TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

Mozilla Labs has announced the availability of Geode, an experimental Firefox extension that brings location awareness to the popular open source browser. The purpose of Geode is to let websites figure out a person’s approximate geographic location – as long as you grant the software permission to access the information – and use it to provide personalized, localized content.

The location detection technology in the Geode extension is built on top of Skyhook's Loki platform, which attempts to determine the user’s location by comparing nearby Wi-Fi access points against a global reference database. Mozilla says that the new feature will be built directly into Firefox 3.1 when it's released.

Although this technology doesn't seem particularly interesting on the desktop, it could prove useful for mobile users as location aware web applications become more commonplace. You can download Geode from Mozilla, and test it with a demo web application called Food Finder.

Sony is attempting to one-up Apple with a new supply of music, offering tracks for their iTunes-competing Dada.net service at a price below what Apple offers. Sony will be offering songs at roughly 66 cents apiece, and sweetening the offer in the eyes of the consumer by providing the tracks without any DRM.

Dada claims that all music they sell will be offered as DRM-free in their entirety, making it simple to transfer them to any type of media player you choose. You wouldn't expect Sony to be a company that endorses or pushes DRM-absent media, regardless of the cost, but clearly something has changed in how big companies are seeing the market.

There are a few fine details that don't make the service quite the iTunes-killer they'd like people to think it is, such as the fact that the discounted price for music only applies to the first 15 songs acquired per month – beyond that, the costs rise. Still, the DRM advantage could be key.

The long-standing rivalry between Dish Network and TiVo may have come to a close. After dealing with numerous court battles that ended up in a nasty injunction, it seems Dish has finally agreed to shell out a sizable $104 million in damages over to TiVo.

The issue, which started with a patent infringement claim TiVo made about a DVR system that Dish pushed out, worried many customers that owned EchoStar-built DVRs. The concern was that Dish Network would recall them, which would be bad news all around. For the customers’ sake, Dish found a workaround and was able to implement it in time.

One of the biggest gripes in online movie distribution today is that most often releases are significantly delayed compared to DVDs. Not only is that annoying to those who subscribe to streaming movie services, but it is a huge incentive for pirates to rip movies and start distributing them online before an official release.

Warner Bros. apparently understands and wants to amend this, with some recent plans to start releasing movies online before the DVD itself hits the market. This sudden change in behavior won't be worldwide, initially deploying only in South Korea due to its high levels of piracy.

The company hopes to turn piracy around by offering movies in digital form before optical discs are available. Depending on what else they try to buddy-up on with the releases – such as DRM – this could be a huge success.

It's no secret that businesses who want to enter the Internet market in China have to sometimes do some unsavory things to comply with government regulations. Thus, it doesn’t really come as much of a surprise to learn that a surveillance system is being used to monitor and block Skype conversations. What’s more troubling, though, is that the company claims the practice was changed for a more aggressive one without their knowledge or consent.

Instead of just blocking certain text messages with sensitive words from reaching their destination, it appears that a joint venture between Skype and Chinese wireless carrier Tom Online was allowing authorities to monitor these conversations and store them on a web server. The logs include a treasure-trove of personal information, such as e-mail addresses, passwords, phone numbers, package tracking numbers and bank card numbers.

What’s worst, many of the captured messages contain words that are too common, suggesting that there may be other more specific criteria to determine whether a conversation should be captured by the system. Skype officials said to be “extremely concerned” over this situation and promised a fix soon.

A few weeks ago it was announced that retail chain Best Buy was entering the digital music market with a $121 million purchase of Napster. Napster has been struggling for quite some time, and Best Buy believed they could not only bail Napster out of its financial troubles but recover the company and compete with the likes of Apple and Amazon.

The amount of cash they offered for the company was substantial, and their only real hurdle in getting this accomplished was the FTC. After a relatively short investigation, the FTC has given approval of the deal as of today. Now it'll only be a matter of time before Napster becomes retail-chain owned.

Somehow I don't see how this will make the service any more appealing than it is now, or what advantage it would give them over other online music services. Best Buy must be awfully confident.

With Google ever increasing its share of the world search market, Microsoft is trying anything to get you to switch to Live Search. Earlier this year the company introduced its Cashback program, whereby it offers considerable discounts to consumers who search and buy products through their search engine. Now, building up on that idea, the software giant is launching a new rewards program.

Dubbed SearchPerks, Microsoft’s latest scheme gives users “tickets” for using Live Search that can later be redeemed for prizes – 25 tickets gets users a free music download, 500 gets them 1,000 free air miles on select airlines, and so on. All users need to do is download a small program which tracks their search queries in exchange for up to 25 tickets a day.

