News written by James Delahunty (March, 2010)

Sky has purchased 15,000 3D televisions from LG Electronics and plans to install them in pubs around the country to promote its 3D broadcasts. Back in January, Sky broadcast a Barclays Premier League match between Arsenal and Manchester United and held screenings of the event in nine pubs to show off the technology.

The broadcaster is set to launch a 3D service for wide use in the UK in April, while consumer electronics manufacturers are pushing out new 3D flat-panel televisions. The industry hopes that growing interest in 3D movies in theaters will spur interest in 3D TV at home.

Sky hopes that showing football matches and other sports events in pubs in 3D will generate some interest in it. LG also benefits from the deal in that its televisions are being promoted as part of Sky's demonstrations.

The UK broadcasting regulator has rejected Channel Five's request for capacity on Freeview's Multiplex B. Ofcom was not convinced that Five was fully committed to HD broadcasting. Under the rules, the bandwidth will now be allocated to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Ofcom has to assign Freeview HD capacity to non-commercial broadcasters if the bandwidth is not being used by commercial broadcasters. Five was unable to clearly inform Ofcom of when it will begin broadcasting HD or how it plans to maintain a daytime HD schedule.

Ofcom is believed to have been planning to give the bandwidth to Channel 4 or S4C instead, but both also failed to commit to a service that would meet Ofcom's requirements.

Five will now have to wait until 2012 when Ofcom will again allow commercial broadcasters for pitch for HD capacity.

Research is showing that action taken by Microsoft and others to tackle the Waledac botnet have been effective. Microsoft's "Operation b49" employed a number of technical measures coupled with court actions to cut off the controllers of the spam-spewing botnet from the 70,000 - 90,000 infected PCs.

"While it is still too early to know the entire scope of this particular takedown's impact, early returns show that Operation b49 has been delivering on the disruption of Waledac and helping to map new territory in the fight against botnets," Microsoft's Jeff Williams said.

He said that data from Microsoft and other security researchers "indicate that our actions have effectively decimated communications within the Waledac bot network." An analysis by the Shadowserver Foundation of honeypot PCs (machines allowed to be infected by researchers to observe their behavior) showed that commands received by the infected machines plummeted.

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Microsoft's upcoming update for its web browser, Internet Explorer 9, puts a lot of focus on support for the HTML 5 standards. IE9 is also expected to beef up performance, offloading tasks within the web browser to the graphics processing unit (GPU), or using separate CPU cores for certain elements of web pages if available.

While still easily the world's most used web browser, Internet Explorer has seen its market share drop along with its reputation as rivals such as Mozilla and Google pump out more and more features, support and speed for their web browsers.

The new IE supports CSS3 features such as rounded corners and opacity, while also now supporting SVG even though Microsoft is pushing its own Silverlight platform for rich graphics. At a conference in Las Vegas where IE9 was demoed, Microsoft showed H.264 video running at 720p in the browser, with the support for the video and audio content built-in.

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Microsoft Corp. has been ordered to pay $106 million in damages to a communications company by a jury overseeing a patent infringement lawsuit. The jury found that the Redmond-based software giant had violated two patents held by communications company VirnetX Holding.

The ruling followed a trial lasting a week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. Specifically, $71.75 million was awarded for violation of one of the patents, while $34 million was awarded for the other, bringing the total to $105.75 million.

Microsoft Corp. was disappointed with the ruling, and maintains that it does not violate any patents held by VirnetX Holding. The patents in question cover methods for establishing Virtual Private Networks (VPN).

Microsoft said that it plans to appeal the jury's verdict.

The Chinese government expects Google.cn to respect the country's rules with regard to censorship even if it plans to quit the country altogether. Shares of Baidu were up 4.8 percent on Monday, while shares of Google fell 3 percent as speculation mounts on Google's likelihood to leave the country.

The search giant announced in January that it would quit China if it had to maintain self-censorship of its search results. The ruling communist party forces search engines to filter out results for certain terms, or certain results that it deems inappropriate for Chinese citizens to see.

Google's threat to leave the country came after it, along with at least 20 other companies, was the target of a cyberattack aimed at stealing Google's Intellectual Property and at the e-mail accounts of Chinese activists.

"On entering the Chinese market in 2007, it clearly stated that it would respect Chinese law," Yao Jian, a spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce, said. "We hope that whether Google Inc continues operating in China or makes other choices, it will respect Chinese legal regulations."

"Even if it pulls out, it should handle things according to the rules and appropriately handle remaining issues," he added. Google entered talks with the Chinese government over the situation, but reports suggest that the company is almost certain to close its Google.cn site and quit the country, which has 384 million Internet users.

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Nokia Corp. said that the market for mobile phones totaled 1.26 billion handsets last year, beating the Finnish giant's forecast of 1.14 billion. The company reduced its share of sales to 34 percent from an earlier forcast of 38 percent, recalculating the size of the market and the scale of the growing grey market for counterfeit and unlicensed mobile phones.

According to Gartner research group, the grey market totaled around 145 million handsets in 2009, with the majority of them being sold in China, India and Latin America. "These include vendors of legitimate, as well as unlicensed and counterfeit, products with manufacturing facilities primarily centered around certain locations in Asia and other emerging markets," Nokia said.

