patch. While many had hoped for fixes to the 3G connectivity issues the device has been experiencing, reports on Apple's support forums seem to indicate there may be no fix in this patch.

Hot on the heels of FCC approval of HTC's "Dream" phone, Google has hinted to BetaNews that the "Dream" isn't the only Android phone already under way.

"To prepare for Android's public launch, we are testing the platform on a variety of devices," a Google spokesperson said, in an e-mail to BetaNews.

While news aggregator Buzz has been up for about six months, until now, users could only vote for content, and the link inclusion process was limited to suggestions from only 400 publishers. That's about to change.

Beginning next Monday at 10:00 pm EDT, users will be able to submit content suggestions to Yahoo Buzz, as it emerges from beta. If a content item gets enough votes, it will appear on the front page of Yahoo.

It's been a slow, painful separation that's taken decades: divorcing Microsoft from its reliance upon per-processor licensing of its software. Today, the company took another hard step toward turning its back on an obsolete practice.

Up until this week, it has actually been a violation of Microsoft's Windows licensing terms for data center admins to do one of the quintessential tasks in their environment: moving running applications on virtual systems between physical processors. For data centers that consolidate their workloads by deploying multiple virtual servers on far fewer processors, live migration is a critical load balancing operation. In fact, it's one of VMware's key administrative features for its popular VMware Fusion.

With Facebook growing at a far brisker clip than any other major social network, four big news organizations, including Fox News -- whose parent company owns rival MySpace -- are now expanding their Facebook presences.

News opportunities on Facebook could loom huge. Although about 32 percent of all Internet users belong to social networking sites, only roughly 10 percent of them regularly receive news on those sites, according to a new survey by Pew Research.

Upstart mobile browser Skyfire this weekend rolled out its Beta version 0.6 to select testers in the US, using the Olympic craze to highlight the browser's native support of Microsoft's Silverlight.

Skyfire's default page provides a link to NBC Universal's glut of Olympic content, and no Silverlight plug-in needs to be installed, giving users almost immediate access to hours of video content. Add to this the browser's full support for Adobe's Flash, and Skyfire opens the user's handset to hundreds of hours of free video from Google Video, YouTube, Hulu and other content providers that deal in Flash.