Google updated Gmail’s web interface. The new interface includes slicker borders for the message and has a drop down menu on each of the messages in the conversation for easy navigation.

Another option is the integration of Google Calendar in Gmail. Now you can create a calendar event directly from your email.

A British court jailed a man on Thursday who wrested control of the computers of girls as young as 13 in order to blackmail them for his sexual gratification.

The Inner London Crown Court sentenced 36-year-old Adrian Ringland from the northern English town of Ilkeston to 10 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to blackmail, indecency with a child and grooming, a term used to describe methods paedophiles use to befriend their victims.

Ringland would pretend to be a teenage boy in Internet chat rooms in order to lure young girls into conversation, said Jenny Hopkins of the Crown Prosecution Service.

Then he would raid their computers for embarrassing material he could use to blackmail them into posing for indecent photos.

Source: Reuters

Yahoo is planning to embed instant messaging into its Web-based e-mail program within the next few months so that people can have live chats in Yahoo Mail, even if they don’t have an instant-messaging application installed, a Yahoo executive announced on Thursday.

Source: News.com

Game maker Blizzard Entertainment announced Thursday that its hotly anticipated expansion pack for the online role playing game World of Warcraft, The Burning Crusade, will hit store shelves on Jan. 16, 2007. It will cost $39.99 for the standard version or $69.99 for a special Collector’s Edition. The expansion pack will ship on hybrid media that supports Mac
OS X and Windows alike.

The Burning Crusade adds on to the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG), which has been supported for both Mac OS X and Windows from the start. The game puts you in the role of a hero representing one of several races that populate the war-torn fantasy world of Azeroth, the setting of all previous Warcraft games. You join other players online as you go on quests, obtain treasure and items, gain experience and fight monsters. You can work collaboratively with other players, and you can also fight them if you wish.

Source: Yahoo

Consumer and communications chip supplier Broadcom Corp. Thurs. (Nov. 9) introduced what the company labeled the first single-chip solution to support both Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD standards.

Broadcom (Irvine, Calif.) originally introduced a high-definition (HD) audio/video decoder chip supporting both formats in January. But the company’s latest device, BCM7440, integrates significantly more functionality, according to the company, including a pair of MIPS cores, a multi-stream HD video decoder, dedicated graphics engines, DSP-based audio processors, a security processor, DDR2 interfaces, integrated video and audio outputs and an array of system and network connectivity interfaces.

The device supports all decoding, processing and memory functions of both specifications and offers a universal optical disk software stack that is compliant with both Blu-ray and HD-DVD, Broadcom said. The chip supports all profiles of both specifications and includes application programming interface support and full navigation suites, according to the company.

Source: EETimes

A draft study commissioned by the Australian Attorney General’s office finds that the music and software industries attributes sales losses to piracy without any evidence to back their claims, The Australian reports.

According to a draft report by the Australian Institute of Criminology, the music industry can’t explain how it arrives at its statistics for staggering losses through piracy. The Business Software Association’s claim of $361m per year in lost sales is “unverified and epistemologically unreliable”, the report says.

“Of greatest concern is the potentially unqualified use of these statistics in courts of law,” the authors observe.

Source: The Register

Microsoft Corp. will pay Novell Inc. $240 million upfront for subscription certificates for Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server product, Novell said in a statement late Tuesday.

Microsoft may sell, reuse or distribute the certificates under an alliance between the rival software companies.

Redmond-based Microsoft will dedicate an additional $60 million over five years to market ways for Microsoft’s Windows products and Novell’s Linux open-source products to work together, Novell said. It will spend another $34 million over five years on a sales force devoted primarily to marketing the offering.

Source: AP

Nine days until Sony’s PlayStation 3 launches in America, and lines are already forming. A CAG forumer went to Best Buy this morning and saw about 7 people waiting outside. He went inside and one of the workers told him that they had been there since Monday. He immediately pondered: “Do these people have no lives?�?

Source: videogamesblogger.com

Online search leader Google Inc. said Wednesday it is waiving the merchant processing fees for its 4-month-old payment service through Dec. 31, hoping the offer will spur more retailers to check it out.

Merchants already could avoid the processing fees, depending on how much they spend on Internet advertisements distributed by Google. The promotion is also available to merchants who don’t advertise through the Mountain View-based company.

The payment service, called “Checkout,” is designed to serve as an electronic wallet that enables consumers to buy products and services from a bazaar of merchants without repeatedly entering the same personal and financial information at each store.

Source: AP