"This is a good thing for Nokia because it is really showing that they want to measure the real market and grey market has been a big driver in 2009," said Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi. "It is an opportunity for them to go after and try and actually win over users in that segment as well."

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Sky and Virgin Media have confirmed that they will be offering ITV1 HD through both company's entertainment services starting in April. This brings more World Cup football games to UK subscribers in High-definition.

"The addition of ITV1 HD from 2nd April means Sky+HD homes across all ITV regions will be able to watch World Cup matches live in HD, as well as other major ITV shows such as Law and Order: UK, The Prisoner, Foyles War, Lewis, Survival with Ray Mears, and Britain's Got Talent," Sky said in a statement.

Virgin Media also announced separately that it will be offering ITV1 HD from April 2, and that some of ITV1 HD's content will be available on demand on ITV Net Player on Virgin Media's TV Platform.

Sky also said it will be launching Hallmark Chanel HD and Sky Sports 4 HD to bring its total line-up of HD channels to 40.

NVIDIA is hosting a website that covers legal cases against Intel Corporation for anti-competitive practices. The site is clearly part of NVIDIA's PR campaign against Intel as the spat between both companies over rivaling technology continues to grow.

The site has extensive details from legal cases brought against Intel, including cases brought by the European Union, the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S., New York State etc. and also aims to educate consumers about the base of the conflict; at least from the perspective of NVIDIA.

The site is an interesting browse and to its credit, is very informative and does its intended job quite well. Nevertheless, some of its content is amusing and reminds you that it is presented from a single side in this argument. Take, for example, the difference in how NVIDIA describes what a GPU is, and what a CPU is.

Q. What is a GPU?
"A. GPUs, or graphics processing units, are specialized processors first developed by NVIDIA in 1999. They were initially used to render three-dimensional graphics. In more recent years, GPUs have also been used for “general purpose” computing, which harnesses the computing power of the chip to perform certain functions traditionally handled by the CPU, often more efficiently than can be done by the CPU alone. General purpose GPUs are being used by scientists and engineers around the world to perform ground-breaking research in fields like medicine, biology and chemistry as well as for mainstream applications like streaming HD video and transcoding media files."

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PRS for Music has compiled figures showing that growth in digital music downloads lead to a increase in royalties paid to British songwriters, composers and publishers. About £623 million was paid out in 2009 in royalties, up 2.6 percent from the total in 2008. It represents the first time that growth in digital revenues was larger than the drop in CD and DVD earnings for the industry.

"2009 was the first year in which the growth in revenues from the legal digital market compensated for the decline in revenues from traditional CDs and DVDs, though we remain cautious as to whether this represents a true turning point," said PRS for Music chief executive Robert Ashcroft.

"The next decade does, however, promise further growth in earnings from the legal digital market as well as the use of British music overseas." The global music business witnessed continuing declines throughout the last decade. It blames growth of Internet piracy and the decline of physical format sales for the reduction in revenues.

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There is something that doesn't seem right about charging games consumers extra fees to unlock content that is already present on a disc they bought, or at least that is what gamers feel. Fans have pointed out that new Downloadable Content (DLC) for BioShock 2 is actually already present on the game disc itself, despite being labeled and sold as "DLC".

The Sinclair Solutions pack was "released" on Thursday and includes two new playable characters, 20 new trials, weapons upgrades and increases the level cap to 50. The add-on is priced at 400 Microsoft Points, the equivalent of about $5. However, fans of the game posted on the 2K Forum that the download size for the PC add-on was just 24K in size.

Similarly, the download size for the Xbox 360 add-on was just 108K in size. Clearly the content is already on the disc itself, fans believed. According to forum community manager Elizabeth, they are right. She posted that the download was already on the disc to ensure there was no split in the userbase for the games' multiplayer mode.

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According to details in a court filing, Nokia Corp. and Apple Inc. will seek a U.S. court hearing in a patent infringement case in mid-2012. The detail shows that both sides expect the mobile patent feud between them to continue for quite some time. Nokia has already moved to have a case brought against it by Apple dismissed in the meantime.

Nokia sued Apple in October 2009, alleging that the company's iPhone uses patent technologies owned by Nokia Corp. without paying royalties for their use. Nokia is seeking up to €1 billion ($1.36 billion) from Apple in the case.

On December 11, Apple filed a countersuit against Nokia accusing the Finnish mobile giant of infringing 13 Apple patents. The company later removed four of the 4 patents from the list.

Patent disputes like these are becoming all too common in the ever-growing market for mobile gadgets. Last week, Apple sued HTC Corp accusing it of infringing 20 hardware and software patents held by Apple. HTC makes touchscreen smartphones that run Google software.

According to the Financial Times, Google Inc. is "99.9 percent" sure to shut down its Chinese search engine. The newspaper cited a source familiar with the situation in reporting that talks between Google and the Chinese government over censorship have reached an apparent impasse.

The report said that Google is likely to make a decision very soon but that it will take some time to follow through on its plans. The company would carry out an orderly closure to take steps to protect local employees from retaliation by authorities.

