Yahoo to close GeoCities
AOL took down its Journals and Hometown services, and now Yahoo's following suit with its own GeoCities, the hosting service that once upon a dot-com bubble seemed to include half the personal sites on the Web.
Yahoo isn't currently providing a lot of detail about what users can expect from the shutdown process, other than that it'll happen "later this year," probably in the summer timeframe. As that unknown date nears, says GeoCities Help Page, "We'll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time."
Judge's impartiality questioned in Pirate Bay trial
Tomas Norström, the Stockholm District Court Judge who presided over the Pirate Bay copyright infringement trial in Sweden is now himself under scrutiny for being a member of two copyright protection organizations, the Swedish Copyright Association (SFU), and Swedish Association for Industrial Property (SFIR).
While the guilty verdict against the four keepers of the Pirate Bay has already been appealed, Pirate Bay attorney Peter Althin said he has filed for a re-trial on the grounds that the court was biased.
For the desktop, AMD covets the budget enthusiast with 3.2 GHz quad-core
If you've ever had the pleasure of owning a Nissan Z car (I've owned two in my lifetime), you understand the extra feeling of confidence you get from still being able to afford your house, your clothes, and food. They're very solid performers, they look presentable in a crowd full of Porsches and BMWs, and yet their owners are conscientious folk who can also maintain a budget.
Every time I tell the fellows at AMD that I've been a Z owner, they shout back at me, "Well then, you know what we're talking about!" They're hoping that there's a certain niche of enthusiast system builders who aren't all that interested in displaying the measurements of their disposable income in public. For them, on time, AMD released its next version of sensible high-performance: the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU.
Microsoft net income tumbles over 30%; are layoffs ahead?
For the company's fiscal third quarter ended on March 31, Microsoft on Thursday is unveiling some highly unattractive numbers, including a net-income drop of 32% and an EPS decline of 30%, to 33 cents per share (in GAAP earnings; non-GAAP earnings weighed in at 39 cents/share, precisely as had been predicted). Revenues for the quarter were $13.65 billion, a decrease year-to-year of 6%; net income was up by 3%, to $4.44 billion.
As the company prepped for its 2:30pm EDT phone call, a skim of the earnings-report press release reveals that compared to the third quarter of last year, the Online Services and Entertainment and Devices divisions had a rotten few months, with operating-income losses of $575 million and $31 million respectively. Online Services has a history of bleeding out -- they lost $226 million this time last year -- but the folks who bring you the Xbox 360 and other amusements are normally profitable, showing $106 million in operating income a year ago.
Public Broadcasting joins the streaming pack
PBS has unveiled the beta site for online consumption of its most popular programs in the way that network counterparts ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and the CW have already done.
Like Hulu, both clips and full-length episodes are presented in Flash, however, they are not embeddable in other sites, as they are through PBS' YouTube page. Videos include a pre-roll sponsorship slot and no in-video advertisements.
Seeking refuge in Asia, EBay makes moves in South Korea
Earlier this month, eBay began to jettison its mismatched properties, such as content location service StumbleUpon, and VoIP messenger software Skype to concentrate on its original strength, the online marketplace.
In the current economy however, those marketplace properties -- which include eBay, StubHub, and Shopping.com -- are actually creating significant drag on the company's revenue. EBay's first quarter earnings report yesterday showed that while the company's overall revenue dropped about 8%, revenue from its marketplace segment dropped nearly 18%. This was attributed to the strengthened US dollar devaluing overseas transactions, which account for more than half of eBay's business.
More speed to come from the first Firefox 3.6 alpha
While awaiting the first public (non-nightly build) copy of Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, we noticed this week the first nightly alpha build of the Mozilla browser to come afterward: the first 3.6 Alpha 1 builds. In Betanews initial performance tests of some of Mozilla's very latest code, there's a lot of room for encouragement: The latest code-name "Minefield" build posted 11.7% better performance overall than the last code-frozen nightly build of Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, and 232% the overall performance of the latest Firefox 3.0.9, released just yesterday.
Our tests pit the latest Windows-based Web browsers in a virtual Vista system, and combine the Acid3 standards test with three trusted performance tests for CSS rendering and JavaScript speed. Nearly all the early news for the 3.6 alpha was good, including posting Mozilla's best-ever score on the Acid3 test -- a 94% -- and posting a Betanews cumulative index score for the first time above 10.0, which means this alpha performs over ten times better than Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (not the current version, IE8, but the previous one).
Full Disk Encryption for notebooks launches in beta
Security company Check Point Software has begun accepting testers for its ZoneAlarm Full Disk Encryption for Laptops beta program, a program designed to make sensitive data saved on notebooks more difficult to extract if the computer is stolen.
