Alibaba.com, which owns Yahoo's operations in China, said Thursday that it had won a unfair competition lawsuit against another China search engine operator. The owners of Qihoo will be required to compensate Yahoo China and end their anti-competitive practices.

Qihoo is operated by Beijing Sanjiwuxian Internet Technology, and is run by a former Yahoo employee who left shortly after the announcement last year that Alibaba would take over Yahoo's China operations. Zhou Hongyi created 3721, which Yahoo bought in 2003 to enter the Chinese market.

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Opera Software said Thursday that it had entered into an agreement with South Korean electronics maker Samsung to provide its namesake Internet browser software for the company's mobile phones. As the contract is per phone, no estimate of the contract's total value was provided. Opera mobile is a standards-based browser that automatically reformats standard-sized web pages for viewing on a small screen.

The company earlier this month had announced that Nokia had agreed to put the Opera Mini browser on 6300 series phones in select markets. "Our strategies in working closely across the board with major handset manufacturers, operators and directly with end users have made Opera Mobile an attractive product," Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner said.

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Having developed a successful business in hard disk drives, Seagate moved into online storage Thursday with the acquisition of privately held EVault for $185 million USD in cash.

The acquisition would close in Seagate's third fiscal quarter pending regulatory approval, which runs from January through March of next year.

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Broadcasting & Cable this morning cited a source close to negotiations between NBC Universal, MySpace parent Fox Interactive, and former siblings CBS Corp. and Viacom to produce a rival video sharing service to Google's YouTube, as having broken down after MTV parent Viacom walked away from the table.

At first, the concept of producing a television-centric mega-site where users would apparently happily upload clips of the network owners' own content on their behalf, for free, without fear of copyright reprisal, may have seemed tempting to negotiators even from a cost-savings standpoint.

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In a 3-2 vote that was delayed until this afternoon for procedural reasons, the US Federal Communications Commission voted to compel states and municipalities to give telephone companies 90 days following the date of their initial petition, to make their case for offering competitive cable TV and broadband service, in regions currently restricted to one CATV provider.

The new rule comes as legislation engineered by Republican House and Senate commerce committee heads last year, in an attempt to open up municipalities to possible national franchising, ground to what may be a permanent halt in the wake of the changing balance of power in Congress.

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Yahoo has pushed an update of the beta of its mail product, including performance improvements, bug fixes, and several new features. Developers have improved the loading times for the client, addressed an issue where the beta would generate superfluous "click" sounds in Internet Explorer, and added Vista support. Language support for Mexican, Argentinean, and American Spanish as well as Indonesian and Malay were also added.

In features, the Mail team has added weather information to the welcome page as well as better calendar and search functionality within the client. Finally, a new feature was added from the company's quarterly "Hack Day" that allows the user to quickly navigate through message folders based on the user's settings.

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German electronics company Siemens said Wednesday that it had set a new network speed record, achieving a speed of 107 gigabits -- the equivalent of roughly two DVDs worth of data -- per second, two and a half times faster than the previous record.

The test transmission was conducted on a 100-mile stretch of fiber-optic cable in the U.S. It also marks the first time such a test was performed outside of the laboratory. Siemens says the continuing surge in multimedia applications necessitates such high bandwidth needs.

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VeriSign said Tuesday that it plans to launch its own movie service next year, to be run by Axiom, a Rochester, Mich. based company. The movies on that service will be targeted at families, VeriSign said. Testing of the service will begin in January, with an official launch on February 1. To watch the movies on a television, some additional equipment will be required.

The movies will be delivered over VeriSign's Content Delivery Network, which is designed to deliver quick downloads in a reliable and secure environment.

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California consumers affected by Sony BMG's decision to place rootkits on some of its music CDs will be compensated under a $750,000 settlement with Los Angeles County and the State of California.

The suit accused Sony of not properly notifying consumers about its actions, as well as creating a potential security hole for hackers to compromise affected consumer's computers. A similar settlement has been filed in the state of Texas, according to media reports.

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Following requests by a Japanese entertainment group for Youtube to implement stricter copyright policies, the social video site has acquiesced to some of its demands and plans to meet with the group in Japan shortly, it said Tuesday.

As requested, a notice in Japanese will be posted on the site notifying users about the penalties for copyright infringement. In addition, YouTube will send a delegation of executives to Japan to talk with the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC).

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Last week's announcement from security research firm eEye, claiming the discovery of an active exploit affecting Symantec's Antivirus suite, led to sweeping national headlines, some proclaiming the existence of a mutating "worm-bot" in the wild. But denials of the threat's severity from Symantec, asserting it's effectively the same problem that was discovered last May by eEye and patched by Symantec the following month, were surprisingly confirmed late yesterday.

Rather than the usual security advisory posted to its Web site, eEye last week shot off a press release, characterizing the worm as "a new class of malware," and christening it "Big Yellow" for dramatic effect. "IT urgently needs to understand that the new vector for attack will not come from Microsoft," eEye CTO Mark Maiffret was quoted as stating, "but from the myriad applications that are scattered throughout its network."

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Comcast's on-demand service is quite popular, mainly due to the wide array of free programming. But the cable provider now wants to turn it into a revenue driver, and is testing a service that would allow its customers to rent movies on demand on the same date it is released on DVD.

The films would cost $4, roughly the same price as renting it from the local video store. According to The New York Times, the service is currently offered in Pittsburgh and Denver. Normally, it takes as long as one to two months before movies make it to on demand services.

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In an effort to end the industry-wide shortage of blue laser diodes that occurred as a result of staggering underproduction by Sony and Nichia, the world's first two suppliers, Sharp Electronics today said it's ready to step up the mass production of diodes it's been making on a trial basis since just last month.

The move could relieve a beleaguered consumer electronics industry that saw Sony, the champion of the Blu-ray Disc format, allocate nearly all its capacity to its PlayStation 3, and yet still have only enough diodes on hand for perhaps a quarter-million units at the time the console launched last month.

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Microsoft issued its second firmware update for its Zune music device on Tuesday, offering stability and performance improvements. In addition, the company updated the device to make it compatible with Microsoft's next-generation operating system, Windows Vista. The update is now available from the Zune Web site.

The company had originally scheduled to make such functionality available in conjunction with the consumer release of the OS in January, however the company received some criticism for not offering compatibility out of the box. "It is plumbing stuff, but it is stuff customers will notice and appreciate," Zune marketing director Jason Reindorp said recently of the update.

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Faced with the rapidly changing dynamics of the Web, including the fact that new forms of Web programming have drastically changed the definition of "page," comScore Networks - which just last week declared MySpace the page view leader over perennial champion Yahoo - quietly announced today it is changing the way it assesses pages, and intends to roll out this new system in 2007.

The change, once it comes, could immediately impact the standings of comScore's Top 50 Web properties, which are assessed primarily by number of page views, and secondarily by number of unique visitors. Since Yahoo rolled out programming changes to its home page earlier this year, its page view counts have decreased by 5% or more, according to comScore.

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