On Friday, China's Minister of Industry and Information Technology, Li Yizhong, warned Google about its decision to stop censoring search results for Chinese users. "If you don't respect Chinese laws, you are unfriendly and irresponsible, and the consequences will be on you," he told reporters.

Google shocked the business world and ignited tension between the United States and China in January when it revealed that it would pull out of China if it would not offer unfiltered search results. The move came after Google was targeted by a cyber-attack sourced in China aimed at its Intellectual Property and the e-mail accounts of Chinese activists.

Electronic Arts has dropped its in-game advertisement partners and opted instead to sell its ads in-house. EA is currently partnered with IGA Worldwide and Massive Inc, owned by Microsoft, but has held an event in New York where it pitched its properties to advertisers and media buyers.

The sale operations will not be handled in-house when the deals with IGA Worldwide and Massive Inc. end in August this year. Both companies will provide ads until Electronic Arts ships the next Madden NFL title in the United States.

Reports from the New York event suggested that Electronic Arts put a big emphasis on content on the Apple formats, such as the iPod Touch and iPad, and also social networking sites like Facebook, along with its expected titles and formats.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and performing rights group TONO have given up efforts to legally force Norwegian ISP Telenor to block the Pirate Bay BitTorrent website. The case had seen Telenor triumphant twice after it refused to block the Pirate Bay and the IFPI brought the case to court.

In November 2009, a court decided that Telenor had no obligation to comply with the IFPI's demands. TONO confirmed that the verdict would be appealed, but in February the Borgarting Court of Appeal rejected the appeal on the grounds that there was no basis in Norwegian law for the claim.

The next option for the IFPI and TONO was to go to the Supreme Court, and most thought it would happen. However, the IFPI and TONO have decided not to take that route. "We wanted to get a legal clarification on whether under Norwegian law it is possible to order ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay," a TONO statement reads.

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LG Electronics has revealed that it plans to release its line-up of 3D televisions and other products in the UK in May this year. The electronics giant's initial line-up includes two LED TVs and a Blu-ray Disc player. The televisions use active-shutter 3D technology which requires suitable glasses that will not be included.

The 47-inch and 55-inch LC9900 series televisions will feature 400Hz frame interpolation, 4 HDMI ports and 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio. The backlighting for the 47-inch comprises of 864 LEDs, whilst the 55-inch set had 960 LEDs. Both come packed with Freeview HD receivers.

Bluetooth and WiFi are included in both sets, and they also feature USB 2.0 ports for playing DivX HD, MP3 or JPEG Images from portable media.

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According to an article in the New York Times, Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs feels that Google violated the alliance it had with the iPhone-maker. The article highlights the growing bitter rivalry between Apple and Google Inc. due to Google's release of products and software that would compete with Apple technologies.

"We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business," Jobs was quoted as saying at a company meeting. "Make no mistake; Google wants to kill the iPhone. We won't let them." The article says that the comments were reportedly met with "thunderous applause" from the Apple employees present at the meeting.

After Google released its Android operating system for mobile devices, relations between the companies reportedly started to sour. A number of heated meetings between Apple and Google executives reportedly followed the software release, many of which apparently turned confrontational with Jobs accusing Google of stealing features from the iPhone.

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Apple Inc. pushed out Safari 4.0.5 earlier this week to address a slew of security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers. In total, Safari 4.0.5 fixes 16 known security vulnerabilities with the browser. The update is available for Mac and Windows.

Among the vulnerable Safari components are ColorSync, ImageIO and the WebKit engine, which were hit with critical code injection and information disclosure bugs. Unpatched Windows machines running the browser are more vulnerable than those running Mac software.

Apple's advisory on the update is available at: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4070

Safari for Windows: https://www.afterdawn.com/software/network_software/web_browsers/safari_win.cfm

Safari for Mac OS X: https://www.afterdawn.com/software/alternative_platforms/mac_software/safari_mac.cfm

Swiss security firm Objectif Sécurité was able to crack 14-digit LMHash Windows XP passwords with special characters in just 5.3 seconds. The firm optimized its rainbow table of password hashes for use with solid-state drives. Objectif Sécurité's Philippe Oechslin said that the result was 100 times faster than previously possible.

The test showed how much of a bottleneck the speed of hard discs are in password cracking based on password hash lookups is. The test rig itself was hardly amazing, running with an AMD Athlon X2 4400+ processor and the optimized tables with 80GB of password hashes on an SSD.

The company claims it is 500 times faster than a password cracker from Russian firm Elcomsoft that utilizes NVIDIA GPUs.

Free web-based demo: https://www.objectif-securite.ch/en/products.php#demo

Ofcom has proposed that frequencies reserved for 2G (GSM) networks be used by 3G technologies, complying with an EU deregulation directive on the 900 and 1800MHz bands. The proposal is part of a bunch of changes that Ofcom is proposing, which includes permitting radar installations at level crossings for safety reasons and rule changes on Ultra Wide Band.

While moves by the European Union meant that eventually the UK would permit the use of 2G bands for 3G networks, the subject has been controversial in the UK.

