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May 27, 2003
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Jury: eBay guilty of patent infringement
A federal jury on Tuesday found eBay guilty of patent infringement and ordered the online auction giant to pay $35 million in damages.
A U.S. district Court jury sided with MercExchange of Great Falls, Va., which accused eBay in 2001 of infringing on three patents held by MercExchange founder Tom Woolston. The verdict determined that eBay and its Half.com subsidiary willfully infringed on two of those patents with its "Buy It Now" feature for fixed price sales.
The willful infringement ruling opens the door for the judge to hold eBay liable for triple damages, or $105 million, said Neil Smith, an attorney specializing in intellectual property law at Howard Rice in San Francisco. The judge may also issue an injunction against eBay to prevent the company from continuing to use the patented invention, a method for using a credit card to lock in an offer to purchase items online, Smith said.
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College plans virus-writing course
While many students would be expelled from their computer science programs for writing a virus, the University of Calgary plans to make writing such malicious programs a part of the curriculum.
This fall, the Canadian school is offering a class for fourth-year students titled "Computer Viruses and Malware," in which students will write and test their own viruses. The move has touched off a wave of criticism within the antivirus community.
Ken Barker, head of the school's computer science department, contends that such a class is needed to better understand what motivates those who write malicious software, which he says is a growing problem. In just the past 24 hours, McAfee has discovered some 190,000 new infected files, Barker said.
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Microsoft tweaks troubled licensing plan
That's the message that the company is seeking to convey with an overhaul to its controversial Software Assurance purchasing program. Microsoft said Tuesday that it will throw in several services, including training and support, with the cost of software licenses, in an effort to encourage customers to buy into the program.
Starting in September, the services will be available free to Software Assurance customers only, covering both desktop and server software.
The services include online training through Microsoft or accredited training companies; extended customer phone and Web support for problem resolution; and access to Microsoft's bug-tracking information service, TechNet. Customers also will have tools to better track their licenses and will have the right to use Microsoft Office on home computers, according to the company.
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TheftGuard Leverages BIOS Technology To Trace And Disable Stolen PCs
Phoenix Technologies and Softex unveiled Tuesday anti-theft software that uses BIOS-based technology to disable stolen machines, wipe data, and trace the thief remotely via the Internet.
TheftGuard is software developed by the Austin, Texas-based Softex and certified by Phoenix to work with its FirstBIOS chips and Core Managed Environment (cME) software. It aims to give computer makers -- and the buyers of their PCs -- a more secure choice of anti-theft technology.
Unlike other, somewhat similar anti-theft solutions -- produced by companies such as Absolute and zTrace -- TheftGuard's protection doesn't dwell only on the hard drive. Instead, it lives in the guts of the computer, where it's difficult to remove, said Timothy Eades, vice president and general manager of San Jose, Calif.-based Phoenix.
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ATI driver caught "optimizing" for 3DMark03 as well
Amidst the evidence that convicted nVidia of cheating at 3DMark2003 scores last week, Futuremark also discovered that ATI's framerate scores took a slight dip as well when 3DMark2003 was altered to prevent programs from detecting its presence.
Another case of cheating on a widely-used benchmark by an industry heavyweight? Perhaps ... but then again perhaps not. Overall, ATI's scores dropped 1.9% on the entire 3DMark2003 benchmark, within the margin of error for the whole benchmark suite. But on the individual tests ATI's score dropped nearly 10% in the Game Test 4 only. All other tests remained within normal error margins.
ATI, anxious to avoid getting embroiled in the same fiasco that nVidia now finds itself in, quickly issued a statement. In it, ATI claims that its drivers did indeed detect the presence of 3DMark2003, but that its driver "optimization" merely re-ordered some of the 3DMark2003 drawing operations in such a way that they ran more quickly. The end results, according to both ATI and Futuremark, were exactly the same visually, just faster.
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From PlayStation to supercomputer
As perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the power of sophisticated but inexpensive game consoles, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has assembled a supercomputer from an army of Sony PlayStation 2 devices.
The resulting system, with components purchased at retail prices, cost a little more than $50,000. Researchers at the supercomputing center believe the system may be capable of a half trillion operations a second, well within the definition of supercomputer, although it may not rank among the world's 500 fastest supercomputers.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the project, which uses the open-source Linux operating system, is that the only hardware engineering involved was placing 70 of the individual game machines in a rack and plugging them together with a high-speed Hewlett-Packard network switch. The center's scientists bought 100 machines but are holding 30 in reserve, possibly for high-resolution display application.
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Microsoft adds Office label to forthcoming IM server
Microsoft's forthcoming Real-Time Communications Server software will be branded as part of the Office family, carrying as its full name Microsoft Office Real-Time Communications Server 2003, the company said Tuesday.
Formerly code-named "Greenwich," the software marks Microsoft's entry into the enterprise instant messaging (IM) and collaboration market. Microsoft hopes to win customers by offering security and management features lacking in free, consumer-targeted IM software, including its own MSN Messenger.
