HD DVD has recently faced some head wind in its struggle to become the high-definition successor to the DVD, but its supporters are playing an ace from their sleeve with the arrival of the first discs that take advantage of its players’ built-in Internet connections.

The first Internet-enabled disc - a Japanese animated feature titled “Freedom” - was released Tuesday. Buyers who connect their HD DVD player to a broadband Internet line will be able to download a high-definition trailer for another movie, change menu styles and download additional subtitles.

Those relatively modest Internet-dependent features will be beefed up in soon-to-be-released discs like the martial epic “300,” due at the end of July but demonstrated Friday by Kevin Collins, Microsoft Corp.’s “director of HD DVD evangelism.”

The Internet’s key oversight agency is on track to start testing addresses entirely in foreign characters by November, but rules for determining which ones to permit likely will take another year or two to develop.

Individuals and companies outside the United States long have clamored for non-English scripts, finding restrictive the current limitation of domain names to 37 characters: a-z, 0-9 and the hyphen.

Addresses partly in foreign languages are sometimes possible, but the suffix - the “.com” part of an address - for now requires non-English speakers to type English characters.

The “live” tests later this year are designed to make sure browsers, e-mail programs and other applications will work well with the foreign characters, said Vint Cerf, chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

“We’ve already done the testing in the laboratories,” Cerf said as ICANN’s general meetings ended Friday in San Juan, Puerto Rico. “We’re confident that none of the infrastructure is likely to encounter a problem but you really don’t know until you are in the live environment.”

Thus, engineers are planning to feed the Internet’s domain name directories with nonsensical strings that can be removed quickly should trouble arise.

Even if they succeed, however, more work remains on developing policies on such names.

TiVo Inc, a maker of digital video recording technology, said on Thursday that the largest U.S. cable operator Comcast Corp had accepted its TiVo-branded software for deployment on Comcast’s DVR platforms.

Microsoft Corp. will sell “affordable” Windows computers aimed at students in India, but the $500 price tag is more than what U.S. consumers might pay for a basic laptop.

Microsoft, with chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Indian PC maker Zenith Computers Ltd., said the $500 “IQ PC” runs the most basic version of the Windows Vista operating system and comes packed with the Office suite and programs to help students practice English and prepare for exams. The computer and related online content will be available in Bangalore and Pune on Sunday.

In a blog post, Orlando Ayala, a senior vice president for Microsoft’s emerging segments market development group, described the computer as “low cost” and “affordable.”

Motorola Inc. started selling the next generation model of its popular, ultra-slim Razr cell phone in South Korea Friday, ahead of a global launch scheduled for July.

“We’re releasing our new phone in the Korean market first in recognition of tech-savvy and fashion-aware Korean consumers,” Motorola Korea Inc. said in a statement.

The new phone, called “Razr2,” will be available via SK Telecom Co., Korea’s largest wireless carrier by revenue. It retails at about 580,000 Korean won ($630) before handset subsidies, Motorola said.

The world’s second-largest handset maker by sales, unveiled the new cell phone last month in a bid to resurrect its ailing handset business. The new phone has a slimmer frame, larger screen and improved call quality compared with its predecessor.

Having re-branded its Personalized Home Page under the name “iGoogle” last month, Google is taking steps to maintain the momentum of this fast growing service.

Google Wednesday announced a new initiative called Google Gadget Ventures to encourage third-party gadget development by funding gadget-oriented business ventures.

“We’ve been hearing from a lot of gadget developers that they’d like to spend more time developing if they could, and we’ve been thinking about ways to help them do that,” said Sep Kamvar, engineering lead for personalization, in a blog post. “To that end, we’re happy to announce Google Gadget Ventures, a new pilot program that will help fund third-party gadget development and gadget-related businesses.”

Gadgets, also known as widgets, are small software programs that can be added to customizable Web pages like iGoogle. They’re easy to spot at social networking sites and online portals. They do things like present slide shows or perform other generally unimpressive but useful tasks.

