Latest news

Fox rejected Cablevision's latest offer Wednesday afternoon, meaning that over 3 million sports fans in metropolitan New York City and Philadelphia were not able to watch Game 1 of the World Series, featuring the San Francisco Giants and the Texas Rangers.

Cablevision also emailed its subscribers saying it would reimburse any user the $10 it costs for a premium MLB.com subscription. Premium users can watch any game from their computers or TVs.

The cable company offered to pay News Corp. (parent of Fox) the same rate that Time Warner Cable currently pays for Fox, for one year, but Fox quickly dismissed the offer, which is meant to be a package deal that includes My 9, NatGeo Wild and Fox Business.

Fox called the offer "yet another in a long line of publicity stunts. Cablevision is seeking a discounted 'package rate' without buying the entire package."

Cablevision CEO James Dolan has sent a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, asking him to mediate the dispute and return the signal to Cablevision subscribers until a deal is agreed upon.

Barnes & Noble has introduced the new Nook Color e-reader this week, hoping to gain an advantage over the rival Amazon Kindle in the quickly growing e-reader market.

The Nook Color will use an IPS LCD screen, the same type of display used by the Apple iPad.

Barnes & Noble's new Nook Color will be 7-inches, run Android 2.1, and have eight-hour battery life per charge. Current Nooks and Kindles (using e-ink displays) have battery lives as long as two weeks per charge.

The display will have 1024x600 resolution with 16 million colors.

Additionally, the device has Wi-Fi (but lacks 3G), 8GB of internal storage and a microSD slot.

The Nook Color will also launch with deals with magazine publishers, a strong advantage over black-and-white e-readers.

Available at Best Buy, Wal-Mart and online starting November 19th, the e-reader will cost $250.

LimeWire, once the world's most popular P2P client, is now officially shut down, following a four-year legal battle against the record industry.

A New York federal court has issued a permanent injunction against the site this week, ruling that LimeWire caused a "massive scale of infringement" by intentionally giving users a platform to share millions of unauthorized music tracks.

At its peak, LimeWire was seeing 50 million monthly users.

Visitors to the site are greeted by the pictured "legal notice."

While the company can no longer make unauthorized music readily available, the site says it is now "working with the music industry to move forward."

The court also added that LimeWire should use all available resources to remove all copyrighted materials currently available to downloaders of the client.

Apple has said today that they are delaying the release of the white iPhone 4 for the third time, this time pushing it all the way back until the Spring of 2011.

When they launched the iPhone 4 in June, Apple said it would have to delay the white model of the phone until July.

In July, the company delayed the smartphone until the end of the year.

"We're sorry to disappoint customers waiting for the white iPhone again," said Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller.

The company neglected to give a reason for the delay except for saying the new white model is "more challenging to manufacture than we originally expected."

Apple sold 14.1 million iPhones in the recent quarter, in its original black colorway.

Zynga, the social gaming giant behind "FarmVille," has just been valued at $5.5 billion by SharePost, the service which exchanges shares of privately held companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Zynga.

With a market cap that large, Zynga is now considered the second largest gaming publisher in the world, surpassing Electronic Arts (EA) which has a current market cap of $5.15 billion.

Nintendo remains the top publisher.

Zynga was launched four years ago and mainly uses Facebook to distribute games. With a built-in audience of 500 million, the company has ascended very quickly thanks to FarmVille, FrontierVille and others. The company makes money off virtual goods, like weapons and upgrades that advance in-game play.

The company has about 210 million monthly active users.

Engadget has revealed the long awaited PlayStation Phone tonight, posting pictures of a working model of the upcoming device.

There have long been rumors that Sony Ericsson was creating a PSP phone, one that would include the gaming aspects of a PSP while adding phone functionality.

Engadget says the phone will hit the market "soon," likely in the Q1 2011.

The device will run on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), with a fast 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8655 processor, 512MB RAM, 1GB ROM and a 4.1-inch screen.

In the gaming part of the slide-out, the PSP Phone has a multi-touch touchpad, shoulder buttons and a microSD slot.

Earlier this week, eBay and Groupon announced the start of "featured deals" through the auction site's new eBay Bucks campaign.

User can collect "eBay Bucks" dollars while buying a daily Groupon they may have wanted to purchase anyway.

Groupon offers large discounts to local or national businesses, sometimes as high as 80 percent off.

When using the featured deal, eBay users will get 5 percent kickbacks in the form of eBay Bucks.

Groupon continues to see exponential growth, with unique visitors growing by 23 percent in August, making it the fourth fastest growing property on the Internet.

Techspot has discovered this week that Microsoft will release its upcoming Windows 8 operating system in late 2012, likely around the anniversary of 7's launch in October.

The proof comes via a blog post in which Microsoft says (translated roughly): "Furthermore, Microsoft is on course with the next version of Windows. But it will take about two years before "Windows 8" hits the market."

Microsoft has not commented on the post.

The timing makes sense, though, as Microsoft has openly said they hoped to return to a three-year product cycle after the delayed cycle that caused Vista to be released seven years after Windows XP.

