Earlier this week we reported that Verizon was suspending the Internet service of alleged illegal file sharers.

This afternoon, Verizon has denied the claims, saying that the original Cnet article misquoted a spokesperson.

Spokeswoman Bobbi Henson says that although the company does reserve the right to kick pirates off the Internet, they have not done so yet.

"I'm not aware that we've ever terminated anyone's account for excessive consumption, although we reserve the right to do so," added Henson. "That part of the CNET story is wrong. I did not say 'we've cut people off'; I said we reserve the right to do so."

Henson adds that the warnings have worked well "in reducing instances of repeat notices and has not resulted in the termination of any Verizon customer's service."

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Motorola has announced that it has opened its own app store in China for Android phones, giving users a chance to download apps for their phones despite Google's decision to pull out of the nation.

The store, called Zhi-Jian-Yuan (Shop4Apps), will be available on February 14th, the Chinese New Year, for Android users in China.

"I see Google and Android as two separate things," said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst for Gartner. "China has always been a key market for Motorola and unless forced to, I doubt they will walk away from it."

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According to new reports, Electronic Arts is already working on games for the upcoming Apple Tablet, and that Apple entrusted the company to create games that would highlight the tablet's "gaming capabilities."

The tablet is expected to be unveiled, after years of hype, on January 27th at an Apple event.

All reports have the device as a 10.1-inch multi-touch capable tablet, with an included e-book reader, as well as Wi-Fi, 3G, TV, and gaming capabilities.

Although consumers have made it clear they will not pay more than $700 for the device, many analysts believe the expensive tablet will weigh in at $999.

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According to the latest official blog, YouTube has now released an experimental version of an HTML5-supported player, giving users their "number one request" for new updates.

To join the beta, Google links to this page, as long as you have an HTML5-supportive browser: http://www.youtube.com/html5

The full post:

A while ago, YouTube launched a simple demo of an HTML5-based video player. Recently, we published a blog post on our pre-spring cleaning effort and your number one request was that YouTube do more with HTML5. Today, we're introducing an experimental version of an HTML5-supported player.

HTML5 is a new web standard that is gaining popularity rapidly and adds many new features to your web experience. Most notably for YouTube users, HTML5 includes support for video and audio playback. This means that users with an HTML5 compatible browser, and support for the proper audio and video codecs can watch a video without needing to download a browser plugin.

Our support for HTML5 is an early experiment, and there are some limitations. HTML5 on YouTube doesn't support videos with ads, captions, or annotations and it requires a browser that supports both the video tag and h.264 encoded video (currently that means Chrome, Safari, and ChromeFrame on Internet Explorer). We will be expanding the capabilities of the player in the future, so get ready for new and improved versions in the months to come.

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Responding to complaints, Xbox group product manager Aaron Greenberg has said that the company does not want to mislead consumers with MS Points and will be looking to display actual currency prices next to the MS Points for all content.

"We never intended to mislead people," Greenberg said, via G4. "We want to be transparent about it, and so it is something that we're looking at."

"How can we be more transparent and let people see it in actual dollars? You've got to think that we have one service that we're offering around the world. The nice thing about Points is that no matter if you're on the JPY or the EUR or the USD – something that's 200 Points is 200 Points everywhere around the world. There's more technical complexities to being able to put local prices in. You have to do that for every product in every country and you then have to deal with currency fluctuations. So there's some challenges to that, but we absolutely did it with the Games On Demand, response has been good and absolutely it's something we're looking at doing," he concluded.

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Kinney Lee Malone, son of former popular Mississippi bluesman Junior Kimbrough and the record label Fat Possum Records have decided to dismiss a copyright lawsuit filed in 2008, where Malone was seeking about $1 million and royalties.

U.S. District judge W. Allen Pepper said this week the case was closed as both sides agreed to dismiss it.

It is unclear whether there was any financial settlement between the two parties.

Kimbrough died in 1998 and had a few hit songs in his life. Malone sued FPR claiming they were using the songs without permission and were not paying royalties.

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PreCentral has compared the older Palm Pre smartphone with the new Palm Pre Plus and it appears that the new handset, which features double the RAM and storage space, can run up to 50 apps simultaneously, whereas the original starts to hurt at around 13.

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According to a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, children ages 8-18 spend about nine and a half hours "glued" to screens, including TV, computers, MP3 players and phones.