2G frequencies were allocated for use in the UK, whereas 3G spectrum was bought at enormous costs on the basis that it was the only way to operate 3G networks in the region.

Allowing 3G on 2G had its good points, but it devalues the 3G spectrum that operators spent enormous amounts of money to obtain. However, with the UK government standing firmly behind the plan and the EU directive mandating it, Ofcom's final approval should go through in August this year.

AMD is pushing its 'Ontario' dual-core chip for use in netbooks, according to an "AMD Notebook Platform Roadmap" slide that is doing the rounds again. The chip though is not "new" news, with Ontario being made public by AMD in November 2009. The chip is part of AMD's "Fusion" line-up. It contains AMD's "Bobcat" core and will have an on-board DirectX 11 graphics processing unit (GPU).

AMD has treated the market for notebooks and ultrathin devices quite differently from Intel. Intel has developed its Atom line of chips specifically for these small-scale devices whilst AMD maintains that they are essentially just tiny notebooks and don't need dedicated chips.

Maybe AMD is correct in a way, as sales show that users buy the netbooks with larger screens (relative to netbook sizes), larger hard-drives and with software capabilities of their notebooks. Linux-based netbooks haven't sold as well as Windows, and low-storage-space SSD netbooks lose out to traditional HDD-based netbooks.

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Microsoft Corp. is racing to release a patch for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 to address a serious security vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control of a victim's computer. The Redmond-based software giant has picked up the pace on this particular flaw since the public release of exploit code by Israeli researcher Moshe Ben Abu.

The exploit code release means Microsoft will issue a patch for the flaw before the next 'Patch Tuesday'. "We have seen speculation that Microsoft might release an update for this issue out of band. I can tell you that we are working hard to produce an update which is now in testing," said Jerry Bryant, senior security communications manager lead at Microsoft.

"This is a critical and time-intensive step of the process as the update must be tested against all affected versions of Internet Explorer on all supported versions of Windows. Additionally, each supported language version needs to be tested as well as testing against thousands of third party applications," he wrote in an advisory on the Microsoft Security Response Center blog.

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According to a report by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, 4G-capable mobile handsets may be available through Verizon Wireless by mid-2011. Verizon Wireless opted to use Long-Term Evolution (LTE) technology for its 4G networks in the United States, whereas Sprint opted for WiMax in order to get to market faster.

Verizon Wireless Chief Technology Officer, Anthony Melone, told the Wall Street Journal that he expected Verizon to offer 4G-capable mobile handsets within 3-6 months after a commercial 4G network is launched by the operator. This would be about twice as fast as previously expected.

Before handsets are available, the 4G networks will be accessed by users through USB air cards for faster Internet access compared to 3G products. Initial handsets will still use CDMA technology to provide access to Verizon's 3G network for voice traffic and when the 4G service is unavailable for data.

Verizon CTO Dick Lynch said at a panel discussion at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February that getting voice to work over LTE has been particularly challenging. The operator recently said that speeds in tests of its LTE network showed peak data rates of 40-50Mbps.

Mozilla's Firefox 3.6 has been downloaded over 100 million times since it was released in January this year. The 100 million figure doesn't include existing users that upgraded to Firefox 3.6 from older versions using the built-in upgrade system in the browser.

Still, a lot of existing Firefox users have not yet updated to the newer version of the browser, and so Mozilla has begun to push notifications to users who haven't updated yet.

Firefox ranks highly against other browsers when it comes to pushing updates, with about 85 percent of users switching to new versions within 21 days of a release.

Google's Chrome is the only browser that ranks better than Firefox in this area, largely due to its agressive background updating system. Mozilla celebrated a milestone of 1 billion downloads for Firefox last year, and the browser is used by an estimated 350 million people each day.

In a letter to the Financial Times, BT Group Chief Executive Ian Livingston suggested that persistent file sharers caught breaking copyright laws should face fines instead of technical sanctions proposed by the UK government. He said that suspending service for persistent infringers as spelled out in the Digital Economy Bill could deny a fair hearing for the accused.

Instead of the technical sanctions outlined in the DEB, Livingston said people could choose to pay a penalty or fight the accusation. Those who dispute accusations could take their case to a new tribunal instead of the courts. The suggestion brings BT in line with the Open Rights Group, which believes such a system would be fairer and less risky than the proposed suspensions and other sanctions.

In the letter - which was also signed by the bosses of TalkTalk, Virgin Media and Orange, as well as Facebook, Google, eBay and Yahoo! - a recent amendment to the Digital Economy Bill faced considerable criticism. The amendment made last week would allow copyright holders to injunct ISPs and force the blocking of specific web addresses.

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Reggie Fils-Aime, President and COO of Nintendo of America, has told Forbes that the company is not ready yet to begin work on a new home console to replace the Wii. "When the software developer comes forward with an idea that can't be executed on the current platform, that's when we start thinking seriously about the next system. We're not there yet, from a Wii perspective," he said.

Fils-Aime once against mirrored Nintendo's general attitude toward including the latest technology in games consoles, saying that as an enabler, technology has to enable a new and unique experience for players. "So when people talk about high definition for the Wii console our feedback is that that by itself will not create a brand new experience," he said.

