A lawsuit filed in Ontario Superior Court alleges that Dell notebooks suffer from design defects that cause premature failure of the motherboard due to overheating.

The suit, which seeks class-action status, was filed on behalf of an Ontario owner of an Inspiron PC, according to articles by the Canadian Press and the Associated Press. It claims that Dell knew or should have known of the defects but sold the notebooks anyway.

The suit applies to the 1100, 1150, 5100, 5150 or 5160 models of the Inspiron.

Source: The Register

AOL released an AIM 6 beta, the latest version of its instant messaging application, for free downloading on Friday.

AIM 6.1.3.1 is compatible with Microsoft Windows Vista but can also be downloaded to Windows 2000 or XP.

Source: News.com

Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy the 550 square metre principality of Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a ‘micronation’.

The group has set up a campaign to raise money to buy the self-declared sovereign nation. Outside the jurisdiction of the UK or any other country, The Pirate Bays believes it could safely run the world’s largest ‘bit torrent tracker’.

Sealand’s royal family, Prince Roy and Princess Joan Bates and their son Prince Michael, Prince Regent, who set up the principality 40 years ago, are willing to sell the platform for £65m.

“If we do not get enough money required to buy the micronation of Sealand, we will try to buy another small island somwhere and claim it as our own country (prices start from $50,000),” the Swedish organisation says.

Source: The Register

Apple is putting out a call for engineers to join its ranks in an effort beef up its iPhone.

The hybrid hardware maker is looking to expand its work force, as it seeks to push its iPhone out the door by June. Beyond its hunt for computer geeks and hipster iPod project managers, Apple is listing jobs for a number of software and hardware engineers, as well as quality control testers, for its recently debuted iPhone.

The company is looking to add 33 positions to its iPhone ranks, ranging from electronic engineers to an engineering project manager for its camera feature to a telephony embedded software engineer to develop more middleware features to add to its library.

Source: News.com

Canon Inc. said on Friday it will buy out Toshiba Corp. in their flat-panel display venture to resolve a patent dispute with Nano-Proprietary Inc. in the United States.

Canon will now own the unit that was set up in 2004 to develop a new type of thin panels that can be used in TVs to challenge consumer electronics giants such as Samsung Electronics and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd.

The move is aimed at appeasing Texas-based Nano-Proprietary, which filed a lawsuit claiming that its 1999 agreement to license technology to Canon did not extend to Toshiba. Toshiba has a 50 percent stake in the joint venture, called SED Ltd.

But it may also pose a bigger risk for the future of Canon, the world’s top maker of copiers and digital cameras, which has been hoping the new display business will become a major profit driver as it expects cooling demand and price declines in its existing core products.

Source: Reuters

AOL signed Napster Inc. as its exclusive online music subscription service, the companies said on Friday, sending Napster’s shares higher.

Napster, which is considering putting itself on the auction block, said it will replace the online service’s AOL Music Now, which has about 350,000 paying subscribers.

Source: Reuters

Camero, a company out of Israel that has developed a camera that can “see” things through solid walls, has raised $14 million, bringing the total is has raised to $20 million.

The investment comes about four months after it showed off a prototype of the Xaver800 and began to sell systems to customers. Investors include Greylock Partners, Motorola Ventures and Walden.

The Xaver800 doesn’t technically capture images directly. Instead, it issues ultrawideband signals and the data harvested is then used to create 3D models of things the signals bounced off of. The trick is that the camera can capture the signals in cluttered environments or through solid objects. Researchers at U.S. universities are working on similar projects.

The camera is only sold to military and police agencies.

Source: News.com