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WASHINGTON (AFP) - Microsoft chief executiveSteve Ballmer set a three-week deadline as he threatened Saturday to go directly to Yahoo's shareholders to advance his company's efforts to take over the Internet giant.

“We believe now is the time for our respective companies to authorize teams to sit down and negotiate a definitive agreement,” Ballmer said in a letter to Yahoo's board of directors and posted on Microsoft's website.

Yahoo has spurned Microsoft's two-month-old offer.

“If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo board.”

Ballmer complained that the two sides have made entered “no meaningful negotiation to conclude an agreement” on Microsoft's unsolicited February 1 offer of 31 dollars a share for Yahoo, a 62 percent premium on the closing price of the time.

“Our goal in making such a generous offer was to create the basis for a speedy and ultimately friendly transaction. Despite this, the pace of the last two months has been anything but speedy,” he wrote.

He added that in the past two months the US economy and stock markets have weakened considerably.

In addition, he said, “public indicators suggest that Yahoo's search and page view shares have declined.”

He also accused Yahoo's board of adopting new plans that will raise the cost of Microsoft's takeover, if successful.

“By any fair measure, the large premium we offered in January is even more significant today. We believe that the majority of your shareholders share this assessment,” he said.

“The substantial premium reflected in our initial proposal anticipated a friendly transaction with you. If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal,” the letter said.

“We think it is critically important not to let this window of opportunity pass.”

SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp. sent a letter to the Yahoo Board of Directors Saturday setting a three-week deadline for moving forward on its more than $40 billion buyout offer.

The letter signed by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Microsoft will take its case directly to Yahoo shareholders and work to elect a new slate of directors, if the board doesn’t respond by the deadline by April 26.

The bid to buy Yahoo was made in January and announced Feb. 1.

At the time, Microsoft offered $44.6 billion, or 62 percent above Yahoo’s market value. The deal is currently valued at about $41 billion, based on Friday’s closing share prices.

Yahoo’s board formally rejected Microsoft Corp.’s bid, saying it undervalues the company.

The Silicon Valley company has since explored alliances with Google Inc., News Corp.’s MySpace.com and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, but no alternative to Microsoft’s offer has surfaced.

Ballmer acknowledged these alternative negotiations in the letter and questioned why the company is not negotiating with Microsoft.

“This is despite the fact that our proposal is the only alternative put forward that offers your shareholders full and fair value for their shares,” Ballmer wrote in the letter. “During these two months of inactivity, the Internet has continued to march on, while the public equity markets and overall economic conditions have weakened considerably.”

Ballmer said the Microsoft offer has grown stronger as the time has passed.

“We believe that the majority of your shareholders share this assessment,” he wrote.

Yahoo and Microsoft both lost less than 1 percent of their share of U.S. Web searches in February, the most recent month for which data are available, according to the research group comScore. During that month, Yahoo grabbed 21.6 percent of searches, more than Microsoft’s 9.6 percent. Google Inc.’s share rose less than 1 point to 59.2 percent.

In the intervening weeks, Yahoo released internal projects drawn up in December that call for the company’s revenue to rise more than 70 percent during the next three years.

The Web company also postponed its annual shareholder meeting, and thus the deadline for Microsoft to nominate its own slate of directors to fill Yahoo’s board. A new date has not been set.

Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Qualcomm– three of the biggest winners in the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's recently completed 700MHz auction– have announced plans for the spectrum they've won, with two of the companies focused on expanding their wireless voice and data networks.

Verizon and AT&T will both use the spectrum for high-speed fourth-generation wireless services.

Qualcomm won eight spectrum licenses in the 6MHz E block, including spectrum covering the Boston, Los Angeles, New York City and Philadelphia areas. The company will use that spectrum, which cost US$554.6 million, to expand its FLO TV service, which offers video over mobile devices. Qualcomm now offers FLO TV to areas containing 68 million people, and the new spectrum will allow the service to reach 130 million people in the U.S., Qualcomm said.

The E block licenses will allow Qualcomm to deliver more video content over FLO TV, Qualcomm said. Qualcomm also won three 12MHz B block licenses, at a cost of $3.5 million, near three Qualcomm research and development centers in California and New Jersey.

The FCC auction of spectrum in the 700MHz band raised more than $19.1 billion for the 1,090 spectrum licenses sold. The spectrum will be available to winning bidders in February 2009, when U.S. television stations must abandon the spectrum and move to all-digital broadcasts.

