Court upholds $82M gaming
verdict against Sony
Buy PlayStation 2 while you can--it may not be
available much longer. Sony Computer Entertainment lost a legal
battle over the controllers that accompany the popular PlayStation
and PlayStation 2 game consoles today that could result in the
suspension of sales of the popular gaming device. The U.S. District
Court in Oakland, Calif., upheld a ruling by a California jury last
year that ordered Sony to pay $82 million to Immersion, a
California-based technology developer. The amount was raised to $90.7
million with interest. Immersion says Sony infringed on its patents
by using technologies that make a game controller vibrate in sync
with actions in games. The Japanese gaming giant plans to appeal the
decision. Sony was also ordered to stop selling the PlayStation and
PlayStation 2 game consoles using Dualshock controllers as well as
more than 40 game software products. But Sony will continue to sell
in the United States as it appeals the decision again while paying
Immersion a licensing fee.
Study: Microsoft's
IE was unsafe majority of 2004
Users who have abandoned
Internet Explorer for more secure browsers now have data to validate the
switch. According to Brussels-based ScanIT, users of Microsoft's Internet
Explorer were unsafe 98 percent of the time last year, while Mozilla users
were unsafe only 15 percent of last year. ScanIT determined the unsafe
periods by measuring the life spans of vulnerabilities in the various
browsers that could be exploited by attackers from remote locations. A
fully patched Internet Explorer was vulnerable all but seven days of 2004.
Firefox and the other Mozilla browsers were vulnerable only 56 days in
2004.
IRS considers crackdown on casual eBay sellers
Filing income taxes is
stressful as it is. But the IRS may be adding another factor into the
equation--eBay sales. Many eBay users who sell items on occasion do not
consider themselves business owners and give little thought to reporting
their earnings. But the IRS encourages them to start doing so. There is no
clear distinction in tax law about the difference between a hobby and a
business. Yet if sales result in a profit, sellers are supposed to declare
it on their taxes. EBay does not report individual sales to the IRS but
urges users, in the site's educational materials and seminars, to learn
about tax issues. More than 135 million people have registered to use the
online auction site.
China
accuses cyberdissident of subverting gov't
Chinese journalist and dissident Zheng Yichun
could face at least 10 years in jail for “subverting state power”
in China for his writings in foreign-based publications and web
sites. He has been held in prison since his arrest in December,
though reports of his detention only became public recently.
Prosecutors are citing 63 of Yichun’s articles as evidence of
charges against him. According to Reporters Without Borders, Yichun
is the latest of five dissident journalists who have been arrested in
recent months for similar crimes. The organization is calling for
Yichun’s release, saying that the
wave of arrests of dissident journalists confirms the virulence of
the government's campaign against liberal ideas and intellectuals. His
work has been published in newspapers such as Da
Ji Yuan (Epoch Times) and websites such as Boxun and Min Zhu Lun Tan
(Democratic Forum), which are all based abroad. He has published four
collections of poems and some 200 political essays. Before being
arrested, Yichun was also an English teacher at Liaoning University.
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