Latest Technology News

In anticipation for the holiday season, Microsoft plans to release version 1.2 of Games for Windows Live next month. The program enables PC-based games to tap into Xbox Live, and a number of titles including Halo 2 and Shadowrun fall under the brand.

The 1.2 update will bring a number of bug fixes, along with user interface improvements, support for offline Achievements, and the ability to see if you can join your friends in a game. According to Microsoft blogger Brandon LeBlanc, the Redmond company can update the Games for Windows Live elements just as it does the Xbox 360 Dashboard.

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Confirming a statement made by Petko D. Petkov on his GNUcitizen.org blog over two weeks ago, almost in passing, Adobe has released a security advisory warning of a potential exploitable flaw in its Acrobat and Adobe Reader software. While Petkov has never made the exploit itself public, Adobe's suggested system registry fix suggests a maliciously crafted PDF can be made to send e-mail undetected.

Instructions posted to Adobe's security site tell Acrobat and Adobe Reader users where they should edit a particular entry in the Windows System Registry. That entry contains a list of protocol identifier stubs that PDF files may typically find embedded. There, users will find a long string terminated by zero (REG_SZ), which lists several URI stubs followed by digits evidently denoting how the PDF handler should process them.

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Sony on Tuesday announced its second-generation Blu-ray disc burner for computers, which doubles the speed of its predecessor to 4X. The BWU-200S can record a full 50GB disc in 45 minutes, and also improves upon standard DVD+R burning speed, which is now at 16X.

Like early-generation CD and DVD burners, however, Sony's new model won't come cheap. The BWU-200S carries a price tag of $600, which includes CyberLink's Blu-ray burning software, and 50GB BD-R discs run upwards of $30 a piece for 2X versions. The drive features a Serial ATA interface and works with Windows Vista and XP.

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While Sony has no plans to bring the 40GB PlayStation 3 to the United States, the model is making its way from Europe to Japan. The company said the mid-range model, which unlike its brethren lacks support for PS2 games, will go on sale November 11 for 39,980 yen ($342).

In the process, Sony will drop the price of its 20GB PS3 by 10 percent as of October 17, bringing the cost down to 44,980 yen ($384). The 60GB model will also become cheaper, selling for 54,980 yen ($470). Sony is phasing out the 60GB PS3 as part of the price drops, which are being made in preparation for the holiday season. The high cost of the PlayStation 3 has hindered its ability to compete with the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft's Xbox 360.

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Confirming speculation published in this morning's New York Times, the Sprint executive largely responsible for guiding his company through the merger with Nextel has been ousted this afternoon by Sprint's Board of Directors. Gary Forsee is out as chairman and chief executive officer, and an upheaval of the board is necessary to keep Sprint going in his absence.

The explanation for Forsee's ouster speaks for itself: Sprint admitted after the close of business this afternoon that it is adjusting its guidance for fiscal year 2007 lower than its previous estimate, and that it lost approximately 337,000 post-paid subscribers in just the third fiscal quarter alone.

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On the recommendation of the US Director of National Intelligence, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission last week declined to open an investigation into evidence that the National Security Agency may have received more information from US telecommunications carriers than it actually requested, in conjunction with federal terrorism investigations, and that it may have investigated innocent civilians as a result.

"The Director of National Intelligence concluded that the United States '[has] consistently asserted the military and state secrets privilege in litigation concerning allegations of an alleged NSA records program,"' cites FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's quote of Director J. M. McConnell, "because disclosures regarding such intelligence activities could cause 'exceptionally grave damage to the national security."'

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The president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters is urging Congress to open an inquiry into the long-standing relationship between recording artists and their record labels. David Rehr's objective is to determine whether the reason artists claim they've been treated unfairly over the past several decades is not because terrestrial doesn't pay them, but because someone else doesn't.

Last July 31, in one of the more extraordinary exchanges to take place in a US House of Representatives conference room in recent memory, a single spokesperson for the broadcasting industry found himself debating giants of American music. There, ICBC Broadcast Holding's Charles A. Warfield, Jr., told the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property that radio was largely responsible for the popularity of most American recording artists since the 1920s -- a fact that, for a time, was actually in dispute -- and that radio broadcasters should not have to pay the recording industry for the right to popularize its artists.