Verizon Wireless was the winning bidder for a nearly nationwide block of spectrum, the 22MHz C block, plus 102 licenses for individual markets around the country. Verizon did not win the Alaska portion of the C block. Verizon will pay nearly $9.4 billion for the licenses, it said in a press release.

Verizon will use the spectrum to deploy a wireless data network using the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard, it said. The company announced plans for an LTE-based network last November, and it plans to launch an LTE network in the 700MHz band in 2010.

The 22MHz C block “provides a speed and performance advantage that will be ideal for connecting a variety of consumer electronics, from wireless phones to medical devices to gaming consoles,” Verizon said.

“We now have sufficient spectrum to continue growing our business and data revenues well into– and possibly through– the next decade, and this is the very best spectrum,” Lowell McAdam, Verizon Wireless' president and CEO, said in a statement. “This is a wise investment in future data growth opportunities.”

AT&T will pay about $6.6 billion for 227 licenses in the 12MHZ B block of spectrum. Paired with 700MHz spectrum that AT&T acquired when it purchased spectrum from Aloha Partners earlier this year, the spectrum will enhance quality and reliability of existing wireless broadband and voice services, the company said.

With the new spectrum, AT&T's spectrum will cover all of the 200 largest markets in the U.S. and 87 percent of the country's population, the company said.

The B block was the “most attractive, most valuable spectrum available, and it was the best investment for AT&T and our customers,” Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO of AT&T's wireless unit, said in a statement.

BEIJING (AFP) - More than a million people have “signed up” to a website petition being promoted by one of China's biggest Internet portals to criticise Western media “bias” in covering the Tibetan unrest.

The petition on Sina.com has attracted 1.19 million signatures, most of them from within China, according to its homepage on Saturday.

The appeal repeats Chinese government statements in referring to “violent crimes of beating, smashing, looting and arson” in Tibet's capital, Lhasa, last month.

“Western media organisations such as CNN and BBC have churned out untrue and distorted reports of the event. Please sign your name here to lodge your strong protest,” it says.

The Chinese government has in recent weeks organised for the state press to heavily criticise the Western media over its coverage of the unrest, while denying foreign reporters access to the protest areas.

The demonstrations began in Lhasa on March 10 and escalated into the biggest challenge to China's rule of the Himalayan region in decades.

Beijing maintains that Tibetan “rioters” have killed 18 innocent civilians and two policemen.

It insists that Chinese security forces have killed no one, but Tibetan exiled groups say at least 135-140 people have died in the crackdown.

China's communist rulers strictly control the nation's press, and have ensured that the version of events given by Tibetan exiles and activists groups are either discredited or not publicised in the Chinese media.

For instance, Sina.com does not mention the exiles' death toll, nor does it refer to what many Tibetans say has been widespread repression they have suffered under nearly six decades of Chinese rule.

The petition can be found at hi.news.sina.com.cn/news/xizang08/index.php?dpc=1

HONG KONG/BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese authorities appeared to have lifted a block on the English-language version of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, but politically sensitive topics such as Tibet and Tiananmen Square are still off limits.

Internet users in Beijing and Shanghai confirmed on Saturday that they could access the English-language version of one of the world's most popular websites, but the Chinese language version was still restricted.

While searches of random topics such as “Johann Sebastian Bach” and “dim sum” brought up English-language articles, sensitive words such as Tibet were met with a message that the browser was unable to connect to the Internet.

The move comes after International Olympic Committee (IOC) inspectors told Beijing organizers that the Internet must be open for the duration of the 2008 Olympics and that blocking it “would reflect very poorly” on the host country.

China's government, keen to avoid sparking social discontent, keeps a tight watch over the media and often blocks or censors popular Web sites and forums where dissent may brew.

Wikipedia and Yahoo's photo-sharing network Flickr have been periodically blocked before, while Google's YouTube is often blocked during high-level political events in China.

Wikipedia, which is written collaboratively by volunteers, has more than 2 million articles in English.

These include politically sensitive subjects such as Tibet and Taiwan independence, the banned Falun Gong spiritual group and the bloodily suppressed pro-democracy protests of 1989.

(Reporting by Jeffrey Hodgson in Hong Kong and Lucy Hornby in Beijing; Additional reporting by Sophie Taylor in Shanghai; Editing by David Fox)

In the wake of a widely publicized security breach that left thousands of patient records exposed, the federal government's National Institutes of Health is forbidding all employees who use Apple's MacBook laptops from handling sensitive data as of Friday, InformationWeek has learned.

Employees at the health agency who store medical records and other personal information on laptops must use systems that run either on Microsoft's Windows operating system or Linux, according to an agency memo.

