Yahoo on Thursday said that it was discontinuing its Yahoo Plus service, a bundle of offerings including a broadband-optimized portal, extra storage for mail, photos and other data, premium video content, ad-free radio and online security services. The service, which cost $5.95 a month or $47.40 a year, will be discontinued beginning April 23, the company said in an e-mail sent to customers Wednesday.

Source: News.com

Developers at OpenBSD have admitted that the organization is running at a loss and want to increase annual income to continue funding the development of the project’s open-source operating system.

“OpenBSD for the past two years has turned a loss of approximately $20,000 (12,000 pounds),” Marco Peereboom, an OpenBSD developer, wrote in the OpenBSD Journal on Tuesday. “This is starting to seriously impede the development of OpenBSD and OpenSSH.”

OpenBSD is a secure Unix-like operating system that is popular among system administrators running firewalls.

Theo de Raadt, the founder and lead developer of OpenBSD, confirmed the loss figures to ZDNet UK and said the project currently has an income of around $100,000 (60,000 pounds), half of which comes from donations, with the other half coming from product sales.

Source: News.com

Search Web site Congoo.com was set to launch on Tuesday a free beta service that will let people search for and among articles in newspapers, magazines and other periodicals that typically charge for access. The Congoo NetPass downloadable toolbar works with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or the Firefox browser.

It lets users access premium content from participating publishers without having a subscription or having to fill out registration forms. Users are allowed access between four and 15 articles per month per publisher. Publishers include Financial Times, Institutional Investor, Morningstar, TheStreet.com, BusinessWire, PRNewswire, Adweek, Editor & Publisher, The Hollywood Reporter, The New Republic, Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer and others.

Source: News.com

Apple appears more likely to pull out of France than bow to government pressures to open iTunes.

In addition to Apple’s tough stance against proposed legislation that would require all downloadable music to be interoperable, there are other factors on Apple’s side as the company battles legislators in France.

Jan Dawson, research director for Ovum Enterprise Services in Boston, said that the French show more resistance to having their markets dominated by foreign companies, especially those based in the United States, than in most other European nations. Since it is even more unlikely the momentum to open iTunes would ever reach the United States, he said Apple would likely just leave the French market if the bill is signed into law.

Source: InformationWeek

David M. Kauchak, 32, a former Machesney Park resident, is the first person in Winnebago County to be charged with remotely accessing another computer system without the owner’s approval. He pleaded guilty Tuesday to the charge and was fined $250 and sentenced to one year of court supervision.

Kauchak was arrested in January in Loves Park when local authorities learned he was accessing the Internet through a nonprofit agency’s computer.

Wartowski said a Loves Park police officer was on patrol in the wee hours of the morning when he saw Kauchak sitting in a car with a computer.

Source: rrstar.com

A post in BoingBoing tells a story about a user who use Yahoo Publisher Network, a beta program through which Yahoo provides text ads in much the same way that Google does. A couple of days ago Yahoo sent him a notice stating they’d revised their Publisher Policy. Item ‘11.l’ stated that I will not “display all or part of the Ad Unit to any user located outside the US”. In other words, he can’t allow users outside of the United States to view his pages if there is a Yahoo ad on the page!

Yahoo rep on their Publisher Support line, said the publisher could block either the ads or the pages, but said over and over again that they “couldn’t and wouldn’t” give me any information on how to accomplish such a task. The rep finally told him that he should just firewall or block off “everything but the US” to keep the Yahoo ads from being seen by anyone outside the US.

US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez backed angry protests by Apple Computer over a new French law that would throw open Apple’s popular online music store to competitors.

Speaking on the CNBC network, Gutierrez said he needed to make further study of the copyright law passed by the French parliament’s lower house this week.

“But any time something like this happens, any time that we believe that intellectual property rights are being violated, we need to speak up and in this case, the company is taking the initiative,” he said.

Source: AFP

Sony Computer Entertainment’s PlayStation 2 adventure “Shadow of the Colossus” was the recipient of five top honors including Best Game at the 6th annual Game Developers Choice Awards. The ceremony, produced and hosted by the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and presented by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), is the only peer-based, open nomination awards program in the industry where honors are bestowed to developers by developers. Recipients were announced last night at the 2006 Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Jose.

“Developers fuel the creative engine that propels the gaming industry forward and it is of paramount importance to recognize their hard work producing brilliant games,” said Jason Della Rocca, executive director, IGDA.

Microsoft Corp. announced a broad reorganization Thursday of the unit that produces its flagship Windows operating system, two days after the company said the new consumer version of Windows would not be ready for the holiday season as planned.

The company said a reorganized Platforms and Services division will be made up of eight new and existing groups, including the Windows and Windows Live Group, led by Steven Sinofsky, who currently heads development of company’s Office business software system.

Other groups will focus on core operating system, online business products, and the servers and software tools businesses.

Source: AP

The US Internet search engine Yahoo has made a deal with the television network CBS to put the popular news program “60 Minutes” online, the companies announced.

“This deal with Yahoo will bring the rich storytelling of television’s number one news magazine to a new and younger audience while offering loyal viewers extended features and content online,” said Sean McManus, president of CBS News and Sports.

Yahoo will preview the service on Sunday with presentation of a “60 Minutes” interview with golf star Tiger Woods, according to the Sunnyvale, California-based company.

Source: AFP

Google released the first public beta of its Google Pages service Wednesday, allowing users who signed up for the service in January and February to begin creating personal websites using an easy-to-use, browser-based tool. The service gives each user 100 MB of free storage space on Google’s servers.

To use the Google “Page Creator” tool, users must have an existing Google account. However, only those who signed up early (in January and February) to use Google Pages have access to the current beta. No new signups are being accepted at this time, Google said. The company is expected to open Page Creator to more widespread use over the next few weeks.

Source: desktoplinux

Microsoft Corp. plans to revamp its blogging service MSN Spaces under the new Windows Live brand in the summer.

The upcoming “more powerful version of MSN Spaces,” called Windows Live Spaces, was announced on the Spaces homepage.

The company said it would unveil the new version in the summer, and also posted a help wanted ad. Microsoft is looking for developers in AJAX and DHTML, technologies used in developing interactive user interfaces for Web applications.

Source: InformationWeek