Melissa Ferrington and Cheryl Schmidt of California have sued the Internet security company McAfee this week, claiming that subscribers were "duped" into purchasing third-party services. They also claim credit card information was passed on to other firms without consent.

The suit has the possibility to go class-action, and the women are asking for monetary damages.

Going into more detail, the women describe that after purchasing McAfee software, a pop-up emerges with a giant "Try It Now" button.

"The pop-up, mimicking the look of the other pages on the McAfee site, thanks the customer for purchasing McAfee software, and prompts McAfee's customers to click a red button to 'Try it Now'...The pop-up contains no obvious visual cues or conspicuous text indicating that it is an advertisement for another product, or that clicking on 'Try it Now' will lead not to the delivery of the McAfee product but rather to the purchase of a completely different product. Instead, all the visual cues suggest that 'Try It Now' is a necessary step in downloading the McAfee software," reads the suit.

If you "Try It Now," you agree to pay $5 to some company called Arpu, which specializes in "one-click" purchases through ads.

ComputerWorld uncovered McAfee's partnership with Apru on their site: "Whenever a McAfee customer completes a purchase on McAfee.com, an ad will appear for a related product or service. Interested customers can choose to subscribe to the product or service using the billing method just entered in their recent McAfee.com purchase.This convenience to the customer streamlines the purchase flow and increases the overall conversion rate."

Both Ferrington and Schmidt said they were charged for PerfectDisk Live online disk defragmentation service. "A single click on the deceptive pop-up causes the purchase of an unwanted product from Arpu, a sale made without the knowledge or authorization of customers, using credit/debit card billing information that they have entrusted solely to McAfee," reads the suit.

McAfee would not comment other to say "No Comment."

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Submitted last month, the Opera Mini 5 application has been accepted by Apple into the App Store, and is now available for free download.

There are over 50 million Opera Mini users globally and the Opera Mini app was initially rejected when it was submitted last year.

Opera Mini uses Opera's servers to render and compress pages, thus increasing speed for the end user, and also working around Apple's stringent rules.

The company says users of the iPhone over AT&T's slower 2G Edge data will definitely feel the "uptake in speed."

"We are delighted to offer iPhone and iPod touch users a great browsing experience with the Opera Mini App," added Lars Boilesen, CEO of Opera. "This app is another step toward Opera's goal of bringing the Web to more people in more places."

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Huawei of China has surfaced as the latest name in a growing list of possible buyers of the struggling smartphone maker Palm.

Palm has been in contact with Huawei since February, although talks have stalled of late.

Just yesterday, Palm confirmed it put itself up for sale, and the company has a handful of suitors already considering buying the smartphone pioneer.

The most notable names mentioned are rivals RIM, Lenovo and Dell, each of which have smartphones in the market.

Says one analyst: "I think its someone who is on the outside looking in to the U.S. smartphone market -- someone who wants to participate but isn't there currently -- a Huaweh or a Lenovo. It's those types that would be the best fit," reads an Avian Securities analyst Matthew Thornton note.

Smartphone sales are expected to continue growing, with a 38 percent rise year-on-year expected in 2010.

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According to new figures from Enterbrain, the Sony PlayStation 3 has now hit a new milestone in Japan, 5 million units sold.

The console launched in the nation in November 2006.

The figures also included the best selling games list, with Final Fantasy XIII becoming the biggest seller with 1.8 million copies sold. Metal Gear Solid 4 was a distant second, with 706,000 copies sold in the country.

According to VGChartz, the Wii is still the leader in Japan, with over 10 million units sold, but it appears the PS3 is trying to play catchup. The Xbox 360 has sold just over 1.28 million units.

Globally, the Wii is the dominant market share leader with over 70 million units sold. The Xbox 360 is in second with almost 40 million units sold, and the PS3 is in third with almost 34 million units.

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According to Wedbush Morgan gaming analyst Michael Pachter, Microsoft will likely launch a "slim" Xbox 360 later this year, one with a 250GB HDD, and one that will likely be bundled with a Project Natal motion controller.

The bundle will also sell for $299, a pretty significant discount considering the three pieces bundled.

Additionally, Pachter says Microsoft will do an across-the-board price slash on current Xbox 360 models by August, if Sony continues to show strong growth.

"At a minimum, we anticipate the introduction of a more feature-packed Xbox 360 as the standard SKU in late 2010 (likely with a 250GB hard drive) at the same $299 price point, and think that Microsoft will cut price before the fall only if it begins to lose significant market share to Sony," says Pachter, via GI.Biz.

