Latest Technology News

AT&T is taking extra steps to prepare for an expected onslaught of business due to the iPhone, including the hiring of about 2,000 temporary employees and enhancing security.

The buzz around the phone is still growing, and people close to AT&T say that even celebrities are being turned away from getting a phone early. There are special lists, but all on it must still pay full price.

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With Leopard pushed off until October, Apple is continuing to update Mac OS 10.4, with its tenth update to the operating system being released Thursday, including fixes for Bluetooth and USB issues, among others.

The patch is generally smaller than previous ones, with only 13 issues fixed. It also follows an unusual naming convention -- 10.4.10: typically the 10.x.9 upgrade heralded the imminent release of the next version of the OS, which would be 10.5 in this case.

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While ATI and its newfound parent AMD continue discussing the potential benefits of actually pairing their technologies into one cohesive unit, now that their companies have been paired together in a similar fashion, their principal rival in the graphics arena decided it isn't waiting to make a similar play with Intel.

NVidia today may have launched the stand-alone GPU-centric computer business all by its lonesome, with today's announcement of a kind of computer system specifically designed to mesh graphics processors together to perform rich math functions.

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The Associated Press this morning hailed a new Xerox innovation that aims to take search engine indexing capabilities "to the next level," with a public unveiling of a semantic networking tool it plans to integrate into its FactSpotter legal document search system. It's being described as the next stage in textual indexing development, and the culmination of a four-year project at Xerox's European research center in Grenoble, France.

But semantic networking has not only been the "next level" of indexing for longer than four years, it's been a factor in indexing since long before the inception of the World-Wide Web. In fact, it was a natural outgrowth of research into hypertext that led to the Web's very creation.

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Verizon Wireless has partnered with mobile payment service Obopay to give its customers the option of using their phones as payment devices.

The service runs as an application on phones that support BREW. After downloading, customers register for an account through the phone or via Verizon Wireless' Web site, and can invite their friends to join as well.

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In less than three years since the high-speed Internet, phone and TV service made its debut in limited regions across the United States, Verizon has signed its one millionth customer to FiOS. Nearly 500,000 of those customers also have FiOS TV, which debuted less than two years ago.

FiOS was an incredible undertaking for Verizon, which had to lay fiber optic cables to buildings and residences (a fact that largely has restricted its adoption in cities), in addition to gaining licenses to operate local television franchises. FiOS is currently available to 1,700 communities in 16 states, Verizon says, and the company has garnered many converts due to poor service from cable and DSL companies.

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Within its recent response to the United States Department of Justice that stated it would modify Windows Vista to enable end users and OEMs to change the default desktop search it uses, Microsoft for the first time discussed Service Pack 1 for the OS, saying a beta will come this year.

Microsoft has remained unusually silent about its SP1 plans for Vista, encouraging users and businesses not to wait for the first major upgrade. With a beta slated for the end of 2008 2007, Vista users could see the final version of SP1 by the middle of next year. For the update, Windows Desktop Search will continue to run in the background, but other programs such as Google Desktop Search can replace Microsoft's results - if the user chooses to do so via a link. Few other details are known about Vista SP1 at this time.

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Although it stops short of the coveted "exclusive" contract, Microsoft said Wednesday that it had paid $50 million for exclusive content for Take-Two's Grand Theft Auto IV.

The next sequel in the wildly popular game series will launch in October on both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, however downloadable add-ons will only be available for Microsoft's version.

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Thought all the laptop battery problems were over? Think again. Gateway recalled Samsung-made batteries due to a fire risk, while Toshiba reports a defective Sony-made battery sparked a laptop fire last month.

Gateway said it will recall about 14,000 lithium batteries shipped with Gateway 400VTX and 450ROG sold between May and August 2003. Samsung produced the battery cells, however Taiwan-based Simplo Technology was the manufacturer.

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Last February, a Microsoft Windows Vista client team product manager was quoted by the Associated Press as having said that his company actively considered canceling virtualization support in Vista after a Black Hat security demonstrator showed a tool that could leverage virtualization capabilities to make the operating system blindly run within a malware hypervisor. That claim has since been denied by Microsoft representatives who work more closely with, or who lead, its virtualization projects.

This morning, sources cited the same team product manager, Scott Woodgate, as having indicated his company would be announcing a licensing change to Windows Vista with respect to virtualization, perhaps today. Consumers were to expect Vista licenses adjustments to enable Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium editions to run in virtualized environments, perhaps supported by Mac OS X or VMware. When such an announcement did not come, and when the company issued a brief statement to reporters indicating it would not come, it was reported that Microsoft "flip-flopped" on virtualization.

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Apple said Wednesday that its update to Apple TV to allow viewing of YouTube videos was available, along with announcing similar functionality for iPhone. But the lack of 3G connectivity will limit the feature's usefulness.

iPhone users will likely not be able to stream their videos across the mobile network as EDGE is often too slow to support higher-quality full motion video. Thus, the functionality would only be usable via Wi-Fi.

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News Corp. may be ready to sell off MySpace in an effort to gain a stake in search engine company Yahoo, British daily The Times reported Wednesday.

According to the paper, talks have already occurred with Yahoo, and Rupert Murdoch's conglomerate is looking for a 30 percent stake in the company. News Corp. also owns The Times, which initially reported the story.

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MySpace said Tuesday that it has officially launched the beta of its instant messaging client to the public, about a year after it had first released it in a limited beta test. Since then, 17 million users worldwide have installed the client. While it enters into a very crowded market, MySpace hopes that its IM service will be able to take advantage of the tight integration with the popular social network site to grow quickly.

Functionality included within the client includes video chat and image sharing. It would also alert users when they receive new mail, comments, or friend requests through their MySpace profiles. The software only works on Windows, and no decision has been made to port the IM service to Mac or Linux, MySpace says.

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In agreeing to make what could be described technically as a minor change to the way it handles its options for consumer desktop search, Microsoft last night may have made its most symbolically significant statement to date with regard to its current stance in the technology market: It backed down, in response to a complaint from Google that its placement of desktop search capabilities within Windows Vista constituted a breach of its antitrust settlement agreement with the US and states' governments regarding middleware.

The question centered around Windows Desktop Search, a feature built into Vista but which essentially competes with Google Desktop Search, which a user must download separately and install intentionally. Google filed a formal complaint, which it never formally acknowledged or even publicly mentioned, but whose existence was finally entered into the public record yesterday by the US Justice Dept.

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A US federal appeals court yesterday upheld a district court ruling in favor of an individual whose e-mail records were copied by government investigators from servers at Yahoo and another ISP. In finding that the government violated Steven Warshak's Fourth Amendments rights against unreasonable search and seizure, it may have prevented the government from loosely applying a key tool in its ability to obtain e-mail records without a warrant: the Stored Communications Act (SCA).

Warshak was the subject of a 2005 criminal investigation of himself and his company, which apparently sold vitamin supplements. In March of that year, investigators obtained an order from a federal magistrate to acquire e-mail records from Warshak's NuVox account, ordering NuVox not to disclose even the existence of that order for at least 90 days. Later in September, the government issued a similar request to Yahoo. Both complied.

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