Microsoft's latest iteration, Windows 7, has sold 240 million licenses in just one year of release.

According to scientists at the University of London, tiny Bee brains can solve complex math problems that take computers much longer to figure out.

The insects can effectively solve the "traveling salesman problem" as they learn to "fly the shortest router between flowers discovered in random order."

Computers solve the "TSP" by comparing all possible routes and then choosing the shortest one.

Bees reach the same conclusion while using a brain that is about the size of a pinhead.

Says Dr. Nigel Raine: "Foraging bees solve travelling salesman problems every day. They visit flowers at multiple locations and, because bees use lots of energy to fly, they find a route which keeps flying to a minimum."

"Despite their tiny brains bees are capable of extraordinary feats of behaviour," adds Raine, via Guardian. "We need to understand how they can solve the travelling salesman problem without a computer."

In under three weeks since launch, Microsoft has boasted today that the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace has hit its first milestone, 1000 available apps.

For comparison's sake, the iOS App Store has 300,000 available apps, the Android Market has 100,000 apps and the BlackBerry App World has a bit over 10,000.

It is important to note, however, that the old Windows Mobile platform took a full seven months to reach 1000 apps.

There are no Windows Phone 7 devices yet available to the U.S. public, with the first batch hitting the States in two weeks.

Microsoft has launched a couple of phones in Europe and Asia.

The digital security firm Gemalto has sued Google, HTC, Motorola and Samsung today over a patent related to the Android mobile operating system.

More specifically, Gemalto is suing over a patent relating to the JavaCard, a technology which allows for Java apps to run on SIM cards.

Says the company, via Mash: "Gemalto is recognized as a pioneer and ground-breaking contributor to the JavaCard [sic] , one of the devices for which the patented technologies were conceived."

Earlier this year, Oracle sued Google over Java and IP law, claiming that the search giant "knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle’s Java-related intellectual property" when creating Android.

From different fronts, Microsoft has recently sued Motorola over patent infringement related to Android, and Apple has sued HTC over the same thing.

The RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) have seized 7000 pirated video games from a 35-year old Saskatoon man's residence and charges are currently pending.

RCMP officials say, if sold authentically, the games would be worth $200,000.

The citizen had his house raided following an investigation "into intellectual property crime offences," adds the police.

More specifically, the authorities were looking into the sale of gaming consoles that were modded to be able to play pirated games.

The man had been advertising the modded consoles via online ads.

Authorities noted that the plethora of games and consoles including systems from Nintendo, Sony, Sega, and Microsoft.

Nokia Siemens Networks has announced a technology that could drastically increase the data carrying capacity of standard copper wires.

The company achieved data transmission speeds of 825 megabits per second (Mbps) over 400 meters of bonded copper lines and 750 Mbps over 500 meters. Nokia Siemens Networks used circuits that involve the creation of a virtual - or 'phantom' - channel to supplement the two physical wires that are the standard configuration for copper transmission lines.

"Laying down new optical fiber to the home remains costly, though it is capable of delivering very high speeds and is a definite solution for long-term bandwidth requirements," said Eduard Scheiterer, head of broadband access business line, Nokia Siemens Networks.

"However, the innovative use of technologies such as phantom circuits helps operators provide an efficient last mile connectivity with existing copper wires."

Phantom DSL promises a bandwidth increase of 50-75% over existing bonded copper lines. This prolongs the life of copper networks, delaying the need for fiber rollout and protecting operator's existing capital investments.

Police in several European countries have carried out raids in a case over counterfeit CD and DVD boxsets that stretches back to 2006.

More than 100 police officers in the four countries took action against those involved in the manufacture, supply and sale of unlicensed Masterbox boxsets that have generated millions in revenue for the criminals behind them.

The Masterbox series contained unlicensed music, films and television programmes. Each box set included an MP3 disc featuring up to 60 albums, some of them pre-release titles. Music from artists such as Black Eyed Peas, Michael Jackson, Green Day and Robbie Williams was found in the Masterbox series, which ran to more than 50 editions.

Copies of Masterbox had a street value of around €40 and were sold informally across the Netherlands. It is estimated that more than 450,000 copies of the various editions were sold, totalling more than €19 million in illegal sales.

Police searched eight business premises and five homes across Belgium, Bulgaria, the Netherlands and Spain over the last few days.

The High Tech Crime Team of the National Crime Squad in the Netherlands issued a press release today announcing action has been taken to isolate 143 servers from the Internet.

The servers were actively involved with the Bredolab botnet, appearing to be command and control centers. They were hosted by LeaseWeb, one of the largest provider of hosting services in the Netherlands. The provider fully cooperated in the takedown operation.

It is unclear so far whether the botnet has been fully decapitated, but security firms such as TrendLabs are monitoring activity levels of the botnet for clues.

Bredolab originated in Russia and rose to prominence in August 2009. The primary initial trigged for infection was through e-mail but later was delivered using a wide variety of methods, even being dropped as a payload by other known malware.

Dutch Authorities estimate that it was capable of infecting 3 million computers per month at its peak.