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Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said on Wednesday that the company expects an outcome in its dispute with the Chinese government soon. Schmidt made the comments on Wednesday at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit. "I'm going to use the word 'soon', which I will not define otherwise," he said.

"There is no specific timetable. Something will happen soon." In Washington, Nicole Wong, the firm's vice president and deputy general counsel, told the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee that the company stands by its decision to stop censorship in China.

"(if) the option is that we will shutter our .cn property and leave the country, we are prepared to do that," she said. At the same time, it was revealed that the United States is mulling a possible legal challenge to China's Internet censorship and related policies which it claims hurt U.S. companies that invest in the Chinese market.

The recent spat between Google and China started in January when the search giant announced that it would stop censoring search results in the country and would leave the market if it had no other choice. The announcement followed a hack targeted at Google's intellectual property and the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

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Sharp will release its first two Freeview HD set-top receivers in the UK over the coming weeks. First though, it will release a new Freeview DVR (standard-definition) receiver that uses USB-connected storage to make it easier to transfer recorded Freeview content to a computer (but unfortunately will not play back content from a computer).

The Sharp TU-T1UR has three USB 2.0 ports on the front of the box for use with external hard driver, flash drives or SD card adapters. It connects to a standard definition television through SCART, Composite cables or through HDMI (even though the box is not HD). It features a typical eight-day programming guide and standard DVR recording and scheduling features.

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China Mobile has announced plans to invest billions of dollars in a Chinese bank as part of a broader plan to develop mobile phone-based banking and business services for end users. The company will pay out 39.8 billion yuan ($5.8 billion) to gain 20 percent of Shanghai Pudong Development Bank.

Mobile phone companies and service operators globally are looking to the high levels of mobile phone use as an untapped instrument for financial transactions and other business uses. Of the between 6 and 7 billion people on earth, it is estimated that around 1 billion have some kind of bank account.

Nokia is one company that has seen huge potential to turn mobile phones into tools for financial transactions with Nokia Money. In some countries, such as Finland, using mobile phones to pay for certain services like public transport, or to pay for a car wash or soft drink from a dispenser, is fairly common practice.

China Mobile and the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank will work together to develop mobile phone services such as customer payments and money transfers and other e-commerce solutions.

The United States is considering whether it can mount a legal challenge against Chinese Internet restrictions that it claims hurt U.S. companies such as Google Inc. in the Chinese market. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk revealed Washington's consideration on Tuesday, but added that direct talks with Beijing could yield faster results.

"We are still dialoguing not just with Google, but with other Internet providers, to make sure we fully understand what is happening in China," Kirk said in remarks at the National Press Club. The case would be the first of its kind taken up by the WTO if it is to go ahead. Such a case has been pushed by free speech groups within the United States, such as the First Amendment Coalition, for years.

The case of Internet censorship has come to the limelight again this year since Google threatened to leave the Chinese market. While having to comply with strict Chinese censorship regulations, Google was also targeted by hackers in the country. The attacks were aimed at Google's valuable source codes and other property, and also the e-mail accounts of human rights activists in China.

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Record company EMI has found itself the target of legal action from Pink Floyd in a dispute over royalty payments and technicalities of how music is sold to consumers in a digital form. Having being outsold only by the Beatles, Pink Floyd has been signed to EMI for 40 years now.

The artists are disputing how royalty payments and the marketing of their music are calculated in modern industry. It also objects to how EMI can "unbundle" their albums - or in other words sell any individual tracks from any Pink Floyd albums over the Internet without selling the full album.

Pink Floyd's lawyer, Robert Howe, told the High Court in London that EMI is violating a contractual clause that "expressly prohibits" unbundling of tracks for individual sale from Pink Floyd albums, which include The Wall and The Dark Side of the Moon.

EMI disputes that it is violating the clause, saying that it only applies to a "physical product" and does not apply for digital sales made on the Internet. Howe disagrees, saying that EMI's position makes no commercial sense, and is clearly contradicted by the conditions used in the agreement with EMI.

According to comments made by Mindy Mount, CFO of Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices division, the games industry can expect to see Microsoft's full line-up of Project Natal titles at this year's E3 event. She said that the company's best designers are working on the platform currently.

Microsoft's Robbie Bach also claimed in January this year that 70-80 percent of game publishers are committed to releasing Natal titles. With Microsoft's first party developers having shrunk in recent years, the size of a full first party line-up is hard to estimate. Reports are that Rare is one developer heavily involved with Natal.

Lionhead Studios are implementing features of Natal into the Fable III title, and smaller first party developer such as Shawnpoint Studios and BigPark reportedly have developments for Natal too.

"We have very strong first and third-party developer support for [Natal]," said Mount. "Needless to say, we're putting some of our best people on coming up with great game ideas for this, and we're going to have some great stuff."

Sony Corp. and Samsung Electronics have announced plans to introduce 3D televisions in the coming months. Both companies are betting that 3D televisions will increase revenues as more high-profile titles such as Alice in Wonderland and Avatar hit theaters. Sony also plans to release 3D game titles for the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console in time for its 3D launch in June.

