Latest Technology News

Some would use the term "blogstorm" to describe the frenzy surrounding The Drudge Retort's run-in with the AP. Now that it has announced "case closed," and the storm is passing, we see a lone insurance salesman trudging through the clearing fog.

After BetaNews ran a story last week about the dispute between the Associated Press and the social news site and blog Drudge Retort that appeared to have led to the AP laying down a "pay per word" scheme for bloggers, Media Bloggers Association President Robert Cox sent us a message entitled, "Your story is entirely false."

Download Skype 4.0 Beta 1 for Windows from FileForum now.

Skype's 4.0 beta has moved away from Instant Messenger style layout consisting of multiple small windows, and has instead opted for a single, full-screen video chat window.

Driven by applications ranging from cell phones, videocams, and embedded pens to PCs and servers, NAND memory is now set for a big resurgence, according to a Samsung vice president this week.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - Ultimately, the NAND flash cards already used in mobile devices and digital photography might even replace CDs, contended Jim Elliott, Samsung's VP of memory management, in a presentation at a Samsung press event on Wednesday.

When Robert Bostock, Jerry Yang, and Susan Decker assert next August that they're a better team to lead their company than the one Carl Icahn is building instead, one question shareholders may ask by that time is, "What company?"

It is a staggering array of individuals -- many of them employees since the company's founding, some of them top acquisitions over the past few years -- who are now exiting Yahoo almost in lockstep, in advance of a tumultuous shareholder meeting scheduled for August 1. As of this afternoon, Yahoo declined to confirm with BetaNews even the exit of individuals whose names were already plastered all over The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as the entire matter of employee exits is now apparently off limits to its public relations.

The company announced Friday it's ending service in most of the areas it served, including major cities in California, Oregon, and Illinois, becoming the latest casualty of the muni-Wi-Fi bubble.

A message on MetroFi's Web site today indicated the company was dropping both its free and premium services effective Friday for the cities of Concord, Cupertino, Foster City, and Sunnyvale in California, and Naperville, Illinois. Remaining under MetroFi control, if only for the time being, are wireless networks in Riverside, Calif. and Aurora, Ill.

Web analytics company comScore this week released its top fifty US Web properties list for May 2008 based upon its Media Metrix service, and Google's leading the pack by a nose.

In April, comScore reported a surge in Google queries, taking it up a whole 1.8% from March, when all other search engines dropped. Strictly as a Web property, however, Yahoo is usually comScore's favorite. It enjoyed several months on the top of the hot properties list, only now to be taken down a notch by Google.

The carrier may be paying as much as $425 in subsidies per unit to Apple, according to an analyst's estimate. If that's true, that's more than double what its competitors pay on average for other smart phones.

As a general rule, carriers usually pay subsidies are about $200 for smart phones. However in a research note, Oppenheimer financial analyst Yair Reimer believes AT&T is paying Apple $325 per phone for right of carriage.

To help prevent fears of online fraud among buyers and sellers alike, Internet auctioneer eBay plans to abandon its previous limits on transaction protection beginning this fall.

The upcoming changes apply only to payments made through PayPal, however, as opposed to checks, direct credit card payments, and other forms of payment used by some buyers and sellers on eBay.

Sprint Nextel announced that its vie for an extension to the mandatory relinquishment of portions of the 800 MHz spectrum was a success. The FCC has now moved the deadline to July 1, 2009.

On Tuesday of last week, Sprint Nextel filed for more time with the FCC to move some of its services out of their current frequency range and into an area less likely to cause interference with the public safety agencies in the spectral vicinity. The relocation is part of a project designed to improve the quality and reliability of emergency and public safety communications in the 800 MHz band.

As many as a third of all senior IT professionals use their administrative passwords and other privileges to "snoop around the network" looking into employees' confidential material, say newly released survey results.

Conducted by Cyber-Ark Software as part of its annual look at "Trust, Security and Passwords," the study also suggests that IT pros -- typically working in companies of 1,000 or more -- are peering at confidential information such as salaries, personal e-mails, and merger and acquisition plans. They could also be sneaking peeks at confidential data long after they've quit their jobs and gone elsewhere.

At least two Mac-focused security firms warned late this week of a Trojan horse that takes advantage of flaws in remote management software in Mac OS X to run code on the affected computer.

As with most Mac flaws, the user must first download and open the file in order for it to take effect. Once it is opened, the Trojan -- dubbed "AppleScript.THT" -- adds itself to the login process and can perform a variety of functions, including keystroke logging.

The firm responsible for building the database upon which the Last.fm Internet radio service is built, has created software to enable iPhone users to use Last.fm -- if they want to risk it.

Even though the iPhone has obvious ties to its iPod roots, the availability of streaming music for the device has still has remained something of a mystery. NPR has a streaming news service, and Pandora has brought its Pandora Everywhere Platform can be used on the iPhone, but very few other alternatives are available to users.

For an undisclosed reason, there continued to be a vulnerability in Windows XP's built-in protocol stack for Bluetooth, even after a patch released a week ago Tuesday was supposed to have addressed the problem.

Last week's round of Patch Tuesday updates from Microsoft included what had been described as a critical fix, over and above what the company had just released in Windows XP Service Pack 3, that addressed a potential problem with how the operating system's internal Bluetooth protocol stack responds to requests for certain services.

Dan Hesse told attendees of a communications trade show Wednesday that its much hyped 4G data network will see its first commercial deployment in September in Baltimore.

Sprint's Xohm WiMAX technology aims to provide data rates well above what current 3G technologies provide. In tests, Sprint's network is able to transfer data at rates of 2-4 Mbps, roughly the same as the average DSL line.

Number 5 search engine Ask.com has issued an open letter agreeing with the sentiments of privacy buffs while also rolling out new user privacy safeguards for its own platform.

As previously reported, a letter sent to Google in early June by a privacy coalition that includes the Electronic Privacy Center and the Electronic Frontier Foundation contends that "Google's reluctance to post a link to its privacy [policy] on its home page is alarming."