Latest Technology News

One of the nation's biggest online retailers is reportedly close to shipping its own electronic book reader, sources report.

Details of the actual unit are not available, although the 'Kindle' as it is called, apparently has an EVDO data connection. Reports seem to suggested that at least a dozen media partners will be available at launch.

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With Windows Vista SP1 not set to land until sometime in the first quarter, Microsoft has announced it will delay its annual springtime WinHEC conference until fall, presumably to give SP1 more time to reach users. The company says it rescheduled the event in response to industry feedback.

WinHEC, or Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, is devoted to engineers and driver developers. Although it sounds mundane, the event plays a critical role in connecting Microsoft to the hardware vendors that actually distribute its software. It's not clear how the delay will affect Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, which it canceled this year because the company's new wave of developer tools won't launch until next February.

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Photography enthusiasts have quite a few options when it comes to working with RAW files, but Adobe is betting a new SDK will make Photoshop Lightroom a favorite once third party developers start building plug-ins.

The Lightroom Export SDK is available as a technology preview and is included with Lightroom version 1.3, which was released Friday. The SDK utilizes the open source Lua language and ships with example plug-ins for Flickr and FTP uploads. The idea of the development kit is to extend the Export dialog box with additional functionality.

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Amid a frenzy of pre-CES activities in New York City this week, chipmaker DS2 drew more than a bit of attention to itself by demoing new technology for delivering 400 Mbps video to home networks.

But with competing technologies also clamoring to bring video to your living room, kitchen, and elsewhere in your home at much higher speeds - for actual HDTV display - why would you want to buy a box from NetGear or D-Link based on DS2's silicon?

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As Dell re-asserts its relevance as a PC manufacturer, the company takes another gamble on completely new form factors, including a hybrid portable.

At Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, CEO Michael Dell made a keynote speech showing off two forthcoming Dell products that shed the company's traditional desktop-or-notebook form factor: the XPS One (no relation to the similar Gateway model of the same name) and the multi-touch capable Latitude XP convertible tablet.

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One of Apple's legal headaches disappeared on Thursday as a judge threw out one of the lawsuits against the company over its options backdating scandal. The suit, brought against it by the New York City Employees Retirement System, was filed in August of last year. It charged that Apple had diluted the stock price by issuing some 200 million improperly accounted stock options. US District Judge Jeremy Fogel disagreed, saying the group itself had admitted the stock price did not fall as a result of the backdating, an important threshold the plaintiffs had to meet in order to sue the company for its actions.

Apple is not completely free of any possible legal action by the retirement fund: Fogel gave the opportunity to the group to refile if they can prove the backdating hurt the company overall. However, several other groups are already attempting to sue the company on that same premise. According to a probe by Apple, between 1997 and 2002 some 6,428 improperly dated stock options were issue.

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Using its billboards across downtown New York City, CBS is creating a Wi-Fi hotspot that will give nearly 20 city blocks free wireless Internet access.

The service, called the "CBS Mobile Zone," will extend 20 city blocks from Times Square to Central Park South, and 6th to 8th avenues when it is fully complete. Portions of the network are already up and running.

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While it is to be expected, users of Microsoft's newest Zunes are seeing some sporadic problems with both the players and the service.

New product launches are never immune to growing pains and glitches, and the latest Zunes are certainly no exception. Within 48 hours of their launch, reports of problems have surfaced across the Web.

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The FCC is considering invoking a legal clause that lets it squeeze more diverse programming into cable TV systems, but CATV's leading advocates are resisting.

Last week, US Federal Communications Chairman Kevin Martin indicated he may at last succumb to requests submitted throughout his tenure, to use a legal tool to help wedge more diverse programming into cable TV lineups. The tool is the so called "70/70 clause" of the Cable Communications Act of 1984 - a part of federal code that predicted a future time when cable programming would be more commonplace.

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With the release of version 2.0, Windows Live OneCare is no longer just for one PC; Microsoft now wants to inoculate entire home networks with its computer care service.

When it launched OneCare in May 2006, Microsoft risked alienating its close security partners such as Symantec and McAfee by entering a market it previously avoided. Now, the Redmond company is upping the ante by going after families with multiple PCs in their homes.

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With networking a major feature of modern game consoles, the first tools for game system security are inevitably beginning to appear.

Trend Micro is the first to throw its hat into the ring, with a security suite released a week ago as part of a PS3 system upgrade. Trend Micro Web Security for PS3 checks the reputation and security of unknown sites, and has user-defined filters to block certain other types of sites. It is touted as a family product, with password-enabled free browsing.

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While Microsoft dominates the enterprise, it's still struggling to gain a foothold among small businesses. But will it be able to steal market share from Intuit with Office Accounting 2008?

The new release is a minor update to the Office Accounting 2007 that adds features and the Spanish language. The previous version was downloaded almost 2 million times, according to Microsoft's tally, and it says the feedback has dictated what's new in 2008.

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The chief of one of the labels leading the fight against P2P has a surprising change of heart: The industry, he says, was wrong about digital music.

Edgar Bronfman's comments came as part of a broader talk about mobile music at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress. He seemed to admit that the industry itself was at fault for the piracy problem that now plagues digital music.

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Although it is apparently not related to the music download site that was the bane of the music industry's existence, a new site is promising cheap downloads of movies.

Called ZML, the new site offers about 1,500 different titles for download that are free of any digital rights management restrictions. Among the titles available include recent hits 300 and Transformers, as well as classics Apocalypse Now and Aliens.

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Less than three weeks after its launch, the first update to Mac OS X Leopard, version 10.5.1, has arrived, bringing with it a number of bug fixes and security updates.

While Leopard's arrival was greeted with overwhelmingly positive reviews, a number of problems did hit early adopters. Most notably, some users found that when they were moving files across a network and the destination drive disappeared, Finder still deleted them from the source. Apple says it has fixed the problem, although it may be a little late for an unlucky few.

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