Panasonic Corp., the world's fourth largest flat-panel television maker, has teamed up with Best Buy in the United States to promote its line-up of 3D televisions. Best Buy stores will set up viewing areas for customers to sample the 3D TVs, and Panasonic has an ambitious goal of selling 500,000 units in the fiscal year starting April.

Samsung, the industry leader, will sell 46-inch and 55-inch 3D televisions (LCD) in the United States this month, and will add more models to its line-up over the coming months. "It will likely be ardent game players who will first buy 3D TVs as an early adopter," said analyst Alex Oh of Hanwha Securities in Seoul.

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The Chinese government has said it is ready and willing to punish hackers in the country that allegedly targeted Google Inc. and other companies earlier this year, if Google can provide evidence against the accused. Vice Minister Miao Wei said that Google has not filed a report to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology over the cyber attacks or sought negotiations with the government.

"If Google has had evidence that the attacks came from China, the Chinese government will welcome them to provide the information and will severely punish the offenders according to the law," Miao said. "We never support hacking attacks because China also falls victim to hacking attacks."

As for Google's threat to leave China following the events and ongoing tensions over mandated censorship, Miao said that the company didn't notify the ministry that it is considering a withdrawal from the country either. "If Google decides to continue its business in China and abides by China's laws, it's welcome to stay," he said.

"If the company chooses to withdraw from the Chinese market, it must go through certain procedures according to the law and regulations and deal with customers' problems that may arise." He went on to vow that China will continue to provide a sound investment environment for foreign investors and protect their legitimate rights.

Panasonic Corp. will work with U.S. electronics provider Best Buy for its launch of 3D televisions in the United States. The official launch of Panasonic's 3D ventures in the U.S. will be on Wednesday, and Best Buy will be the main promoter of the products in the market.

Best Buy will setup viewing areas at its retail outlets across the country, where consumers can try out the Panasonic 3D products. Panasonic is aiming to sell half a million 3D televisions in the United States in their first year on the market, and expects a 50-inch Viera model to retail in the region for $2,500.

Consumer interest in 3D has been on the rise due to high-profile theatrical releases of 3D titles, such as James Cameron's Avatar or Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. Panasonic is in 4th place in the global market for flat-panel televisions (behind Samsung, LG Electronics and Sony).

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Apple Inc. is believed to have played a part in raids carried out at this year's CeBIT expo in Germany. Along with Siemens and Sisvel, Apple is believes to have been behind the forced shut down of an exhibitor's booth at CeBIT on Friday. The unnamed company was showing off Netbooks and e-book readers.

The unnamed company is alleged to have violated patents held by the three. On Thursday, lawyers from Siemens, Apple and Sisvel reportedly had visited to the booth and levied a €10,000 fine in advance of the raid. On Friday, German police moved in and forced the unnamed exhibitor to shut down.

The raid was not the only one to happen at CeBIT this year either, according to reports. Moves such as these are common at trade shows like CeBIT, as bigger tech companies use their patent portfolios to essentially "shut up" a smaller competitor that might not get as much exposure in a particular market.

iSuppli has issued a warning to manufacturers of LCD televisions about an upcoming shortage of LEDs, which are used for backlighting of some LCD televisions. LEDs provide a much better video imagery for viewers when used in LCD TVs, compared to LCD TVs that utilize fluorescent lamps for backlighting.

LCD televisions generally required between 300 and 500 LEDs per panel, all producing a uniform level of brightness. This makes the sector much more vulnerable to an LED shortage than notebook makers for example, as notebooks generally use about 50 LEDs in LCD screens.

Due to the popularity of LED-backlit LCD televisions, consumption of LEDs rose from 57 billion units in 2008 to 63 billion in 2008. iSuppli expects it to reach 104 billion by 2011, while current industry capacity is about 75 billion units.

Unless LED fabrication plants are built rapidly, or manufacturers figure out how to reduce the number of LEDs required in an LCD television whilst not compromising on picture quality, iSuppli predicts that the industry will have to deal with a "drastic under-supply" of LEDs starting later this year.

The popular Hulu online video service has been dealt something of a blow by Viacom. The service will soon be without The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report after failing to secure the rights to carry the shows after March 9.

Hulu's senior vice president of content and distribution, Andy Forssell, confirmed that the shows will no longer be available on the U.S. service after March 9. Hulu offers programming to viewers for free, while using advertisements to generate revenue. The revenue is shared with content owners like Viacom's Comedy Central.

Hulu is jointly owned by General Electric Co's NBC Universal, News Corp's Fox Entertainment and Walt Disney Co's ABC. It will continue to negotiate with Comedy Central to resolve the dispute.

Other disputes have emerged between content providers and video delivery outlets recently too. ABC on Monday threatened to remove content from services run Cablevision, while Fox and Time Warner Cable Inc resolved a similar dispute.

Argos has "sort of" entered the pre-owned games trade in the United Kingdom. The catalogue-driven retailer is trialing a system where customers get vouchers in return for certain pre-owned video games. Only 27 of the chain's 735 stores are taking part for now, and the company has no plan for expanding the trial yet.

Only selected PS3, Xbox 360, DS and Wii titles are being accepted -- all listed here -- and they have already been assigned a value. Grand Theft Auto IV will get you £11 in vouchers, while Assassin's Creed II will get you £22.

