In Her Own Words: Neelie Kroes on the MS fines
The European Commissioner stood in front of reporters Wednesday morning to announce the EU's latest round of sanctions against Microsoft.
While BetaNews reported on the news that the EU would be fining Microsoft 899 million euros at that time, we are posting snippets of her comments and answers to reporters questions below in order to give our readers an better idea of the bloc's reasons for this latest round of sanctions.
Why would Comcast need 'seat warmers' to appear to show support?
Comcast has admitted to paying "seat warmers" to attend an FCC hearing held Monday, to hear its arguments in favor of blocking P2P file transfers. But Comcast contends that the seat warmers left once company employees showed up.
In a phone interview today, the organizer of a Federal Communications Commission hearing Monday on the grounds of Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass., disputed Comcast's statement, telling BetaNews that its paid "seat warmers" were only hired by the Internet service provider to fill seats until Comcast employees turned up to take their places.
Corsair announces 4x faster flash drive
Corsair announced today its new 16GB Voyager "GT" USB 2.0 flash drive that will be showing at CeBIT next week in Hanover, Germany.
The company typically markets its devices as more rugged than other removable memory devices, with its Survivor line designed to even be water resistant to 200 meters. But the GT is instead shown off for its transfer speeds.
Nobody likes DRM, including attorneys for Microsoft, Real
At this week's Digital Music Forum, lawyers managing digital rights for Microsoft's Zune music download site and RealNetworks' Rhapsody said that they too believe digital rights management to be more of a headache than an asset.
NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - Few would argue that consumers truly like dealing with digital rights management. But attorneys for big music download sites like Microsoft's Zunes and RealNetworks' Rhapsody aren't all that thrilled with managing digital rights, either.
Internal e-mails show concern over 'Vista capable' program
As the looming court battle over the "Windows Vista capable" program draws nearer, a federal judge unsealed internal e-mails which show that Microsoft may have been aware of potential problems long before the suit was filed.
These e-mails are likely to provide the plaintiffs a good deal of evidence that the Redmond company was indeed aware that some of their certified products could not run the more advanced features of the new OS.
Blinkx inks new content deals, goes after 'double-dippers'
Video search engine Blinkx has announced content partnerships today with BBC, CBS and The Weather Channel. If you watch TV while you're on the Internet, Blinkx thinks it can be of service.
Though it does have a history of jumping the gun when it comes to announcements, Blinkx's new partners build considerably its library of 18 million indexed hours of video.
Next edition of .NET Micro Framework adds Web services support
The impending ubiquity of .NET in computing devices everywhere got a big boost this week with the unveiling of a new edition of its handheld and embedded device runtime, now capable of communicating with Web services.
As Java already proved, the ubiquity of a runtime platform depends on its ability to scale up to the data cluster level, and down to the handheld device level. Microsoft would like to one-up Java wherever it can, but in some respects, it has to play catch-up first. This week, the company may have caught up with Java in at least one more department, with the release of Web services support for the .NET Micro Framework, unveiled in its new 2.5 release.
Google adds collaboration tools to Apps platform
The search giant resurrected Jotspot on Thursday, relaunching the company's technology in a new Google Apps application called 'Sites.'
Sites would allow users to create collaboration areas quickly and easily. Within them, users can include videos, calendars, presentations, and attachments. The information is then presented in a wiki-like interface.
Sharp, Hitachi investigated for fixing price of Nintendo DS screens
Sharp and Hitachi said Thursday that their LCD display businesses were probed to look for evidence of price fixing in portable game console displays.
Under Japanese law, if a company is found guilty of the scheme, up to 10 percent of its profit gains obtained under those policies could be forfeited in fines. What is not yet known is how the investigation started.
After FCC hearing turns into circus act, NY subpoenas Comcast records
At an FCC hearing on Monday, cable broadcasting giant Comcast meant to offer a serious defense to intimations by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other critics that it is blocking P2P file transfers by end users.
But the remarks made by David L. Cohen, Comcast's executive VP, came across as ludicrous in light of later rumors that Comcast paid employees -- and even homeless people or other non-employees -- to hold seats for the cable company, thereby keeping foes out of the hearing venue in Cambridge, MA.
Digital Music Forum: How to offer digital tunes without going broke
At the Digital Music Forum in New York City today, speakers talked up a couple of alternative approaches for offering freely downloadable digital tunes without going broke.
As Microsoft's Zunes, Apple's iTunes, and other online music distributors are quickly finding out, a lot of people just don't want to pay for song downloads to their PCs.
Encyclopedia of Life launched, prepare to wait in line
Like a tourist attraction on opening day, the Encyclopedia of Life today opened its site to the public, and was promptly swamped with visitiors.
The project was announced in May of 2007, and undertook the massive initial task of cataloguing every single of the 1.8 million living animal species upon the Earth today. The first 30,000 pages of data were unveiled this morning, and by midday, the site was inaccessible due to the heavy traffic it was seeing. As of press time, the site was still unreachable.
EFF, ACLU say Wikileaks shutdown harms First Amendment rights
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed motions in a federal court in San Francisco to overturn a decision that disabled Wikileaks' primary domain name.
A permanent injunction was imposed which disabled wikileaks.org, and prevented its transfer to any other registrar. This followed a lawsuit by Swiss bank Julius Baer which accused the site of posting the personal transactions of its customers.
Spammers bypass Google's Gmail signup security
An Internet research firm discovered spam bots are now able to register on Google's Gmail for spamming purposes. This latest attempt by spammers has been the most sophisticated recorded attempt to get around CAPTCHA, using both humans and bots.
The Completely Automoated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) test is designed to stop bots from being able to register on Web sites and Internet e-mail services to spam users. CAPTCHA technology is the jumbled letters in a small box that you must enter before being able to finish registration on most popular Web sites.
Microsoft struggles to fix data corruption bug in Windows Home Server
Microsoft still has not issued a fix for a problem within Windows Home Server that will leave some files corrupted if edited on a networked PC and saved to the home server.
The problem was initially discovered on December 21, and can occur when users edit a file, document or image already stored on Windows Home Server. The company updated its list of affected applications last week.
Most Commented Stories
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. About Us - Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy - Sitemap.