trading

Google, Verizon in tiered-Net traffic talks

Links from Thursday's episode of Loaded:

Verizon & Google agreement may raise net fees RIP Google Wave FTC & Intel reach settlement Jailbreakme.com patch coming soon

App not selling? There's a place to sell its code

Back at the World Wide Developers Conference in June, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that the company had paid out more than a billion dollars to application developers through the App Store. But what about those developers who had created something that hadn't sold so well?

There's a new service from application tracking site iPhone Application List, called the App Exchange that is playing matchmaker to such developers. There, they can effectively offload their creation to another party who might be able to do a better job, or at least use some of the app's technology in … Read more

Microsoft to challenge Google-Yahoo Japan deal

So guess what Microsoft thinks of Yahoo Japan's decision to swap it out for Google as main search partner?

Yeah, not too happy about it. And it's going to do all that it can to thwart the deal. "We plan to present evidence to the Japanese FTC explaining why we believe that this deal is substantially more harmful to competition than Google's deal with Yahoo in 2008 that the DOJ found to be illegal," the company said in a statement issued Friday afternoon.

Not all that surprising given the situation and Microsoft General Counsel Brad … Read more

Intel vs. Nvidia: The tech behind the legal case

The graphics chip has become one of the big legal battlegrounds for Intel.

To get a better understanding of what all of the legal wrangling is about, I asked an expert to describe the technology underlying the court battle between Intel and the world's largest purveyor of standalone graphics chips, Nvidia.

To date, the antitrust actions against Intel have focused on the sales practices for central processing units, or CPUs, an area where Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have been skirmishing for decades. In December, however, the Federal Trade Commission, in effect, inserted itself into the legal wrangling between Intel and Nvidia when it alleged in a complaint that Intel was engaged in anticompetitive practices in the graphics chip market.

Intel and the FTC are currently trying to negotiate a settlement, with a deadline of July 22. If they don't reach an agreement, the FTC case against Intel will go to trial, slated to begin on Sept. 15. The suit (Intel) and countersuit (Nvidia) are expected to be addressed in some form if there is a settlement, in addition to the longstanding AMD issues.

Nvidia, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based neighbor of Intel, is the world's leading supplier of "discrete," or standalone, graphics chips but takes a distant second place in overall market share to Intel, which supplies "integrated" graphics built into the chipsets that accompany all of its processors.

One of the core contemporaneous issues in the legal squabbling is Intel's Nehalem design. (Nehalem is Intel's latest chip architecture and includes processors such as the Core i3, i5, and i7.) With the introduction of the Nehalem chip architecture, Intel has asserted, via court filings, that Nvidia, in effect, does not have the right to attach chipsets to Intel CPUs anymore--locking Nvidia out of a potentially large market. (Intel claims it has the legal right to do so because the technology has changed.) Before Nehalem-based chip designs emerged, Nvidia had supplied chipsets for Apple's MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro, for example. Now, it is prevented from doing so.

And the dynamics of the market are changing quickly as Intel yanks the graphics function out of the chipset (which is a separate piece--or pieces--of silicon) and moves it onto the CPU itself. In other words, what used to be a CPU is now, for Intel, the functional equivalent of both a CPU and GPU, or graphics processing unit.

Via an e-mail exchange, I asked David Kanter about the technology behind the case. Kanter is an editor and analyst at Real World Technologies, which covers chip technology in depth.

The key technological issues in the case are the connection technologies. Can you describe them?… Read more

End of gay teen Web site sparks privacy concerns

A now-defunct Web site that catered to gay youth is now ensnared in a federal bankruptcy proceeding that the founder says could result in as many as 1 million profiles being sold to creditors, putting its former subscribers' privacy at risk.

XY, which billed itself as a young gay men's magazine and could be found at XY.com, ceased publishing in 2007. Its founder filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year, which could put names, addresses, e-mail addresses, unpublished personal stories, and other information about gay minors into creditors' hands.

The Federal Trade Commission recently expressed its concerns, saying … Read more

Nokia sics Russian police on blogger with prototype phone

Stop me if you've heard this one before. A prominent consumer electronics company has asked authorities to help it retrieve a prototype phone from the journalist who revealed it--prematurely--to the world.

Sounds a lot like the Gizmodo/iPhone 4 prototype debacle, doesn't it? But it's not. This time, the consumer electronics company is Nokia, the journalist is Eldar Murtazin, editor-in-chief of Moscow-based mobile-review.com, and the authorities are the Russian police.

Claiming that it's been unable to recover the prototype N8 that Murtazin previewed unfavorably earlier this year, Nokia has turned to Russia's Ministry of … Read more

Groups push feds for video game age restrictions

Video game aficionados might have to enter a credit card or find another way to verify their age before playing a networked game, thanks to a new push from advocacy groups who say they want to protect minors from in-game advertising messages.

In-game marketing has become so advanced that it "allows advertisers to track game users" and detect if people who are exposed to certain ads eventually use or buy the advertised product, a coalition including the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, the Center for Digital Democracy, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and U.S. PIRG told federal … Read more

Regulators bound to stack up over Google-ITA

When will the U.S. government eventually decide to confront Google?

That's really the only question that needs to be debated in the wake of Google's announcement that it plans to acquire ITA Software, the leading provider of flight information from airlines to travel Web sites, for $700 million in cash. As it stands, the deal would marry the world's leading Internet search company with a crucial link in the online flight reservation process, making life for executives at online travel sites such as Orbitz, Kayak, and Expedia a whole lot more complicated.

As usual, this acquisition … Read more

Twitter, FTC reach agreement on security

An investigation that the Federal Trade Commission launched into Twitter's allegedly lax security practices following two high-profile hacking incidents last year has been settled, the company announced Thursday.

Twitter general counsel Alexander MacGillivray, who joined the company last summer after serving as a member of Google's legal team, posted an entry on the company blog Thursday explaining the situation. "Early in 2009, when Twitter employed less than 50 people, we faced two different security incidents that impacted a small number of users," the post explained. "Put simply, we were the victim of an attack and … Read more