In a keynote address this morning to the American Antitrust Institute in Washington, D.C., AMD CEO Hector Ruiz gave attendees what he described as "an idea of what it's like to do business day in and day out when you are competing against an abusive monopolist." Although he also invoked the phrase "illegal monopoly," he left a convenient 846-word buffer zone between that phrase and his first invocation of the term "Intel."

"I do not need my fortune teller hat to tell you one truth about which I am absolutely certain," Ruiz told attendees, "There is no proper or defensible place for illegal monopolies in the 21st century global marketplace...My purpose is not to argue for competitive advantage - we know how to compete. My purpose is to lay out the facts so that law and economics can do their job to protect consumers."

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CENSORING THE NET Sri Lanka is being criticized for apparently ordering the nation's ISPs to block a Web site that supports the Tamil Tiger rebels, a militant group that supports secession of the north and east portion of the country into a separate state.

The Web site at issue is Tamilnet.com, which is characterized as one of the most influential in reporting news from the group's perspective in the three-and-a-half decade long conflict.

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Facing shareholder pressure to show performance, Sony executives are becoming increasingly vocal in public about their plans to correct the listing PlayStation division.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal and at a meeting of shareholders, new PlayStation head Kazuo Hirai and CEO Howard Stringer both said changes were already underway to improve the unit's performance.

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Creative updated its Zen Stone player on Thursday, adding a "Plus" model which doubles the capacity to 2GB for 69.99 USD, and includes a color screen and FM radio and voice recording functionality. Working much like the iPod Shuffle, it includes play and random features, and holds about 500 songs encoded at 128kbps. Its release follows the original stone last month, which went on sale for 39.99 USD.

Silicone skins allow the consumer to change the color of the player to any one of five options, and an armband and wristband option is also available. Accessories also include a portable speaker system that retails for 39.99 USD. The player will be available beginning in July from several online retailers.

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While Congress continues to back-burner the debate over whether it's fair for streaming radio services to be charged as much as ten times their revenue in performance royalties, the US Copyright Royalty Board last week met for a roundtable discussion about whether yet another class of royalties that are already part of copyright law, should apply to Internet radio as well.

The class being discussed is the "mechanical royalty" - a fee collected for the right to make a reproduction of a recording, or what the law calls a phonorecord. The basic meaning of the royalty is quite sensible: When you have a record, and you want to make records off of that master for reproduction and possible sale, you owe a mechanical royalty fee for each reproduction. Historically, that fee has been set at a flat rate of $0.09 cents per copy.

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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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