Business - NewsFactor

In advance of its WiMAX rollout this fall, Sprint announced Thursday a lineup of mobile partners to localize its customer's 4G experience. In what the company calls "geobrowsing," XOHM users will get local news, weather and many other localized networking features delivered to their laptops and mobile devices.

After eight years of litigation, accused British hacker Gary McKinnon is set to be extradited to the United States to stand trial.

In a stunning example of a journalistic screwup, financial news wire service Bloomberg published Steve Jobs' obituary Wednesday. The Apple cofounder and CEO is very much alive.

The second beta release of Internet Explorer 8 is now available for download by developers and consumers alike on Windows-based PCs running Vista, XP, Server 2003 and Server 2008.

In a move to boost both companies, Nvidia announced it will provide native Scalable Link Interface support on Intel's X58 chipset, which is due in the fourth quarter. Nvidia's nForce 200 SLI architecture aggregates multiple graphics cards in separate PCI slots and runs them as one card for greater performance.

In a ruling that could have implications for Viacom's $1.65 billion lawsuit against YouTube, a California federal court on Wednesday dismissed a copyright-infringement lawsuit against online video-sharing site Veoh Networks.

Mozilla Labs has rolled out an experimental Firefox plug-in that promises to streamline the way Web surfers manage the mountains of information online. Called Ubiquity, the proof-of-concept prototype is an experiment with two parts -- it's both an interface and a development platform, notes the plug-in's developer, Aza Raskin.

The iPhone took hits on two fronts Wednesday as Orange -- an iPhone 3G carrier in France -- admitted to limiting 3G bandwidth for its customers, and a security flaw was discovered in the iPhone that enables unauthorized users to access private data on the phone when it is supposedly locked.

Perhaps you've seen this movie: A virus infects a human-piloted spacecraft, and within days the mission is compromised and Earth is lost to the alien attackers. There's now a report that the first part of that storyline has come true -- only it's a computer virus on the International Space Station.

It will come as no surprise that Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jen-Hsun Huang believes in the future of graphics processing. As he pointed out in a two-and-a-half hour presentation at the Nvision 2008 conference, today's GPUs have the equivalent of 1,000 times the processing power of a Cray supercomputer from 30 years ago.

Klausner Technologies, a patent-holding company, is at it again. The New York-based company said late Tuesday that it has filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Verizon Wireless, LG Electronics, Google and a long list of others.

Anyone perusing porn sites at home will appreciate Microsoft's latest efforts at browser privacy, but it's not clear it will do much for the enterprise. Internet Explorer product manager Andrew Ziegler discussed the new privacy features of IE8, currently in its second beta, in an extensive blog post Monday. Users of the new software will be able to turn on Microsoft's InPrivate Browsing and Blocking features.

Psystar, the plucky Mac cloner in Doral, Fla,, has thrown down the gauntlet and countersued Apple. At a small press conference in the office of Psystar's attorneys in Palo Alto, Calif., the lawyers said they have answered Apple's original lawsuit filed July 3 and upped the ante by filing one of their own in a Northern California federal court.

After more than six years of disputes and battles between Immersion and Microsoft, the companies are waving white flags. After suing Microsoft for patent infringement on Xbox controller technology and winning, and then suing again for breach of a confidentiality agreement, Immersion will now pay Microsoft $20.75 million of the $26 million it received in a previous settlement.

Nokia has taken the wraps off two new smartphones in its N series -- the N79 and the N85. Both phones further blur the distinction between a phone and a computer, a blending that Nokia is encouraging by describing each of them as a "multimedia computer."

In a move to set itself apart from the flood of Bluetooth headsets on the market, BlueAnt Wireless on Tuesday introduced the BlueAnt V1 headset.

Adobe Systems has announced major updates to its Photoshop Elements suite of video- and photo-editing software, including online sharing and mobile-phone options. In beta now, the software is expected to be on retail shelves in early October.

The Mozilla Foundation is on the verge of adopting a new software-programming technique that promises to dramatically improve the speeds at which browsers interact with the Web. The first step, the nonprofit organization said, will be to optimize the way that JavaScript runs in Firefox 3.1 -- the next incremental update to Mozilla's popular open-source browser.

Nvidia Corp., a 5,000-employee company known for its graphics processing units, is gearing up for battle against giant chipmaker Intel. During the first day of the Nvision 2008 conference Monday, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsuan Huang said his Santa Clara, Calif.-based company plans to focus on the smartphone market.