Justice Department lawyers, calling an amended settlement an improvement over an earlier deal, said it still “suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement.”
The agreement “still confers significant and possibly anticompetitive advantages on Google,” the department said in a press release yesterday.
The department repeated its view that the electronic distribution of books “holds vast promise” of “breathing new life into millions of works that are now effectively dormant.” Justice Department [...]

The recalls and other technical problems besetting Toyota in the last few weeks highlight the risks of relying on electronics instead of the mechanical rods and cables that controlled vehicles for most of the 20th century.
Such advancements bring many benefits, but the worry is that the car is a computer on wheels that could freeze up and potentially crash. No less a computer celebrity than Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak has said his Toyota Prius sometimes accelerates on its own.
For many years, a cars gas and brake pedals were connected directly to the throttle and the brake assembly. Now computers [...]

The reversal comes as the Federal Communications Commission is drafting rules to keep broadband providers - including wireless companies - from favoring or discriminating against Internet traffic flowing over their networks.
AT&T said last May it worried SlingPlayer Mobile, which sends a users home cable or satellite programming to devices such as smart phones and laptops over the Internet, would clog its network.
Meantime, versions of the program that used the 3G network were available for use on other smart phones sold by AT&T. But distribution of programs for Windows Mobile and BlackBerry phones arent as tightly controlled as those for Apple [...]

So the European head of New York-based Tremor Media Inc., an advertising network, knows which Web sites to market to the German carmakers ad agency.
“We go to them and say here are 150 sites with video content that is attractive to that target group,” said Baudis, who works with Volkswagens ad agency, Mediacom, a unit of WPP Plc, the worlds biggest advertising company. “Targeted advertising is more efficient. It costs less money to reach the target. Thats the beauty of it.”
[...]

The all-cash deal marks another step in Yahoo CEO Carol Bartzs effort to jettison services that have been struggling or dont fit with the Internet companys efforts to focus more on its news, entertainment and communications features.
Yahoo already has closed several unprofitable services and last month agreed to sell e-mail provider Zimbra to VMWare Inc. for an undisclosed amount.
HotJobs sale price reflects how far it has fallen since Yahoo bought it for $439 million in cash and stock nearly eight years ago. In an ironic twist, Yahoo had to outbid Monster.coms holding company to buy HotJobs.
As often happens in acquisitions, [...]

Much like the Motorola Droid, which debuted to much fanfare in November, the Devour has a touch screen that slides away to reveal a keyboard. The screen is slightly smaller, however. Verizon said Wednesday the phone would be on sale in March, but did not say what it would cost.
The Devour also features Motoblur, a software package from Motorola that displays e-mails and content from such sites as Twitter and Facebook on one screen. Motorolas Cliq, which launched through T-Mobile USA last year, also used Motoblur, but the Droid did not.
Verizon Wireless has positioned Android phones as its main alternative [...]

The foundation was set up in 2008 after Nokia Corp., the biggest maker of Symbian phones, bought out the consortium that made the software. Nokia decided to give the software away starting Thursday to make it more popular with other manufacturers, a move not uncommon in the technology world.
Lee Williams, executive director of the London-based foundation, said it has now completed the largest-ever conversion of proprietary software to “open source,” which means the source code, or blueprint for the software, is available to anyone. However, software associated with some phone features has yet to be released.
Symbian software is used on [...]

A new study has found that young people are losing interest in long-form blogging, as their communication habits have become increasingly brief, and mobile. Tech experts say it doesnt mean blogging is going away. Rather, its gone the way of the telephone and e-mail - still useful, just not sexy.
“Remember when Youve got mail! used to produce a moment of enthusiasm and not dread?” asks Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard Universitys Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Now when it comes to blogs, she says, “people focus on using them for what theyre good for and turning to other [...]

The hacking that angered Google Inc. and hit dozens of other businesses adds to growing concern that China is a center for a global explosion of Internet crimes, part of a rash of attacks aimed at a wide array of targets, from a British military contractor to banks and chemical companies to a California software maker.
The government denies it is involved, and it reiterated that on Wednesday. Speaking in Paris, Chinas foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, said China itself “is the victim of pirate attacks” and the international community must fight the phenomenon together.
But experts say the highly skilled attacks suggest [...]

The judge said it was the first time a court had ruled on the question of whether an ISP should be liable for copyright violations by its users, and one expert said the decision would have global implications.
A group of 34 movie companies, including Australian branches of Hollywood studios Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox, claimed Australias third-largest Internet provider, iiNet, breached their film copyrights by failing to stop users from illegally downloading files.
Federal Court Justice Dennis Cowdroy ruled that while iiNet knew its users violated copyrights, that did not mean the provider was authorizing those breaches and [...]