The study, dubbed "Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds," showed that kids are spending more time with media then sleeping. It appears that it may be affecting their school work as well.

"While most of the young people in the study got good grades, 47 percent of the heaviest media users -- those who consumed at least 16 hours a day -- had mostly Cs or lower, compared with 23 percent of those who typically consumed media three hours a day or less," says the study.

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Ericsson and 3 Scandinavia have unveiled plans to roll-out a worlds-first 84Mbps HSPA+ wireless network. The initial rollout will cover Denmark and four Swedish cities. HSPA+ networks that currently operate in Canada, for example, offer speeds of up to 21Mbps depending on conditions. In the United States, T-Mobile recently announced a similar planned network.

Real-world tests of the 21Mbps networks show the services achieving around 7Mbps speed. If a similar performance could be applied to the new Ericsson/3 network, it could result in speeds of roughly 28Mbps at realistic distances and network load. Of course, that is just speculation and the performance of such a high-speed network under heavy demand and in a variety of conditions could be much different than predicted.

Regardless, the availability of such a high-speed network will be good news for the near-future, especially for those in rural areas of some countries where broadband outside of a mobile network is impossible. Ericsson and 3 will also deploy 900MHz 3G networks in Sweden in a bid to boost coverage in remote areas, as existing higher frequency networks have left some users with poor performance.

The high-speed services will hit Denmark and areas of Sweden this winter if all goes to plan.

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U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged Beijing to investigate the sophisticated hack of Google services during a wide-ranging speech about Internet freedoms and rights. Clinton brought up the issue of some governments attempt to erect "electronic walls" to block access to information to their Internet users. "Countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century." she said.

She acknowledged that China and the U.S. had differing opinions on the matter, and said they would,"address those differences candidly and consistently." Clinton named China, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Egypt and Vietnam as countries where there has recently been a spike in the threats to the "free flow of information". "They have expunged words, names and phrases from search engine results," Clinton said. "They have violated the privacy of citizens who engage in nonviolent political speech."

Earlier on Thursday, a Chinese government official insisted that the Google hack issue should not effect relations between the United States and China. "The Google case should not be linked with relations between the two governments and countries; otherwise, it's an over-interpretation," the Xinhua News Agency reported Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei as saying.

After making several comments about the potential economic impact to countries that engage in blocking political or commercial speech, Clinton then specifically mentioned the Google situation. "We look to Chinese authorities to conduct a thorough review of the cyber intrusions that led Google to make its announcement," she said, referring to Google's threat to leave China.

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The secrecy over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) currently being negotiated by countries from across the world has hit elected MPs in the UK, who cannot get access to any ACTA documents. Junior business minister David Lammy said documents related to ACTA will not be put in the House of Commons library, due to the desire for other countries to keep the negotiations secret.

"Although I am sympathetic to the view that ACTA negotiations should be more transparent and I have instructed my officials to press for more transparency, we are not in a position to place the drafts held by my Department in the Library," Lammy said. "Disclosure of any documents without the agreement of all our ACTA negotiating partners would damage the United Kingdom's international relations."

He continued: "This would harm our ability to protect, promote and secure an outcome in the UK's interest, and the premature release of documents that are not agreed and not fully developed may also have a negative effect on the Government's reputation."

The European Commission, which is also involved in the negotiations, said that ACTA will not go any further than current EU policies for the enforcement of intellectual property rights, and dismissed claims that ACTA will leave to border searches of iPods and other gadgets in case they contain pirated multimedia content.

"EU customs, frequently confronted with traffics of drugs, weapons or people, do neither have the time nor the legal basis to look for a couple of pirated songs on an iPod music player or laptop computer, and there is no intention to change this," the Commission said. Measures in ACTA that involve border security would deal with the trade of counterfeit products instead.

In December, EuroISPA, a trade association for Internet Service Providers, warned that ACTA could be used to force a policy of "graduated response" to deal with illegal file sharing. Graduated response means basically that offending users will be warned a number of times before being suspended from the ISP if the illegal file sharing persists.

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The European Commission has approved Oracle's bid for hardware and software vendor Sun Microsystems. The Commission granted Oracle an unconditional approval to take over Sun Microsystems, in a deal worth €5.17 billion ($7.75 billion), after previously being concerned about the proposition.

The takeover of Sun, which developers the popular Java programming language amongst other products, was approved the U.S. Department of Justice in July.

