Outdated Domains To Meet Their End

Dr. Eggman writes

"The little used .um internet domain is no more. The domain was used, or rather unused, for US minor outlying islands and the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute had grown tired of maintaining it. This announcement comes as last month ICANN began taking comments on deletion of outdated suffixes. Among the top of the list? .su, the internet domain of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union's .su may prove harder to remove however, as Google still lists 3 million .su sites."

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Verizon Wireless passed on iPhone two years ago

Verizon Wireless could have been the first wireless carrier to offer the Apple iPhone, but the mobile carrier passed on the opportunity because Apple's financial terms were too steep, Verizon said Monday.

Denny Strigl, president and chief operating officer of Verizon Communications, said the iPhone will help draw attention to the whole mobile-music movement, but he said he was glad Verizon passed on the opportunity. Verizon Wireless is jointly owned by Verizon Communications and the European wireless carrier Vodafone.

"The iPhone product is something we are happy we aren't the first to market with," he said during Verizon Communications' fourth-quarter 2006 earnings call on Monday.

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Nickelodeon to launch virtual world for kids

Nickelodeon on Tuesday plans to launch "Nicktropolis," a virtual world that encourages kids to play games, watch TV and interact with animated characters like SpongeBob.

With Nicktropolis, the children's cable network joins parent unit Viacom's MTV Networks in embracing virtual worlds as a way to showcase television programming and advertisements against a backdrop of 3D graphics, instant chat, games and shopping. MTV operates the virtual world Laguna Beach and owns the wildly popular virtual game NeoPets, among other Net properties.

"The virtual worlds we've been building across our networks give the fans of our brands the high level of interaction they want with one another...with the content itself," MTV Networks CEO Judy McGrath said in a statement.

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MySpace donates sex offender database to center

MySpace.com will donate a national computer database on U.S. sex offenders to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the popular social-networking site said Monday.

Sex offender data is collected by individual state authorities. News Corp.'s MySpace and background verification company Sentinel Tech Holdings developed a technology that combines close to 50 U.S. state registries in an aim to help police keep track of an estimated 600,000 convicted sex offenders.

MySpace has increased efforts to block convicted adult sex predators from the site, which is a meeting place for a large population of teens attracted to the service to share photos, blogs, music and videos.

Earlier this month, the families of five girls abducted by adults they met on MySpace sued the company for negligence.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) said it will use the new database to help law enforcement in investigations. Its local alerts are now incorporated within MySpace.

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Patents for dynamic Web pages to get another look

U.S. patent examiners are poised to take another look at two controversial patents that critics say may sweep up the dynamic Web page systems commonly used by search features, online merchants and millions of other sites.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced the move last week in letters to the Public Patent Foundation, which last November requested the re-examination. PubPat, as it is known, is a public interest legal group whose directors include free and open-source software advocates.

The patents in question, Nos. 5,894,554 and 6,415,335, cover systems and methods for managing dynamic Web page generation requests--that is, sites that return a customized page based on user input. An enormous number of Web sites use some form of dynamic processing, often through programming languages, such as PHP, that are designed to create Web pages based on database queries.

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Newspapers don't make the grade in Web-savvy schools

More U.S. teachers are using national and international online-news sites in the classroom, leaving behind newspapers that fail to grasp the Internet's importance in trying to reach students, a study found.

Fifty-seven percent of teachers use Internet-based news in the classroom with some frequency, said the study, which was based on a survey of 1,262 teachers in grades 5 through 12 in the fall of 2006 and released on Monday by the Carnegie-Knight Task Force on the Future of Journalism Education.

That compares with 31 percent for national television news and 28 percent for daily papers. Local television news, at 13 percent, was at the bottom of the list, the study found.

"Students do not relate to newspapers at all--any more than they would to vinyl records," one teacher said in the study.

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Priceline, Travelocity, Cingular settle over adware charges

Priceline.com, Travelocity.com and Cingular Wireless have settled over charges that they used secret adware Internet software programs as marketing tools, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said on Monday.

This is the first time marketers have been held responsible for ads displayed through adware, the software that automatically displays promotional material, Cuomo's office said in a statement.

The settlement calls for Priceline.com, Travelocity and Cingular, the wireless unit of AT&T, to pay New York $35,000, $30,000 and $35,000, respectively, to cover penalties and investigatory costs.

"Advertisers can no longer insulate themselves from liability by turning a blind eye to how their advertisements are delivered, or by placing ads through intermediaries, such as media buyers," the statement said.

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Getting printers down to iPod size

Zink wants to take the printer off your desk and put it in your pocket. The question now is whether you want it there.

The Waltham, Mass.-based start-up has created--with help from Polaroid--a way to print photographs or documents without ink or an ink cartridge. Without an ink cartridge, a printer can be reduced to the size of an iPod or smaller, said CEO Wendy Caswell. The controlling factor when it comes to printer size is whether you want 2 x 3 inch prints or 4 x 6 inch prints. Zink says it has two manufacturing partners lined up, and products based on its technology will come out later this year.

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Adobe: Make room for Photoshop Lightroom

Photoshop Lightroom, the photo file manager from Adobe Systems, is now available for preorder, the company announced Monday.

Adobe's photo management software, which has been in beta for months for Windows users and since 2005 for Mac OS users, is scheduled to begin shipping in mid-February.

Lightroom is a file management tool intended to complement photo-editing software such as Adobe's Photoshop. It enables photographers to import, minimally edit, manage and output batches of large digital photo files rather than having to deal with each file individually.

It is a direct competitor to Apple's Aperture 1.5 software, which currently sells for $299.


Lightroom will sell at the Adobe store for US$199 in the United States and Canada through April 30, according to Adobe. After that, it will be sold for about $299. The public beta version is set to expire February 28.

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TomTom shipped viruses on its navigation devices

Satellite navigation company TomTom has admitted that it shipped two viruses on a number of its devices.

According to the company, a "small number" of TomTom GO 910 satellite navigation devices were shipped last year with malicious software preinstalled.

"It has come to our attention that a small, isolated number of TomTom GO 910s, produced between September and November 2006, may be infected with a virus. Appropriate actions have been taken to make sure this is prevented from happening again in the future," said TomTom in a statement.

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