8 February 2006 Technology News

last SG · 2006-02-09T09:55:45+00:00

Lost an IPod or Wallet? Look for It Online BOSTON - Maureen Silliman felt her empty pocket and gulped: Her new $300 iPod must have bounced out as she ran t...

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Gateway and HP settle patent dispute

Gateway has agreed to pay Hewlett-Packard $47 million to settle a long-standing patent dispute between the parties, Gateway announced Wednesday.

As part of the settlement, the computer makers also made a seven-year cross-licensing agreement and dropped all legal claims against each other.

The legal wrangling between the companies began in March 2004, when Hewlett-Packard filed a lawsuit against Gateway, alleging six patent infringements relating to its PCs.

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Microsoft opens out Exchange 12 preview

Microsoft said Wednesday it plans to send out an early version of Exchange Server 12 to more than 200,000 customers and partners worldwide. The private Community Technology Preview of the planned e-mail server update is being expanded to tap TechNet and MSDN subscribers. MSDN members will be able to download it Wednesday, and the software will be sent to TechNet people this week, Microsoft said. The preview includes new features for round-the-clock access to e-mail and for mitigating data loss if a server fails.

In addition, Microsoft announced it will make the Beta 2 version of Exchange 12, planned for release in mid-2006, publicly available for testing. The completed update is expected to be delivered to manufacturing at the end of this year or early next year, the company said.

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Republicans tout high-tech agenda

WASHINGTON--Republican leaders from the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday promoted a series of policy proposals they hope will keep the nation's already-flourishing tech industry dominant in the future.

"Competitiveness" was the buzzword at a press conference in the basement of the U.S. Capitol, where House Speaker Dennis Hastert and 10 House leaders from the Republican High-Tech Working Group talked up a wide-ranging agenda tied closely to goals outlined by President Bush in his State of the Union speech last month.

"In short, America needs an education system that produces the finest students in the world, who enter an economy that is not hampered by regulatory red tape, frivolous lawsuits and an anticompetitive tax structure," Hastert said.

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Linux company rPath hires Red Hat alum

rPath said Tuesday that it has hired former Red Hat sales executive Dave Cotten to direct all of its sales operations. Cotten has a 10-year technology industry career that includes stints at Oracle, Strategic Technologies and Inforte. rPath, based in Raleigh, N.C., sells rBuilder technology to help software developers create and maintain Linux-based software appliances. It announced in January that it had picked up $6 million in first-round funding from North Bridge Venture partners and General Catalyst Partners.

rPath already has a couple of Red Hat alumni in its leadership. It was set up by Erik Troan, a veteran of the Linux distributor. Troan left embedded Linux company Specifix also home to Red Hat veterans, to set up rPath, where he is chief technology officer. Billy Marshall, once Red Hat's sales chief for North America, is CEO of rPath.

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Sun and Quantum settle patent suit

Quantum has agreed to pay Sun Microsystems $25 million to settle a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Storage Technology, a tape storage company Sun acquired in 2005.

Under the terms of the settlement, the companies agreed to cross-license a limited number of each others' patents and settle all legal claims, the companies said Tuesday. Quantum will pay Sun $20 million this quarter and $5 million over the next five quarters.

StorageTek sued Quantum in August, after Sun announced in June it planned to acquire the company for a net amount of about $3 billion but before the deal closed in August.

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Microsoft to provide special EU Vista

Microsoft will construct a special version of its new Windows Vista operating system without audio-visual software to meet a European Union decision, its European president said on Wednesday.

"Will there be a version that is specific for the European union? Yes, there has to be," said Neil Holloway, Microsoft president for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Six different standard versions of Vista will replace the current Windows XP operating system later this year.

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BEA Systems acquires Fuego

BEA Systems announced Wednesday that it bought business process management software maker Fuego for $87.5 million in cash.

BEA, which announced or closed roughly half a dozen acquisitions in 2005, is seeking to further expand its presence in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) software market with its purchase of Fuego.

"The addition of Fuego to our AquaLogic portfolio means that we (can)...offer a unified SOA-based platform to integrate business processes, applications and legacy environments," Alfred Chuang, BEA chief executive, said in a statement.

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Overstock to restate earnings

Online retailer Overstock.com said on Tuesday that it would restate financial results dating back to 2002, citing an error related to accounting for freight costs, which will cut the net loss reported for the annual periods.

In light of the accounting error, certain financial statements "should no longer be relied upon," the company said in a securities filing.

It's the latest stumbling block for the money-losing Web discounter, which in late December said its holiday sales growth had lagged previous seasons.

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Altiris sees value in utility software

Having focused on the asset lifecycle management space for the past three years, Altiris is now expanding its playing field, moving toward software virtualization and on-demand managed service, say company officials.

Tom Galantomos, Altiris' director of strategic alliance sales for the Asia-Pacific region and Japan, said the new positioning is aimed at helping companies get more value out of their IT spend.

He explained that Altiris will focus on what it describes as a service-oriented management concept, encompassing service-oriented architectures (SOAs) as the technology backbone, products that address management processes and a service-based delivery model.

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India is top target for spam

India's rapid adoption of new technology has left its PC users struggling to cope with high levels of spam, according to a report released Wednesday.

Ninety-one percent of e-mail traffic sent to Indian PC users is spam, according to e-mail security company MessageLabs, which warned that the rate of technological advancement has outstripped growth in security awareness.

"There is booming technology in India, but it has been suggested there is little thought for security, which creates a market to exploit that," said Paul Wood, security analyst at MessageLabs.

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In federal e-security we trust? Not a chance

Do you trust the federal government when it comes to your privacy and the handling of your personal information? Is your personally identifiable data handled by the government in a way that your privacy might be breached or such that your data is safe? Inquiring minds want to know.