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Even though Take-Two attempted to tone down the violence in its Manhunt 2 video game, the revised version is still too much for British eyes.

The British Board of Film Classification said Monday that the changes made were not enough for it to lift the ban of the game within the UK. The US, which also banned the original version, has allowed the revised one to ship within the US.

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With the PlayStation 3 not generating the revenue Sony expected, it now appears that the company is looking at in-game advertising to turn its gaming division around. The new division will be headed by Darlene Kindler, a two-and-a-half decade veteran of the consumer electronics industry. She will assume the title of network advertising director, and report to Sales and Business Development chief Phil Rosenberg.

Kindler will be tasked with developing an in-game advertising strategy for all of Sony's PlayStation platforms, as well as advertising within the PlayStation Network. She had most recently worked with Adscape Media, an in-game advertising company that was acquired by Google in March, and previous to that had worked at Nintendo as part of the company's start-up team. Sony did not say when the advertising would begin to appear in its games.

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Microsoft said Monday that it will begin bundling two free games worth $90 with its standard $349.99 USD package and the Xbox 360 Elite in order to entice new consumers to the console. The games include Forza Motorsport 2 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance when they begin appearing at retailers in October. While many are expecting Microsoft to also release its replacement for the Core system, called "Xbox 360 Arcade," no announcement was made as of yet.

The console, which has been out since November 2005, has one of the broadest game lineups of the three next-generation systems. Besides Halo 3, the console currenty has six other titles expected to sell over a million units, including BioShock, Project Gotham Racing 4, Mass Effect, Guitar Hero III, and Call of Duty 4. 21 of the top 30 best rated games on Metacrtic.com are Xbox titles, Microsoft added.

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While countless observers of the absurdly long SCO trials against IBM and Novell have already stuck their proverbial forks in the matter, after SCO's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing last month, Novell filed a motion in Utah District Court last week arguing that lifting a stay of SCO's lawsuit against it would not only be beneficial in the long run, but may actually be beneficial to SCO's survival.

"The District Court Order has special importance for SCO's attempt to reorganize," argued Novell's attorneys. "It already makes SCO's current business model questionable. The only periods in which SCO appears to have been profitable are those periods in which it generated substantial one-time revenues through transactions wrongfully based on Novell's property [licensing of its UNIX trademarks and copyrights for royalties]. When not based on Novell's property, SCO's historic business model does not appear to be profitable or provide SCO with reasonable prospects for reorganization."

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Cerulean Studios said Friday that it was in the process of developing a version of its client for the Mac, encroaching on territory long occupied by competitor Adium. Trillian did for Windows what Adium does for Mac - allow the user to load one program for multiple instant messaging clients. Cerulean has released an alpha build of the client, which it says is roughly the same as a flash-based version of the client, which basically allows for simple IM.

With the new v4.x iterations of Trillian, the codebase was separated from the user interface, which was made platform-agnostic. Thus, the Mac OS X version will have all the features of the Windows version, however, it will be affected by the limitations of the UI. Cerulean said that as the UI is developed, these features will appear in the Mac client.

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McDonald's said over the weekend that it planned to offer free wireless access in its restaurants across the UK. The company already offers Wi-Fi in many of its US locations, however it is only free to those using the Nintendo DS - others are charged a nominal fee. All 1,200 restaurants in the region will offer the service, which would make it the largest provider of wireless access.

When complete, the restaurant's network will account for about 10 percent of all hotspots in Britain. The country currently has about 12,000 hotspots, provided by The Cloud, BT, and T-Mobile, along with other smaller carriers. The average price for an hour of usage is around 5 pounds ($10.18), so a free McDonald's service with such wide reach could have the effect of lowering access prices for other premium services.

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Without providing any public reason, two of the chief developers behind Mozilla's Thunderbird client announced their intentions to leave ahead of the e-mail client's split from the company.

The moves are all the more puzzling considering there was never any indication that either Scott MacGregor nor David Bienvenu did not support the restructuring of Mozilla to focus on Firefox.

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MSNBC.com has acquired social networking site Newsvine in order to stake its claim in the growing "citizen journalism" movement occurring in the broader media industry.

The acquisition is MSNBC.com's first in its 11-year history. MSNBC is a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC, with the Web site acting as an extension of the online television network.

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