Technology Info

A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco’s new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail, authorities said Monday.

Terry Childs, a 43-year-old computer network administrator who lives in Pittsburg, has been charged with four counts of computer tampering and is scheduled to be arraigned today.

Prosecutors say Childs, who works in the Department of Technology at a base salary of just over $126,000, tampered with the city’s new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials’ e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates’ bookings are stored.

Childs created a password that granted him exclusive access to the system, authorities said. He initially gave pass codes to police, but they didn’t work. When pressed, Childs refused to divulge the real code even when threatened with arrest, they said. (link)

Nokia Corp. is buying the consortium that makes the software for its phones and making it available for free to other manufacturers, in hopes of blunting the influence of competing software providers.

Nokia said Tuesday that it is offering to buy the 52 per cent of Britain’s Symbian Ltd. that it doesn’t already own for about US$410 million. Symbian’s software is the most widely used on high-end phones.

Nokia will then establish a foundation with handset makers Sony Ericsson and Motorola Inc. and Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo to make the software available royalty-free. They will combine their three different versions of the Symbian software for advanced, data-enabled phones into one open platform. (link)

Trying to pass legislation that impacts how games can be sold or what has to be put on them is a popular and expensive way of sending the message that you’re concerned about the issues that affect the youth of today. Although every law attempted has gone down in flames, and has cost taxpayers at least $1 million through the years, politicians continue to line up to give it a go. The newest bill is A11717, proposed by Assemblyman Joseph Lentol, and it has already passed through the New York State Assembly. Now it’s on to the State Senate. It’s a familiar story, but in this case the New York government is asking for things the industry is already doing.

The legislation would require game consoles to include parental locks for mature content but, while this sounds good on paper, every current-generation console already has parental controls. Not only that, but the ESRB has done a great job of getting the word out on how to use said controls. The bill also wants to force games to show their ESRB ratings on the cover of the title, which is also something that is done industry-wide. Every game sold at retail has the ESRB rating on the front cover, with more detailed information on what content the game includes on the back of the box. Given that industry compliance on showing the ratings on games is already at 100 percent, it’s unclear what the law would achieve. (link)

Nintendo is refusing to pay a 149.1 million euro fine slapped on its for allegedly price fixing.

European Union regulators fined the gaming giant in 2002 following on from allegations that Nintendo, and seven distributors had colluded to raise hardware and software prices between 1991 and 1998.

They were found guilty as charged and one of the biggest ever fines in EU competitions history levied against Nintendo.

But now the games console maker is fighting the fine.

“The penalty was unfair, illegal, even shocking”, Ian Forrester, representing Nintendo, told the European Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. (link)

The six major Hollywood studios have won a US$111 million judgment for copyright infringement against the shut-down file-sharing website TorrentSpy.com.

The judgment, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, fined the operators of the website, Valence Media LLC, $30,000 per violation for nearly 3,700 illegal movie and TV show downloads. The Motion Picture Association of America said the judgment sends a strong message to copyright violators.

The site shut down in March, saying the legal climate was too hostile to continue. (link)

Apple Japan Inc. and Sony Corp. have agreed to jointly pay about Y1.3 million to settle a damages suit filed by a Japanese couple who argued that the husband had suffered burns after their Apple personal computer caught fire due to its Sony-made battery, judicial sources said, according to Kyodo News Agency.

The three parties reached the settlement at the Osaka District Court April 2, the sources said.

On Monday, both Sony (SNE) and the Japan unit of Apple Inc. (AAPL) of the U.S. declined to comment on the settlement.

In the lawsuit filed in July 2007, the couple sought around Y2 million in compensation, arguing the notebook computer caught fire while the wife was using it at their home in Osaka Prefecture in April 2006. (news)

Data storage provider EMC Corp. said Tuesday it would acquire Iomega Corp. for $213 million, expanding EMC’s offerings targeting small businesses and consumers.

The price is a 20 percent increase over EMC’s initial bid of $178 million, or $3.25 per share. Iomega, a San Diego-based storage company best known for the Zip drive, had rejected that offer earlier this year, calling it inferior to a proposed all-stock transaction that Iomega had reached in December with a stockholder.

Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC came back with a $3.75-per-share offer totaling $206 million. Further talks led to Tuesday’s all-cash agreement at $3.85 per share, which is 5.8 percent higher than Iomega’s Tuesday closing price of $3.64.

With Iomega’s acceptance of EMC’s bid, Iomega said it paid a termination fee of $7.5 million to the shareholders in the canceled deal. (link)

Iomega Corp., a data storage company best known for the Zip drive, said Monday it considers a revised $205.5 million takeover offer from EMC Corp. to be superior to a proposed all-stock transaction with a stockholder.

San Diego-based Iomega said EMC’s revision to its earlier, unsolicited offer would increase the offering price for Iomega’s 54.8 million outstanding shares to as high as $3.75 per share. An offer from EMC that Iomega disclosed a week ago proposed a price of $3.25 per share, or about $178.1 million.

While EMC’s offer is nonbinding, Iomega said its board “has determined that the revised acquisition proposal from EMC would reasonably constitute a superior proposal” to an agreement reached in December with other parties.

Under that deal, Iomega agreed to acquire China’s ExcelStor Group from a shareholder of the California company in an all-stock deal that would more than double the number of its outstanding shares.

Had that deal closed, Great Wall Technology Co. Ltd. — an Iomega shareholder and parent firm of ExcelStor — would have held a majority stake in Iomega, and ExcelStor would operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Iomega. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Iomega had considered EMC’s initial, lower offer inferior to the other transaction. (link)

The Dutch government has issued a warning about the security of access keys that are based on the widely used Mifare Classic RFID chip.

Government institutions plan to take “additional security measures to safeguard security, ” Guusje ter Horst, minister of interior affairs, wrote in a letter to parliament on Wednesday.

NXP developed the Mifare Classic RFID (radio frequency identification) chip, which is used in 2 million Dutch building access passes, said ter Horst. One billion passes with the technology have been distributed worldwide, making the security risk a global problem. A spokesperson for the ministry told Webwereld, an IDG affiliate, that it had not yet notified other countries.

The warning comes in a week when two research teams independently demonstrated hacks of the chip’s security algorithm. (link)

User-generated news site Digg has been working with influential investment bank Allen & Co. (the ones that recently got Slide a half billion dollar valuation) for a few months now, and pitching big tech and media companies on a sale.

And despite a number of false starts, this time a sale looks like it might actually happen, and soon. We hear from a source very close to the deal that four companies are in heavy due diligence with Digg - two media/news companies, and two big Internet companies - Google and Microsoft. And Google and Microsoft are on the verge of making their bids.

Digg is prepared to take less than the $300 million Allen & Co. were floating late last year. Google, our source says, will likely bid $200-$225 million, which Digg would likely accept. (link)