Telecommunications companies in Brazil began blocking access to YouTube on Monday after a Brazilian model sued to get the popular video sharing service to remove footage of her having sex from its Web site.

Last week, a court in Sao Paulo state ordered phone companies that provide Internet service in Brazil to block YouTube until it removed the video.

Daniela Cicarelli, a model and ex-wife of soccer star Ronaldo, and her boyfriend, Renato Malzoni Filho, sued YouTube and demanded $116,00 in damages for each day the video, which apparently showed them having sex on a Spanish beach, remained on the Web site.

Brasil Telecom said it had blocked Brazilians from seeing the YouTube site. The sex video had been the most widely viewed in Latin America’s biggest country for days.

Source: AP

A team of AJAX experts is working on a new capability to enable Web applications to work offline.

Brad Neuberg, a San Francisco-based software architect and programmer, said that he, along with the support of some developers at SitePen, of Palo Alto, Calif., is working on the Dojo Offline Toolkit, a small, cross-platform, generic download that allows Web applications to work offline. The tool kit is based on the popular Dojo Toolkit, an Asynchronous JavaScript and XML development system maintained by the Dojo Foundation. Major companies such as IBM and Sun Microsystems are members of the Dojo Foundation.

“I had been prototyping and playing with some ideas around bringing true offline access to Web applications in a simple, generic way,” Neuberg said.

To accomplish his goals, Neuberg said he will be working for the next three months “on bringing the Dojo Offline Toolkit from the drawing board to reality.”

The tool kit will be an open-source library that brings true, offline access to Web applications, where “users will be able to access their Web applications and work with their data even if no network connection is available, just like desktop applications,” Neuberg said.

Dojo Offline Toolkit will use a simple, small Web proxy that runs locally. The proxy will cache files that need to cached for later access without hitting the network, Neuberg said.

In addition, to enable the browser to talk to the local Web proxy, the new tool kit will use a standard technology known as PAC (Proxy AutoConfiguration). A PAC file is a small bit of JavaScript that is invoked on each browser request.

With the Dojo Offline Toolkit, the Web browser does not know if the user is online or offline, since the proxy serves up the user interface either way, Neuberg said.

The last step of the process is to wrap the Dojo Offline Toolkit into a small installer for each target platform and to have it start up silently on system startup, Neuberg said.

Source: eWeek

Sony Electronics is looking at ways to bring flat-panel TVs based around organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer and Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow said in an interview.

“It is not as far off as you might think,” Glasgow said. “Perhaps next year.”

Sony has managed to make large OLED screens. At the Consumer Electronics Show here, Sony is showing off a 27-inch OLED panel, along with other small OLED screens.

Still, a lot of work remains, and both executives emphasized that Sony is not announcing products or a definitive commitment to OLED TVs. The company, for instance, has to figure out how to mass-manufacture them at a price consumers are willing to pay. SED, a TV format promoted by Toshiba, has been delayed several times, and critics say that when it comes out, Toshiba will have challenges making SED competitive in price with plasma or LCD.

Source: News.com

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Monday, SanDisk unveiled the Sansa View, a video and music player it expects to start selling this quarter for $299.

The gadget has 8 gigabytes of memory - tiny compared to Apple’s heftiest 80-gig iPod - with space for an additional memory card. It works with recent versions of Windows Media Player, and can download music from various services, including Rhapsody and Yahoo Inc.’s Yahoo Music.

The entire gadget, including speakers and a replaceable battery, is less than an inch thick.

Milpitas, Calif.-based SanDisk also said it will start selling two new music players in March, the Sansa Connect and the lightweight Sansa Express.

The Connect can use a Wi-Fi connection to access music services on the Web - including streaming radio - instead of relying on transfers from a PC. The 4-gigabyte model, which will retail for $249.99, also allows the user to connect to the Web to seek out and share music recommendations.

Source: AP

TiVo Inc. and Comcast Corp. on Monday unveiled the long-awaited fruits of an agreement to work together: A cable box that runs TiVo’s digital-video-recorder software.

The collaboration between the largest U.S. cable operator and TiVo was announced to great fanfare in March 2005 and has been considered one of the most significant deals for the DVR pioneer. TiVo has been facing tough competition against a growing number of less expensive DVRs from cable and satellite TV operators, including Comcast.