And just in time, a privacy think tank called the Ponemon Institute has issued its 2006 Privacy Trust Study of the United States Government. The report ranks public perception of the privacy protection practices of federal agencies, based on responses to various survey questions. More than 70 agencies were evaluated, and each was assigned a privacy trust score by factoring together positive and negative survey responses.

Let's turn to the bad news first. The least-trusted federal agencies, starting from the bottom, are: the Department of Homeland Security, the Transport Security Administration, the CIA, the Department of Justice, the Office of the Attorney General, the National Security Agency, the Bureau of Citizenship & Immigration, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

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Study: Cell phones a hazard on flights

Severe accidents could be the consequence of airline passengers defying the cell phone ban and making calls while flying, a new study has shown.

Despite the U.S. ban on cellular calls on airplanes, air travelers have a hard time keeping their hands off their mobiles and often make calls during critical stages of the flight such as final approach, according to a research team from Carnegie Mellon University.

As part of the study, released Monday, the research team filled their hand luggage with a broadband antenna and spectrum analyzer and boarded random airplanes crossing the Northeast United States. Picking up signals from cell phone calls onboard, they found that an average of one to four calls are made on every U.S. commercial flight.

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Global handset makers locked in merger dance

Your new handset is certainly better and may be cheaper than your previous phone, but the choice of brands will reduce drastically in the coming years as smaller players exit the cutthroat market.

High research-and-development costs and a trend toward low-margin but high-volume phones are likely to force further consolidation among mobile handset makers.

The global top five--Nokia, Motorola, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and Sony Ericsson--already make roughly 75 percent of all mobile phones.

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'World of Warcraft' hits 6 million milestone

The number of "World of Warcraft" customers worldwide has hit 6 million, Blizzard Entertainment announced on Wednesday, and a version of the popular game will soon be out in Spanish.

The VU Games-owned developer's European branch announced that the company is prepping a Spanish edition of its massively multiplayer online role-playing game for release in Europe, where English, French and German versions of the game are already available.

"We look forward to offering Spanish-speaking players in Europe a version of 'World of Warcraft' tailored specifically for them," Blizzard president and co-founder Mike Morhaime said in a statement. "The enthusiasm for the game here has been overwhelming, and we're pleased that this new localized version will make 'World of Warcraft' accessible to an even wider audience."

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Burning Man vets bring Wi-Fi to Katrina region

As veterans of Burning Man, the annual art festival held in a remote Nevada desert, Tom Price and a group of about 20 others who have been volunteering with post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction in Mississippi are used to persevering in forbidding environments.

But when members of the group wanted to stay in touch with friends and family, and needed to keep up with the contract jobs that allow them to spend weeks and months on the Gulf Coast, the nearly complete lack of Internet access posed a problem.

Now the group, known as Burners Without Borders, is using new Kyocera mobile hot-spot technology to create a wide-area-network in an area with little, if any, Internet access. Their shoestring network, based on $250 routers and $150 wireless cards, could prove to be a model for other volunteer groups in disaster areas.

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Need your PC fixed? Get ready to pay up

Technology is a wonderful thing, when it works. Just as cars run reliably but lawn mowers never start, many people wonder why humans are capable of creating amazing technology but can't make PCs that average people can understand.

As a result, demand for PC support services is booming even as retailers and PC vendors pare down their standard warranties. Fed up with pleasant but unsatisfying support answers, PC users are increasingly willing to pay for support from those companies. Third-party PC support is becoming big business, with Best Buy aggressively promoting the services of the Geek Squad and vendors like Dell jumping to provide their own touch.

It's not completely clear how big the market is for premium consumer support, said Matt Healey, an analyst with IDC. However, the overall market for Windows support last year was $7.8 billion, which includes everything from corporate server support to consumer PCs. It's safe to say the market size for consumer support measures in the "billions," he said.

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Yahoo gets early win on trade secrets case

A California state judge has given Yahoo its first legal win against a start-up that Yahoo sued for stealing trade secrets.

Yahoo sued San Francisco-based wireless content provider MForma earlier this week, contending that a group of former Yahoo employees left the company and took proprietary source-code and business information to their new jobs.

A judge on Wednesday granted Yahoo's request for a temporary restraining order, barring MForma employees from using or disclosing any proprietary Yahoo information in their work.

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Spam and scams prompted AOL's fee-based e-mail

American Online says it's waging a fierce battle against Internet scam artists and is unconcerned that not everyone approves of its new approach to protecting users from phishing schemes and spam.

A plan by AOL and Yahoo to charge mass e-mailers a fee for guaranteed delivery of messages to subscribers has run into very vocal opposition from a consortium of nonprofit and public interest groups, including MoveOn.org Civic Action, the AFL-CIO, Gun Owners of America and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The fee, scheduled to take effect in 30 days, is little more than an "e-mail tax" say opponents of the plan. Paying for e-mail will thwart the growth of grassroots organizations and divide mass e-mailers into two groups: elites who can afford to communicate with a mass audience, and those who can't and are locked out, says Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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Microsoft: Our engine to be better than Google soon

Microsoft will introduce a search engine better than Google in six months in the United States and Britain followed by Europe, its European president said on Wednesday.

"What we're saying is that in six months' time we'll be more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google," said Neil Holloway, Microsoft president for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

"The quality of our search and the relevance of our search from a solution perspective to the consumer will be more relevant," he told the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit.

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China creates own Internet domains

China has announced it is creating a new set of domain names based on Chinese characters.

China has created three of its own top-level domains that will use the domain names .cn, .com and .net, in Chinese. The domain names were launched Wednesday by the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry.

The creation of Chinese character domain names has led to speculation that China could break away from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) completely, and undermine the global unity of the Domain Name System (DNS), the network of servers that resolves domain name requests.

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