American Airlines Sues Google Over AdWords
Upset that advertisements for its competitors are appearing in searches for its trademarks, American Airlines parent AMR has sued Google seeking unspecified damages.
AMR says that ads for competitors' services appear when searching for its trademarked names, such as its “Aadvantage” frequent flyer program. The company says the ads appear alongside ads placed by the company itself in the ‘Sponsored Links’ section.
Skype: Users Rebooting Brought Service Down
A system outage that impacted Skype users for about 48 hours last week has officially been attributed to a multitude of Windows-based clients receiving critical security patches and rebooting at roughly the same time. According to the company, the reboots triggered a flood of logon requests that collided at Skype's network hub, like a circumstantial form of denial-of-service.
Coupled with a reduction in the P2P capacity of the Internet at the time those Windows reboots were going on, there simply wasn't enough capacity in the network to handle the network traffic, as the company's Villu Arak explained this morning.
Xbox 360 Price Drops in Europe
Microsoft moved to lower the price of its Xbox 360 console in Europe on Monday, about two weeks after it made a similar move in the United States and Canada. In EU countries, the price of the high-end console drops by 50 euros to 349.99 euros ($470 USD), while the Core model drops 20 euros to 279.99 euros ($378 USD). In addition, the Xbox 360 Elite will premiere at a price of 449.99 euros on August 24.
The price cuts are intended to fend off stronger than anticipated competition from Nintendo and its Wii, which have been selling at a torrid pace since its release last November. Additionally, Microsoft is hoping a cheaper price will help it to expand its core fan base, which primarily consists of younger men. Analysts say that much of the Wii's success can be explained by its appeal to a much wider consumer base.
Late Effort to Have FCC Re-examine the DTV Transition Plan
It is a mere eighteen months away: American terrestrial television transmitters will vacate the VHF and UHF spectra that dominated the broadcast industry for most of the 20th century, and move to a new set of frequencies with the broader bandwidth required for digital television. While lawmakers complain that not enough people are aware their analog TVs won't pick up over-the-air signals after February 17, 2009, a collection of interest groups is now telling the FCC that it's neglected to enact critical ethical standards for the use of that spectrum.
The Benton Foundation's complaint deals with multicasting, which is something owners of new DTVs may have already discovered: Many relocated channels are capable of broadcasting three other sub-channels concurrently. For instance, viewers might find the old Channel 4 programming on the new Channel "4.1." But they may find other programming from the same station on Channels "4.2," "4.3," and "4.4."
Researcher: US Gov't Editing Wikipedia Entries
Entries in Wikipedia involving subjects such as the Iraq War and Guantanamo Bay have been edited by individuals using FBI and CIA computers, a scanning program indicates.
The researcher says he created the application to "to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike" and see if others are attempting to edit Wikipedia entries that may involve them, according to an interview with the Associated Press on Thursday.
HP Silences Critics With Stellar Quarter
In a stock market desperately searching for good news, HP's quarterly numbers provided a much needed boost.
Since joining HP in 2005 as the permanent replacement to controversial CEO Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd has engineered a stunning comeback. In fact, this quarter revenue grew at the fastest rate that it had since 2000, amidst the height of the dot-com boom.
Record Industry Will Appeal AllofMP3 Ruling
Stinging from its loss in the Russian courts, prosecutors and the recording industry pledged to appeal the dismissal of a case against former Allofmp3 and Mediaservices head Denis Kvasov. According to a spokesperson for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the plaintiffs have one week to file their appeal.
A Russian District Court judge found that the prosecution did not have sufficient evidence to back up their charges and threw the case out earlier this week. The IFPI has not elaborated on what their basis for an appeal would be, however it continued to stress that AllofMP3 operated "in clear violation of copyright law."
Microsoft Releases Live ID SDK 1.0
Microsoft on Friday said it had released the final version of its Windows Live ID authentication system, which would allow third-party developers wishing to build applications around Windows Live services to implement the authentication scheme on their sites. The service directs requests to Microsoft to sign in, then directs them back with a unique identifier used to access various Live services.