Kamvar said Google would offer $5,000 grants for gadgets developers to improve existing gadgets and $100,000 seed investments for new gadget-related businesses. The catch is that the cash is available only to those with gadgets already garnering 250,000 page views per week or more.

The Blu-ray Disc Association is going for HD DVD’s throat with a new promotion announced this week that will give purchasers of new Blu-ray players five free Blu-ray movies. Any Blu-ray player is eligible, including the Sony PS3. The promotion begins July 1 in the US, and lasts through the summer until September 30.

The five movies will come from a list of 21 titles, including choices like Pearl Harbor, Black Rain, Underworld, and Transporter 2.

Note to entrepreneurs hoping to build a business using illicit content: don’t grant extensive interviews (complete with pictures) to the Wall Street Journal. That’s what a pair of aspiring hackers did back in April when they described how their service, YouTVPC, allowed users to watch streaming TV shows and movies without charge. Now, the MPAA is cracking down on such sites, filing a lawsuit against both YouTVPC and Peekvid this week.

The case was filed Tuesday in a California federal court. The gist of the suit is that businesses should not be allowed to prosper from illicit material, even if they do not host it. Both YouTVPC and Peekvid provide access to some of the most popular video content in the world, but they do so by linking up other sites (many of them outside the US) where the content is stored. This allows them to claim that they are doing nothing illegal, even though providing access to this unlicensed material is the extent of their business

Roughly a third of all teenagers who use the Internet have been subject to some form of cyberbullying, according to a new report by Pew Internet. The telephone survey was conducted on a representative sample of 935 teens in the US between the ages of 12 and 17 and revealed a number of observations about manipulative and bullying activity online. However, despite the fact that so many teens had experienced some level of cyberbullying, two-thirds of the group said that they believed more bullying occurred offline than on.

Video rental chain Blockbuster Inc. said on Wednesday it settled a patent dispute with rival Netflix Inc. that challenged Blockbuster’s entry into online DVD rental, but it signaled that the new business was taking a toll on its finances.

Although terms of the settlement were not disclosed, shares in Netflix jumped more than 6.3 percent to $20.76 in early trading while Blockbuster slipped 1 percent to $4.17.

Blockbuster also disclosed in a securities filing on Wednesday that it plans to seek an amendment to its August 20, 2004 credit agreement that would lower earnings requirements.

Blockbuster said in the filing that it plans to modify its popular Total Access plan before the end of the year to “strike the appropriate balance between continued subscriber growth and enhanced profitability.”

Google was set to launch late on Wednesday a beta version of Google Desktop search for Linux in a sign of encouragement by the search giant for Linux on the desktop.

Google Desktop allows people to search the Web while also searching the full text of all the information on their computer, including Gmail and their Web search history. Because the index is stored locally on the computer, users can access Gmail and Web history while offline.

Google Desktop for Linux was written natively and uses Google’s own desktop search algorithms, not existing Linux search applications such as Beagle, a company representative said. Only computers with x86 processors can use the software. It supports the Debian 4.0, Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu 6.10, Novell Suse 10.1 and Red Flag 5 versions of Linux, and uses either the KDE and GNOME graphical user interfaces.

The core framework of the Eclipse programming tools project and 20 of its packages will be overhauled Friday in a massive synchronized release called Europa.

Europa, with 17 million lines of code, is significantly larger than last year’s Callisto release, which had 10 projects and 7 million lines of code, said Mike Milinkovich, the Eclipse Foundation’s executive director.

Milinkovich is happy that the project still met its end-of-June deadline, the fourth time it’s done so. “One of the key values of the Eclipse development community is predictability,” he said, because many commercial and noncommercial projects rely on the tools. Next year’s project is likely to be called Ganymede, following the Jupiter-moon naming pattern.

Eclipse includes not just programming tools and “runtime” software libraries that accompany running software produced with Eclipse, but also modules for producing software that runs on everything from PCs and servers to embedded computing devices and Web browsers.