"Argos can confirm it is trialling a trade-in service for video games in a few stores in the North East region commencing in March 2010," an Argos spokesperson told GamesIndustry.biz.

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The movie industry has been hoping that digital downloads of movies will make up for lost revenue of falling DVD sales. In 2007 and 2008, legal movie downloading surged as more and more high profile players entered the market. However, while 2009 saw growth, it was way below analyst expectations and industry experts warn that the financial downturn doesn't explain it all.

A new report by Screen Digest showed movie downloading revenues in the U.S. of $291 million, way below the predicted $360 million haul. The total for 2008 hit $219 million, almost double what it was the year before. "The market just cooled off," said Arash Amel, a research director with Screen Digest. "This wasn't caused by economic factors . . . the level of interest in digital downloads just isn't there."

Consumer confusion is believed to be a large factor in cooling demand. Different avenues provide movie downloads with completely different limitations. "Digital downloading is characterised by its restrictions - it's all about what viewers can't do, rather than what they can do," added Mr Amel.

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The Federal Constitutional Court in Germany has overturned a controversial law that retained communication data between citizens for anti-terrorism purposes. The court called the law a "grave intrusion" of citizen's privacy in its decision. The ruling is a blow to Chancellor Angela Merkel's government, which was displeased with it.

The Court said that the law needed to be revised, and that it did not correctly balance privacy rights for German citizens with measures to protect them from harm. Under the law, communication data by e-mail or phone was retained for possible use by law enforcement agencies, but the content of the communication wasn't itself retained.

Nearly 35,000 Germans had appealed to the court to overturn the law that stemmed from a Europe-wide data retention plan formed under the UK's EU Presidency term. Just the previous year, London had been the target of several terrorist attacks.

"The disputed instructions neither provided a sufficient level of data security, nor sufficiently limited the possible uses of the data," the court said, adding that "such retention represents an especially grave intrusion."

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, the country's top security figure, expressed disappointment at the court's decision. "It would be inappropriate to criticize a ruling by the constitutional court, but I have to say that it does not instill happiness," he told reporters.

Spanish police have arrested men behind a 13 million-strong botnet used to spew spam around the world. All three men arrested were Spanish citizens, and none had any significant hacking skills. Over 13 million computers in 190 countries were believed to have been compromised in this case, with half of the Fortune 1000 companies and 40 major banks in some way affected.

The botnet was rendered inactive in December 2009 following action by the FBI, the Spanish Guardia Civil and security experts around the world. One of the three individuals gave investigators the break the needed when he inadvertently logged into the network without disguising his IP address. He was arrested in early February, and the other two arrests followed later in the month.

"This is very alarming because it proves how sophisticated and effective malware distribution software has become, empowering relatively unskilled cyber criminals to inflict major damage and financial loss," said Panda Security senior research adviser Pedro Bustamante.

Personal and sensitive information was harvested from the network by the three men, one of which had 800,000 pieces of personal data on his computer. The group made money by renting out use of the botnet to cyber-criminals that would use it to send out huge amounts of spam to Internet users.

Nokia Corp. announced on Monday that Skype for the Symbian platform has been released. This makes Skype available for 200 million smartphone users worldwide. Skype for Symbian will allow Nokia smartphone users worldwide to use Skype on the move, over either a WiFi or mobile data connection (GPRS, EDGE, 3G). It is now downloadable for free from the Ovi Store, Nokia's one-stop shop for mobile content.

Skype for Symbian will run on any Nokia smartphone using Symbian^1, the latest version of the Symbian platform. Skype will soon introduce this client to Symbian mobile devices from other manufacturers, including Sony Ericsson.

Using the new Skype app for Symbian enables smartphone users to:

• Make free Skype-to-Skype calls to other Skype users anywhere in the world
• Save money on calls and texts (SMS) to phones abroad
• Send and receive instant messages to and from individuals or groups
• Share pictures, videos and other files
• Receive calls to their existing online number
• See when Skype contacts are online and available to call or IM
• Easily import names and numbers from the phone's address book

"Symbian enables us to bring smartphones to more and more people and ensures scale for our solutions and compelling services, such as Skype. We're seeing around 1.5 million downloads a day on Ovi Store now and believe that the Skype client for Nokia smartphones will have wide appeal to Symbian users," said Jo Harlow, Senior Vice President for Smartphones, Nokia.

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The European Commission has cleared the proposed merger of Orange and T-Mobile in the UK, a deal that would create the largest mobile operator in the United Kingdom. The Commission cleared the merger after Orange and T-Mobile agreed to make changes to ensure competition in the market and to give up some of the wireless spectrum that would be allocated to the new company.

"I am happy that we managed to resolve the competition issues in this case quickly in close cooperation with the Member State concerned," European Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said in a statement. The Commission had raised concerns about the merger, in particular what effect it would have on 3UK, owned by Hong Kong-based conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa.

"With the merger... there will be only four players in the UK, hence the concerns about the fate of 3UK," it said," the commission said.

