Security researches are criticizing retailer Sears for not adequately describing its efforts to track the behaviors of those who provide the company with their contact information.

The process begins after the customer provides Sears.com with an e-mail address. An e-mail will appear in the customer's inbox inviting them to join a program called "My SHC Community."

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In preparation for CES 2008, which kicks off in Las Vegas on Sunday, we have decided to give away a number of products that have been gathering dust around the office. All you need to do to win is come up with a good question.

The rules are easy: leave a comment below with a question we should ask at CES. This question can be directed at a specific manufacturer or general technology. It should be something that would be interesting to other BetaNews readers and that it is possible to answer. We will post answers to the winning questions as we ask them during the event.

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The FCC has posted its third periodic review of the rules and policies regarding the conversion from analog to digital television, showing a further degree of slackening in regulations.

In light of FCC commissioner Adelstein's criticism of the transition from analog to digital TV, saying that the Commission lacked a strategic plan, it appears that the FCC is now even becoming hazy on the February 17, 2009 deadline date mandated by Congress.

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No list of trends would be complete without a mention of Apple's iPhone, a device that many handset manufacturers will be looking to beat in 2008 in order to attract a consumer that is ever more interested in advanced wireless services. Many of those devices will debut at CES next week.

Since its launch in June of last year, iPhone sales have nearly topped 2 million. While the closed nature of Apple's business model has kept the device out of the hands of many consumers, the iPhone no doubt has sparked a revolution in the entire mobile phone industry.

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In a court decision that could dampen deployment of high-speed wireless Internet in the US, Qualcomm has been banned from shipping cell phone chipsets using three technologies judged as belonging to archrival Broadcom.

Many consumers, businesses, and wireless carriers in the US desiring WCDMA or UMTA Internet phones based on Qualcomm chipsets will now need to wait a while, due to a new court ruling announced today in a patent dispute brought against Qualcomm by competing Broadcom.

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The last day of 2007 brought some relief to struggling Internet telephone provider Vonage, as the company settled the last patent infringement lawsuit against it, this time with telecommunications giant Nortel.

AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Nextel had all sued Vonage earlier in the year. Verizon was the first to sue the company, and for a period left Vonage unable to accept new subscribers. In the end, Vonage was forced to pay $80 million each to Verizon and Sprint, while the cost of its AT&T settlement was not yet disclosed.

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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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