Latest Technology News

LANCOR (Lagos Analysis Corporation), a Nigerian company headquartered in Massachusetts, has sued One Laptop Per Child for $20 million in damages and an injunction blocking OLPC from distribution in Nigeria.

In August, the company's lawyers publicly accused OLPC of clandestine use of LANCOR product "information," and infringement of intellectual property rights. They claimed Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC, purchased 2 of LANCOR's keyboards on August 7, 2006, then, weeks later, the company reverse engineered its XO keyboards to be more like the KB-201s Negroponte allegedly purchased.

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While Microsoft is not specifically citing any cause, reported issues with the Xbox 360's online Xbox Live service seem to have been resolved as of Wednesday morning.

In all, the problems lasted 12 days, frustrating those who may have unwrapped a new Xbox over the holidays, or even longtime users eager to play the latest game that was found under their Christmas tree this year.

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Mobile video to your back seat, cameras for your car mirrors, gesture recognition in your dashboard...The 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), set to open its doors on January 7, will offer the largest amount of floor space ever accorded to auto electronics in the long history of the Las Vegas show.

If you've ever wondered what kinds of computerized capabilities your next car is likely to give you, more than 600 exhibitors savvy on this subject -- including heavyweights such as Microsoft, General Motors, Ford, and Kenwood -- will be on hand to let you see and try things out for yourself.

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Our countdown to next week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas continues now with how impossibly cheap flash memory, coupled with lesser than expected demand for it, could lead to newer classes of flash-based devices.

The dream of embedded device designers and consumer device manufacturers is to be able to embed new, higher levels of functionality into more everyday items. Still on the drawing boards of futurist designers are the wallet or purse that can report itself stolen, the doorknob that remembers what time it was last opened, the authentication device capable of passing or failing employees' smart cards in low- or no-power situations, and the credit card that helps its bearer make his payment on time.

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Our countdown to next week's CES centers now on whether the CE industry will at last reach a solution to the DRM conundrum. The new trend toward DRM-free music doesn't appear to be shaking the Blu-ray and HD DVD folks, who continue to cling to proprietary disk formats. Will consumers seek a video alternative, and might it come from China?

At the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES), there will be abundant evidence of at least some exhibitors, perhaps many, abandoning their dependence on digital rights management technologies in favor of spurring more digital music downloads.

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BetaNews begins its countdown to next week's Consumer Electronics Show: From dual-mode handsets to a new technology dubbed Femtocell, hardware vendors and service providers are doing their best to meet a strong desire among consumers for seamless device connectivity across the growing tangle of networks.

Consumers crave easy connectivity over multiple wireless networks, and hardware makers preparing to exhibit at CES 2008 next week are trying their best to give that to them. But according to some industry analysts, technical issues still remain.

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As we bid adieu to 2007 and prepare to enter the new year, AOL is also saying goodbye to memories: the company has finally killed off the Netscape Web browser - or what was left of it, anyway.

March 31, 2008 will mark 10 years since the Netscape development team opened up the source code to the browser that ushered in the Internet era. With its acquisition of Netscape in 1999, AOL continued that effort and helped launch the Mozilla Foundation into an organization that has taken on Microsoft and shaped the Web as we know it today.

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Users of Adobe's programs are taking issue with an apparent feature within the company's products that is sending out some type of data to an outside service.

Dan Moren of Uneasy Silence first posted about the apparent data sniffing on Wednesday night. Using a program for Mac OS called Little Snitch, he was able to discover Adobe's hidden practice.

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The retailer decided to silently walk away from its planned video download service after HP ended its participation.

HP was providing the back end to the service, but apparently the company felt it was not getting enough of a return and decided to stop offering it. From there, Wal-Mart just decided to end the service altogether.

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A lost legal struggle with Linux distributor Novell, an apparently truncated fight with IBM, a bankruptcy filing in September...and now, a NASDAQ delisting. Is there any hope at all left for floundering PC Unix vendor SCO?

The long embattled PC Unix vendor SCO has finally gotten the heave-ho from NASDAQ, some two months after filing for bankruptcy and three months after losing a crucial legal copyright struggle with Novell, a company that's morphed over the years into a major distributor of Linux, a competing breed of Unix software that also runs on PCs.

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4:10 pm EST December 27, 2007 - The assassination of Pakistan's leading challenger to the prime minister's post may be to blame for a late afternoon plummet in Apple's stock value, along with the rest of the tech sector.

With the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling nearly 200 points by the close of trading Thursday, even a buoyant Apple -- which had traded at $203 per share at about 10:15 this morning -- couldn't help but get weighed down, falling to a half-dollar below yesterday's close at about $198.50.

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Major consumer electronics producer Samsung is expected to show off a prototype 31-inch active matrix OLED, and to begin producing 14-inch displays in 2008.

Samsung's latest prototype active matrix screen will be a 31" 4.3 mm display, slightly larger and lower-profile than Sony's 27" 5 mm prototype that it showed off at last year's CES.

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With CES 2008 now just around the corner, Samsung today injected more fuel into a legal battle already revving up among some of the top global players in LCDs and other TV and computer display screens.

Although poised to show highly advanced TV display technology at next month's CES 2008 in Las Vegas, Samsung also stands embroiled in legal battles on a couple of fronts in its South Korean homeland and elsewhere. One of these fights -- an LCD patent war -- took on heightened global proportions with Samsung's revelation today that it has filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission demanding a probe of industry rival Sharp.

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A set of policy position documents reportedly authored by Microsoft made the case that Google could use DoubleClick's advertising network to peer into competitors' traffic -- a position the FTC apparently rejected last week.

Last week, The New York Times blogger Louise Story released copies of a series of documents reportedly shared between Microsoft and US Federal Trade Commission members prior to their decision on the Google + DoubleClick merger. The documents reveal that Microsoft was willing to characterize its own competitive position in the Internet advertising market, both before and after a merger took place, as tenuous and perhaps even unsustainable, in order to distinguish itself against what it described to be a larger, perhaps predatory, competitor.

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The label has announced a deal that allows Amazon to sell DRM-free tracks through its online music store.

The addition of Warner brings the number of DRM-free tracks on Amazon MP3 to 2.9 million, more than any other online music service. Amazon already has deals with many independent labels, as well as majors EMI and Universal.

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