Technology News and IT Business Intelligence

In March, Apple sued smartphone maker HTC for 20 counts of patent infringement, alleging the company had “stolen [its] patented inventions” for the iPhone.
Today, HTC fired back at Apple in the same fashion, filing a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) to stop the sale of the iPhone, iPad and iPod in the United States. The complaint accuses Apple of five counts of infringement.
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Part of the national broadband plan includes the construction of a nationwide 700MHz broadband network specifically for emergency first responders. Until now, there are no broadband connection services specifically for public safety, and they have been limited to commercial services.
Today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted conditional approval of 21 petitions filed by cities, counties and states looking for waivers to move forward with the construction of regional interoperable wireless broadband networks. The Commission requires these broadband networks to be deployed under a common interoperability framework in coordination with the FCC’s Emergency Response Interoperability Center (ERIC). Under this framework, all networks will be technologically compatible and interoperable.
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In a decision handed down in US District Court in New York this afternoon, representatives of the recording industry won summary judgment against P2P file-sharing software maker LimeWire, in a patent infringement suit first filed in 2006.
Though the case took almost four years to resolve, as Judge Kimba Wood wrote in her decision today, LimeWire may very well have sealed its fate in July 2008. At that time, Greg Bildson, the company’s CTO/COO met with plaintiffs’ attorneys to discuss a potential case settlement.
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Streaming video service Qik first debuted just over two years ago, letting users turn their smartphones into live webcams with just a simple app and a strong connection. Users can stream video from their phones live to Qik’s site, but with considerable buffering.
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Ever since it stopped billing itself as a producer of “replacements” for Intel CPUs, AMD has struggled with the platform question: the need for OEMs to produce PCs based on pre-determined patterns. Manufacturers can achieve price breaks when they buy parts in bulk, and platforms can help them do that; likewise, they can reap even more benefits down the road from selling popular platforms to the public.
It was Intel that figured out the platform formula first, ironically through the help of a brand it no longer uses: Centrino. Up until last year, although individual AMD processors have been successful in the consumer marketplace, and Opteron as a brand has reclaimed its respect among server makers, it’s never been able to crack the nut for consumer-grade platforms. Last September, AMD announced it would try yet another spin on the platform approach, unveiling a new “Vision” brand for classes of PCs based on AMD processors. OEMs such as HP, Acer, and Dell would use these classes not to denote the processor in their PCs, but rather what those PCs are capable of doing.
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The good news should be, everyone with a major stake in the outcome of the Web video standards debate has now publicly expressed support for something called “open” or “openness.” But that’s where the similarities, and even the niceness, end. Yesterday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs personally weighed in on the subject by making it an “us against them” battle, with Adobe and Flash the villains.
Late yesterday, the head of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 project, Dean Hachamovitch, followed suit, representing the company whose decisions about what standards to support — or not support — have historically steered the course of Web development, for better or worse. Assuming a far more civil tone than Jobs, but with a message no less significant, Hachamovitch solidified Microsoft’s stance on high-definition Web video standards by announcing that IE9 would support H.264 for HTML 5 built-in video…and only H.264.
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Apple CEO Steve Jobs has made numerous disparaging remarks about Google’s Android platform because of the availability of X-rated material on it, statements that obviously downplayed the ubiquity of pornography.

“You know, there’s a porn store for Android,” Jobs said. “You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go — so we’re not going to go there.”
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It’s been quite a week for Android apps. It started with the early release of two major browsers and has closed out with the release of the platform’s first official Twitter app.
Until now, Android has been a battleground for third-party Twitter solutions with more than 20 major competitors jockeying to be the “most official” Twitter app for the platform.
But this is undoubtedly one of the cleanest looking Twitter apps available, and certainly the one most tightly woven into the Android architecture.
In Twitter’s blog today, Leland Rechis wrote, “When apps work well with each other, sharing becomes as second nature on machines as it does in person. The Android platform is really good at that, and we’ve worked with the Android team to make it super easy to share what’s happening.”
So the team worked with Google to create the app, but unfortunately the final product is only available on devices running version 2.1 and up. Rechis reminded users of older Android versions that they can always use mobile.twitter.com.
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In late 2008, David C. Kennel obtained the Yahoo email address of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, and then used simple deduction to answer the “challenge question” that would grant access to her password and subsequently to her email inbox.
Kennel, son of Tennesse Democratic state representative Mike Kennel, got access to Palin’s Yahoo email account while the former Governor was on the Republican presidential campaign with Arizona Senator John McCain. Kennel posted some of the contents of Palin’s email account online, including both “work-related” and personal information, such as the mobile phone number of her daughter Bristol Palin.
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As expected, Canonical today released the latest long-term support version of Ubuntu (v. 10.04, a.k.a., “Lucid Lynx”). This release carries considerably more weight than the usual bi-annual Desktop and Server updates because long-term support (LTS) come only biennially — once every two years. They typically don’t get treated to experimental feature additions, and are meant to be more stable. They do, however, include three years of package support for Ubuntu Desktop and five years for Ubuntu server. The last LTS versions Canonical released were “Dapper Drake” (4.0) in 2005 and “Hardy Heron” (8.04) in 2008.
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