Thousands of Sprint Nextel wireless and landline customers across the country were without service for about three hours Monday as two fiber lines in the network were cut around 3:30pm ET. The problem occurred in Sprint's lines running between Phoenix and Palm Springs, Calif.

While most of the affected customers were in the Western U.S., the company received scattered reports of service issues across the rest of the country as well. According to a statement from Sprint, the cut occurred during emergency maintenance near Reno Junction, Calif.

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One week after issuing an emergency patch for a vulnerability in Windows Meta File image processing that opened the door for arbitrary code execution, a new problem has been discovered in the format. But Microsoft has downplayed the concerns, saying the bug only causes "performance issues."

According to a posting to the Bugtraq mailing list, "Windows WMF graphics rendering engine is affected by multiple memory corruption vulnerabilities." The problems involve the ExtCreateRegion and ExtEscape functions.

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The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday it would not overturn a lower court ruling that allowed the University of Texas to block thousands of e-mails from an online dating service. According to court documents, the college blocked over 59,000 e-mails in 2003.

White Buffalo Ventures, which owns LonghornSingles.com, claimed UT's actions violated its constitutional rights to free speech under the First Amendment. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that the CAN-SPAM act does not pre-empt the university's anti-spam policies.

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The self-proclaimed King of All Media made his debut on Sirius Satellite Radio Monday, complete with the theme from "2001: A Space Odyssey" performed to the tune of flatulence in different keys. However, some fans may have walked away disappointed; Stern says he will attempt to keep his language in check.

Both critics and fans had been anticipating a much raunchier show than what was offered Monday. While some sections of the show featured points where foul language was the rule of the day, Stern actually took one of his co-hosts to task over cursing too much.

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In order to beef up the playlist capabilities in Yahoo! Music Engine, Yahoo has acquired Webjay and hired its creator Lucas Gonze. Webjay enables users to create and playback playlists of music and video from the Web. Gonze also played a role in developing the open XSPF playlist format.

"With Dave Goldberg (head of Yahoo! Music) running around telling people that the playlist is the next frontier in digital media, it shouldn't come as any surprise that we're interested in what Lucas is doing with Webjay. Y! Music Engine has some interesting playlisting features, open APIs, and more goodies on the way. Lucas will help shape our strategies around playlisting in the future," explained Ian Rogers on the Yahoo! Music Blog.

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With the keynote address from Apple CEO Steve Jobs less than 24 hours away, the rumor mill has shifted into overdrive concerning what the company will unveil on Tuesday at Macworld in San Francisco.

These rumors range from the believable -- that some type of Intel Mac would be announced at the show -- to the more outlandish, including speculation that Apple could be set to introduce its own line of plasma televisions based around its Front Row media center application.

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The word "podcast" -- a combination of iPod and broadcast -- has become the latest tech term to enter our growing lexicon, being named the 2005 word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. But Creative, unhappy that the word promotes its rival, has redefined podcast as "Personal On Demand broadCast."

The change comes alongside the launch of ZENcast, the company's beta application for downloading video blogs and podcasts. "Podcasts, short for Personal On Demand broadCast, are audio files you can download into any MP3 player or computer. These audio files are broadcasted over the Internet automatically to subscribers of specific podcast channels,"

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Microsoft at CES last week provided the first official peek at Windows Live Expo, formerly known by the code-name Fremont. Expo joins a number of other Live services already in public beta, and offers classified listings much like Craigslist.

Using its AJAX interface, Expo users can post items for sale or rent, complete with images and a WYSIWYG text editor. The service also supports job listings and other types of content. Each entry is categorized into groups, which can be searched or browsed by users.

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Clear Channel is launching on Tuesday a beta of an on-demand music video service across 16 of its radio stations in five cities. Altogether, videos from 40 labels would be featured, including content from major labels Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and EMI Music.

Videos on Demand would be completely interactive, Clear Channel says, giving users the ability to customize the service and vote for their favorite music videos. Each radio station would have the ability to customize the site to its own liking.

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Creative's iPod clone took top honors at CES this year, winning Best of CES in the MP3 and Portable Video category, and the overall Best in Show award. It marked the fourth consecutive year that one of the company's products won an award. The Zen Vision:M boasts a 30GB capacity and retails for $329 USD.

"This is the most powerful endorsement one can have in our industry and it is a reaffirmation of our strategy to provide the coolest-looking, most feature-rich portable media players," Creative CEO Sim Wong Hoo said. The award was given by technology Web site CNET.

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To coincide with the start of Macworld 2006 this week in San Francisco, Adobe has released a beta version of its new tool to compete with Apple's Aperture. Called Lightroom, the software enables professional photographers to work with digital photos more easily and natively supports manipulation of RAW images.

According to Adobe, "The concept behind Lightroom is to provide a single environment that has all of the functions photographers most commonly need to perform on their images." But the company says it isn't "interested in trying to pack more knobs and switches into Lightroom than Aperture."

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Having finished speaking to Blu-ray, BetaNews sat down with a representative from HD DVD to discuss how the Microsoft-backed format will compete with Blu-ray. Toshiba HD DVD expert Mark Knox gave a thorough explanation of the optical disc drive technology, and said that because of Blu-ray's complicated design, HD DVD will triumph in the format war.

Blu-ray's difficulties, Knox explained, begin with the technology itself, and the idea that its 50GB dual-layer capacity is superior to HD DVD's 30GB. Through the use of better codec technology, such space is not actually needed for high-definition movies. In fact, Blu-ray admitted to BetaNews that most discs won't go beyond the 25GB mark.

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Apple this week asked a federal court to invalidate claims by Burst.com that it is infringing on patents owned by the company. At issue are certain technologies within Apple's iPod player and iTunes software that Burst says are not properly licensed.

Burst attempted to settle with Apple two years ago, when Burst lawyers first informed the Cupertino company that it was illegally infringing on patents. Apple attempted to negotiate a deal, but talks broke down.

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Microsoft began sending out additional invitations for its Windows Live Messenger client on Thursday, BetaNews has learned. The company had previously closed the test to a few thousand users, who have received only a limited number of additional invites over the past several weeks for friends and family.

"We'd like you to be among the first to try a new beta version of Messenger," the invite reads. "We need your feedback if there's anything that doesn't seem to working right, or that you would like to see done differently." No information has been released as to how many invitations will be sent out during this second phase of the beta test.

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Just days after announcing plans to release a patch that fixes a security vulnerability in Windows Meta File image processing on January 10, Microsoft has rushed out the update early. The company said the patch was ready earlier than expected and its decision was based on feedback from partners.

WMF, or Windows Metafile, is a vector based image format used by Microsoft's operating systems. SHIMGVW.DLL is loaded to render the images and contains a flaw that opens the door for a malformed WMF image to cause remote code execution and potentially allow for a full system compromise.

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