Sony announced late last week that they have invented a new encryption mechanism known as “CLEFIA,” a block cipher algorithm designed to help content producers deliver “advanced copy protection” with their products. The name comes from a play on the French word clef, which means “key.” We can’t help but snicker, given that it has been key-sniffing that has been undoing DRM as of late.

CLEFIA is aimed at portable electronics and home entertainment products, and can be applied to music, images, or even video. The big claim from Sony is that CLEFIA has “sufficient immunity against known cryptanalytic attacks,” yet it has relatively low hardware requirements. The company plans to formally present the CLEFIA algorithm at the Fast Software Encryption 2007 conference in Luxembourg.

Google Inc., the most popular Internet search service, said its engineers are developing software for handheld devices and the company has no plans to build mobile phones.

“We’re not doing a mobile phone,” Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research, said in an interview yesterday at Google’s office in Atlanta. During an event earlier in the day, Eustace said, “I’d like to find something that is broader, rather than do yet another mobile device.”

The remarks contradict reports on Web logs and online news sites this month that Mountain View, California-based Google is working with a handset manufacturer to develop a phone. Google will “look across all of the devices” rather than focusing on individual handsets, Eustace said.

In just six years, Wikipedia has mushroomed into one of the Web’s most astonishing successes, with 1.7 million articles in English alone. The downside is that the free encyclopedia has its share of errors and juvenile vandalism, and sometimes the writing is incomprehensibly arcane.

To Wikipedia fans, these blemishes are an unavoidable — and relatively small — price to pay for the dazzling breadth spawned by its “anyone can edit” open design.

But Larry Sanger doesn’t buy it. To Sanger — who was present at the creation of Wikipedia (in fact, call him a co-founder, although that, like many things within Wikipedia, is disputed) — its charms seem to outweigh its warts simply because it has no competition.

And that’s precisely what Sanger hopes to change.

This week, Sanger takes the wraps off a Wikipedia alternative, Citizendium. His goal is to capture Wikipedia’s bustle but this time, avoid the vandalism and inconsistency that are its pitfalls.

Like Wikipedia, Citizendium will be nonprofit, devoid of ads and free to read and edit. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium’s volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy.

Oracle sued its rival SAP yesterday, accusing the big German software maker of intruding into its computer systems to carry out “corporate theft on a grand scale.�?

The companies are fierce competitors in the lucrative market for the business software that corporations use to manage their finances, human resources, sales and customer relations.

SAP is the industry leader. But Oracle, the leading maker of computer database software, has moved quickly to become No. 2 in the business-applications market, mainly through an acquisition spree, spending about $20 billion in the last three years to buy two dozen companies.

The Oracle suit states that SAP repeatedly stole copyrighted software and other confidential information in a campaign to undermine Oracle and grab corporate customers that came to Oracle as part of its two largest business software acquisitions: PeopleSoft, for $10.3 billion in early 2005, and Siebel, for $5.85 billion, a purchase completed in 2006.

According to the suit, workers at an SAP subsidiary in Texas logged into an Oracle customer-support Web site, posing as current or recent Oracle customers like Merck, Honeywell, Bear Stearns, Abbott Laboratories, Smithfield Foods, the Texas Association of School Boards, and many others.

Then, from September 2006 to January 2007, SAP proceeded to make more than 10,000 illicit downloads of Oracle software and technical support documents, the suit states.