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Psystar is not only pushing cheap Mac clones, it's defending its right to do so by accusing Apple of running an operating-system monopoly. Will Apple get a taste of Microsoft's Windows woes? Or will Psystar wind up out of business?

The Miami-based company claims to be “reinventing the wheel” with its Open Computer, formerly called OpenMac — for $399.99. Psystar tapped into efforts known as the OSx86 Project, and its goal of running OS X on a PC have been realized. Even the latest releases of OS X can run on PC hardware, Psystar said, but compatibility can be an issue.

“Why spend $1999 to get the least expensive Apple computer with a decent video card when you can pay less than a fourth of that for an equivalent sleek and small form-factor desktop with the same hardware,” the company's Web site says.

Challenging Apple

Apple has made it clear that Open Computer violates the Leopard end-user license agreement (EULA). The agreement forbids installation of the operating system on third-party hardware. Apple CEO Steve Jobs may have taken the violation personally, suggested Ilan Barzilay, a member of the litigation practice group at Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks, P.C.

“When Jobs left the company in the 80s, there were internal struggles about how to keep the company profitable and how to increase market share. Apple decided to take the Windows route and license the operating system, and we saw Apple clones,” Barzilay recounted. “When Steve Jobs took control of Apple again, he cut that off.”

Now, news reports indicate that Psystar is challenging Apple's EULA. The company is using the “unfair monopoly” card, claiming Apple overcharges for its hardware and its EULA might not hold up in court. Legal analysts said the dispute could ultimately wind up in a federal court.

Is Apple Running a Monopoly?

Making the case for an Apple monopoly will be tough, Barzilay said. Antitrust issues are typically decided by defining the relevant market. If Psystar manages to convince the court that the relevant legal market is people running OS X, then that could fly.

If you define the market as personal computers, on the other hand, Apple's market share compared to Windows machines is still small. Apple's U.S. PC share is up 32.5 percent in the first quarter, but that still only gives Apple 6.6 of the total market, according to Gartner.

“Now that Apple has created the version of the operating system that is licensed to run on Windows software, there are a number of users who are choosing that option,” Barzilay said. “If the relevant market is personal computers, there's no way you can say Apple has a monopoly. It's a question as to what the specific legal arguments are going to be.”

What's in the Open Computer

The Open Computer offers a 2.2-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2GB of DDR2 667 memory and integrated Intel GMA 950 graphics. It also boasts a 20x DVD+/-R drive, four USB ports and a 250GB, 7200-RPM drive.

The closest machine Apple offers is the Mac mini, but the specs are not the same. The mini sports a 1.83-GHz or 2.0-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with an integrated Intel GMA 950 graphics processor. It offers 1GB of DDR2 667 memory, though it can support 2GB.

The mini sells for $599. Apple's machine comes with iLife, Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Test Drive, a 30-day trial of iWork and Front Row, as well as other standard applications. The clone doesn't offer those extras.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Green may be the new black, but many U.S. consumers are not recycling old electronic gadgets despite promises by multiple organizations for hassle-free ways to get rid of electronic waste.

Putting computers, televisions or cell phones in the trash is increasingly frowned on, and states like Massachusetts ban discarding many electronics in garbage cans. As a result, some local authorities arrange free recycling events and companies and charities around the country offer to recycle old devices.

But while most U.S consumers say they approve of recycling, a large number are not actually doing it. Stephen Baker of consumer research firm NPD Group has an idea why.

“People aren't doing it because people are lazy. When it comes right down to it there are no incentives. Most of the time it costs them money and even if it doesn't, the customer has to be proactive,” said Baker.

U.S. consumers will spend $171 billion on 500 million electronics devices in 2008, adding to the existing 2.9 billion pile-up of items such as televisions, computers and cell phones, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.

Lots of these gadgets will replace existing items. Many people say they keep old devices with a view to passing them on to relatives. Their more entrepreneurial and Web-savvy counterparts often sell used gadgets on sites like eBay.com and craigslist.org.

But while the percentage of old electronics thrown in the trash can dropped to 19 percent in 2007 from 21 percent in 2005, according to the association, U.S. consumers still ditch millions of device such as TVs and computers with their coffee grinds and candy wrappers.

BIG EFFORT

Major U.S. mobile providers Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc (T.N) and Sprint Nextel (S.N) accept old cell phones at their stores. Groups such as greenphone.com even pay to take phones that are no longer in use. But still less than one in 10 consumers recycles a phone, researcher iSuppli said.

“I had originally been saving mine for my grandmother and the years went on,” said Tracy Sullivan, a marketing specialist who lives in Medford, Massachusetts, and recalled having to make a big effort to find local recycling options.

“You have to really want to recycle and find the information. It's there if you go looking for it,” she said.

In Chelmsford, Massachusetts, sanitation workers will not collect a computer screen or a TV from the curb because of a state ban on trashing those items. But the town has struggled to find alternatives for its 33,000 residents.

