Latest Technology News

Attempting to move in on Parallels' turf, VMware on Tuesday announced the pre-order for a previously announced product that allows users to run any x86 operating system simultaneously.

A preorder special would give consumers the opportunity to purchase VMware Fusion for $39.99, some $40 cheaper than its rival. When the general availability of Fusion arrives in August, the price will be pegged at $79.99.

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Blockbuster stepped up its battle for customers with rival Netflix on Tuesday by adjusting its online rental prices down.

Online rental plans now start at $4.99 per month, with the price of its standard three-at-a-time movie rental package lowered to $16.99 per month. Pricing is available to new as well as old subscribers.

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A large cluster of consumer electronics and Internet industry trade groups, including the Consumer Electronics Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the US Telecom Association, and the Center for Democracy & Technology filed an amicus brief last Friday, in support of Cablevision's appeal of a ruling last March that stated its plan to deploy off-site, on-demand DV-R systems for its subscribers amounted to copyright infringement.

"If Cablevision were a direct infringer because it houses and maintains the machines that consumers use to make recordings," the amicus brief reads, "then providers of similar services likely would be as well."

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In an effort to appease EU regulators, Google on Tuesday said it will limit the amount of time it keeps user data to 18 months.

However, it left the door open to return to its original high-end time period of two years depending on data retention laws, it warned. After this period, the identifiable information will be removed, however Google will still retain the data.

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CA is seeking beta testers for the 2008 version of its Internet Security Suite Plus, its all-in-one application for protecting against viruses, phishing attacks, spyware, spam and other Web borne threats. The software bundles together CA's other products, including eTrust and the popular PestPatrol program (now known as CA Personal Firewall and CA Anti-Spyware, respectively).

New features in CA Internet Security Suite Plus 2008 are data backup and transfer, better anti-phishing capabilities, integrated parental controls, and easier installation. Testers will communicate directly with the development team to help refine the final product. Those interested can find more information and the short application survey on CA's beta program Web site.

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Nokia said Tuesday its Wibree technology is becoming part of the Bluetooth standard, meaning the ultra low power technology will likely see much broader adoption as a result.

Wibree offers Bluetooth-like performance at up to 10 meters (30 feet) at a speed of up to 1Mbps, and operates in the 2.4GHz band. Nokia has been developing the technology in its labs since 2001.

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Apple executives at WWDC said that Mac OS X Leopard will not use Sun's ZFS 128-bit file system, contrary to reports that surfaced last week. Apparently, somebody forgot to tell Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who told a conference that Apple would announce the switch Monday.

Instead, Leopard will continue to use HFS+, the file system currently found in Mac OS X Tiger. The news is disappointing to many Apple enthusiasts who were looking forward to the improvements ZFS would have brought, including checksums to protect data integrity, disk snapshots for backups, and virtually unlimited storage space.

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Not even a day after it had boasted about rapidly increasing player sales, Toshiba said Tuesday it would lower its sales target for HD DVD players in North America.

On Monday, the Toshiba-backed HD DVD Promotions Group said it regained its lead over Blu-ray, now holding 60 percent of all high-definition set-top players sold. In addition, the format was able to set an all-time record for titles sold in May, with 75,000 discs shipped.

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It took security engineers perhaps less than two hours yesterday to introduce Apple's surprise entry in the field of Windows browsers to the big, cruel world of exploits and vulnerabilities, following its introduction yesterday morning at WWDC. As a result, much of the clout Safari had received as the secure browsing alternative to Internet Explorer and Firefox -- as long as it was on a Macintosh -- was burned off like fire to a flash fuse.

Errata Security engineer David Maynor had a report posted on the first vulnerability he found by 1:48 pm, complete with screenshots of the pre-crash letdown dialog produced by his fuzzing tool. As he admitted, it wasn't a difficult crash to find, posting a screen shot of the memory dump revealing both a stack corruption and an access violation, and then giving credit to Thor Larholm for posting a complete report on the calamity not an hour later.

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Yahoo said Tuesday that it had reason to suspect that China was blocking its Flickr photo-sharing site. The move came after pictures of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were posted to the site, which drew the ire of the Chinese government. While Flickr apparently loads, the image links are non functional and the company has confirmed it is not experiencing any technical difficulties.

Discussion of the Tiananmen massacre Square is forbidden in the country, and state media, the Internet, and books have been scrubbed of any references to the event. Yahoo did not specifically say whether the pictures were uploaded by a Chinese resident or by someone outside the country.

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Adobe took the wraps off of AIR on Monday, its cross-operating system platform that allows developers to use Web-centric programming languages and environments to create desktop applications.

AIR, formerly code-named "Apollo," works hand-in-hand with with Flex, Adobe's framework for creating rich Internet applications. Together, "the masses would be able to create applications," senior product manager for Adobe AIR Louis Polanco told BetaNews.

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Finally emerging from beta after Microsoft told an already anxious customer base in May of last year it would eventually be available early in first quarter 2007, Service Pack 1 of Virtual Server 2005 R2 has at last emerged from beta. But some customers looking for a feature that Microsoft brochures said it has may be disappointed today to learn they really should have said it's a feature that SP1 supports (big difference): Volume Shadow Services.

For users of Windows Server 2003 on physical systems, the support is actually good news. They already have VSS, which currently enables them to take backup "snapshots" of their hard drives while they're running, for possible restoration to an earlier state in case of an emergency. After SP1 is installed, their existing VSS software will take similar snapshots of virtual hard drives as well as physical ones.

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As urgent appeals for lawmakers to finally address multiple defects in US patent law appear to finally be taken seriously, the US Patent and Trademark Office is considering riding this wave of upheaval and making a tremendous change of its own: Last week, it announced its official support of a Web site whose purpose will be to encourage citizens to assess the validity of patent applications for themselves, and issue challenges where necessary.

The goal is to expedite the discovery of "prior art" - creations that existed before the applicant for a patent claimed he invented them. If successful, the Peer-to-Patent Web site could become a kind of SourceForge for intellectual property integrity.

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The HD DVD Promotions Group said Monday that its strategy of price cuts seems to be paying off - sales have skyrocketed, it claims.

HD DVD has regained its lead over Blu-ray, now holding 60 percent of all high-definition set-top players sold. In addition, the format was able to set an all-time record for titles sold in May, with 75,000 discs shipped.

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WWDC 2007 - Responding to feedback from developers, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said Monday that the company would open up the iPhone platform for third party application. The initial concern with such a capability was security, but Jobs says Apple came up with "a very sweet solution."

Because the iPhone (due at 6pm on June 29) includes Safari's full WebKit engine, Apple says developers will be able to write Web 2.0/AJAX applications for the device. The applications can integrate with iPhone services, which means they can make calls, send e-mail and integrate with Google Maps. Because they share Safari's security features, the applications are safe and require no separate SDK. "With all the Web services built in, you can build fantastic applications for iPhone," remarked Apple vice president Scott Forstall.

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