Latest Technology News

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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)."

Twitter's new limits, which some are discovering just today, seems to have been made effective since the middle of last month, but don't appear to be fixed in stone.

The way Twitter works, each user's chain of posts may be "followed" by others, and a user selects the feeds, or "twitters," he chooses to follow. For the average user, it would appear the limit on the number of feeds he can follow is 2,000, although that number may increase as more users follow his own feed. Some with high traffic, but whose follow-to-follower ratio is more balanced, appear able to follow more feeds.

In an announcement that harks back to Dell's roots, when during the 1990s it tested a number of its laptops during four-hour flights, the company said its new Latitudes will add continuous battery life for as long as 19 hours straight.

At a Dell press event in San Francisco this morning, its Senior Vice President for the business products group, Jeffrey Clarke, filled in the biggest missing element in Dell's description of its completely redesigned Latitude product line to this point: Dell, he says, has developed a proprietary power cell technology that will enable Latitudes to run continuously while unplugged for at least 10 hours, and intermittently for as much as 19 hours straight.

A new batch of problems for the already plagued service seem to have started in the late morning for some, including intermittent timeouts and issues accessing the accounts on desktop mail.

The majority of the problems seemed to be for most between about 3:00 and 6:00 pm EDT Monday. During that period, a message also appeared on the MobileMe status page, saying "MobileMe members may be unable to access MobileMe Mail. Service will be restored ASAP. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Download Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 from FileForum now.

This contains the latest Feature Pack for Visual C++, which updates the "refresh" of the final beta, which was released last April.

Yesterday, many Gmail users found themselves unable to access their mailboxes, as Gmail returned a "Temporary Error (502)." Google later posted an apology in the official Gmail Blog that gave a clue as to how big the outage was.

"We don't usually post about problems like this in our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted," Gmail Product Manager Todd Jackson posted. About 20 million users visit Gmail daily, and there are more than 100 million accounts in total.

Download .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 from FileForum now.
This is the redistributable package for Windows users to be able to run .NET programs.

This afternoon, Microsoft unveiled a slate of new enhanced releases, including an updated .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 that had been in beta only since February, and the first service pack for Visual Studio 2008 only six months after its premiere.