After reports of Vista refusing to record select programming from NBC, online interest group The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says the same thing is happening for over-the-air (OTA) programming.

One user has reported that while attempting to record TV shows from Raleigh's WNCN high definition channel -- the NBC affiliate in the area -- an alert shows up saying that the broadcaster has disabled recording of the programming.

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Today in a press conference launching the Japanese language Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed his company's dispute with Google's Friend Connect and the ensuing blog duel, saying he wants to "make it work."

It began last week when Facebook, MySpace, and Google all announced similar plans to share user information seamlessly with other sites. The so-called "walled garden" nature of socially-oriented sites -- where members' information and activities are kept within one property -- was what these three groups were looking to change. In order to do so, they have no choice but to work together.

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Constrained by its current deals, the Cupertino company is in talks with labels over giving it the rights to offer over-the-air downloads and more ringtones.

Sources told The New York Times that while negotiations are ongoing, Apple is seeking to expand the number of songs which then can be made into custom ringtones. In addition, it is looking into offering "ringback" tones as well.

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Not deterred by Take-Two's consistent stance against the merger, EA has extended the expiration of the takeover deal by one month.

The company first made moves at Take-Two in March, when it offered to buy the game maker for about $2 billion. Take-Two said this undervalued its assets, and rejected the offer. EA pressed on, extending the expiration once before in April.

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AOL today closed its $850 million buyout of European-based social networking site Bebo, leaving Yahoo as the only player among the "big four" search engines not to control the ad space of a social network.

"When you combine Bebo's worldwide users with those who use AIM and ICQ, we reach around 80 million," said AOL CEO Randy Falco, during a conference call held when AOL initially announced the deal in March.

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Just as a team of white knights are preparing a new round table of leadership for Yahoo, and riding off to rescue the Microsoft buyout, Microsoft inexplicably sends an intentionally mixed message on Sunday implying it would rather not be rescued.

In a move that could be considered unprecedented, for the most part, due to its being bizarre, Microsoft issued a statement yesterday saying it would be interested in purchasing part of Yahoo, without saying which part it had in mind. While reporters and analysts speculated that Yahoo's search component must be what the company has in mind, an internal memo "leaked" to multiple reporters, including The Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher, written by Microsoft's president for its platforms division and also dated yesterday, gives employees a heads-up that it is actually planning to announce its own, homegrown, major search initiative this upcoming Wednesday.

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Despite its well known interoperability deal with Microsoft, Novell still sees Redmond as the big competitor to catch in the groupware, collaboration, and messaging arenas, where the SuSE Linux distributor has just released the new, multiplatform Novell Open Workgroup Suite (NOWS) with Novell Teaming.

"Our agreement with Microsoft is about interoperability only. When we signed it, we didn't say we'd never compete with Microsoft on anything," said Richard Lindstedt, senior product marketing manager at Novell, in an interview with BetaNews.

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In a strange move, Google has added a new feature to Google Docs that enables users to allow anyone to edit a spreadsheet, advertising the option as a way to make a spreadsheet like a wiki.

Previously, individuals could be invited to view or edit a spreadsheet, but they had to create an account with Google after entering a custom URL that effectively served as a security-through-obscurity barrier.

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"Little thin, tablet-like computers" and giant, sensitive walls with interchangeable touch- and pen-based "natural interfaces" are still on the way, said Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, speaking at a CEO Forum Wednesday.

Microsoft's prototype Touch Wall includes special software plus "some scanning cameras down here at the bottom, so whenever I go up to it and say just touch it, the software will notice that, theoretically," as described by Microsoft's ex-CEO and soon-to-be-retired chairman to an assembly of CEOs at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

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Testers of a forthcoming service pack for Windows Home Server were the first to discover that a feature they'd come to rely upon had been removed from the product -- as it turns out, intentionally.

One of Windows Home Server's key features is the ability to perform manual or automatic backups of the entire contents of hard drives of PCs in a home network -- a consumer-centric version of the same backup engine used in Windows Server 2003 and 2008. WHS stores the backups from each of those drives in a special database; and for safety, many users have found it convenient enough to manually back up the backup database, sometimes onto separate drives in case of a server crash.

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Looking to keep up the current string of positive news, Sony on Friday detailed its game lineup for the rest of the year and into 2009.

Part of the announcement also revolved around games intended to take advantage of the PlayStation Network, Sony's online gaming service. While the service is said to have eight million registered users, it still is seen by many as inferior to Xbox Live.

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After scrapping its citywide Wi-Fi deployment project for Portland, Oregon, municipal wireless company MetroFi is planning to liquidate its network assets or close down entirely.

In addition to Portland, MetroFi has free, ad-supported networks in place in Concord, Cupertino, Foster City, Riverside, San Jose, Santa Clara, and Sunnyvale, California as well as Aurora, Illinois. In a private e-mail from MetroFi CEO Chuck Haas to Wi-Fi Networking News editor Glenn Fleischman, he says if no buyers turn up for these networks, his company will gradually shut them down.

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Sprint this week unveiled plans for a commercial launch of its WiMAX 4G network by the end of 2008 in the Baltimore and Washington, DC area, capping about a year of testing with Samsung and other wireless vendors.

Yesterday, Sprint announced the latest battery of tests of its Xohm network in the Baltimore/Washington, DC area launched last month, show it has passed "commercial acceptance" criteria, including overall performance, handoff performance, and handoff delay. That milestone having been passed, the company can now concentrate on its first commercial service rollouts.

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A great many Microsoft Outlook users don't have the benefit of an Exchange server, so their e-mail and calendar are bound to one PC. Now, a gadget just entering beta could help by extending the reach of personal data to the Web, through Google Apps.

More than 2,000 beta testers have reportedly signed up to help Cemaphore Systems test its MailShadow for Google Apps service, which offers real-time synchronization between Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, calendars, contacts, and Google's Gmail.

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A private security researcher well known for turning up cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in Web browsers has discovered another one, and is trumpeting the find as another milestone in Web history.

Truth is, it sounds like a trumpet we've all heard too many times before. On Wednesday, researcher Aviv Raff posted on his Web site the discovery of a vulnerability so open and easy to exploit, that merely mentioning what it is could be enough of an instruction manual for malicious exploiters to try it for themselves.

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