Yahoo criticized the Chinese government on Monday, saying it shouldn't curtail its citizens' rights to free speech. The statement came just one day after the mother of jailed Chinese journalist Shi Tao announced she sued the company in U.S. District Court. Yahoo, along with its Chinese partner Alibaba, has been accused of leaking the information that led to Shi's arrest.

Human rights groups have criticized companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, which have all been accused of either kowtowing to questionable Internet restrictions or providing governments with information that have led to arrests and imprisonment. However, the companies have defended their actions, saying they must follow Chinese law or it would put employees at risk of legal action.

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The legal battle between Nokia and Qualcomm further heated up on Monday as Nokia sued over patent infringement in the chipmaker's MediaFLO and BREW technologies.

Nokia's latest legal salvo is only one filing in a string of lawsuits and countersuits between the two sides. A cross-licensing deal expired on April 9, and the companies have since only intensified the fight against each other.

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Apple is reportedly in talks to bring movie rentals to its iTunes store, with the company reportedly planning to offer rentals for $2.99 USD for 30 days.

It was not clear which studios were being asked to participate, although the Wall Street Journal reported Paramount Pictures seemed open to the idea while Universal Studios was against it.

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ORLANDO - It has been a long and fruitful week for us here, which was a welcome surprise. A computer convention, or any kind of convention, is a broad and complex story whose importance becomes clearer once the details are all assembled. Conventions are about the details, the parade of little events, the things you overhear, the questions that were unanswered and then unanswered again, the discoveries you didn't expect.

From Wednesday to Friday of this week in Orlando, I heard from some of our newest and some of our regular readers face-to-face, personally thanking BetaNews for sticking with the full five-day program. I heard you, and I thank you. One of my most important and most enjoyable jobs in covering a conference is listening to the everyday people, not just the program managers and the presenters and the keynotes. It's through them that I learn what's truly important to developers, administrators, architects, designers, and engineers. This week, they changed my point of view on a few interesting points.

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Following an announcement last month that it will sell specially-made desktops in select Wal-Mart locations, Dell announced Friday that it will sell notebook PCs in 500 stores of Wal-Mart subsidiary Sam's Club. The PCs feature Windows Vista Home Premium, including 2GB of memory, and sport AMD's Turion dual-core processors. Sales are to begin next week, the company says.

Unlike the Wal-Mart deal, the notebooks sold will be the same as what is sold on its website, the Inspiron model number 1501. Although Dell spokespeople did not immediately have retail prices available, the systems are currently selling for $549 on the Dell Web site after a $100 instant rebate.

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Apple released an update to its Boot Camp dual-booting application on Thursday, including some new features as well as tweaks to ensure smooth operation. Among the new features is the support for the keyboard backlighting feature on MacBook Pros, and added support for Apple Remote Pairing.

Enhancements include a smoother installation process for Boot Camp drivers, which incorporates an improved graphics driver. International keyboard support is improved, and localization issues have been remedied. Apple has also provided an update to the Windows Help files for Boot Camp. According to Apple, repartitioning of the drive is not necessary, however the user would have to update the Boot Camp Assistant software and create a new drivers CD.

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Microsoft said Friday it had named Craig Eisler to head the Macintosh Business Unit, replacing Roz Ho, who had spent seven years with the division and spearheaded much of the Redmond company's recommitment to the platform.

Eisler was formerly development chief for the company's DirectX platform, however he left the company to work for mobile software developer Action Engine as its CEO and then helping AOL launch its wireless offerings in 2005.

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Parallels updated its software that allows Mac users to run Windows within Mac OS X on Thursday, adding support for Vista Boot Camp partitions, among other enhancements.

The new version will not come free to current customers as past updates have, customers have to pay $49.99 to upgrade. Those installing Parallels for the first time will be charged the full list price of $79.99.

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The US International Trade Commission sided with Broadcom on Thursday, ruling that all imports of cell phones using Qualcomm chips could not be imported into the country.

While current models are allowed to continue to be imported, future models are barred from importation. However, with the fast pace of updates to cellular phones, it essentially means a full ban within a matter of months.

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Rumors of Sony Computer Entertainment's plans to cut U.S. jobs were substantiated on Thursday with the announcement of its plans to restructure in the face of last year's operating losses.

The size of the cutback is not yet known, however the recent streamlining of its European gaming unit saw the loss of 8 percent of the workforce there. If a comparable cut is made stateside, it could mean roughly 120 employees would be let go.

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NBC Universal and News Corp. have announced the inclusion of several cable networks in their online video venture expected this summer. Gemstar-TV Guide, Fuel TV, Oxygen, Speed, and the Sundance Channel have all agreed to provide content for a new portal designed to rival Google's YouTube.

The content, which will range from short-form clips to full-length original programming will also be available through News Corp.'s MySpace and Time Warner's AOL, as well as MSN, Yahoo and Comcast.

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UPDATE: Yahoo has posted a fix for the security flaws with the release of Yahoo Messenger 8.1.0.401 Code for two exploits in Yahoo Messenger first disclosed earlier this week by security firm eEye appeared on the Full Disclosure mailing list on Thursday. At the current time, the only fix is to set the 'kill bits' in the ActiveX controls responsible for the vulnerabilities, although it requires a system registry edit.

The first set of code takes advantage of buffer overflow issues within the Webcam ActiveX component, while the other causes a buffer overflow in the ywcvwr.dll viewer. The issues affect both Yahoo Messenger 8.0 and 8.1 running on Windows.

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ORLANDO - Yesterday's TechEd demo of building an XNA Game Studio Express version of Asteroids using C# appeared to indicate the resurgence of low-level (in the processing sense) programming languages in experimental development.

But this morning, Microsoft's lead program manager for the Common Language Runtime team, Mahesh Prakriya, may have one-upped C#, showing another XNA revamp written by IronPython developer Jim Hugunin, of the exact same demo package, but using Microsoft's dynamic language IronPython instead.

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Analysts are suggesting that AMD may be forced to delay its Barcelona multi-core chip, a move that could set the company back both financially and strategically.

Originally, the new multi-core processor was scheduled for a July debut, however now AMD is pushing its release to October. While Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung initially reported the news, others are agreeing with his assessment.

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ORLANDO - At a morning session introducing many to the window-less Server Core installation option in the forthcoming Windows Server 2008, Microsoft product manager Andrew Mason made it official: Windows Virtualization Services (code-named "Viridian") will become the ninth role available for the trim server option, joining Internet Information Services 7 announced last Monday and other common, unattended role such as DNS server, DHCP server, and Active Directory Application Mode (now called AD LDS).

This addition may be both welcome and extremely important for enterprises working to create homogeneity of services where heterogenous (OS-specific) applications are deployed. Now SUSE Linux and other systems can be hosted by servers that don't need to waste space managing Windows printer and display drivers, such as DirectX and Direct3D, when they're not ever going to be used there anyway.

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