There are some caveats, though. The latest program doesn't just require one to use Microsoft's search engine, but also its Internet Explorer Browser – users of Firefox, Opera, Chrome or Safari are out of luck. The SearchPerks program is available until the end of the year or until 250,000 people sign up.

Yahoo is suffering today from both a security breach and some serious embarrassment after it was discovered that their Zimbra e-mail client was exposing sensitive data. The flaw was discovered during a recent Yahoo University hack day where a Canadian programmer noticed that passwords of Yahoo's email accounts were being sent in plain text format through the Zimbra client due to a Yahoo IMAP server not supporting SSL encryption.

Reportedly, Yahoo was notified of the problem, but the company didn't give any feedback as to whether or not they were addressing the problem. Zimbra, however, has said that they have already fixed the issue upstream, and the next release of the client will come with a fix built-in. The recommendation for Zimbra/Yahoo account holders is to change their passwords immediately and stop using Zimbra until the next release is available.

Sprint has officially launched its WiMAX broadband wireless network in Baltimore, marking the technology’s long-awaited debut. The service, dubbed XOHM, is based on the 802.16e standard and delivers download speeds of 2 Mbps to 4 Mbps with prices starting at about $25 a month.

That’s quite reasonable pricing, but customers will still need to outfit their PCs with WiMAX compatible gear. According to the company, users in Baltimore can begin accessing the network using XOHM-branded Samsung Express laptop air cards that cost $59.99 or a ZyXel modem that goes for $79.99. Sprint hopes to expand the service to Washington D.C. and Chicago before the end of the year and other major cities sometime in 2009.

A recently uncovered security flaw in Adobe’s flash video servers has left Amazon’s Video on Demand service (and presumably other similar services) vulnerable to piracy, with users being able to record or copy content streamed online without spending a dime. Reuters broke the story, and even demonstrated how to pull it off.

Apparently, Adobe sacrificed “a stringent security feature” that protects the connection between Adobe software and its players in order in increase download speeds. Although Amazon insists its movies can't be pirated, tests by Reuters suggest otherwise. Using video stream catching software, the news agency was able to circumvent the two minute preview for TV shows or films on Amazon’s video service and successfully downloaded their full content.

After a few weeks of speculation, MySpace Music finally launched today, offering users the opportunity to stream full songs for free, build playlists and buy DRM-free tracks from Amazon or ringtones from Jamster. The initiative is part of a joint venture with all four major music companies to counter iTunes and play a key role in the evolution of the music industry, which has suffered from declining CD sales and continued piracy.

Most of the revenue for MySpace Music will come from advertising. And since all four major music labels together own a 40 percent stake in the venture, they stand to gain financially if it attracts enough users. The site will also offer concert ticket purchases and other merchandise.

Music has traditionally been one of the strongest attractions of MySpace, but until now there were few ways for artists to sell their songs on the site. Whether or not this new effort will help the labels downplay Apple’s influence in the market is debatable, but at least they are launching with the potential to reach a very broad audience – there are 120 million unique users every month on MySpace.

Rumors about AOL and Yahoo merging earlier in the year seemed very plausible, but dried up as the friction between Microsoft and Google increased. Yahoo's talks with Microsoft went sour afterward, and the company was apparently dead set on not selling out to Redmond – at least not for the price offered.

All of this has come full circle, and now it appears that AOL and Yahoo are once again discussing a possible merger in the near future. Apparently, even with their stock suffering after the Microsoft fiasco, Yahoo feels confident enough to buy AOL from Time Warner and use it gain leverage in search.

If Yahoo acquires AOL, will it help them avoid being absorbed by a larger company in the future, perhaps with the added benefit of a Google partnership as well?

Chrome's initial user explosion had a lot to do with hype and newness. Or, at least, that's what you can infer as their explosive growth is now waning and users are returning to other browsers. Sites that track browsers noticed that in some areas Chrome swelled over 1% a mere day after release, an impressive feat.

That later stabled to a bit under 1%, and now has dipped down to 0.77%, almost the lowest since the browser was released. Some of the loss is being attributed to those who just wanted to test drive Chrome and are heading back to their regular browsers. More could be attributed to those who gave Chrome an honest try, but are waiting for additional functionality or bug fixing before they continue using it.

Google is already great at getting the word out for their software, so their primary goal now should be to make the browser suitable for everyday use.

Microsoft’s downloadable Windows Live tools all got an update last week and it looks like their online tools are next. According to the company, Hotmail is getting a major update in the coming few days, one that will increase the mail service’s speed as much as 70 percent on slower machines.

