The Valentine’s Day breakup of two North Carolina college students that featured singers, hundreds of spectators and a profanity-laced tirade was a hoax after all.

Ryan Burke confessed Monday that the confrontation, which became an instant hit on YouTube.com, was all a stunt to show the power of Internet communities and the amount of money that companies make from them. The pair weren’t even dating.

The fake breakup garnered plenty of attention, including more than 747,000 hits on YouTube, where users post video online, and local and national media coverage.

Source: AP

Internet giant Google plans to open its first Southeast Asia research and development centre in Singapore.

The company chose Singapore because of its “very vibrant” info-communications and technology environment, Tuesday’s edition of ‘The Straits Times’ quoted Richard Kimber, Google’s Southeast Asia managing director of sales and operations, as saying.

Source: Yahoo

In a reversal of the trend of distributing branded TV programming to the Internet, Comedy Central is bringing original Web programming to late-night television viewers, the cable network said Monday.

Dubbed “Web Shows,” the half-hour weekly series, which will air at 2 a.m. ET/PT and premiere Monday, will include a mix of animation, live-action narrative and comedy programming from Comedy Central’s Web site, Motherload. The network has ordered six episodes.

The programming block will also feature the AtomFilms webisode “The Punk Group: Fat Girls on Bicycles,” marking the first collaboration between the network and the short-film Web destination that its MTV Networks parent acquired in August.

Source: Reuters

Ning, the latest startup of Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, is looking to get a jump ahead of MySpace and Facebook by giving consumers free tools to create and operate specialized online social networks of their own.

The two-year-old Silicon Valley-based company said the new service, to be introduced on Tuesday, allows casual Web users to create, within a matter of minutes, a highly customized social network for one’s friends, family or acquaintances.

Social networks have caught fire in recent years among active Web users who use them to connect to people with shared interests. Popular sites range from hangouts for teenagers and their friends to video game fans or business professionals.

Sites like MySpace offer Web users individual profile pages they can use to connect to friends, but typically keep control of the underlying network, including advertising sales.

By contrast, users within each Ning network can select the latest Web features for watching videos online, creating a photo slideshow, listening to music or publishing a blog. Members have far greater flexibility over the look of their personal profile pages, buddy lists and site color schemes.

Source: Reuters

Apple Inc. has delayed until March the launch of its gadget for streaming video and other content from computers to TVs, but the company would not explain why. The company had said in January the $299 Apple TV set-top box would be available this month.

“Wrapping up Apple TV is taking a few weeks longer than we projected, and we now expect to begin shipments mid-March,” Apple spokeswoman Lynn Fox said Monday. She declined to comment further.

Apple TV is designed to move digital content from a user’s computer to a TV set and is anticipated to be a highly competitive product in the growing crop of offerings that deliver Internet-based videos to the television.

Source: AP

Sony Corp. said Monday it is bringing out a cheaper player for Blu-ray discs early this summer, a crucial step in its battle to make the high-definition format the replacement for DVDs.

The BDP-S300 will cost $599, yet will have the same capabilities as the $999 BDP-S1 Sony is currently selling, said Randy Waynick, senior vice president of the home products division of Sony Electronics.

Sony and Samsung Corp., which also makes a Blu-ray player, have been undersold by Toshiba Corp.’s players for the rival HD DVD format. Toshiba has a model on the market for $499.

However, sales of players for either format have been tepid, as consumers have stood back, waiting for the market to settle on one of the discs.

Source: AP

Symantec on Monday released its much-anticipated Norton 360 service, packing a full security suite plus utilities into a subscription offering.

Norton 360 includes all the expected security features—antivirus, antispyware, firewall, intrusion prevention, and more. But it also incorporates a backup solution, transaction security, and a module to optimize PC performance. The price is large as well, though: $79.99 per year.

According to Symantec, Norton 360 is “designed to work as automatically as possible” and to “offer a user experience that is reassuring, helpful and unobtrusive.”

