It appears as if Twitter was unable to reach agreements with UK carriers to keep costs of its SMS tweets down. While users will still be able to send updates to a phone number, they will no longer be able to receive them on phones.

With Twitter's text option, a user's blog update could turn into dozens of text messages depending on who is following that particular user, which the Twitterer was not paying any additional fee for.

When a developer distributes a modified version of open source code as his own without attribution to the original author, is that a copyright violation? Earlier, a district court said no. Yesterday, an appeals court strongly disagreed.

A typical copyright violation is the variety where someone makes money from the sale of a product or service whose idea or whose content belonged to someone else. The usual reason someone would license an idea or content to anyone else is in order to share in the proceeds. In the open source community, the motivation is different: The author seeks only credit, some measure of validation, and for others not to claim his work as their own.

While the FCC continues to stall and postpone its debate over holding yet another auction for free broadband service spectrum, two bills certain to be debated in both houses of Congress may just get its attention.

After the US Federal Communications Commission's tremendous 700 MHz auction concluded earlier this year, some congresspeople were disappointed that it had not achieved one of its originally promised outcomes: the creation of a free, nationwide broadband service for public safety providers, and even for everyday consumers.

Telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent has extended the tender offer it made in June to buy Texas automation software company Motive.

The previous offer to buy all issued and outstanding stock in Motive was set to expire at midnight on August 12. Today, the company announced that it will extend the offer until September 10. As of last night, approximately 27 million shares had been tendered.

Could everyone's VMware licenses really have expired on August 12? That's the question hundreds of major data centers found themselves asking, right after midnight when they realized they weren't rebooting or resuming.

In what appears to be a fault with its license validation, virtualized data clusters worldwide running on VMware's ESX hypervisor found themselves unable to boot yesterday. Admins received messages saying their licenses had expired, whether or not they actually had.

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?"

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.