Hotmail will also "combine the current classic and full versions of the service” to allow consumers to view the body of an email without clicking into it – a la Microsoft Outlook. Other changes include stronger virus and spam-detection technology, more storage, and a bunch of catch-up features such as IM access directly from the inbox, auto-complete functionality in the “To” field of outgoing messages, and easier calendar sharing options.

Following Windows Live Hotmail, other tools such as Windows Live Skydrive, Windows Live Spaces, and so forth will also get updates in the coming weeks.

With the fight against DRM focusing so much on PCs, it is easy to forget that the sophisticated consoles of today are also susceptible to it, especially as they all look to provide access to online services. Those who use the PS3 to watch movies are finding out very quickly just how bad and frustrating DRM can be, discovering that Sony has been enforcing very restrictive rules on videos purchased through the Sony Video Store.

As it turns out, the movies can be downloaded only a single time. After that, you're out of luck. A single extra download can be achieved by contacting Sony directly, which they have the gall to call a “courtesy.” This means quite plainly that if you should upgrade the hard drive in your PS3, have the console replaced or need to temporarily make room on the unit, you're basically abandoning any “ownership” you had of those movies in the first place.

As the article states and many of us are aware, this is more evidence that the entertainment industry is not content letting you “buy” content – you may pay a “buy” price but you are renting it at best, all thanks to DRM.

Last month, the FCC officially ruled that Comcast acted unlawfully and dishonestly when they decided to throttle peer-to-peer traffic from applications such as BitTorrent. The giant Internet provider was then ordered to amend its network management and disclose any future plans on this matter.

While Comcast is currently appealing that ruling, they sill decided to come clean over the weekend, detailing how it targeted peer-to-peer traffic (despite repeatedly denying it) and unveiling their new “fair share” plan to ensure the equal distribution of bandwidth to all subscribers.

According to the company, their new method of managing traffic does not block applications and it is instead based on customer priority. In a nutshell, during high volume traffic periods, the software will determine which subscribers are using the most bandwidth and temporarily slow down their connections. Comcast says that, on average, less than 1 percent of its high speed Internet subscribers will be affected by this protocol-agnostic congestion management technique.

The aging but still very popular Usenet is finding itself to be less and less desired at the ISP end, with them slowly dropping support for the system. Just recently, Comcast, one of the world’s biggest ISPs has pulled the plug on their Usenet newsgroup service. This follows up changes they made earlier to restrict bandwidth consumption on newsgroups.

Advocates of newsgroups claim that ISPs shutting them down is a blow to privacy and anonymous discussion, among other things. Comcast customers can of course still use other newsgroup services, only their local servers have disappeared. AOL was one of the first big providers to offer Usenet access, and also one of the first to shut their servers down, in 2005.

Remember when Google used to be the underdog? Those days have long since passed. So far gone, in fact, that Google has been rated as one of the 10 most valuable brand names in the world. It is now sitting up there with huge brand names that go back decades or even over a century like Coca-Cola and IBM.

That's a very high place to be – it puts them above companies like Nintendo, Nokia, Apple and many others who have had tangible hardware for many years longer than Google has existed. That's a testament to how well Google has done and how much people have responded to what they offer. However, no more can Google truly be called a “rebel” company – they are a massive, worldwide entity, one that has made their kingdom on advertising.

The StumbleUpon plug-in, supported in a variety of browsers, doesn't seem to be pleasing its current owner, eBay. After paying around $75 million for it about a year and a half ago, it seems they are suffering buyer's remorse and are looking to sell the company that develops it.

The primary reason seems to be “stagnation” in the number of hits provided by StumbleUpon. This is despite the fact that adoption of the plug-in has continued at a steady rate, currently installed on an estimated 6 million browsers. That's quite a lot of people to have use your plug-in, though clearly eBay doesn't feel it was worth the $75 million they paid. They may end up selling it at a loss, or even rescinding the sale offer if it doesn't go as they hoped.

StumbleUpon made a huge leap about two years ago, when they first offered multi-browser support.

In what is a blow to anti-spam movements around the world (regardless of how ineffectual many are), the Virginia Supreme Court has declared that a state anti-spam law is unconstitutional. While not the same as the CAN-SPAM act, which affects every state, the Virginia courts found that the law was unconstitutional because it prohibited more than just commercial emailing, applying also to any unsolicited mass-mailers for any causes.

Why exactly anyone would want to find themselves on an unsolicited bulk mailing list I don't know. In this case, it seems that the law being struck down ended up setting free one of the world's biggest spammers. Nearly five years ago he was arrested and convicted, under the law which has now been rendered invalid. At this point it doesn't matter much, as all current spammers are pursued under the federal law.