Beginning next week, Nielsen will begin tracking viewing of programming through digital videos recorders like TiVo. The new rating system would be split into three categories, including traditional live programming, live with same-day playback on a DVR, and live with playback up to 7 days after airing.

According to Nielsen, the first Live/Same Day ratings set would be available Wednesday, and the first Live+7 Day ratings charts would be available two weeks after the completion of next week's Monday-to-Sunday ratings cycle.

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Copernic, which makes the popular desktop search tool that is also utilized by AOL's Desktop Search product, has been acquired by metasearch engine Mamma.com in a cash and stock deal valued at just over $22 million. The two companies announced plans to join up last year, but the marriage was fraught with delays, including an investigation into Mamma's stock by the SEC.

Mamma will pay $15.9 million in cash and issue 2.38 million shares of its stock to Copernic. "With this acquisition, we are now at the forefront of the search and on-line marketing industry," Mamma CEO Guy Fauré said. "With the addition of Copernic's award winning desktop search (CDS) product, we now have a formidable portfolio to satisfy the growing need for integrated search of both web-based and desk-top based users."

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While some say otherwise, Sony is placing its bets that bigger is, in fact, better when it shows off a new LCD television at CES 2006 in January. The company has developed an 82-inch display, which will further prove that TFT displays can reach sizes attained by plasma and rear-projection televisions.

Japanese daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun first reported on Sony's plans, but no other details of the TV have been announced. Samsung introduced a similar 82-inch behemoth at CeBIT in March, which boasted 1920x1080 pixels and 1080p HD support. Sony actually worked with Samsung on that TV, and is now ready to demo one of its own.

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Time Magazine may have selected Bill and Melinda Gates along with Bono as its "Persons of the Year" for their efforts in helping to fight diseases in developing countries, but the Financial Times has chosen Microsoft's rivals Sergey Brin and Larry Page -- the founders of Google -- as its "Men of the Year."

The FT says it chose the two for their success in 2005 and ambitions to make the world a better place. "The Men of the Year recognition reflects the effect the company created by Mr Brin and Mr Page only seven years ago has had on internet users, as well as the worlds of business and technology, in the past 12 months," the paper said.

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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with the assistance of fax company Xpedite Systems, won an injunction on Wednesday in California that would prevent the state's tough "junk fax" law from taking effect until at least January 31, 2006.

The new rules were originally to start at the beginning of the year, however several groups took issue with how strict the California law was to be. While federal laws passed last summer allow people or businesses to send bulk faxes to those parties that they have had business with in the past, the California law doesn't.

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Microsoft continued to quietly back away from its partnership with NBC Universal for MSNBC Friday. The two companies announced that NBC had acquired a controlling interest in the cable channel, and has the ability to exercise an option that would allow it to buy the entire channel in 2007.

Steve Capus, president of NBC News, said the deal would allow the company to further integrate the cable channel into the news business. However, he did not elaborate on what exactly that would entail.

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Despite a recommendation by infamous tech pundit John C. Dvorak and rumors of a near-complete deal, Opera Software on Friday said it was not being acquired by Microsoft. Opera also says a rumor last week that Google was an interested suitor is just as false. But that hasn't stopped a barrage of opinions.

"This is a good move for the folks at Opera. For Microsoft, it's a very good move," said Jupiter Research vice president Michael Gartenberg before the clarification from Opera. "It gives them some excellent technologies they can incorporate into IE and that can help serve them well in their battles with Firefox."

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Google has taken some time to dispel concerns about its expanded partnership with AOL. With the clarifications, however, it now looks like the deal was not so sweet, with the only real positive for Time Warner's online unit being the $1 billion dollar investment by the search engine.

Google vice president of search Marissa Mayer posted the clarifications to the Google Blog on Thursday night. "The recent announcement of the AOL partnership has been the source of a lot of rumors and misconceptions. We'd like to clear some of those up," Mayer wrote.

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Ending a five month drama that seemed more a soap opera than legal battle, Microsoft and Google late Thursday announced they had reached a settlement regarding Kai-Fu Lee, the famed engineer who left Microsoft to head Google's Chinese research and development center.

The legal wrangling between the rivals began on July 18 when Microsoft announced that it would pursue legal action against Google. The Redmond company argued that Lee was breaking confidentiality and non-competition agreements he signed before working for Microsoft.

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The courts have blocked yet another state law preventing the sale of violent video games to minors. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte found that California's video game law unfairly restricts the First Amendment rights to freedom of expression.

The law made it illegal for a retailer to sell a game to a minor that included the "killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being."

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Microsoft said this week that Internet Explorer 7 will finally provide support for international domain names (IDN), detailing a number of security measures it will put into place to prevent phishing and spoofing attacks. Firefox, Opera and Safari implemented similar protections earlier this year.

The problem with IDN stems from its use of the Unicode character set to enable domain names that include international letters. Unicode URLs must be converted by a Web browser into a format called "Punycode," which opens the door for a malicious Web site to mimic a trusted URL, including its SSL security certificate.

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The French Parliament voted Wednesday night to legalize file sharing of music and movie files, a move that is sure to anger the entertainment industry. The French government has also come out against the legislation, and vowed to fight it. If the bill survives, France would be the first country to legalize such P2P usage.

A law would also make it nearly impossible for media companies to sue file swapers within the country. However, the government can attempt to overturn the legislation by reopening it for debate, or getting it turned down by a no-vote in the upper house. The intent of the law, legislators say, is to allow the sharing of such files when they are used privately. Laws against the public use of copyrighted material would still stand.

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Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has expanded his state's lawsuit against Sony BMG that was filed in November over the use of illegal spyware in its XCP copy-protection mechanism. The new charges allege that Sony's other DRM software, SunnComm MediaMax, installs even if a user declines the license agreement.

In the initial filing, Abbott sued under Texas' Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act of 2005, and sought civil penalties of $100,000 for each violation of the law, attorneys' fees and investigative costs. The additional allegations invoke the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

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Mozilla on Thursday asked Firefox users to create a 30-second broadcast quality television ad for a contest called "Firefox Flicks." The company said that winning ads could possibly be used in global marketing campaigns for Firefox 1.5, the newest version of the open source browser.

The ad contest is the second phase of a full-court press by Mozilla to continue increasing the browser's market share. After an initial surge, the company has found it harder to generate interest through its traditional means.

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Often looked at with a suspicious eye from left-leaning groups for its pro-Republican executives and skewed campaign donations, and already being investigated elsewhere, Diebold was told Wednesday by the State of California that it could not certify the company's e-voting systems without further review.

This isn't the first problem for the polling machine manufacturer. Last week, Leon County, Fla. Officials dropped Diebold after it was discovered memory cards in the company's optical scan machines could be easily tampered with.

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