The release provides samples of code used to integrate Windows Live in various languages including ASP.NET, Ruby, Java, Perl, Python, and PHP. Microsoft has also provided improved documentation over what was provided with the Alpha version of the release provided at Mix 07. The SDK is now available for download from the Microsoft website.
The Dell Debacle: How Serious is the Damage?
When a parent finds his child with chocolate on her cheeks saying she hasn't been sneaking candy from the pantry, he may find himself giving the oft-repeated lecture about how small lies are just as bad as big ones. If he then goes to work as the chief financial officer of a corporation, he might find himself in the position of explaining away accounting fraud as a minor deficiency in the context of a major company, reminding stockholders that corporate revenues are big and adjustments to those revenues, real or imaginary, are often small.
Dell Computer CFO Don J. Carty attempted to appear less like a parent yesterday afternoon. At his press conference, he first tried to paint a picture of a company where little men made little adjustments to meet little targets, in the context of a big manufacturer with a big customer base and a big number of outstanding shares.
Microsoft Updates Expression Blend 2
Microsoft on Thursday released an updated preview of Expression Blend 2, the next version of its interface design tool that integrates into Silverlight, Microsoft's new Web-based platform for rich media that is competing with Flash. Most notably, the August update supports Visual Studio 2008, which is also in beta.
Expression Studio 1.0 was officially launched at MIX 07 at the end of April, and Microsoft had already prepared Blend 2 specifically for Silverlight. The company hopes to entice developers to build rich Web interfaces using the tool, and then deploying them with Silverlight, which requires a browser plug-in much like Flash. Other updates in the August Blend 2 preview include reusing control content like animations, XAML editing improvements, a Storyboard Picker, and object manipulation. Download Blend 2 from FileForum.
The Compact Disc Celebrates 25 Years
Friday marks the 25th anniversary of the Compact Disc. However, is there much time left for the format in the age of the digital download?
The first CDs rolled off an assembly line on August 17, 1982 with a copy of Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony. It was hailed as the next big thing in music, replacing the cassette tape and vinyl LP as the de facto format for many music aficionados.
100 Million DivX Certified Devices Ship
DivX announced this week that it has certified over 100 million devices to use its video format since 2003, which it began the program with consumer electronics makers. The company estimates that fully 32% of all standalone DVD players sold worldwide now support DivX. This number reaches 90% in Russia, Spain, France and Korea.
But its major success on the hardware side has yet to translate into actual use. DivX has struggled to gain traction among consumers, and a number of its efforts to deliver DivX-encoded video to consumers have floundered. In fact, it could be argued that most of its use on DVD players has been playing back illicitly downloaded movies. The company is now reportedly testing a set-top box to offering streaming video over the Web, but few concrete details are known.
Skype Outage Enters Day 2, Client Updated
Internet calling service Skype remained offline for most users Friday morning, as a major outage related to account sign-ins continued into its second day. Skype owner eBay's stock took a hit Thursday from the news, but Skype employees said the service was "on the road to recovery." Interestingly, Skype released a new version of its software Friday, despite the outage.
It's still not clear what exactly happened to cause the downtime, but more details will likely surface the problem is fully resolved. Skype did say that planned maintenance was not the cause, nor was an attack. "An encouraging number of users can now use Skype once again. We know we’re not out of the woods yet, but we are in better shape now than we were yesterday," said Skype's Villu Arak.
Nokia Looks for Import Ban of Qualcomm Chips
Qualcomm found itself in legal trouble yet again Friday, as Nokia said it will ask the US International Trade Commission to investigate claims of patent infringement.
Nokia says Qualcomm's chipsets infringe on five of its patents relating to CDMA2000 and GSM/WCDMA. It is asking the ITC to investigate and bar the importation into the US of these chips.
Dell Admits Fraud in Financial Reporting, Will Restate Earnings Since 2003
In an historic admission of culpability, Dell Computer this afternoon announced that its internal review of accounting practices dating back to its 2003 fiscal year turned up evidence of senior executives having adjusted its balance sheets in order for the company to meet specific financial goals.
This admission, if validated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission which is also investigating Dell, would go way beyond the initial subject matter of the accounting scandal. That investigation looked into whether the issuance of backdated stock options to senior executives was intentionally not reported on the company's balance sheets as expenses.
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