While Full Disk Encryption is turned on, the user must enter an additional password before Windows starts up. Once in Windows, the software encrypts unused files, including even deleted and temporary ones, and decrypts only the files currently in use.
Presto, and your PC is on
Instant-on capability isn't entirely unknown on Windows machines, but those who spend too much time around Mac or Linux folk may find that its availability -- mostly laptops and tablets, mostly higher-end gear -- is too limited to countenance. To the rescue comes Xandros' Presto Instant-On -- as long as you're willing to apply yourself to a bit of setup effort. (Think of it as making time to save time.)
Xandros has been making a name for itself on various fronts, most interestingly as part of the software that made the first Eee netbooks such a kick in the pants for the PC market. They're good at interoperability across Windows and Linux, and the Presto software takes good advantage of Linux's speed and light system load while behaving -- we found -- as politely as one might hope for a Windows app.
Facebook governance voting ends today
You've got just a few hours to cast your vote for your preferred documents of Facebook governance. Do you prefer the current Facebook-written terms of use (the ones to which the site rolled back after that disastrous sortie back in February)? Or are you more in tune with the version incorporating comments from users and advice from experts not named Zuckerberg? Over half a million people so far have an opinion on the matter.
The gist of the user-input version, as summarized in a Facebook Town Hall blog post, is clarity: clear language, clear limits on how Facebook can use user content, and clear procedures for changing terms of service. And though we don't mean to mess things up with a premature exit poll, there's clearly a preference already among voters, with around three-quarters of the "electorate" pulling for the crowdsourced version of the terms of service. Voting ends today at 11:59am Pacific; go now.
Warner's $5 HD DVD to Blu-ray trade-in: Bargain or scam?
If you were on the red team back in Format War II, also known as HD DVD vs. Blu-ray, you may have been left with substantial library of obsolete HD DVD titles. Warner Bros. is now offering a hand to those early adopters worried about having a dead library, a trade-in program called Red2Blu.
It hearkens back to box-top trade-in incentives from the heyday of breakfast cereals. For every Warner Bros. HD DVD you purchased, you can mail the cover art and $4.95 back to the company, and the company will send you the same movie on Blu-ray. There are 128 HD DVD titles from Warner Bros. that are available for trade, and each user can trade up to 25 discs.
Congress puts the head of LimeWire back in the hot seat
During Congressional hearings back in July 2007, legislators were astounded by high-profile testimony from former NATO Supreme Commander Gen. Wesley Clark, revealing that federal employees who had installed the P2P software LimeWire on their computers inadvertently shared classified government materials with other LimeWire users, in many cases without those users even requesting the material.
But sidestepping the entire question of why P2P file-sharing software was installed on government computers in the first place, Rep. Darrell Issa (R - Calif.), the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, quizzed Lime Group Chairman Mark Gorton about his personal responsibility for the security breaches. Calling him the "elephant in the room," Rep. Issa asked, "Are you prepared here today to say you're going to make significant changes in the software to help prevent this in the future?" Gorton responded, "Absolutely, and we have some in the works right now."
VP Biden promises movie industry to step up search for IP czar
According to an account from a pool reporter assigned to Vice President Biden yesterday, and covered in its entirety by Time Magazine's Mark Halperin, Mr. Biden told a Washington gathering of both senior senators and motion picture industry leaders that he plans to accelerate the search for an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC).
Though the role has been treated as a creation of the Obama administration, it was President Bush who signed into law last October the controversial PRO-IP Act, stepping up enforcement provisions against intellectual property infringement and piracy, and creating the role Mr. Biden likes to refer to as a "czar." But it was Biden himself who coined the usage of the term "czar" to apply to policy leaders with authority over specific issues, who report directly to the President -- in this case, in 1982 when then-Senator Biden helped create a drug policy enforcement administrator.
Apple reports the best non-holiday quarter in its history
Another Apple earnings report, another vacation from dreary recession news in the Cupertino Reality Field: The company reported on Wednesday its best non-holiday quarter in history this afternoon, with year-to-year sales of iPods and iPhones up 3% and 123% respectively. The company posted Q2 '09 revenue of $8.16 billion and a net profit of $1.21 billion, working out to $1.33 per share.
The company reported 9% year-over-year revenue growth, and an operating margin of 20.4%.
New Firefox 3.0.9 patches mucked-up memory and other holes
Download Mozilla Firefox 3.0.9 for Windows from Fileforum now.
Bugs in versions of Firefox before 3.0.9 can lead to memory corruption -- a problem that might, in theory be used by bad people to run arbitrary code on your machine. The problem is also present in versions of Thunderbird before 2.0.0.22 -- if you've gone and enabled JavaScript in e-mail -- and of SeaMonkey before 1.1.16.
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