Technology News

San Francisco - Mixed economic news and forecasts of weak IT spending for at least the beginning of next year caused IT investor confidence to waver this week, though upbeat analyst presentations from Cisco and AT&T and online e-commerce figures brought some cheer to the holiday season.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Dance musician Moby has launched a Web site that gives his music away -- to the right people, of course.

San Francisco - The Web site of a law firm employing the husband of U.S. Federal Trade Commission chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras contradicts an FTC explanation that Majoras has no conflict of interest in reviewing DoubleClick's $3.1 billion acquisition by Google, two privacy groups said Thursday.

NEW YORK Two months ago, when wildfires scorched hundreds of square miles in Southern California, forcing the evacuation of a half-million people, listenership spiked on KNX Radio, the CBS-owned outlet in Los Angeles. But the uptick wasn't for the station's on-air signal; listeners had instead tuned into the station on the Internet.

NEW YORK - The next batch of painful "Jackass" stunts is coming to a computer screen near you.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Nintendo Co Ltd's (7974.OS) Wii held on to its spot as the No. 1 video game console in the United States in November, selling 981,000 units, industry data showed on Thursday.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Palm Inc., the troubled maker of Treo smart phones, laid off about 10 percent of its work force this week to cut expenses, according to a person familiar with the situation.

TORONTO (Reuters) - A Canadian oil-field worker, stunned to get a C$85,000 ($83,700) cell phone bill, has had the charges reduced to C$3,400, but is still fighting them.

TOKYO (AFP) - Sony on Thursday unveiled a prototype digital camera shaped like a pizza cutter with a wheel that can be turned to generate enough power to take pictures.

A new report from investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts that Apple's 2008 releases will include a 3G iPhone and a modified Apple TV. According to AppleInsider, the research report was written by Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey and was based on information obtained from component suppliers in Asia.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Nintendo Co Ltd's (7974.OS) Wii held on to its spot as the No. 1 video game console in the United States in November, selling 981,000 units, industry data showed on Thursday.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - French video game publisher Ubisoft Entertainment SA raised its revenue and profit estimates on Thursday, citing strength of its "Assassin's Creed" action game.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The success of Nintendo's (7974.OS) Wii video game console and franchises like Activision's "Guitar Hero" have prompted companies to explore new ways to allow players to control their games.

ORLANDO, Fla. - If you're tired of watching Mitt and Mike, Hillary and Rudy, and Colbert and Coulter limit their swipes to words, pick one and go for it in the new video game "DC Smackdown."

NEW YORK - A new research lab at the prestigious Parsons design school aims to develop video games with a conscience — called "serious games" — and study whether playing them can be a force for social good.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Dance musician Moby has launched a Web site that gives his music away -- to the right people, of course.

BRUSSELS, Belgium - The EU's top court should back a ruling that overturned regulatory approval for Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG's 2004 deal to combine their music units and form the world's second-largest record label, a legal adviser to the EU's highest court said Thursday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fraudsters are targeting troubled borrowers facing foreclosure in a scheme that could leave homeowners with even more debt than they otherwise would face, a new online video warns.

The company is one of several carriers hoping to entice subscribers to ring up more than music tones on their cell phones this year.

The 'digital fingerprint' technology used to identify copyrigh violations doesn't work as well with original footage from many sources.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Internet chatroom romantics beware: your next chat may be with a clinical computer, not a passionate person, trying to win your personal data and not your heart, an online security firm says.

NEW YORK - Some popular online retailers don't do enough either to inform customers how their personal information could be used or to give them control over it, according to a public interest research group.

A hole in Microsoft's Access database permits hackers to install software on vulnerable systems, the US-CERT team warns.

Mobile phone providers say they're saving customers from spam, but a coalition says it's censorship.

Spam continues to plague the average computer user, with up to 95 percent of all e-mail traffic consisting of unsolicited e-mails, according to a study from Web security vendor Barracuda Networks

Apple released an update on Thursday for QuickTime that fixes several security issues in the application.

Among technology companies, Apple is often perceived to have something that the likes of rivals Dell, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard lack—that indefinable element of cool. Apple carefully cultivates a specific image for itself, and a cornerstone of those efforts is its advertising, especially the 30-second spots that air on television.

A new report from investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts that Apple's 2008 releases will include a 3G iPhone and a modified Apple TV. According to AppleInsider, the research report was written by Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey and was based on information obtained from component suppliers in Asia.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Back in 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the Apple I, an early personal computer that consisted of a circuit board in a simple wooden box.

Amid further delays of AMD’s quad-core server chip and plans to write off goodwill from the acquisition of ATI, AMD executives are going to face tough questions when they meet financial analysts in New York Thursday.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - The Dutch government has set a soft deadline of April 2008 for its agencies to start using open-source software — freely distributed programs that anyone can modify — the Netherlands Economic Affairs Ministry said Thursday.

Open-source enterprise software developer OpenLogic wants open-source users to stand up and be counted in a worldwide census-- and is offering a new software tool to help the process.

San Francisco - Adobe Systems is announcing on Thursday plans to release source code for its high-performance remoting and messaging technology via an open source product called BlazeDS.

San Francisco - Open source enterprise software developer OpenLogic wants open source users to stand up and be counted in a worldwide census -- and is offering a new software tool to help the process.

San Francisco - More and more open-source developers these days are employees of companies, paid to work on open-source projects, rather than independent programmers doing it for fun. The change raises issues for projects, programmers and employers alike.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Not even a blackout could put a damper on festivities at one Japanese aquarium where an electric eel is being used to light up its Christmas tree.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Back in 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the Apple I, an early personal computer that consisted of a circuit board in a simple wooden box.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - The Dutch government has set a soft deadline of April 2008 for its agencies to start using open-source software — freely distributed programs that anyone can modify — the Netherlands Economic Affairs Ministry said Thursday.

NEW YORK - In one high-tech thriller after another, the hero attaches a tiny tracking device on the villain and follows him as blinking dot on a computer screen.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Palm Inc., the troubled maker of Treo smart phones, laid off about 10 percent of its work force this week to cut expenses, according to a person familiar with the situation.