Corporate & legal

Don't believe everything you read on Bebo.

That's the message an angry mother is sending by suing six U.K. newspapers that lifted a story off social-networking site Bebo about her daughter's supposed wild party.

The Bebo invite promised the "party of the year," for the teenager's 16th birthday. Subsequent posts on Jodie Hudson's Bebo account spoke of underage drinking, sex acts, and violence that occurred at the celebration.

Several newspapers ran the story, along with pictures lifted from Jodie Hudson's Bebo account, alleging that 400 partying teens responded to the Bebo … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices announced Friday that it would take a total of $948 million in charges in the second quarter, sending its stock down as much as 7 percent in early morning trading.

Shares of the chipmaker fell as low as $4.60 a share in early trading, or down approximately 7 percent. AMD was trading at $4.82, down 2.8 percent, later in the morning.

AMD noted the bulk of its charges will come from a continuing deterioration in the goodwill value of its former ATI handheld and DTV units, which are part of AMD's Consumer Electronics … Read more

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin will recommend sanctions against cable company Comcast for allegedly blocking access to file-sharing traffic, the Associated Press has reported.

"The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers' access to the Internet," the AP quoted Martin saying. "We found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles."

The AP said Martin would circulate the order to his fellow commissioners on Friday, who will vote on the measure at an open meeting on August 1.

Comcast has been sharply criticized in recent months for slowing down peer-to-peer … Read more

The U.S. Justice Department has ended its two-year criminal probe of backdated stock options at Apple and has decided not to file charges against current and former executives, including CEO Steve Jobs, according to a report Thursday in The Wall Street Journal.

Apple and the Justice Department declined to comment, but attorneys for two subjects of the probe told the newspaper that they had been notified that the investigation had concluded

"We were always confident that after a full and fair review of the facts, there could be no other outcome," Cris Arguedas, a lawyer for former … Read more

Rambus is suing Nvidia, accusing the company of violating 17 Rambus-held patents on memory controllers. The suit was filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The Los Altos, Calif.-based company says that chipsets, graphics processers, and media communication processors across six different Nvidia product lines are illegally infringing. The patents held concern memory controllers for SDR, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR, and GDDR3 SDRAM.

Rambus is asking the court for an injunction (which would stop Nvidia from selling the products at issue), as well as monetary damages.

In a prepared statement, Rambus' head … Read more

By now it is old news that Diane Greene is no longer CEO of VMware. A lot has been written about the reasons for the abrupt change and related prospects for VMware moving forward. Rather than focus on the business aspect however, I prefer to use this blog as a tribute to Greene's accomplishments.

Along with her husband, Mendel Rosenblum, and a few others, Greene founded VMware in 1998. In her short 10 years at the company, she helped propel a tech rocket ship. Aside from the obvious financial returns, VMware:

1. Brought a real competitive threat to the … Read more

Improved e-mail filtering and government crackdowns might've deterred some of the once-ubiquitous spammers peddling prescription-free Viagra on the Web, but a new study from Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse has found that many of those sites are still alive and kicking.

The CASA study, resulting from its fifth annual "You've Got Drugs!" investigation, did find that there has been a decline in the total count of Web sites hawking controlled drugs: 365 of them, compared to 581 in 2007's study.

But it's still alarming, CASA said, because few of … Read more

OAKLAND, Calif.--The body that Linux programmer Hans Reiser led police to Monday has been positively identified as his estranged wife Nina Reiser, whom he is convicted of killing, police revealed at a press conference here Tuesday afternoon.

That development not only brings some closure to family and friends of Nina Reiser, but also brings Hans Reiser one step closer to a reduced sentence as part of a deal in the works with the prosecution that would still need a judge's approval, according to Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Paul Hora.

Reiser--known to the technology world as the founder … Read more

Syntax-Brillian, one of several smaller LCD TV makers to use club store sales to do an end-run around the category's traditional leaders, has filed for bankruptcy.

The Tempe, Ariz.-based Olevia television and Vivitar digital camera maker, filed for protection from creditors in a Delaware court following a year of missed sales targets, leadership changes, and accounting problems, according to Reuters.

The company's stock has dropped more than 90 percent in the last year, and its efforts to refinance and raise additional financing were unsuccessful. With just eight employees left at headquarters, it has ceased operations.

A new … Read more