Latest Technology News

A Florida man faces up to ten years in federal prison and a quarter-million in fines, after pleading guilty to dropping adware onto unsuspecting users' computers for cash.

Botnet master Robert Matthew Bentley, 21, of Panama City, Florida, pled guilty to conspiracy to commit computer fraud and computer fraud charges. Bentley was one of eight bot net herders busted under Operation Bot Roast II, an anti-bot net and spammer campaign that was launched with participation from London Metro Police, the US Secret Service, US Federal Bureau of Investigation, Finland National Bureau of Investigation, and other agencies.

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After an enormous amount of publicity for the richest sale of publicly-held frequencies in history, the question being asked sounds like something Walter Cronkite could be heard saying: "What kind of a day was it? A day like all days..."

From a standpoint of contests -- especially the athletic and political kind -- typically the second prize winner is often forgotten. But the second prize in the US Federal Communications Commission's 700 MHz auction, which ended on Wednesday, was not exactly dinner for two at Applebee's: AT&T will pay $6.636 billion to purchase 227 licenses to deploy services nationwide on the "B-block."

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Apple has chosen to leverage its significant install base for QuickTime and iTunes in order to quickly gain market share for its Safari Web browser on Windows.

Along with iTunes or standalone QuickTime, Apple installs a small application, called Software Update. This looks very much like the program of the same name built into Mac OS X, and is used by Apple to push updates -- both security fixes and new versions -- to its products.

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China has cracked down on over 50 video-sharing Web sites for distributing content it feels is pornographic, violent or subversive, by either punishing or shutting down the sites altogether.

The Chinese government had published three lists with sites that had been either found to be operating without a content license, warned, or shut down. One of the most popular video-sharing sites, Tudou.com, was on the list of those warned.

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Microsoft announced today that it acquired startup Komoku, a company specializing in rootkit detection and protection solutions. The deal marks Microsoft's second purchase related to fighting rootkits.

Komoku is headed by sixteen-year information security veteran Dr. William Arbaugh, and former Silicon Graphics Inc. and Atheros Communications engineer Jeffrey Chung.

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Record label EMI yesterday publicly announced it is in talks with Nokia to have music from its catalog offered through Nokia's new "Comes with Music" initiative that is to be offered on select Nokia phones.

First announced last December, the Comes with Music program allows consumers who just purchased a Nokia phone to have access to a music catalog of millions of songs through a one year subscription plan.

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Will the Google-sponsored Android platform be the right alternative for today's proprietary mobile environments? The answer is an emphatic "no," according to open source developer David Schlesinger.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - Although Google has announced high profile wireless carriers and phone manufacturers as partners in the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), the search specialist has done "absolutely nothing" on the directly related Android Project, to date, Schlesinger said today at the AjaxWorld conference.

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SlySoft, a software company located in Caribbean nations Antigua and Barbuda and maker of the AnyDVD ripping utility have announced a software upgrade that defeats the BD+ protection used on some Blu-ray discs.

BD+ is a DRM solution for Blu-ray that was initially developed by Cryptography Research Inc. In November, Macrovision struck a $45 million deal with CRI for the BD+ code and associated patents.

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Although AJAX has now "entered the mainstream," the 350 existing implementations of the browser-oriented open source development language could still hardly be called interoperable, according to a leader of the OpenAjax Alliance.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - In a session today at the AJAXWorld conference, Jon Ferraiolo, operations manager of the OpenAjax Alliance and a Web architect at IBM, said membership in his alliance has gradually grown from 15 companies to more than 100 since it was originally formed back in 2006, the year after the first Ajax implementations started to emerge.

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A Moroccan computer engineer who was put in jail last month for pretending to be the brother of Morocco's King Mohammed VI has been pardoned and released from prison. Fouad Mourtada, 26, created an online Facebook account that led to him being charged with "usurping the identity of Prince Moula Rachid."

Originally given a three-year sentence and a fine of up to $1,370, Mourtada was released after serving 43 days in a Moroccoan jail. Family, friends and supporters created Facebook groups and Web sites to try and raise awareness of what happened to Mourtada, while pressuring the government to release him.

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In a growing effort to show the world it is embracing the open source community, Microsoft announced it will work with the Eclipse Foundation to offer the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit that can be used with the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation.

The use of Eclipse technology will allow Java developers to make software applications that look native to the Windows Vista operating system. Eclipse is an open source community project that is the most popular Java development environment available to programmers.

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The popular BitTorrent tracking site Mininova is working with a Dutch university development team in the development of an online video streaming service that may later be integrated into the site.

The service will begin with closed beta testing for a small number of current Mininova users, with no indication when it will be moved to open beta status.

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Apple issued firmware updates for its AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule base stations late Wednesday, bringing back a feature it initially touted for Mac OS X Leopard, but later dropped.

AirPort Disk was supposed to allow users to hook up an external hard drive to their AirPort Extreme base stations and perform automated backups using Leopard's new Time Machine feature. Shortly before the operating system launched last October, however, the feature was removed from Apple's Web site.

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As it turned out, those smiles were on the Verizon Wireless executives' faces for a very good reason: It has won easily the most valuable wireless spectrum ever auctioned in US history, by virtue of high bids placed 230 rounds ago.

Verizon Wireless may not have ever been seriously challenged for rights to use the most valuable C-block of wireless spectrum -- currently hovering around Channel 63 of the VHF TV dial -- for future wireless operations. Throughout the lower 48 states, it placed winning bids for the nation's major regions as early as round 18, in an auction that lasted through round 261.

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Google yesterday announced the availability of a plug-in for Windows Mobile devices, which provides a shortcut on the home screen to Google's search.

The plug-in was first made available to BlackBerry devices last December, and then to Symbian-based phones more recently. Making it available on Microsoft's popular mobile operating system was only a logical step for Google.

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