"In order to address the competition concerns... the parties concluded a revised agreement with 3UK which will secure its position as a competitive force on the market. The Commission concluded that the commitments offered by the parties remedy the identified competition concerns."

Sony is still working on a fix for a suspected bug in the clock functionality of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console that caused a variety of errors and problems for PS3 and PSN gamers since last night. The bug only appears to affect the "fat" older version of the PS3, but not the newer slim models.

Sony has advised users of the non-slim models to leave their consoles off until a bug fix is available, saying that certain functionality might be affected by errors, and a risk of not being able to restore certain data. The PlayStation-maker listed the following problems are being reported by users.

• The date of the PS3 system may be re-set to Jan 1, 2000.
• When the user tries to sign in to the PlayStation Network, the following message appears on the screen; "An error has occurred. You have been signed out of PlayStation Network (8001050F)".
• When the user tries to launch a game, the following error message appears on the screen and the trophy data may disappear; "Failed to install trophies. Please exit your game."
• When the user tries to set the time and date of the system via the Internet, the following message appears on the screen; "The current date and time could not be obtained. (8001050F)"
• Users are not able to play back certain rental video downloaded from the PlayStation Store before the expiration date.

"We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, if you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data." said the company.

Some gamers who have tried to play popular PS3 titles today might have had a nasty shock. Thousands of users are being prompted with an error - "8001050F – Hardware failure. Cannot update Firmware or connect to Internet" - and report not being able to connect to the PlayStation Network (PSN), play certain titles offline, access or play downloaded PSN content and more.

The fault is being blamed on a bug with the consoles clock or calendar which oddly set the date back to Dec 31, 1999 for many users in the switchover from February to March. Sony is well aware of the issue and made a statement earlier. "We have found out that some users are experiencing a network connection failure when signing on to PlayStation Network," the PlayStation maker said.

"We are currently looking in to the issue to identify the cause of this network connection failure and will update further information as necessary on the PlayStation blog and official website. We appreciate your understanding and continued support."

The problem only seems to affect users of older "fat" PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles, while owners of the Slim PS3 models reportedly have no problems so far.

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The BBC Trust has revealed to The Register that it will not investigate a move by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that resulted in open source software being unable to play content from the iPlayer service. The BBC blocked out open source implementations of the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) streaming content from the iPlayer service through the use of SWF Verification.

"The decision to block open source plugins is a matter for BBC Management. The Trust has not received any complaints on this issue and has no plans to look into it further at present," a BBC Trust spokeswoman told The Register.

Adobe has effectively made it impossible for develops to create a fully-compatible open source Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) client. RTMP is used by Flash for streaming video, and it is publicly documented, but Adobe has guarded the RTMP content protection measures. SWF Verification is a security measure that can lock out an unauthorized client from multimedia content.

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In 2007, Universal Music Group made a stir when it forced YouTube to remove a video of a toddler dancing to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy." YouTube complied with the video removal, leaving mother Stephanie Lenz shocked and angry. Lenz teamed up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to prove that the use of the song in the video constituted fair use.

Lenz and the EFF decided to bring the issue to a judge where they wanted a declaration that the video was "fair use" and was protected under current copyright laws in the United States, and Lenz also sought damages against Universal for the "meritless takedown request". Disputed takedown requests are the subjects of many a rant on YouTube from regular users. In cases, DMCA takedowns have been issued against users as a way to silence them.

Universal didn't want to back down without a fight, saying that Lenz had bad faith and unclean hands in pursuing damages. Unfortunately for Universal, a California district court judge has rejected Universal's assertions and granted partial summary judgment to Lenz. The decision paves the way for Lenz to collect attorneys fees.

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Microsoft Corp. has begun offering alternative web browsers to users of its Internet Explorer browser in Europe. Delivered via Windows Update, Windows XP, Vista and 7 users will be prompted to make an "important choice" on what software they want to use to browse the web. The move is part of a settlement with the European Commission.

Users of the mentioned operating systems that have already chosen something other than Internet Explorer as a default browser will not be prompted to make a selection. For users with Automatic Updates switched on, the screen should appear within the next few days without any user intervention. If Automatic Updates are turned off, the download can be gotten from Microsoft's Windows Update site itself.

The full list of Web Browsers on offer:

• Avant
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Flock
• Green Browser
• Internet Explorer
• K-meleon
• Maxthon
• Opera
• Safari
• Sleipnir
• Slim

And here is what to expect to see.

Introduction Screen

When the first screen displays, it will also install a shortcut to the Desktop in case the user would prefer to check it later. In Windows 7, it automatically unpins Internet Explorer from the taskbar. If the user selects any other browser, or even opts to stay with Internet Explorer, then it will have to be pinned to the taskbar manually again. This is done easily by locating an Internet Explorer shortcut in the Start Menu or Desktop, right-clicking on it and clicking "pin this program to taskbar".

Selection Screen

The second screen provides the user with a selection of web browsers to choose from. In accordance with the agreement between Microsoft and the European Commission, the browsers will appear in random order. Additional browsers can be viewed by scrolling to the right. The screen provides three options; "Install" to install the selected browser, "Tell Me More" to get more information about a specific browser (provided by the vendor of the browser) and "Select Later" to make a decision at a later time.