“Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects,” wrote Google senior vice president of operations Urs Hoelzle in a statement. “The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began.”

Wave’s full potential remains unrealized, and the path to transcending e-mail remains elusive. Breaking down the barriers between e-mail, instant messaging, and microblogging is a non-trivial task, one that will require a more incremental approach. Despite the fact that Wave has failed to gain enough traction to justify further development, the project and its innovative underlying concepts have already had an impact on how developers think about messaging technologies.

Full Story — ars technica

A few days after announcing that Windows XP SP2 would no longer be supported, Microsoft on Monday announced the availability of a beta version of its Service Pack 1 update to Windows 7.

Intended for business computing professionals, the single update package simultaneously addresses Windows Server 2008 R2, which uses the same core code base as Windows 7. Microsoft made the announcement on the first day of its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington D.C.

Microsoft had discussed the coming service pack back in March at the company’s Desktop Virtualization Hour event, but no release date was divulged at that time. Then just last month at Tech Ed 2010 Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s president of Server and Tools Division, announced that the public beta of the service pack would appear in July, without getting more specific.

According to Microsoft’s TechNet site targeting IT professionals, “This early release of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta is not available for home users. The SP1 Beta does not provide new end-user features, and installation is not supported by Microsoft.” In fact, as has mostly been the case with recent Windows service packs, this first Windows 7 update is made up of previous fixes already delivered through Windows Update.

Full Story — PCMag.com

“Star Wars” creator George Lucas wants to force a laser company to stop making a new, high-powered product he says looks too much like the famous lightsaber from his classic sci-fi series.

Lucasfilm Ltd. has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Hong Kong-based Wicked Lasers, threatening legal action if it doesn’t change its Pro Arctic Laser series or stop selling it altogether.

“It is apparent from the design of the Pro Arctic Laser that it was intended to resemble the hilts of our lightsaber swords, which are protected by copyright … ,” said the letter, dated last month and provided to CNN by Wicked Lasers.

The letter calls the company’s newest laser “a highly dangerous product with the potential to cause blindness, burns and other damage to people and/or property.”

Steve Liu, CEO of Wicked Lasers, said his 7-year-old company has been selling similar lasers for years and has never compared the product to the Jedi weapon wielded by Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader and others in the “Star Wars” franchise.

“Most people feel it’s kind of ridiculous …,” he said. “We would never use any comparison like that to ‘Star Wars’ or a lightsaber or anything like that.”

He called the $199 gadget’s design fairly typical for a handheld laser and said it isn’t a copy of the lightsaber.

Full Story — CNN

While the device has some lightsaber shape and design characteristics, lightsabers came in so many designs.  According to Star Wars lore, each jedi created their own lightsaber. Also, the lightsabers used in the movies looked much like current pieces of science fiction and characteristics taken from sword hilts.  I’m no lawyer but I will be curious to see how this turns out. That said, I want one!  Anyone feel free to send me one to test, play with, show off to other geek friends. : )

Click here to view the embedded video.

Romanian iPhone developer Alexandru Brie was among the first to wonder how Thuat Nguyen’s Vietnamese-language comic books had come to occupy 41 of the top 50 spots in the App Store’s paid books category (in the process, booting Brie’s own app from its usual top-20 perch). In a blog post, Brie put together such evidence as Nguyen’s poor showing in the store’s Vietnamese categories and multiple reviews of his titles alleging fraud to suggest one explanation:

The issue is that it seems people’s iTunes accounts have been hacked, with mass purchases of one developer’s apps being made using their accounts.

Other sites picked up the news and added details; for instance, Apple Insider passed on a tip from a reader about a Chinese cottage industry in iTunes Store account hacking.

Tuesday morning, Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller e-mailed that Apple had resolved the situation:

The developer Thuat Nguyen and his apps were removed from the App Store for violating the developer Program License Agreement, including fraudulent purchase patterns.

Muller added that developers, fraudulent or otherwise, “do not receive any iTunes confidential customer data” when somebody downloads one of their apps. She suggested that anybody who sees fraudulent purchases on their iTunes account should have their credit card issuer cancel the stolen number and issue a chargeback for the unauthorized purchases.

Full Story ~ Washington Post

Another suspected suicide has occurred at a factory in China, the latest in a string of deaths at the plant this year, state media reports.

Xinhua said the male employee jumped to his death hours after a media tour at the plant owned by Taiwan firm Foxconn.

The firm manufactures mobile phones and electronic equipment for top brands including Dell computers and Apple.

If confirmed, the death would be the twelfth attempted suicide at the plant – two people have survived such falls.

