Technology - NewsFactor

SanDisk is keeping good on its promise to bring music to its consumers. On Wednesday, the Milpitas, Calif.-based company, along with four music giants, said consumers this week can begin buying its SlotMusic microSD cards to be used in slot-enabled mobile phones, portable media players, computers and car stereos.

Mozilla's Firefox 3.1 beta 1, now available for public download, is loaded with new features that once again put the Firefox developer community on the cutting edge of browser development.

President George Bush signed two bills into law on Monday that would protect children from online predators, but one group said the bills were rushed to the White House for signature without careful consideration.

Internet radio advertising just got a little more competitive. That's because TargetSpot is acquiring Ronning Lipset Radio, and together the merged company will boast a network of more than 50 partnerships with more than 1,000 stations reaching more than six million listeners a week.

The hotly contested 2008 presidential election is spilling over into yet another corner of cyberspace. The McCain/Palin Republican campaign is challenging a decision by YouTube to pull several of its videos and election advertisements from the popular video-sharing site, an action YouTube says was necessary under terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

According to a new study from the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior at UCLA, using the Internet and other types of communication technology can boost aging brains.

Sick of the advertisements for the presidential election? Thought unplugging your phone, ignoring television programs, and avoiding the newspaper would protect you from advertisements featuring Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain? Think again.

Microsoft's October Patch Tuesday list is hauntingly large. Redmond issued 11 bulletins that address 20 vulnerabilities, nine of them rated as critical.

Google continues to move quickly to monetize YouTube. In the latest effort for one of the most popular video sites on the Web, Google-owned YouTube has launched Google-style search ads.

It's all in the name -- or maybe not, in Microsoft's case. The software behemoth announced Monday that it will share a pre-beta, developer-only release of Windows 7, the successor to Windows Vista, at the Product Developers Conference on Oct. 25 and at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference on Nov. 7.

A day after Research in Motion launched its first BlackBerry flip phone, Motorola is countering with an interactive flip touch phone.

The much-anticipated Apple notebook event took place Tuesday at the Apple Town Hall on the manufacturer's Cupertino, Calif., campus. Although the trendy manufacturer may not have hit every item on Mac fans' wish list, Apple clearly intends to keep the pressure on Microsoft and the universe of Windows PCs.

The OpenOffice business productivity suite is now available as a native Mac application for the first time.

For the last two years, a California-based communication startup called M2Z has been advocating free national Wi-Fi broadband using the relatively narrow 2155-2175-MHz portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The cost of providing free Wi-Fi, M2Z says, could be covered by advertising revenues. A premium, ad-free service would also be available for a subscription fee.

Intellectual-property offenders face tougher penalties now that President Bush has signed into law the PRO-IP Act with greater penalties for piracy. The president signed the bill Monday.

Microsoft released Silverlight 2 on Monday, the second major version of its platform for creating and delivering advanced multimedia applications and experiences in a Web browser.

While the smartphone world is moving toward touchscreen technology, Research in Motion on Monday partnered with T-Mobile to announce the first BlackBerry flip phone.

The Tokyo Game Show is, to put it mildly, a noisy event as game manufacturers crank up the volume on their latest racing or military combat products. But the loudest sound may have come from Kazuo Hirai, president and group chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment, who told the Financial Times that Sony has no plans to cut prices on its gaming consoles for the holiday season.

The Federal Communications Commission has released an engineering report that opens the door for the FCC to apportion a chunk of wireless spectrum for free Internet services across the nation.