Norton 360 includes the same type of security protection found in the popular Norton Internet Security 2007, but makes even fewer demands on the user. It includes the new SONAR (Symantec Online Network for Advanced Response) technology, which catches zero-day attacks by detecting and preventing malicious behavior. Antispam and parental controls are pushed out into a separate add-on pack, just as with NIS 2007.

Source: PC Magazine

Little-known Texas MP3 Technologies Ltd. is taking on Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Sandisk Corp. with a patent-infringement lawsuit.

The suit, which came to light over the weekend, was filed on Feb. 16 in Marshall, Texas. The eastern Texas city is fast becoming one of the leading locations of patent infringement lawsuits in the U.S. thanks to speedy trials and juries that more often than not find in favor of the plaintiff.

In the complaint, Texas MP3 Technologies alleges infringement on U.S. patent 7,065,417, which was awarded in June 2006 to multimedia chip-maker SigmaTel Inc. and covers “an MPEG portable sound reproducing system and a method for reproducing sound data compressed using the MPEG method.”

Source: computerworld

BitTorrent Inc., makers of a technology often used to trade pirated copies of Hollywood movies, is launching a Web site that will sell downloads of films and TV shows licensed from the studios.

The BitTorrent Entertainment Network was set to launch Monday with films from Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Lionsgate and episodes of TV shows such as “24″ and “Punk’d.”

The service is squarely aimed at young men and boys who regularly use BitTorrent to trade pirated versions of the same films and who more often watch such files on their computer instead of on a big screen TV in the living room.

The San Francisco-based company is betting that at least one-third of the 135 million people who have downloaded the BitTorrent software will be willing to pay for high-quality legitimate content rather than take their chances with pirated fare.

TV episodes are $1.99 to download to own, which is typical for competitor sites such as Apple Inc.’s iTunes.

BitTorrent’s content is protected by Windows Media DRM and will only play back using Windows Media Player.

Source: AP

Think the new built-in phishing filters in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 will protect your private data? Think again. The number of sites devoted to phishing skyrocketed last year, and the number of Americans taken in by phishing schemes has nearly doubled. In November 2006, the last month for which data is available, the Anti-Phishing Working Group found 37,439 new sites, up an astounding 709 percent from the 4630 sites in November of 2005.

Last October, both Mozilla and Microsoft released new versions of their browsers that use blacklists to block access to known phishing sites. In response, resourceful phishers are flooding new fake Web sites onto the Internet too quickly for them all to be shut down or blacklisted.

The alarming ease with which the fraudsters changed course, plus other new phishing tactics, makes some security experts say that phishers have the upper hand in the war against online fraud.

Source: Yahoo

The new US stealth fighter, the F-22 Raptor, was deployed for the first time to Asia earlier this month. On Feb. 11, twelve Raptors flying from Hawaii to Japan were forced to turn back when a software glitch crashed all of the F-22s’ on-board computers as they crossed the international date line.

The delay in arrival in Japan was previously reported, with rumors of problems with the software. CNN television, however, this morning reported that every fighter completely lost all navigation and communications when they crossed the international date line. They reportedly had to turn around and follow their tankers by visual contact back to Hawaii.

According to the CNN story, if they had not been with their tankers, or the weather had been bad, this would have been serious.

Source: Slashdot

About one-third of Internet users in the U.S. have used a wireless connection to surf the Web or check e-mail, according to a survey released Sunday.

The survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that 34 percent of Internet users have gone online through Wi-Fi service or a cell phone network, including 27 percent who have logged on from somewhere other than their home or workplace.

That’s up from February 2004, when 22 percent of Internet users said they had gone online using a wireless device.

Nineteen percent of Internet users now have a wireless network in their home. That number has nearly doubled since January 2005, when 10 percent said they had a home wireless network.

Three-quarters of the people with both a home wireless network and a laptop computer said they now use their laptop in different parts of the house.

Source: AP