"It is far more likely that we will see a slim version of the Xbox 360 with a 250 GB hard drive and with Project Natal bundled into the box while maintaining the $299 price point, especially if Sony does not lower the price of the PS3 by the time Natal and Sony's Move controllers launch in the fall," Pachter continues.

In March, rumors began surfacing that a Slim Xbox 360 might be in the works, when Microsoft opened up a new job for "motherboard engineer" for their gaming division.

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Last week, Apple showed off the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0, which includes multitasking, notable UI improvements, a social gaming network, and the opening of the iAd mobile advertising network.

Notably missing from the supported hardware list for iPhone OS 4.0? The original iPhone 2G.

Macstories is reporting that CEO Steve Jobs has confirmed this fact, responding to an email asking about future support with the blunt answer: "Sorry, no."

In addition to dropping support for the iPhone 2G completely, first and second generation iPod Touches, as well as iPhone 3G (missing the 'S') will not be able to work new features of the 4.0 OS, including multitasking.

Pic of the email exchange:

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In late 2006, Texas-based Anascape filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and Nintendo for allegedly infringing a number of controller-related technology patents.

12 patents filed by Brad Armstrong were added in the claim including US Patent 5,999,084, granted in 1999 which covers a "sensor having a housing" and a depressible actuator in a "resilient dome cap," appearing to cover pressure-sensitive controller buttons. Patents 6,102,802, 6,135,886, 6,343,991, 6,351,205, 6,400,303, and 6,208,271 all basically cover the concept of controllers that include analog pressure-sensitive buttons. At the time, the company also claimed that the following patents had been violated: 6,906,700 (3D Controller with Vibration), 6,344,791 (Variable Sensor with Tactile Feedback), 6,347,997 (Analog Controls Housed with Electronic Displays) and 6,222,525 (Image Controller with Sheet Connected Sensors).

In May of 2008, a federal jury ruled in favor of Anascape, announcing that Nintendo will have to pay the company $21 million USD for infringing patents while designing controllers for the Wii and Gamecube consoles.

Today, almost two years later, Nintendo has won their patent appeal over Anascape, and it appears for the time being, sales of the Wii "Wavebird" and Gamecube controllers will not be banned in the U.S., as Anascape was asking for.

Microsoft settled with Anascape in 2008.

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As we predicted last year, it appears Google is preparing to turn On2's VP8 video standard into an open source project.

The purchase of On2 by Google, which was finalized earlier this year, is part of a larger campaign by Google to include open source, and therefore royalty free, standards in HTML5. As you can see from ChromeOS, Google's web browser-based netbook OS, they are clearly focused completely on web-based computing and even traditional applications using web technology.

NewTeeVee is reporting that Google will make their plans for VP8 official at a developer's conference next month.

This development is part of an ongoing debate between web browser developers about what video format(s) should be supported by HTML5's <video> tag. Supporters of the two leading candidates, H.264 (aka MPEG-4 AVC) and OGG Theora (aka VP3), primarily disagree about royalty models.

Apple and Microsoft favor including H.264 as the standard format for the <video> tag. Although there are royalties collected by the MPEG Licensing Authority (MPEG LA), they have been waived for web browsers until at least 2016.

H.264 has the advantage of being a standard already in use on a wide variety of devices, including computers, mobile phones, Blu-ray players and portable media players like the iPod. It's also widely used for web video already.

Theora, on the other hand, was originally commercially licensed by On2, but later released as an open source project. Although it's been around longer than H.264, it's not widely used.

Google has a significant impact on web video through their ownership of YouTube. YouTube primarily uses Adobe Flash for video delivery but is also experimenting with HTML5.

Flash uses On2's older (and commercially licensed) VP6 codec and also supports H.264. YouTube's HTML5 video is exclusively in H.264 format right now.

There's no reason to assume Apple or Microsoft will suddenly throw their support behind VP8 any time soon. But if VP8 is superior to H.264, as some people claim, it could still have a future.

The most important question may be whether VP8 offers anything to consumers that H.264 doesn't.

The average consumer doesn't care whether browser developers use open source software or not. They care whether it's more or less convenient to view pages and consume content.

It's hard to see how Google could hope to make an immediate impact with VP8, but that might not be their strategy at all. They might instead be hoping for a success similar to Matroska.

Although Matroska started out as a somewhat redundant multimedia container, it came into its own when developers and end users couldn't do what they wanted with commercial tools and industry standard formats.

Its support for Dolby Digital audio with H.264 video in the MKV container suited consumer needs better than re-encoding all audio to AAC for use in MP4 files. Matroska's adoption as a standard format for saving TV captures was probably the most important factor in finally getting consumer electronics support.

And like Matroska, unless someone comes up with a "killer app" for VP8 it may be relegated to being little more than curiosity for the average consumer.

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