An Internet blogger in new EU member state Lithuania vowed Tuesday to fight a parliamentary decision refusing him accreditation on the grounds that he was not a legitimate journalist.

“This decision does not allow me to enjoy the rights and protection other journalists are entitled to,” Liutauras Ulevicius, author of the www.blogas.lt/liutauras, said.

Parliament rejected his application for accreditation, saying he and other bloggers do not meet the legal definition of a journalist.

AT&T Inc. said on Tuesday it has taken a step toward the long-promised notion of phones replacing credit cards, checks and cash by signing agreements with Wachovia Corp. and several other banks.

The agreements will allow customers of its Cingular Wireless arm, which is being rebranded as AT&T, and participating banks to manage their accounts and pay bills electronically by using an application on their cell phones.

While the use of mobile phones for transactions is in its nascent stages in the United States, such services are already available in parts of Europe and Asia.

Verizon Communications Inc. is preparing to launch a local television channel on its new fiber-optic cable TV service, the company said Tuesday.

The channel, called FiOS1, will be the first TV channel owned and operated by the telephone company. The exact date of the launch has not been announced.

The channel will broadcast 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It will include local news, traffic, weather and sports - including Major League Baseball and college games featuring local universities such as Georgetown and George Mason.

One of the landmark businesses on Second Life, Amsterdam, sold on eBay Monday for $50,000 to a buyer located, appropriately enough, in the Netherlands, said the developer of the popular adult-oriented business.

Sex is the business of Amsterdam, with streetwalker avatars soliciting business. They hang around near the train station.

Amsterdam’s developer, Kevin Alderman of Tampa, Fla., put the site up for sale on eBay last week, and it sold at 6:34 am PDT, according to the eBay listing.. The buyer didn’t bid; he just paid the asking price.

We weren’t able to find out who the buyer is; he goes by nedstede2769 on eBay, where his three-year-old account has no feedback. Alderman said he didn’t want to give the buyer’s name without checking first.

Alderman’s company, Eros LLC, specializes in adult business on the Internet, with 90% of its business in Second Life. He said Eros sold Amsterdam so it could concentrate on building a new, much larger sex business in the game. While Amsterdam is open to anyone logged into the game, the new business will be available only to adults.

Google has released a new mobile search engine designed to make it easier to find Web information using a handheld device.

Launched on Tuesday, http://www.google.com/m?uipref=3 can be accessed from a mobile browser and customized to feature pre-selected weather, news, stocks, and movies information, tailored to a specific geographic area.

By using improved algorithms and factoring in a user’s location, the new mobile search engine delivers a more relevant list of Web results than its previous version, said the Mountain View, California, company

One of the largest and certainly most popular DSL providers in the United States has been acquired by Best Buy, according to the two companies. The purchase price was reported as $97 million, which the companies put at 20% greater than Speakeasy’s 2006 revenues.

Best Buy bought Speakeasy for its business operations. The plan is to promote Speakeasy Small Business DSL through the company’s lesser-known Best Buy for Business program (BBFB).

Does this mean big changes are in store for Speakeasy customers? It’s unlikely, at least in the short term. The deal won’t even go down until the first quarter of 2008, and even then the plan is to run Speakeasy as an independent subsidiary of Best Buy. For now, both Speakeasy and Best Buy are focusing much of their public statements on keeping customers comfortable with the change.

Samsung has upped the capacity of its Flash-based SSD line to 64GB, offering the unit in the media player- and notebook-friendly 1.8in form factor.

Intel has come up with a form of Wi-Fi that would let a laptop in San Francisco connect to the Internet from a base station in San Jose, Calif.

And there would still be about 10 miles of wiggle room to spare.

Academics and researchers from the company’s labs have created a system that lets Wi-Fi signals, which ordinarily carry a few hundred feet, instead travel 100 kilometers, or more than 60 miles, said Eric Brewer, director of Intel Research Berkeley, a lab owned by the company that cooperates on research projects with the University of California at Berkeley.

“It is regular Wi-Fi hardware but with modified software,” he said.

New software has been published on the Internet that could be used to exploit a known flaw in Internet Explorer.

The code, which was posted Monday to the Milw0rm.com Web site, exploits a recently patched flaw in Microsoft’s browser. It could be used to run unauthorized software on a computer that was not updated with the latest Microsoft patches, security experts warn.

The vulnerability was first discovered by security researcher HD Moore who posted code last July that could be used to crash the browser. Microsoft patched the flaw in February, but some security researchers say that it will get more attention from criminals because of this latest exploit code.

Researchers at eEye Digital Security Inc. say the Milw0rm code works on IE6, but not on the latest version of Microsoft’s browser.

Adobe Systems Inc. is unveiling the first upgrade in two years of its flagship design software — including Photoshop — which accounts for more than half of the company’s overall revenue.

The 13 stand-alone products and six suites in Creative Suite 3, as the upgraded software package is known, represent the fullest use of Flash technology to date.

Flash is software used to give Web sites a slick, animated quality, turning static Web sites into television-like programming. It’s one of the byproducts of Adobe’s 2005 acquisition of Web design tools maker Macromedia.