Latest Technology News

Another minor privacy upgrade to Google came yesterday afternoon to Gmail, the ability to check activity in the user's mailbox.

Over the weekend, Google added the "privacy" link on its main search page, bringing it up to speed with California law, and providing users with important information regarding their search data. Now, Gmail has received a minor feature upgrade that allows users to see recent activity in their mail accounts.

The stereotypical picture of senior citizens spending their days in front of the television is not far off from the truth, although the nation's youth is increasingly turning to the Internet, Nielsen finds.

The average American 65 and older watches nearly 178 hours of television a month, far above the national average of 127 hours a month, up 4% from the previous year, according to findings published today by the Nielsen Company. However, an increasing number of people are using timeshifting technologies.

Amazon.com has rolled out deferred billing as an option to customers, realizing an agreement made with Bill Me Later in the beginning of 2008.

As the largest online retailer, Amazon's stock is not limited to items that are normally purchased in one lump sum. From a 6.21 carat diamond for $384,000 to full playground apparatus for $35,000, there is demand for financing on Amazon, and an affiliated partnership currently expedites the process.

The telecommunications company presented arguments at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, asking for a $1.52 judgment against Microsoft to be reinstated.

A San Diego court found the Redmond company liable in February 2007 of infringing on two patents related to MP3 technologies. That judgment came out of a case that was originally filed against Gateway and Dell in 2003, for using MP3 playing software in their computers.

Two days ahead of the release of the iPhone 2.0 software, Apple said it would debut the new online service for sychronized e-mail, calendars, and resource sharing.

.Mac subscribers began receiving e-mails over the past few days alerting them to the company's transition plans. Most of the service would become unavailable save for mail for a six-hour time frame Wednesday evening.

In an effort to solve the bulk and time-consumption problem when encoding large databases, Google developed its own alternative to XML. Yesterday, the company began evangelizing others to use it as an alternative to the industry standard.

There's an argument that open standards are only truly useful when one standard applies to any given category of service -- an argument that was raised in the matter of application formats. Now the broader category of data encoding -- handled nowadays by XML -- is about to receive a big challenge, ironically from the group perceived as the champion of open standards in Internet communication: Google.

Last week, Sony pulled its PlayStation 3 firmware upgrade (v2.40) after users began to report that it "bricked" their consoles. An updated update has been made available.

First promising that a fix was coming some time "midweek," in Playstation.blog, the new firmware upgrade is reportedly available worldwide already.

Pioneer Corp. plans to launch a Blu-ray disc recorder stand-alone console in Japan by early next year, making the company the seventh Japanese vendor to step into this market.

Under co-development by Pioneer and its partner Sharp, Pioneer's high-end, high-definition disc recorder console for consumers is slated for release in Japan before the 2008 holiday season, according to Japan's Nikkei news service. Meanwhile, a report in the Associated Press gives a later target date of March 2009 for Japanese shipment of Pioneer's first standalone Blu-ray disc recorder for consumers.

With more videos turning up on the Web, how should "fair use" -- an element of copyright law first developed for the printed word -- best be applied within this emerging medium? That's the subject of a Ford Foundation-funded study.

To help answer questions around the legal repurposing of content, the Center for Social Media -- funded by the Ford Foundation -- has just released a new "Code of Best Practices."

If the merger must go through, a group of states' legal leaders now contend, then at the very least, the FCC could mandate that the merged Sirius publish its specifications for interoperable receivers as open source.

In a phone conference July 1 with US Federal Communications Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate, representatives of fourteen states' attorney generals' offices, including the attorneys general of Tennessee and Connecticut, collectively voiced their opposition to the merger of Sirius and XM satellite radio recently approved by the Justice Dept. And in a filing with the FCC Thursday, the Tennessee A-G's office states they questioned the DOJ's logic that compelling or forcing the merged parties to develop a standard for interoperable radios would be anti-competitive.

Although Nokia has now made a financial concession to Bochum, Germany worth well over $30 million USD, the city will still be left without its main source of income, after Nokia pulls up stakes and moves its factory to Romania.

Through an initiative announced July 3, Nokia will contribute 20 million euros -- the current equivalent of 31.4 million US dollars -- to help fund a new program rather ironically entitled "Growth for Bochum."

"This is where we think the future of the Internet is going -- you can start to see these applications breaking out of the confines of the browser space, and try to move onto the desktop," a key Mozilla engineer told BetaNews.

The term "rich Internet application" is almost becoming a misnomer; there truly is no worthy Internet application that, in at least some respect, isn't rich. The original idea of "richness" was in describing a function that justifies the use of technology above and beyond what is typically used for laying out HTML Web pages. Any more, if you're using AJAX, Flash (especially with Adobe's AIR), or Microsoft's Silverlight to develop your application, you've automatically crossed into the zone of "rich."

The agency responsible for classifying movies in the UK wants more power to review and pass judgment on video games intended for younger audiences, and is answering critics who claim it would create a monumental bureaucracy.

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) currently reviews 250 to 300 game titles, 500 to 600 movies, and at least 10,000 DVDs per year. Although movies are watched from start to finish, only the first five hours of a video game is played, with reviewers often times using cheat codes so material in later levels can be reviewed.

When Toyota's popular hybrid gets a makeover in 2010, the car will now harness the power of the sun to operate its own air conditioning.

The first Priuses shipped in 1997 in Japan, and worldwide in 2000. Toyota last redesigned the car in 2003 to make it quicker and more efficient, and automotive analysts have widely expected another revision to come soon with additional enhancements.

Nokia's Ovi portal has added a fifth service called Files, offering subscription-based cloud storage for exchanging files between PCs and mobile devices.

Ovi launched with three services: Nokia's reborn N-Gage mobile gaming platform, Nokia maps, and a music store that is currently available in 10 countries (UK, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Singapore, Australia, France, Sweden, Spain). The service then grew with the addition of Share, the document-sharing service (still in beta) originally developed by startup Twango.