Blockbuster's online service seems to be catching on, as the company added some 800,000 subscribers during the first quarter of the year, it said on Wednesday. Over the past two quarters, it has nearly doubled in size to 2.8 million members, and beat its larger rival Netflix in subscriber additions for the first time. Netflix added 481,000 new customers to end this past quarter with 6.8 million subscribers.

The quick growth has not come without a price however. The nation's biggest brick-and-mortar movie renter swung to a much larger loss, posting a net loss of $46.4 million compared to $1.9 million in the year ago quarter. Cost of sales increased 17 percent, while operating costs increased 3 percent.

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Penn State will end its partnership with the Napster music service on May 31 in favor of Ruckus, the university said on Wednesday.

The announcement ends a nearly four-year deal between the institution and music service, and sends mixed signals on the future of the offering itself. Penn State was one of Napster's largest educational customers.

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Following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling Monday that called into question the patentability of "obvious" inventions, Vonage on Tuesday asked a federal appeals court to vacate a ruling that it infringed on Verizon's voice over IP patents and send the case back to the U.S. District Court for a retrial.

The Supreme Court decision came as part of KSR v. Teleflex; justices ruled in favor of KSR saying Teleflex's patents on electronic sensors in accelerator pedals were too obvious. In addition, the court said the Federal Circuit Court had recently too quickly sided with patent holders.

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VeriSign is looking to strengthen credit card security by offering a new technology that would generate a temporary password directly on the corner of the card. Users would need to have the card in their possession in order to make purchases.

The company has announced a deal with Innovative Card Technologies that would assist interested banks and online stores with the addition of temporary password technology to their web sites.

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For the third time this year, Apple has released a security update for its QuickTime media player, which corrects a flaw that could lead to code execution. The vulnerability was discovered as part of a "Hack a Mac" contest at the CanSecWest security conference earlier this month.

According to Apple, a problem exists in QuickTime for Java that allows reading or writing out of the bounds of the allocated heap. As a result, a malicious Java applet on a Web site could result in a full system compromise. QuickTime 7.1.6 resolves the issue, and is available for both Windows and Mac OS X.

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The problem with making the Web work the way publishers want it to is establishing a business model for it. Everything that drives users to the Web thus far has been free, even though that's not always how those users perceive it - they're paying someone for what they read or download, they're just not paying the publishers.

Sites like YouTube and MySpace and even Slashdot have proven how it's indeed possible to generate a veritable storm of traffic around the simple notion of sharing pictures or conversation. But there hasn't been a service model attached to these sites' publishers; any revenue they receive is generally for ancillary services, such as promoting a producer's films or selling a portion of space along the side of the page for advertising.

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Scientists have turned on a new telescope in Arizona that they hope will help them find so-called 'dark matter.'

Dark matter is a term that refers to matter that does not emit enough radiation to be observed directly. Scientists say it makes up much of the observable universe, but its composition so far has been indeterminable.

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With Google scooping up DoubleClick, and Yahoo's acquisition Monday of the remaining stake of Right Media, Microsoft is apparently eyeing 24/7 Real Media, the New York Post reported Tuesday.

Microsoft and advertising company WPP Group are in the running to acquire the company, which is said to be worth some $600 million according to analysts. However, the Redmond, Wash. Company is serious about its pursuit of the firm, and is said to be considering a $1 billion offer.

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As the companies continue to work towards getting their proposed merger approved, both show progress in improving their balance sheets. Sirius shows the most improvement, capturing a 66 percent subscriber share.

Both companies expressed confidence in the eventual merger of the two companies, saying the retail market had changed dramatically since the companies were first granted their licenses ten years ago.

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In its response filed Monday to a complaint against it by Viacom in New York District court, claiming its YouTube division is guilty of copyright infringement against Viacom properties, Google formally invoked the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, effectively claiming it's exempt from responsibility for the content shared over YouTube because it doesn't know what that content is.

While YouTube and its new parent, Google, have been taken to task in the past by former prospective content partners for not having adopted controls against IP infringement quickly enough, it could be the lack of such controls which is providing Google with its defense against Viacom: a "safe harbor" against liability by virtue of lack of control.

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Saying it was the first major manufacturer to do so, Gateway announced Tuesday that it will offer at retail a quad-core system through both select online and brick-and-mortar retailers. The Gateway FX line includes Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processors, 512MB ATI Radeon X1950 Crossfire video cards, Ethernet connectivity, and either 500 or 1000GB of hard drive storage. Retail prices start at $2,099.99.

Gateway said it had seen "tremendous" demand for its quad-core line through phone orders and its own web site. However, it acknowledged many consumers prefer to purchase computers through local retailers, and said its decision had much to do with the buying habits of the consumer. The systems will be available at select Best Buy, Micro Center, and J&R locations and websites, as well as the online stores of Circuit City and CompUSA.

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The question of how much support Microsoft intends to give JavaScript as a Web development language became murkier yesterday, perhaps inadvertently, when a statement made by the company's chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, was cited out of context by press sources. The citation by itself made it appear that Silverlight, Microsoft's new cross-platform runtime environment for Web applications, would at some point be competing with AJAX as though that technology were exclusively Google's.

The comment in question is as follows: "We're announcing today that we're bringing .NET technology together with Silverlight, and that Silverlight is being transformed into an amazingly powerful cross-platform extension to our entire .NET development and design environment, specifically factored to run in a browser. The Web over the last years has been mostly about AJAX, about increasing the richness of the user experience through the magic of DHTML, and clever browser hackery. But AJAX development has its limitations, and certainly there are better languages than JavaScript to use for many of the sophisticated apps that developers want to build. In this respect, Silverlight changes the game by giving you a new choice for developing incredibly sophisticated, rich Internet applications in the language of your choice."

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Apple confirmed the appearance of Steve Jobs at the Worldwide Developers Conference on June 11, Tuesday, saying he will be the keynote speaker at the event. Although it typically keeps the subject matter of his keynotes under wraps, the Cupertino, California company said developers will be shown a feature-complete version of Mac OS X Leopard and attendees will be given a beta copy to take home for final testing.

The WWDC runs from June 11-15 and includes some 150 sessions on various topics on Mac OS X software development. While Apple has traditionally also used the event to launch hardware products, Apple rumor sites have thus far not reported any possible hardware announcements.

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Internet television service Joost moved into public beta on Tuesday, as the company announced that it is allowing its existing beta testers to invite an unlimited number of friends and family to sign up for the service.

Current users can invite anyone by clicking on the "My Joost" area, then selecting the "Invite Friends" widget.

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Seemingly taking a page from Apple's naming playbook, Google on Tuesday will unwrap "iGoogle," a new brand for the search company's Personalized Homepage service. News features will arrive alongside the iGoogle site, including a "Gadget Maker" and location based search results.

Google's Personalized Homepage lets users create exactly that: a customized start page for their Web browsing. On the page, users can place "gadgets" containing information they are interested in, be it weather, stock feeds, news feeds from Web sites, and even the current date and time.

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