In a few short years, users can expect to make telephone calls for free, with no per-minute charges, as part of a package of services through which carriers make money on advertising or transaction fees, eBay’s chief executive said on Wednesday.

Seeking to justify eBay’s $4 billion purchase last week of Web-based communications phenomenon Skype Technologies, Meg Whitman countered criticism by a financial analyst during the company’s quarterly conference call by agreeing with some of his points.

“The percentage of users that you can actually charge for (phone services) will actually go down, so I actually agree with that and we understood that when we looked at Skype,” Whitman said in responding to the analyst’s question.

“In the end, the price that anyone can provide for voice transmission on the ‘Net will trend toward zero,” eBay’s top executive said.

Source: Reuters

Internet pirates with prerelease movies in their shared folders will face stiffer federal penalties starting Monday.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission on Wednesday approved an emergency set of rules that would boost prison sentences by roughly 40 percent for people convicted of peer-to-peer infringement of copyright works “being prepared for commercial distribution.”

The changes also say judges may “estimate” the number of files shared for purposes of determining the appropriate fine and sentence. Larger numbers typically yield longer sentences.

This week’s sentencing adjustments arose from a law that President Bush signed in April called the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. It gave the commission 180 days to revisit its rules to make them “sufficiently stringent to deter, and adequately reflect the nature of, intellectual property rights crimes.”

Source: News.com

A man who ran an Internet file-sharing hub where computer users could swap movie, music and software files was sentenced Thursday to three years probation and ordered to use the computer only for personal use.

Jed Frederick Kobles, 34, pleaded guilty in August to a single felony count of conspiracy to commit grand theft. He is the first person in California to be convicted on state charges for illegal file sharing, prosecutors said.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David Horowitz knocked down Kobles’ crime from a felony to a misdemeanor and suspended a 180-day jail sentence. Kobles also will appear in an anti-piracy ad for the film industry to be shown in theaters, Deputy District Attorney Jeffrey McGrath said.

Source: AP

Microsoft Corp. has quietly backported one of the security improvements slated for the new Internet Explorer 7 browser into IE 6.0, but the giveaway comes with a small catch.

The Microsoft Phishing Filter, which is being embedded into IE 7, will now be available in IE 6 but only via an add-on to the MSN Search Toolbar.

A free 1.3MB download of the anti-phishing add-on is now available in beta form for IE 6/MSN Search Toolbar users running Windows XP SP2 (Service Pack 2).

Samantha McManus, a business strategy manager at Microsoft, said the toolbar add-on uses the same back-end technology as the phishing protection built into IE 7.

Source: eWeek

Skype released a toolbar for the open source browser, Firefox. The Skype Web Toolbar lets you combine Skype with your web browser. It recognises phone numbers and Skype Names on web pages so you can call them with one click, through Skype.

You can also use the Skype Web Toolbar to: Call and chat to your existing contacts, change your online status, see how much Skype Credit you have left and automatically send a contact a link to the web page you’re viewing

Amazon.com wants you to use its search engine more frequently. With the heated search engine war, Amazon wants to establish itself as a major player in this hot market.

Amazon now came out with a promotion to A9 users. You can save an additional 1.57% (π/2%) on virtually all your purchases at Amazon.com by simply becoming a regular user of A9.com search engine. Once you use A9.com for a few days you will automatically be eligible for the A9 Instant Reward. Just make sure that you are recognized by name (You need to be logged on to Amazon) when you use A9.com, and your Instant Reward will be applied automatically at checkout whether you use the Shopping Cart or 1-Click ordering.

If your A9 Instant Reward is Active the Amazon.com logo will change, letting you know that you are eligible for the 1.57% (π/2%) Instant Reward.

While Amazon are not revealing the exact criteria to be eligible for this reward the say it is minimal, and you should get it with only few queries a week.

Netflix Inc. will postpone a test launch of its online movie download service indefinitely because of problems obtaining licensing agreements from Hollywood studios, Chief Executive Reed Hastings told analysts on a conference call on Wednesday.

Source: Reuters

Shanghai police are investigating an online ad offering babies for sale on the Chinese subsidiary of auction Web site eBay, the company said Thursday.

The ad was deleted shortly after it was placed Sunday and relevant information has been turned over to investigators, a spokesman for the Eachnet Web site said.

“We took measures as soon as we received complaints from customers,” said the spokesman, who gave only his surname, Tang. “Then we called the police and now they are investigating.”

Media reports said the ad offered baby boys for 28,000 yuan ($3,500) and girls for 13,000 yuan ($1,600), reflecting the traditional Chinese preference for males. It promised to deliver infants within 100 days of birth.

Source: AP

OpenOffice.org today released the much anticipated OpenOffice.org 2.0.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 is the productivity suite that individuals, governments, and corporations around the world have been expecting for the last two years. Easy to use and fluidly interoperable with every major office suite, OpenOffice.org 2.0 realises the potential of open source.

With new features, advanced XML capabilities and native support for the OASIS Standard OpenDocument format, OpenOffice.org 2.0 gives users around the globe the tools to be engaged and productive members of their society.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 is the first open source office suite to offer thorough support for the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) OASIS Standard. OpenDocument is an XML file format that was developed by OASIS, the international body for the development and ratification of e-Business standards. The OpenDocument format can be used by any office application without fear of vendor specific lock-in or onerous licensing terms and fees, with the confidence that documents can be viewed, edited and printed for generations to come.or generations to come.

The suite now also offers a database module, Base, to complement the word processor (Writer), spreadsheet manager (Calc), presentation manager (Impress) and drawing tool (Draw) modules. These give all users the tools they need to be productive in the modern world. Free for all, OpenOffice.org offers everyone the enduring freedoms to use, study, improve and share the software. Users can download it for free from the Project’s Web site.

That was the question many asked when Intel reported in its third-quarter earnings Tuesday that it would pay a $300 million charge to settle a lawsuit with MicroUnity, an eight-employee company in Santa Clara, Calif.

The deal, which brought an end to a patent-infringement suit filed by MicroUnity in March 2004, was the first some had heard of the company, which specializes in media processors.

In its suit, MicroUnity alleged that Intel had infringed on its patents with its use of extensions for multimedia and application threading, a process that lets a chip perform two tasks at once.

The settlement underlines the trend for small companies to seek revenue through patent lawsuits. In recent years, for example, Intel spent $675 million to put an end to a similar action by Intergraph. In MicroUnity’s case, the deal illustrates how legal action can revive the promise of a once-hot company.

Source: News.com

E Ink, a U.S.-based developer of electronic-paper type flat-panel displays, has developed a color version of its screen technology and is showing it at the FPD International exhibition that opened Wednesday in Japan.

The main difference is the addition of a color filter. The prototype on display in Yokohama is a 6-inch display with 400-by-300-pixel resolution. That works out to 83 pixels per inch, which is half that of the commercial screen used in the Sony e-book reader.

Source: PCWorld

In the face of competition from security suite vendors, Kerio Technologies will pull the plug on its popular desktop firewall product at the end of this year.

Kerio will stop offering its Kerio Personal Firewall product as of Dec. 31 but will continue to support existing customers until the end of next year, said James Gudeli, vice president of strategic business relations at the Santa Clara, Calif., company.

The Kerio Personal Firewall is available in a free and paid version, which for $45 adds such features as intrusion detection, remote administration and Web filtering. The software has been downloaded more than 2 million times since it became available in March 2002, the company said.

Kerio is pulling out of the desktop firewall space because it can’t compete with security suites that bundle a firewall with antivirus and spyware-fighting software, the company said. Such products are sold by companies including Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro and Zone Labs.

Source: News.com