YouTube plans to launch a video identification system that will help the company sniff out copyrighted material, it said earlier this week. Tests begin initially with Walt Disney and Time Warner.

In about a month, the company will start using clips supplied by the media companies to identify unique characteristics within clips posted by users. If a match is found, the content owner is alerted.

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Intel and Google are heading a group comprised of both technology and environmental groups aimed at promoting energy efficient computing.

Called the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, the group also includes Dell, HP, Microsoft, The World Wildlife Fund and about 20 other companies and groups. Altogether, the group aims to save $5.5 billion USD in energy costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 54 million tons.

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Sprint said Wednesday it had reached an agreement with Northern PCS of Minnesota to acquire the company for $312.5 million in a continuing effort to appease regional affiliates that objected to its merger with Nextel in 2005. The company serves about 167,000 customers across Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Iowa, and the deal is expected to close in the third quarter of this year.

The Northern PCS deal follows similar deals with various other providers. Sprint paid $3.4 billion for its largest affiliate Alamosa Holdings, as well $1.3 billion for UbiquiTel, a combined $2 billion for US Unwired, IWO Holdings, Enterprise PCS and Gulf Coast Wireless, and $6.5 billion for Nextel partner Nextel Partners, which served rural areas with Nextel's "push-to-talk" technology.

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One of Microsoft's most ambitious new projects is taking off more rapidly than many expected, perhaps due to popular demand. Windows Home Server -- one of the stars of WinHEC last month and a surprise standout at TechEd last week -- has officially moved to Release Candidate 1 status.

Essentially, WHS is a retooled Windows Server 2003, with new services including one that pools multiple hard drive spaces together as an easier-to-manage partition, and browser-based management software whose ambitious goal is to be easy enough to be understood by the same guy who loses his remote under the couch every week.

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Microsoft released six updates to address various issues across its products on Tuesday, including four which were rated critical, and three that affected Windows Vista.

The first is an important fix that addresses two issues within Microsoft's Visio product. The first is a remote code execution vulnerability in how the product handles a specially-crafted version number within a Visio file. The other revolves around an issue in how Visio handles parsing of packed objects.

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This afternoon, Reuters reports, shareholders of Yahoo defeated two resolutions offered by representatives of New York City's pension funds, one of which would have mandated it would no longer store personally identifying data on servers housed in any country where Internet use among citizens is monitored by its government. An identical proposal was defeated by Google's shareholders last month.

The data storage policy and anti-censorship proposal was defeated by a vote of 15% in favor to 74% in opposition, with the remainder abstaining. A separate proposal advanced by a single shareholder - a John C. Harrington of Napa, California - that would have established an independent human rights committee of the Board of Directors, went down in something less than a blaze of glory: 4% in favor, 80% opposed. Both proposals were argued down by Yahoo annual proxy statement, whose recommendations shareholders do tend to follow.

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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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