"I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalise important assets and create new and innovative products," EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said.

Sun Microsystems shareholders had also given their blessing to the buyout. Following concessions by Oracle last month, such as the extension of the terms and conditions of existing commercial licenses for up to five years, the EU Commission came to the conclusion that the deal would not have a negative impact on the market within Europe.

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Nokia Corp. has dealt something of a blow to navigation players including TomTom and Garmin by announcing plans to release a new version of Ovi Maps that includes high-end walk and drive navigation at no extra cost to the user. The move, which could potentially double the size of the mobile navigation market, will bring high-end car and pedestrian navigation features to Nokia smartphones, such as turn by turn voice instructions for 74 countries in 46 different languages.

The Nokia move is probably a response to Google's move to offer free navigation on Motorola's Droid smartphones in the North American market. Nokia's decision to offer the services for free will help it to stay firmly on top of the Smartphone market that it leads, where it has lost some group to Apple and RIM.

"Why have multiple devices that work that work in only one country or region? Put it all together, make it free, make it global and you almost double the potential size of the mobile navigation market," explained Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President, Nokia.

"Nokia is the only company with a mobile navigation service for both drivers and pedestrians that works across the world. Unlike the legacy car navigation manufacturers, we don't make you buy maps for different countries or regions even if you're only visiting for a few days. We offer both navigation and maps free of charge, with all the high-end functionality and features that people now expect."

Research firm Canalys reports the number of people worldwide using GPS navigation on their mobile phones at about 27 million, as of the end of 2009. Nokia's announcement could potentially rapidly grow this figure to around 50 million, depending on the number of users that exploit the offer. Additionally, Nokia will continue to add more smartphones to the compatible devices list.

"This is a game changing move. By leveraging our NAVTEQ acquisition, and our context sensitive service offering, we can now put a complete navigation system in the palm of your hand, wherever in the world you are, whenever you need it - and at no extra cost," continued Anssi Vanjoki.

"By adding cameras at no extra cost to our phones we quickly became the biggest camera manufacturer in the world. The aim of the new Ovi Maps is to enable us to do the same for navigation."

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Verizon Communications has confirmed to CNET that it has suspended the accounts of several file sharers suspected of sharing copyrighted content illegally. The ISP is known for issuing warnings to its customers when they are found to be sharing illegally, but until this confirmation it was unclear whether Verizon would suspend a customers. "We've cut some people off," Verizon Online spokeswoman Bobbi Henson told CNET.

"We do reserve the right to discontinue service. But we don't throttle bandwidth like Comcast was doing. Verizon does not have bandwidth caps." At the end of 2008, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced that it would cease filing lawsuits against individual users and had instead come to an agreement with several major Internet Service Providers in the U.S. to take another approach.

The approach would start with a warning to an offending user. If the user persisted then the warnings would get stronger, until a point where the ISP would determine a suspension was in line. It has been over a year since the RIAA made these claims, and still no ISP has officially acknowledged any support for the RIAA's plan.

Henson told CNET that the number of users who have been cut off is very small, instead noting that the warning letters seem to be having the intended effect on customers. "We've found that we don't have to warn most people a second time," Henson said. "Most people stop. Or they tell whoever is doing it to stop." Many customers who receive warnings were unaware that such activity was taking place in the first place, particularly parents with teenagers.

Verizon does not gather information on its customers itself, instead it gets reports from industry investigators that include an offenders' IP address. The company does not disclose any private information of the customer without a court order.

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Mozilla Corp. is set to release Firefox 3.6 later today, coming just a couple of days after Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate 2 was made available for download. The newer version makes dozens of fixes over the previous Firefox 3.5 versions. The updated browser will have better add-on support, with a new page to check all user plug-ins, alert when an update is available and then link to download it. This should help users to maintain security and performance of the browser.

According to a Mozilla video, which showcases some of the changes in Firefox 3.6 (below), the new browser version is now 20 percent faster than Firefox 3.5, which itself had dramatically increased speed over older versions of the software. HTML 5 is also more integrated in Firefox 3.6. Also added is support for Firefox Personas, a user-friendly way to change the entire theme of the Firefox browser.

Check out the Mozilla video on Firefox 3.6.



Download Firefox 3.6 from: http://www.afterdawn.com/software/network_software/web_browsers/firefox.cfm

(For MAC) (For Linux)

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