Those systems must be equipped with Check Point Software's Pointsec encryption tool as of April 4, according to an NIH mandate. Systems running Windows Vista can also use Vista's built-in BitLocker disk encryption tool.

NIH imposed the no-MacBooks rule because there is no Apple-compatible version of Pointsec. To date, Check Point has only released a beta version of Pointsec for Macs that's not yet ready for government use.

“Computers that cannot be encrypted by Pointsec at this time (e.g., Macs) are waived from the encryption mandate, but only with the stipulation that they do not contain any PII or sensitive government information,” the NIH Office of Research Services said in a memo to NIH staff. PII refers to personally identifiable information.

NIH said it's been given no estimate as to when a final version of Pointsec for Macs may become available. It was not immediately clear how many Apple MacBooks are in use at the NIH. It also wasn't clear whether the ban extends to the whole of the U.S. Department of Health And Human Services, of which NIH is a part.

An NIH spokesman did not immediately respond to an inquiry seeking more information.

The MacBook ban applies to in-house NIH workers and also to contractors employed by the agency to handle sensitive data, according to the memo.

NIH employees who use laptops that are permanently anchored to a desk or research equipment can ask for an exemption from the encryption mandate as long as they place a “Do Not Remove” sticker on their machines.

NIH's decision highlights one of the biggest challenges facing Apple as it seeks to make greater inroads against Microsoft in the business and government computing markets. Commercial software developers have little incentive to port business applications to the Mac because the platform holds only a tiny share of the business computing market.

NIH imposed the April 4 deadline in the wake of an embarrassing incident in February in which a laptop containing records on 2,500 patients enrolled in a medical study was stolen. The laptop was not encrypted, despite a 2-year-old federal policy that mandates encryption on government systems.

NIH did not disclose the type of laptop that was stolen. Apple officials were not immediately available for comment.

See original article on InformationWeek.com

The number of people without traditional landline phones is increasing, as a growing number of U.S. adults use only mobile phones, a market research firm said Friday.

In a survey conducted in the fourth quarter of last year, Harris Interactive found that about one in seven adults only uses a cell phone, up from roughly one in 10 in 2006. The percentage of adults with landline phones has dropped slightly to 79% from 81%.

Surprisingly, the percentage of cell phone-only users split between Americans 30 or older and 18- to 29-year-olds, Harris said. Last year, 55% of the people who no longer used landlines were of the younger age group.

But that doesn't mean late teens and young adults are going back to landlines. On the contrary, cell phone-only usage among the younger group rose to 32% from 26% in 2006. The lower percentage of the overall number is only an indication that older Americans are increasingly tossing traditional phones, Harris said.

The majority of U.S. adults, however, are still using multiple approaches to making telephone calls. Three-quarters of the survey respondents were using landlines, cell phones, and Internet telephony.

But the percentage of adults with cell phones has increased significantly over the last year. Nearly nine in 10 adults have a mobile phone, up from 77% percent a year ago. As a result, the rapid adoption rates “will likely reshape the entire communications landscape within the next decade,” Harris said.

What hasn't changed much is the percentage of people using Internet telephony, or voice over IP. Harris found about one in six adults using the Internet for calls, which is basically unchanged from 2006.

See original article on InformationWeek.com

JAKARTA (AFP) - Indonesian Internet providers have started blocking websites or blogs posting an anti-Islamic film that has sparked widespread protests, a report said Saturday.

Internet Service Providers Association chairwoman Sylvia Sumarlin told news website detikcom that access to YouTube has been blocked but could not guarantee it would be totally unavailable for national viewing.

She said there were other routes that Internet service providers (ISPs) could access that were currently not being used.

The film, “Fitna”, could still be accessed on YouTube from some providers on Saturday.

Earlier this week, the government wrote to YouTube asking it to take down the film, made by the far-right Dutch MP Geert Wilders.

“A letter was sent to Internet providers asking them to block any site or blog posting the film Fitna,” communications and information ministry official Ferdinandus Setu told AFP.

In the letter dated April 2, the minister said the film “could disturb religious and civil harmony at a global level” and asked Internet providers to block sites posting the film, without specifically mentioning YouTube.

“Not only YouTube has uploaded the film, so it is up to the ISPs' discretion to block these sites,” said Setu, adding that the ministry had not decided on any sanctions for ISPs who do not comply with the request.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono this week banned screenings of the film and barred Wilders from entering the country.

He also urged Indonesians not to resort to violence. Protests here have mostly been peaceful, but dozens of members of a Muslim student group on Wednesday attacked a Dutch consulate building, burning a flag and breaking down the gates.