The company, which makes database software and other technology, said in the lawsuit that Google's Android operating system software consists of Java applications and other technology. As such, it infringes on one or more parts of seven different patents — something Google should know, Oracle argues in the complaint, because it has hired former Sun Java engineers in recent years. Oracle acquired the Java computer programming language and related technology when it bought Sun Microsystems in a deal that completed in January. Java can be used as a platform for building applications for computers, websites and smart phones and other mobile devices. Oracle is seeking an injunction to stop Google from further building and distributing Android, plus higher monetary damages for willful and deliberate infringement.

India piled fresh pressure on Research In Motion today when it gave the company less than three weeks to satisfy its concerns over its BlackBerrysmartphones or face seeing some services banned. Security fears over BlackBerry services in the country are thought to spring from the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack in which 116 people died. Officials suspect the culprits used encrypted services on the device. The Indian government has set RIM a deadline of the end of August to give it access to data transmitted by BlackBerry's email and messaging services. If the Canadian-based firm does not comply, Indian telecoms operators will be ordered to close the two services down. "Our message to RIM and service providers is that if they don't come up with a technical solution by 31 August, then the home ministry will take a view and will shut down BlackBerry Messenger and business enterprises services," a spokesman for the ministry said.

TweetMeme, a British start-up which curates Twitter’s data, is partnering with the microblogging service on the new button. Halstead has told The Telegraphthat the alliance had deepened the relationship between the two companies and gave TweetMeme fuller access to interact with Twitter’s complete dataset. He refused to disclose the financial terms of the arrangement, but did clarify that no publishers would be paying for the new ‘Tweet Button' as its intention was to grow the site’s reach and use, rather generate revenue. Twitter announced the new ‘Tweet Button' on its blog today. The post said: “Today we’re launching the Tweet Button to make sharing simple. It lets you share links directly from the page you’re on. When you click on the Tweet Button, a Tweet box will appear - pre-populated with a shortened link that points to the item that you’re sharing.

Earlier tonight our friend Michael Gartenberg tweeted that when he went to the Android Market to search for the word "Jewish," a number of Nazi and Hitler themes turned up. Of course, we had to take a look for ourselves, and sure enough, the search for a fairly innocuous word related to a religion and culture turns up skins which are disgustingly, hatefully pro-Nazism and pro-Hitler. That's a problem, no matter how you look at this. In the past, we've railed against Apple for its confusing, unfair, and often absurd App Store policies, particularly when it comes to the policing of applications based on content, not code. Steve Jobs has made a point during press conferences to say that the Android Market allows porn apps -- which of course set off a furious debate. Sadly, what Jobs should have pointed out was that the Market allows something far more insidious and damaging than even the hardest-core pornography -- apps that spread hate and propagate the views of a movement that is pretty much universally reviled. 

Search engine company to build business on display ads. China Mobile and China's state-run Xinhua News Agency have signed an agreement to establish a new Internet search engine company, Xinhua reported on Thursday. The joint venture will seek to build a leading search engine for China and develop other businesses related to the Internet, publishing and advertising, the news agency reported. "Search engines, which have powerful information integration abilities, play an increasingly important role in disseminating information and influencing public opinion," Xinhua Vice President Zhou Xisheng was quoted as saying. The partnership will help China "to safeguard its information security and push forward the robust, healthy and orderly development of China's new media industry," he said. China's search market is dominated by the Chinese company Baidu, which controls a 70 per cent share, according to Analysys International. Google ranks in second place with 24.2 per cent of the market.

Dreams of “designer babies” with the genius of a rocket scientist or the athletic prowess of LeBron James aren’t ever coming true. Thanks to our complex genetic makeup, human traits are rarely expressed by one gene. Science is one thing, ethics are another, and genetic manipulation is something most researches don’t want to touch — unless it’s going to cure life-threatening diseases. Throw that one on the pile of tech innovations we were promised but are never going to get. In “Where’s the Future? Will Ferrell’s Tour of Tech that Never Took,” in the August issue of Wiredmagazine, writers tackle important questions like: Whatever happened to my jetpack? What about my robot maid? Why on earth do I still have to chew food instead of taking my meal pill? Does Will Ferrell want an edible beard? In this week’s Storyboard podcast, hear the story behind future fails as Adam Rogers talks shop with fellow senior editor Robert Capps. You’ll find out why we really wish that talking albino robot mini-monkey bartender existed by now.

Facebook is scrambling to fix a bug in its website that could be misused by spammers to harvest user names and photographs. It turns out that if someone enters the e-mail address of a Facebook user along with the wrong password, Facebook returns a special "Please re-enter your password" page, which includes the Facebook photo and full name of the person associated with the address. The feature helps people understand if they've mistyped their e-mail address at login, but it could be misused by spammers to get information on Facebook's 500 million users. A spammer with an e-mail list could write a script that enters the e-mail addresses into Facebook and then logs the real names. This could help make a phishing attack more realistic, said Atul Agarwal, the researcher who posted a note about the issue (along with a sample script that could harvest names) to the Full Disclosure mailing list on Tuesday. Someone could also use the feature to generate random e-mail addresses and check to see if they really worked, Agarwal said. The login page shows images of people, even when they've properly set their privacy settings to keep this information private, said Agarwal. "Harvesting this data is very easy," he said. Facebook blamed the issue on a recently introduced bug.

 

The UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre today claimed its new Facebook application has prompted 211 new reports of suspicious online behaviour. Facebook, which has 26 million UK monthly unique users, proposed the app after it refused to introduce Ceop's reporting button to every profile on the site, and it has now been downloaded 55,000 times since it was launched on 12 July. But online safety campaigners are concerned that the spat between Ceop and Facebook, and the preoccupation with the so-called "panic button", is distracting the agency from more wide-ranging efforts to tackle online grooming and abuse. A spokeswoman for Ceop said the agency is keen to move the debate on and emphasise its work in other areas, including discussing a browser plug-in with Microsoft, Mozilla and Google.

Guardian 

  

Research from Rice University’s Department of Psychology finds that if you like what you’re watching, you’re less likely to notice the difference in video quality of the TV show, Internet video or mobile movie clip. The findings come from the recently released study “The Effect of Content Desirability on Subjective Video Quality Ratings” authored by Philip Kortum, Rice professor-in-the-practice and faculty fellow. The study appears in the journal Human Factors. “Research has been done asking if people can detect video quality differences,” Kortum said. “What we were looking at was how video quality affects viewers in a real way.” Using four studies, Kortum, along with co-author Marc Sullivan of AT&T Labs, showed 100 study participants 180 movie clips encoded at nine different levels, from 550 kilobits per second up to DVD quality. Participants viewed the two-minute clips and then were asked about the video quality of the clips and desirability of the movie content. Kortum found a strong correlation between the desirability of movie content and subjective ratings of video quality. “At first we were really surprised by the data,” Kortum said. “We were seeing that low- quality movies were being rated higher in quality than some of the high-quality videos. But after we started analyzing the data, we determined what was driving this was the actual desirability of the content.