Soon, for an additional fee, Comcast subscribers will be able to add TiVo DVR features to their existing set-top boxes without a visit from a technician, Comcast said. The actual launch plans were unclear, but the companies said they have been testing the service since late 2006.

Source: AP

Linden Lab, creator of 3D virtual world Second Life, is releasing the code of its Viewer application to the open source software development community. Developers can now access the source code to the Second Life end-user software in order to make modifications, enhancements and to add new features. The move marks Linden Lab’s continued commitment to building the Second Life Grid as an open, extensible platform for development, rather than a closed proprietary system.

Netgear may be hoping to steal some of Apple Computer’s thunder by introducing on Sunday an appliance that lets users play Internet and other digital content on their TVs.

Apple is rumored to be planning to announce this week at the Macworld Conference and Expo a set-top box, potentially called iTV, that would let users play video from their computers on their TVs.

Netgear’s Digital Entertainer HD, introduced at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, discovers content on a variety of PCs, servers and storage devices in a user’s home and can play that content, including video in high definition format, on a user’s TV.

Customers can also use the Digital Entertainer HD to access and play content, including streaming video, direct from the Internet.

Netgear said that it is the first to deliver YouTube content direct to the TV. “We access YouTube through YouTube [application programming interfaces] directly to their servers,�? said Michael Spilo, vice president of engineering for Netgear. Netgear executives would not comment further on the relationship between the companies but hinted that they might make a further announcement about a partnership in the future.

Source: Yahoo

If your provider of Internet connectivity has a strict monthly limit on bandwidth usage, you could be forced to turn the channel on the new peer-to-peer TV streaming offering planned by the founders of the Skype Internet telephone service.

The beta video stream service, known as The Venice Project, is a bandwidth blockbuster, consuming an average 320MB of downloaded and 105MB of uploaded traffic for an hour’s worth of TV viewing. The service aims to distribute TV and other video content over the Web instead of conventional terrestrial, satellite or cable channels.

The 105MB per hour upload rate is almost equivalent to 256Kbps, double the upload speed currently offered by many DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) services in Europe.

In documentation provided to beta testers, The Venice Project team warns that the service “will exhaust a 1GB cap in 10 hours” and explains how they can exit the application to ensure it doesn’t continue running once they’ve stopped watching.

A typical video stream in TV quality consumes about 70GB per hour, a spokeswoman for The Venice Project confirmed in an e-mail. To lower users’ bandwidth requirements, The Venice Project is testing a new compressing technique but nevertheless points out that users will need to ensure that they have an upper limit on their monthly Internet usage, according to the spokeswoman.

Source: Yahoo

TiVo Inc. in partnership with Roxio, announced today the highly anticipated availability of TiVoToGo for the Macintosh platform. Through Toast 8 Titanium, Roxio’s TiVo subscribers with broadband connected TiVo Series2 DVRs will now be able to transfer their recorded shows to watch on their Mac, burn to a DVD, and enjoy on portable devices such as iPod or PSP.

Roxio is the official provider of TiVoToGo for the Mac through Toast 8 Titanium, the standard for Mac disc burning. Toast 8 makes it easy to transfer shows from your TiVo DVR to your Mac, either one episode at a time or automatically as soon as the TiVo DVR has recorded them. Extending the TiVoToGo experience further, Toast 8 allows users to view shows on the Mac in windowed or full-screen mode, archive their programs to CD, DVD or Blu-ray Disc, burn programs to standard DVD, or enjoy on an iPod or PSP or other mobile devices.

Kicking off the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas with a bang, Microsoft Corp. today unveiled revolutionary games, technologies and partner support for the first-class gaming platform, Windows Vista.

CES attendees will get hands-on experience with 15 of the hottest Games for Windows titles, including some of the first games to deliver stunning graphics and gameplay through Microsoft DirectX 10 that will challenge any game for superiority in visual fidelity: “Crysis(TM)” (EA Partners/Crytek) and “Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures” (Eidos Interactive Ltd./Funcom).

Gamers will also experience “Shadowrun(TM)” from Microsoft Game Studios, the first of many titles that will bring the Live games and entertainment network on Windows Vista for true cross-platform gameplay.