The plant employs more than 400,000 people.

One man was also reported to have killed himself at another Foxconn plant in Hebei province earlier this year.

Apple has said it is “saddened and upset” by the recent string of suicides.

Full Story ~ BBC News

Microsoft on Tuesday announced it is replacing top executives at its gaming and mobile devices division, which has stumbled in the smartphone and tablet computer markets.

Robbie Bach, 48, will retire by year’s end from his post as president of the Entertainment and Devices Division.

Entertainment devices chief technology officer James “J” Allard will also leave Microsoft, becoming a strategic adviser to chief executive Steve Ballmer.

Don Mattrick will remain head of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business and Andy Lees will stay in charge of the Mobile Communications Business but both men will report directly to Ballmer as of July 1.

“I’ve been so fortunate to spend more than two decades of my life working with incredible people and doing amazing things like launching Office, Xbox and Xbox Live, the ‘Halo’ franchise, Windows Phones, Zune and more,” said Bach.

Full Story ~ AFP

For a company whose unofficial slogan is “Don’t Be Evil,” Google has been ignoring its so-called core value with alarming frequency as of late. And because of that, I decided to delete my Gmail account, along with all other Google services that I am able to do without. I have also deleted as much personal information as possible from my Google profile.

I still need to use some Google services–I have clients who share a couple of documents via Google Docs, I need to access one private blog on Blogger, and I will continue to use Google search (though I plan on exploring alternatives, such as Bing and Yahoo). But for the most part, I’m dropping Google wherever I can.

It was a combination of recent incidents that drove me to this point. One was the introduction of Google Buzz, which, in some cases, disclosed contact information that users thought was private. When Google launched Buzz, its “social networking tool,” the company didn’t let users opt into the program, but automatically applied it to all of the millions of users of the company’s free Gmail. Google quickly backtracked, but it is not clear whether the “turn off Buzz” link at the bottom of Gmail pages truly purges the links that Google created.

Full Story ~ PC World

As the online search giant Google has completed its acquisition of video compression outfit On2 Technologies the company was recommended by the Free Software Foundation to release On2′s latest codec under an irrevocable free license and use it to replace Adobe Flash on YouTube.

“With your purchase of On2, you now own both the world’s largest video site (YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec: VP8,” reads a open letter to Google, posted to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) blogs.

“Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube? You can end the web’s dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash).”

Full Story ~ Ecommerce Journal

Google released Buzz last week as a better way to manage the growing deluge of social networking information, but privacy concerns have caused quite a fallout. First, numerous complaints online caused Google to quickly change some features. Then came a complaint to the FTC from the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Now Google is facing a class-action lawsuit filed this week in federal court in California, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Eva Hibnick, a resident of Florida, though the suit seeks to include all 31.2 million Gmail users as potential plaintiffs. Buzz was rolled out to most, if not all, Gmail users last week. In at least some cases the feature was automatically activated, and generated publicly accessible lists of followers gleaned from users’ Gmail accounts and Gtalk conversations. There is real concern that sensitive information related to some contacts could have been exposed.

Google made numerous changes last weekend in an attempt to make it easier to opt out of the service and make contact lists private. It also dropped the automatic following features, replacing it with a list of suggested contacts. Buzz won’t automatically connect and use public data from Picasa and Google Reader without a user explicitly activating the connecting, either.

Full Story ~ ars technica

According to Computerworld, a class action lawsuit has been served upon the Lower Merion School District, based in Ardmore, Pa. It declares that the school district has taken on surveillance methods of which a sex video store owner or that nice Stasi man in the movie “The Lives of Others” would have been proud.

What is alleged to have occurred is that the parents of student Blake Robbins received word in November from an official at Harriton High School that their son has been involved in “improper behavior in his home.”

(Credit: CC Sergis Blog/Flickr)

The story, you see, heads in a direction somewhere east of disturbing. The Robbins family says an assistant principal at Harriton High, Lindy Matsko, confirmed that the school district “in fact has the ability to remotely activate the Webcam contained in a student’s personal laptop computer issued by the school district at any time it chose, and to view and capture whatever images were in front of the Webcam.”

Update, 3:46 p.m. PST: Lower Merion School District has issued a statement regarding the allegations on its Web site.

It says the remote-activation Webcam system has been deactivated, effective immediately. It further states that the feature was enabled only “to track lost, stolen, and missing laptops.”

While declaring that the system was only able to take “a still image of the operator and the operator’s screen,” the School District says it “has not used the tracking feature or Webcam for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever.”

The school district says it is continuing to review the matter.

Full Story ~ cnet news