Latest Technology News

It seems an eon has passed since the PC could be considered a thing of beauty. Even two decades ago, during the rise of Macintosh and the highly animated duel between the artful Commodore Amiga and the 8 MHz Atari ST, the computer itself, sitting there on the desk turned off, wasn't expected to be something of awe. Its beauty was in its function. Back then, "PC" was a brand whose very meaning was practicality, frugality, conservativeness. The personal computer may or may not be an art medium, but it has rarely in its history been an art form.

Still today, the computer is not universally recognized as something that elicits emotion, like a sports car or a tailored suit or even a simple sculpture. Even Apple restricts an iMac's beauty to its "interface," and hides its central components behind its widescreen monitor. When we emote about computing, more often than not, it's about how it aggravates us - or rather, how its manufacturers and software publishers aggravate us. Our feelings remind us constantly not of what the computer has evolved into but what we wish it could be.

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Nokia's Newest unlicensed mobile access phone, the 6301 was unveiled in Helsinki today.

The world's number one maker of cellular handsets said that this model will be shipping in Europe in the fourth quarter of 2007. As their fourth UMA-enabled device, the estimated retail price is €230 ($322USD) before subsidies and taxes.

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Users of Firefox yesterday began receiving notices of the availability of version 2.0.0.7, which the Mozilla organization said addresses a vulnerability involving Apple's QuickTime plug-in. In BetaNews tests of the new version this afternoon, the vulnerability in question appears to have been fully patched.

In a recent permutation of what might have been a very old, very open hole, a malicious Web page was capable of spawning a new running copy of the default Web browser, and then - if that browser was Firefox - trigger it to try to load QuickTime by pointing it to a file whose type QuickTime is known to handle (typically .MOV files). Whether or not that file actually existed, the trigger could be crafted to contain JavaScript code that ran unchecked, possibly enabling the execution of any kind of binary code.

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been subpoenaed by the Securities and Exchange Commission to testify in a options case against his former general counsel Nancy Heinen, sources say.

The subpoena was issued last month, and does not target him, according to Wall Street Journal sources. Instead, it focuses around Heinen's own actions in falsifying company documents, as well as tampering with Jobs' and her own options.

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Although no official announcement has come from Apple itself, Orange on Thursday said that it had won the contract to bring the device to its customers in France. Like the German deal, no pricing details were given, however the company also declined to specify any launch date. In all likelihood, the phone would ship there on November 9, as that is the date that has been selected for both the UK and German launches.

Apple has shipped one million of the phones here in the United States, and has activated anywhere from 750,000 to 900,000 of them according to BetaNews estimates. Whereas it was originally planning to ship about 1.5 million Phones next quarter, it plans to attempt to ship nearly double that. This moves the target number of shipped phones from 3.6 to 4.8 million for the entire year.

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NBC Universal announced today it's scheduling the testing of its own "NBC Direct" online download service this October. You might be thinking, didn't NBCU already plan something like that? Indeed it did, in a joint venture with News Corp. So this new service may need a different premise.

The Direct service won't be offering downloads to own, but just to watch - temporary downloads, but with a shelf life of one week. And each program is embedded with advertisements that cannot be skipped.

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BetaNews was on hand in New York City Wednesday night for the annual Holiday Spectacular product press preview. While there was certainly a dearth of new and compelling products to make their debut at the show, there were a few bright points.

Among those were a new line of techno-centric products from the same company that brings you the Swiss Army Knife, 3-D HDTV, and a device that uses the sun to power your cell phone. Check out the photo gallery to see what could be hot this holiday season.

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Staking its claim to a chunk of HD DVD technology, Microsoft announced today its HDi logo - representing its version of the interactivity layer of the HD DVD format - will appear on all Toshiba brand HD DVD players made from this point on, as well as on selected Universal and Paramount high-definition discs.

"Given some confusion over what qualifies as true interactivity," a Microsoft spokesperson stated today, "Microsoft wanted to officially logo the technology as a quality assurance."

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Sony had been actively demonstrating its 3D online user community Home recently, ramping up excitement around a release initially planned for later this year. But Thursday at the Tokyo Game Show, in his first public appearance as CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, Kazuo Hirai announced that "Home" would be delayed until next spring.

Hirai said Sony is waiting until it can offer what would be a "totally satisfying" experience for its customers, and that he'd prefer to see it spend more time in development.

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In its quarterly 10-Q filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, UNIX provider SCO Group expressed its fears that, if it were faced with a judgment ordering it to pay Novell for several years of using UNIX trademarks recently found to have been owned by Novell all this time, it may not be able to continue business.

"As a result of both the Court's August 10, 2007 ruling and the Company's entry into Chapter 11, there is substantial doubt about the Company's ability to continue as a going concern," the company stated in its SEC filing Tuesday. "Absent a significant cash payment to Novell for this matter, management believes it is remote that the undiscounted future cash flows generated by the Company would not be sufficient to recover the carrying values of the long-lived assets over their expected remaining useful lives. However, if a significant cash payment is required, or significant assets are put under a constructive trust, the carrying amount of the Company's long-lived assets may not be recovered."

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In an unusual move, US Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Thomas Barnett issued a statement earlier this week, following the European Court of First Instance (CFI) decision in the Microsoft matter, politely but clearly dissenting from the Court's decision and implying the American antitrust system is more evolved.

"It will...be some time before the full impact of today's decision on antitrust policy in Europe will be apparent," wrote Barnett last Monday. "We are, however, concerned that the standard applied to unilateral conduct by the CFI, rather than helping consumers, may have the unfortunate consequence of harming consumers by chilling innovation and discouraging competition."

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As polarizing as the high-definition format war continues to be, Warner Home Video remains silently, but firmly, committed to its position of providing its movie titles to users of all formats on the market.

"If the consumer continues to support both formats, the industry will as well," Warner Home Video president Ron Sanders told TWICE magazine in an interview last week from the floor of the CEDIA convention in Denver.

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On September 11, the US Federal Communications Commission approved a plan that would continue to mandate cable TV carriers within an area make available all the broadcast signals receivable in that area. Both cable operators and broadcasters applaud the plan, but perhaps it's because it has not only been scaled back but also has an expiration date.

That date is three years following the February 17, 2009 transition date for terrestrial broadcasting from analog to digital format. After that time, the FCC will review the plan...though it would appear commissioners are betting that it will be a different FCC by that time.

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Galileo, once billed as a potential rival to the US Department of Defense's GPS system, is now facing serious issues following disagreements over the development of the system by eight companies tasked with its build-out. However, the European Commission is proposing to shift money in the bloc's 2007-2013 budget to come up with extra funds to ensure its completion. Public funds were initially supposed to cover about one-third of the cost, said to be around 3.5 billion euros.

EU officials say the additional money -- some 2.4 billion euros -- will come from unspent money elsewhere. They are making the case by saying that the Galileo project is a strategic necessity, and would lessen the dependence on the US GPS system. The EU's positioning system would improve coverage in higher latitudes, and be interoperable with the GPS system through a recently announced deal. Member countries will still need to approve the bailout before it can proceed, however.

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At the same time Apple was celebrating the iPhone's launch in Germany, elsewhere the company was defending its price structure for iTunes.

The European Commission claims that the record labels are forcing iTunes to not allow European residents to purchase music from stores in other countries in the EU. This apparently runs afoul of the bloc's laws, and the Commission isn't happy about it.

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