BetaNews has confirmed this morning that a widely disseminated story first published by Financial Times Deutschland, which said the European Commission was preparing to issue sales restrictions on Intel, is false.

The FT story, which appears here in a poor translation from German, stated that the EC was preparing to issue a decision that would force Intel to refrain from giving preferred customers in Europe any kind of discounts. Allegations of Intel playing favorites with certain customers, especially for preferring Intel over AMD, has been central to AMD's worldwide antitrust battle with the market share leader.

Bill Gates is scheduled to retire from Microsoft on July 1, shifting his efforts over to his namesake foundation. But Wednesday night at the Wall Street Journal's D conference, Gates clarified what he means by "retirement."

In an informal question-and-answer session before his keynote with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer during which the Windows 7 multi-touch interface was briefly demoed, Chairman Bill Gates said that he'll continue to spend 20 percent of his time on Microsoft projects. The remaining 80 percent of his time will be dedicated to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation -- a swap from the 20 percent he devotes currently.

It's no secret that Windows Vista hasn't seen the warm reception Microsoft had hoped. With Windows 7, the company is placing its bets on a multi-touch interface -- like the iPhone UI for PCs. Could it change the public mood?

At The Wall Street Journal's 6th D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, California Wednesday night, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer offered up a "small snippet" of the next version of Windows after Ballmer acknowledged that he wants to "do better" than Vista. A video showed how Microsoft is bringing the touch technology from its Surface table-tops to standard laptops and desktops.

In a court filing late Friday nearly one year after Viacom's suit was brought against it, Google claimed its outcome could have a chilling effect on all online communications.

According to an Associated Press account Tuesday, Google's filing in US District Court in Manhattan alleged that Viacom's insistence that Google's YouTube unit stop allowing others to post its intellectual property "threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression."

The Korean electronics maker showed off its biggest and fastest SSD in the 2.5" category, bringing its solid state hard drives ever closer to its HDDs in capacity.

Samples of the drive will go out to Samsung's clients in September, with release targeted for the end of the year. Also in development is a 1.8-inch version of the same drive, which is slated for fourth quarter 2008 availability.

In a scramble to regain position in a chaotic hardware marketplace, Via Technologies today introduced an ultra-mobile reference design based on its low-power CPU chips.

The company hopes its OpenBook computer assisted design (CAD) documents will persuade manufacturers to use Via motherboards and chips when creating new laptops. The Via framework is for a UMPC that can support up to 2 GB DDR2 DRAM and support a number of different HDDs or solid state drives.

At a time when there seems to be a specialized search engine for every possible topic, Paglo today launched a new beta search engine service designed specifically for the IT environment.

Based on the popular Web 2.0 infrastructure, Paglo's software-as-a-service (Saas) was first introduced to the public in November, but today marks the first day it is available for public use. The service will be available for free until the fall, when Paglo says it will implement a paid model.

A Facebook spokesperson this afternoon confirmed rumors circulating all day long that the social networking site will turn its year-old developers' platform into an open source project.

Following on the heels of an announcement last week that Facebook is opening a new developers' sandbox, rumors of the impending open source initiative were first published late last night by blogger Michael Arrington in TechCrunch.

Dell on Tuesday lost a major judgment in New York, in a case that centered around its financing practices for customers in which it was accused of defrauding and even harassing some.

The case was brought by the state's attorney-general Andrew Cuomo one year ago, and alleged that Dell failed to provide "zero-percent financing" to as much as 85% of the customers to whom that rate was promised, or who were otherwise entitled to such a rate. Dell then failed, the suit alleged, to provide customers with the customer support to which they were clearly entitled.

Yet another format is attempting to replace MP3 as the standard for digital music, but can MT9 really succeed where others have failed for a decade - even with its advanced features?

MT9 was developed by South Korean engineers at Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in association with venture company Audizen, and the format has been dubbed "Music 2.0." Its creators hope to see MT9 replace MP3, but that lofty goal will likely be replaced by one more attainable: becoming the standard for karaoke.

Novell is now in beta with a subscription management tool for SuSE Linux Enterprise, aimed at helping users of Novell's Linux operating environment to manage their software updates.

In an interview with BetaNews, Michael Applebaum, a senior product marketing manager, described the new tool as a package proxy system designed to accommodate customers' regulatory compliance requirements and corporate firewall policies during the software update process.

Swedish mobile firm TeliaSonera has struck a deal to bring the device to seven countries in the region later this year.

In addition to Sweden, the company has operations in Norway, Denmark, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. No specific date has been set. Either way, it expands the device's reach to much of Europe.

A simple bug with a drop-down menu on PayPal has been preventing international transactions for over twelve days, and users are understandably upset.

"One Time Purchases" between countries remains functional, however, when on the "Subscription Checkout Page," PayPal customers cannot choose their country when entering credit card information during checkout.

After last week's news that Sprint confirmed its plans to implement a 5 GB per month overall use cap for its mobile broadband service, the company has seen a flurry of negative comments, and last weekend attempted a clarification.

"The vast majority of our current users (about 99.5%) shouldn't be affected" by the usage cap, reads a statement to BetaNews from Sprint public relations manager Roni Singleton over the weekend. "Whether it's the 300 MB roaming limit or the 5 GB limit on total data usage, that's enough data to meet the regular monthly usage habits of almost all of our customers."

Despite the overwhelming dominance of Amazon and Barnes & Noble in the online bookstore space, Borders Group today opened its own independent retail store on the Web.

The launch of the new Borders.com takes place a little over two months after Borders announced it might put itself up for sale.