Los Angeles Sues Time Warner Cable

In the two years since becoming the major cable provider in the Los Angeles area, Time Warner Cable has drawn sometimes colorful criticism from its subscribers.

On Wednesday, the Los Angeles City attorney, Rocky Delgadillo sued the company in Los Angeles County Superior Court accusing it of engaging in “unlawful, unfair and fraudulent business acts and practices and deceptive advertising.” The suit says that the company has subjected subscribers to delayed repair appointments, deceptive pricing and Internet outages.

“Time Warner Cable must be held accountable for illegally deceiving and ripping off its subscribers,” said Mr. Delgadillo in a statement on Wednesday.

Mr. Delgadillo is seeking $2,500 in civil penalties for each violation.

Time Warner Cable, a unit of Time Warner, joined with the Comcast Corporation in 2006 to buy the bankrupt cable provider Adelphia Communications Corporation. Time Warner Cable, based in New York, and Comcast, based in Philadelphia, then carved out regional markets in the United States. Time Warner Cable received the Los Angeles area.

A spokesman for Time Warner Cable said that the company disagreed that it had “misled customers in any way.”

Time Warner’s Los Angeles area subscriber base grew from 360,000 to about 2 million after the acquisition, Mr. Dudly said. Since then, the company has done an extensive renovation and upgrade of the system it inherited.

“We now receive fewer complaints than we did before the acquisition,” said Mr. Dudley. “I think that shows some substantial progress.”

Message boards for Los Angeles area residents rating the city businesses are filled with comments complaining about botched cable services.

Form : http://www.nytimes.com/

Google Opens Up Gmail Experiments

Google’s always been a company willing not only to try things, but to fail in public. You can go to Google Labs and try all sorts of new services the company’s engineers have developed, but that aren’t yet ready for mass consumption. Starting today, Google is applying that approach to Gmail.

Click "Settings" in Gmail, and you should see a Labs tab.(The company started rolling out the change at 6 p.m., but said it could be hours or days before every Gmail user has it.) Within the Gmail lab are 13 tweaks, from a change in the way your signature appears at the end of messages to an expanded way to mark messages to a setting called "Email Addict" that lets you block Gmail and Chat for 15 minutes so you can walk away and have a life.

I haven’t had much chance to play with the new tweaks, but these look the most useful to me:

Superstars: Standard Gmail lets you add a yellow star to an important message. Enabling Superstars let’s you mark messages with different colored stars and other icons like a check mark or exclamation point. You choose which icons you want to use. Should be useful for prioritizing and sorting messages.

Quick Links: A way of bookmarking any page within Gmail. You can link to an individual email message, obviously, but you can also do a search and bookmark that search. Go back to it again and the link will display any new messages that fit the search criteria. You can do the same thing with browser bookmarks, but this looks to be easier, plus the links display within the Gmail interface.

Signature Tweaks: Let’s you put your automated signature above the quoted text when you respond to a message, instead of all the way at the bottom of what somebody else wrote.

My nominations for least useful:

Email Addict: Taking a break from email’s a great idea, but this is unlikely to get many people to do that. You click a link at the top of the window and are locked out of your account for 15 minutes. But you can get back in to your account anytime you want, just by refreshing the page.

Random Signature: Appends a random famous quote to the end of your email. I’ll say this: They can’t be more annoying than the quotes people choose for themselves.

What’s ironic about this change is that it’ll take quite a while for Gmail Labs to become the best source for ways to change Gmail.

There’s already a thriving community of people using Greasemonkey to change the look, operation and features of Gmail. (One of the best of those hackers, Gina Trapani of Lifehacker, was at the event.)In fact, some of the early Gmail labs features are copies of ones that a Greasemonkey coder has already created.

But Greasemonkey hacks of Gmail can be flaky: sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, in part because Gmail itself is always changing. The features that graduate from Gmail Labs to the standard service shouldn’t have those problems.

Let’s hope it won’t take Google as long to move popular features into standard Gmail as it’s taken for the service itself to emerge from beta. Four years after its debut, Gmail’s still labeled beta. But there’s hope: Product Manager Keith Coleman says that once they take care of a secret list of last tweaks, perhaps in a matter of months, the service will lose its beta label.

Google Leases NASA Ames Land To Develop New Campus

You might say Google’s universe is expanding with a little help from NASA.

The fast-growing Internet search company will lease 42.2 acres of land at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. to construct up to 1.2 million square feet of office and research and development space. The property lies between Google’s headquarters and Moffet Field on the NASA property.

Google and NASA have collaborated on several projects since September 2005, including establishing the Planetary Content project that makes it easier for scientists to publish planetary data online. That project has provided high-resolution imagery and maps to the Google Moon Website.

The relationship also includes a controversial deal between NASA and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt to land a Boeing 767 and two smaller planes at Moffet Field, according to a Reuters news agency story.

Under terms of the 40-year lease Google will pay NASA an initial base rent of $3.66 million per year. Google can incrementally extend the lease up to a total of 90 years, the company said. Google has even provided a view of the property at http://maps.google.com/googleameslease.

