Technology News

BRUSSELS - European Union antitrust regulators on Tuesday dropped a monopoly abuse probe into wireless chip maker Qualcomm Inc. after mobile phone companies withdrew complaints about high royalty fees.

HELSINKI - Nokia Corp. said Tuesday it is axing 220 jobs at research and development units in Japan as the world's largest mobile phone maker continues to cut costs.

STRASBOURG (AFP) - The European parliament approved Tuesday a major overhaul of EU telecoms law aimed at boosting the rights of European mobile phone and Internet users and protection against access restrictions.

Video games don't respect humanitarian laws, according to a study of virtual 'war crimes' in contemporary shooters like Modern Warfare 2 and Army of Two, and whose results, say researchers, are 'as deflating as reality'. Swiss human rights groups Pro Juventute and TRIAL ("track impunity always") chose to analyze video games and not literature or film, which they view as 'passive' mediums, compared with 'shooter games, [in which] the player has an active role in performing the actions'. What's more, says the report, games are used as military training tools and set during present-day conflicts, 'thus illustrating the realism these games have now achieved'.

On Black Friday, Nintendo is offering two limited edition Nintendo DSI Bundles that come with more than $20 in software value.

Of all the Mario Kart games, the best was probably the first, and now you can see why for 800 Wii Points, or about eight US dollars. We're talking the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) original here, born 17 years ago in 1992. It supported 1 to 2 players, packed eight playable Mario-verse characters, and offered three championship cups divvied into three distinct 'kart' classes.

NEW YORK - The struggling online video startup Joost, begun with much fanfare by the creators of Skype and Kazaa, has been sold to an online advertising company.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Adconion Media Group announced Tuesday it has acquired the assets of Joost, an online video portal from the founders of Skype that failed to live up to its pre-launch buzz.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - In its bid to make TV advertising more accountable -- and to sell more of it through its online auction service -- Google has teamed up with TiVo, the companies are set to announce Tuesday.

One of the most notorious U.S.-based spammers was sentenced to more than four years in jail on Monday for a scheme that used spam to manipulate stock prices in order to make a profit.

BOULDER, Colo. - A leading climate change scientist said hackers breaking into a university's computer server and then posting documents online show the nasty politics of global warming.

DETROIT - A federal judge has sentenced a suburban Detroit man described as one of the world's most prolific senders of spam e-mail to more than four years in prison for his role in a 2005 stock fraud scheme that netted him $2.7 million.

Apple's jumping into the battle that sees Verizon Wireless and AT&T flaming each other in advertisements, but unlike AT&T's recent effort to defend itself, Apple's new pair of iPhone ads are actually good.

On the heels of a judge's decision to allow Verizon to continue running commercials that attack AT&T's 3G network, Apple has a new an iPhone ad campaign that defends AT&T's capabilities.

In a battle between AT&T and Verizon Wireless that never seems to end, AT&T's partner Apple now appears to be getting into the mix with two retaliatory iPhone TV ad that air Monday night. The ads comes hot on the heels of AT&T's TV ad campaign that aimed to "set the record straight" around Verizon's "there's a map for that" campaign.

Will the market accept another netbook with a non-Microsoft operating system? That's the question some are asking in the wake of the release of the code behind Google's Chrome OS, which is known as the open-source Chromium OS.

Redmond turned red-faced upon learning that an automatically installed Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation plug-in for Firefox opened a major security hole. Following Microsoft's disclosure of the bug, Mozilla blocked the plug-in. According to Mozilla, Microsoft agreed with the move, even though it had released a patch to close the underlying flaw.

When Google unveiled its open source Chrome OS on Thursday, many commentators were quick to dismiss the new operating system as unimpressive and underwhelming.

WASHINGTON - The summer's trend of rising home prices is ebbing as the traditional home shopping season ends, two reports Tuesday showed.

WASHINGTON - A day after the recall of 2.1 million cribs linked to four suffocations, the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission conceded the agency "hasn't been acting as quickly as it should."

WASHINGTON - The economy is growing modestly, with consumers too wary about spending to invigorate the recovery.