Applications in Microsoft's under-development Office 2003 suite will be integrated with the Real-Time Communications Server, Microsoft said. For instance, a user receiving an e-mail in Outlook 2003 would be able to see from within the e-mail whether the sender is online, and if so, to initiate a conversation.
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Ballmer sells $1.2 billion in stock
Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer recently sold nearly $1.2 billion worth of stock of the world's largest software maker, according to regulatory filings on Tuesday.
Ballmer, 47, said the share sale, his first in 12 years, was aimed at diversifying his financial assets, according to a statement issued by Microsoft on Friday.
According to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Ballmer sold 49.32 million shares of Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft from May 21 to May 23, for a total of $1.19 billion.
Each share sold for between $23.89 and $24.67.
"Even though this is a personal financial matter, I want to be clear about this to avoid any confusion," Ballmer said in Friday's statement. "I remain excited about the potential for our technology to change people's lives, and I remain as committed to Microsoft as ever."
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Astronomers Find Seven Planet-forming Disks
A mammoth sky survey led by University of Florida astronomers has uncovered seven planet-forming disks in clusters of young stars, doubling the number of such disks discovered and expanding the territory that might yield new planets.
The disks, composed of giant clouds of gas and dust that surround infant stars, are around 1,000 light years away, about four times farther away than most disks seen previously. They also are by far the biggest yet observed - which suggests that planets, known to coalesce in such disks as they rotate, may exist at much greater distances from stars than any yet discovered. This observation could lead astronomers to expand the areas in which they search for new planets, a search that has so far been confined to stars' immediate vicinities.
"You might be able to look much farther out than people have been looking and find planets," said Richard Elston, a UF professor of astronomy who conducted the survey with his colleague and wife, UF astronomy Professor Elizabeth Lada.
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Microsoft Covers Back With SCO Unix License
The crusade by the SCO Group to protect its Unix intellectual property took an unexpected turn last week when Microsoft Corp. said it was licensing the Unix source code and patent from the company.
"SCO approached us a couple of months ago, and they had a valid IP claim, and, as we do quite regularly, we agreed to a broad IP license with SCO and as such have stepped out of the fray," said Alex Mercer, a Microsoft spokeswoman, in Redmond, Wash.
In the last month, SCO, of Lindon, Utah, has made a number of moves, charging that IBM, Linux and many of SCO's own customers are violating SCO's Unix IP.
Mercer said it was not Microsoft's intent to exploit the IP license as a way to fund SCO's campaign against IBM and Linux-which SCO is suing for $1 billion-and against Linux. "There is absolutely no correlation between the IBM suit and our IP license with SCO," she said.
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Adobe Officially Releases Acrobat 6.0
Adobe Systems Inc. ships the latest version of its Acrobat PDF-creation software today, introducing for the first time light and advanced versions of its flagship application. The vendor has found itself fighting off Microsoft's attempts to build presence in the desktop publishing market; this latest release reflects Adobe's desire to offer more alternatives in response to that competitive threat.
Acrobat Elements 6 is a new entry-level edition that's designed to let all knowledge workers easily create PDFs with a simple right-click command while working in a document. Elements, which is available only for Windows, is priced at $29 per user for a deployment of 1,000 seats.
Acrobat Standard 6, which is essentially the new version of the existing Acrobat, adds automatic tracking and digital-signature capabilities, and leverages XML to enable the exchange of data with enterprise applications. The software is available in both the Windows and Macintosh formats. Single copies are priced at $299 for first-time users, or $99 for upgrades from Acrobat 5. Bulk licenses also are available at discounted prices.
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Apple limits iTunes file sharing
Apple Computer has limited a music-sharing feature from the latest version of iTunes after some Mac owners used it to swap songs over the Internet.
In an update to iTunes released Tuesday, the Mac maker removed a feature that had been exploited to allow Mac users to swap songs over the Internet. Version 4.0.1 of iTunes removes the ability to share iTunes play lists over the Internet, limiting the feature to streaming songs over a local network.
"The new iTunes 4.0.1 update limits Rendezvous music sharing to work only between computers on a local network (its intended use) and disables music sharing over the Internet," Apple said in a statement provided to CNET News.com.
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In-Flight Broadband Ready for Takeoff
Passengers on Lufthansa Airlines will soon have wireless broadband access not only on daily flights between Frankfurt, Germany, and Washington, D.C., but on the airline's entire long-haul fleet.
Lufthansa AG has signed a deal with the Boeing Company to fit about 80 long-haul jets, including the Boeing 747-800 and the Airbus SAS A340 and A330, with the Connexion by Boeing wireless Internet system, the German airline company said Tuesday in a statement.
At the beginning of next year, Lufthansa will successively equip its planes with Connexion's wireless broadband technology, which it tested between January and April, Lufthansa said.
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