"This long-term lease agreement is a key component of Google’s strategy for continue growth in Silicon Valley," said David Radcliffe, Google vice president for real estate and workplace services, in a statement.

Construction of the new campus will take place in three phases with the first phase beginning by the end of September 2013, the second phase by 2018 and the third by 2022. Most of the development will be office and R&D space, although it will include conference, housing, dining, fitness, and child care facilities, as well as parking and infrastructure improvements for NASA’s use. NASA will actually retain control of the project during the construction phase.

Form : http://www.crn.com/

Windows XP SP3 includes vulnerable Flash Player

June 2, 2008 (Computerworld)  Microsoft Corp.’s Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) ships with an out-of-date version of Adobe’s Flash Player that’s vulnerable to recently-spotted attacks, according to Microsoft’s support documentation.

Windows XP SP3 includes Flash Player 9.0.115.0, a version released by Adobe Systems Inc. in December 2007. That version of Flash Player, however, was superseded by version 9.0.124.0 on April 8, nearly two weeks before Microsoft decided SP3 was done by giving it a Release To Manufacturing (RTM) label and sending it out for distribution.

The older version that shipped with XP SP3, however, harbors a bug that hackers have been exploiting since last week; that’s when security researchers, including those at Symantec Corp., reported what they at first thought was a zero-day vulnerability in the most current edition of Flash, 9.0.124.0. A few days later, however, Symantec retracted that claim, and said that only the older 9.0.115.0 was at risk.

Adobe has confirmed that version 9.0.115.0, included with XP SP3, is vulnerable to the ongoing attacks, which have originated from Chinese servers. Users have been attacked after visiting legitimate Web sites that had been hacked using now-common SQL-injection attacks.

Microsoft noted that it bundled the outdated version of Flash Player with Windows XP in a document published on its support site; that document was last revised three weeks ago, on May 13. It has not advertised the fact, however, or issued a security advisory recommending that users update Flash.

Computerworld has confirmed that PCs running XP SP3 use the obsolete 9.0.115.0 version of Flash.

Adobe patched Flash on April 8 to plug seven vulnerabilities, including one that was reported two weeks earlier after a researcher used it to claim a $5,000 prize in a hacking challenge.

Although Microsoft tagged Windows XP SP3 as RTM April 21, it didn’t release the service pack into general distribution via Windows Update until May 6. It has not yet triggered the update service to automatically download and install the service pack to users who have that option turned on; instead, users must explicitly go Windows Update and select SP3 from a list of offered updates.

Late Monday, Microsoft declined to answer questions about Flash, including why it wasn’t able to add the newest version to XP SP3 and what advice it would give users.

Users running XP SP3 can determine which version of Flash Player is installed by calling up this Adobe page in their browser. Adobe has recommended that all users update to version 9.0.124.0.

Form : http://www.computerworld.com/

Microsoft, HP Do Search Deal for PCs

Ramping up its efforts to build search market share, Microsoft signed a deal to embed a Live Search toolbar on all Hewlett-Packard consumer PCs in North America starting next year.

In
addition, Live Search will be the default search engine on browsers on
the computers, the companies said. Both features will be included in HP
PCs in January 2009.

While the deal could boost use of
Microsoft’s search platform, it could also boost support of
Silverlight, Microsoft’s new browser plug-in and development runtime
for adding multimedia to Web applications. That’s because the Live
Search toolbar will be built using Silverlight, meaning that the
browser plug-in, which is required to view multimedia content built
with the tool, will come with the computers.

Microsoft is
concurrently trying to improve the distribution of Silverlight by
building some of its own Web pages with the technology and requiring
visitors to download the browser plug-in to view the Web pages.

The
toolbar will also include buttons that HP will be able to customize to
direct computer users to Web sites such as Snapfish, HP’s online
photo-sharing and printing service, and HP customer service.

Microsoft
called the agreement the most significant distribution deal for Live
Search that the company has done. HP is the world’s largest PC
manufacturer, the companies said. They did not mention whether the
agreement might be extended outside of North America.

Some
Microsoft competitors have cried foul at previous efforts by the
software giant to tie its search platform into its browser. Two years
ago when Microsoft launched IE7 in beta, it set Live Search as the
default search provider in a toolbar in the browser, although users can
hit a drop-down menu to change the search provider to a handful of
other companies. At the time, Google complained to the European
Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice that the default setting
removes choice for users. Google has a similar setup in Mozilla’s
Firefox browser, which comes with Google as the default search bar. The
DOJ found that Microsoft makes it easy enough for users and computer
makers to change the default setting.

Deals like the one
between Microsoft and HP are not uncommon. Yahoo previously had an
agreement with HP to feature its search engine on new computers, and
Google signed a similar deal with Dell.

The HP deal builds on
other Microsoft efforts to grow its search market share since it
withdrew its acquisition offer for Yahoo. For example, Microsoft
recently launched Cashback, a service that offers Live Search users
money back when they buy products through the search engine from Live
Search advertisers.

Form : http://www.pcworld.com/