Its recycling coordinator, Jennifer Almeida, described twice-yearly recycling days when residents drop off gadgets as “extremely inefficient,” even if they reap hundreds of devices.

“It's a bit of a madhouse,” she said, recalling lines of cars waiting with engines running for the event to begin. “It's not convenient for residents and it's just not earth friendly. It's a whole lot of cars burning a whole lot of fuel.”

Local companies offer to pick up gadgets with fees ranging from $10 to $50, depending on the type of devices or their number. Almeida is looking for a cheaper curbside pick-up alternative that she hopes will be available this summer.

Companies such as computer maker Dell (DELL.O) and retailer Staples (SPLS.O) also offer recycling. Dell picks up its own computers or printers from your doorstep at no charge but only collects non-Dell PCs from consumers who are buying a Dell computer.

HEFTY BILL

Staples takes in small items such as keyboards free at its stores but charges $10 each for bigger items like computers.

Linda Wilson, the technology director at Hoffman Agency in Denver, said she was surprised by a hefty bill when Waste Management Inc (WMI.N) came to pick up old computer gear, some of which her co-workers had brought in from home.

“They said they'd pick it up for free but when the driver got here he said, 'Didn't they tell you it's $10 a monitor?”' said Wilson, who also noted that the recycler would not guarantee it would wipe data from computer hard drives.

Reluctance to recycle often stems from privacy concerns, as personal data can still lurk on hard drives even if the drives are wiped clean. “You've got to be careful,” said Wilson, who said that overwriting a disk several times could help.

Wilson, who recalls finding electronics recycling more convenient in San Jose, Silicon Valley, said she has since found a local Denver church that holds a twice-yearly free recycling event. But this still takes some effort.

“I have probably four printers in my basement that I have to get rid of and just haven't taken the time,” she said.

Yet there is an abundance of recycling information on the Internet at sites such as earth911.org. Earth Day, which started in 1970 and is scheduled for April 22 this year, will promote awareness of environmental issues such as recycling at http://ww2.earthday.net.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also displays a lot of useful information about electronics recycling at http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/osw/conserve/plugin/recycleit.htm.

While consumers can also find easy choices on their local authority's Web site, analysts say it doesn't help that recycling options vary widely from location to location.

“I suspect everybody has an option. It depends whether you want to go to the trouble of finding it,” said NPD's Baker.

(Editing by Brian Moss)

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - EBay Inc shares fell 4 percent on Thursday following stronger quarterly results that were belied by continued weakness in the company's core U.S. auctions business, analysts said.

Analysts said the results painted a mixed picture of the Internet auction leader, with some using the quarterly report to justify higher price targets on the stock, while one broker downgraded the stock to “neutral” after recent price gains.

The shares fell 4.3 percent, or $1.39, to $30.73 in Nasdaq trading. In the month prior to the quarterly report released on Wednesday, the stock had jumped 25 percent.

American Technology analyst Tim Boyd cut his rating on the stock to “neutral,” saying the company had failed to deliver a hoped for reacceleration in U.S. gross merchandise volume — an overall measure of goods and services sold via eBay auctions.

“We see limited upside to the shares from current levels and are therefore moving to the sidelines,” Boyd said in a research note.

The growth rate for gross merchandise volume was flat compared to the fourth quarter and up 12 percent from the year-ago quarter, down from levels around 20 percent or higher prior to 2007.

Citi analyst Mark Mahaney said internally generated growth in its U.S. marketplaces business was around a modest 5 percent, excluding recent acquisitions. He reiterated his “hold” rating on the stock and said a good re-entry point would be if it fell to $28.

Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay raised his price target on eBay to $38 from $36, but noted that the company had cobbled together “bits and pieces into a reasonable quarter.”

“EBay reported a good first quarter but analysis reveals that it was patched together out of better-than-expected performances at PayPal, Skype, StubHub, Classifieds and Advertising,” Lindsay said in a research note.

The improved performance was supported by a favorable exchange rate, cross-border trade and low taxes, he said.

Lindsay said the overall stronger results bought new Chief Executive John Donahoe a year to fix the core marketplaces business, which includes eBay auctions and e-commerce sites such as Shopping.com. “It looks as if the new CEO is committed to growth by fixing the core business this time,” he said.

(Reporting by Eric Auchard, editing by Maureen Bavdek)

Any executive who's ever been involved in litigation — or at least watches Law and Order on a regular basis — knows that the process of discovery calls for all information related to that litigation to be disclosed. No matter how big the company, that's a tall order, given the number of ways such information can be created using the plethora of high-tech tools, from BlackBerry handhelds to voice mail, available to workers.

Say hello, then, to information governance. “It's a unified view of your information and what you need to do with that information for compliance purposes, legal-hold purposes, and also overall for deletion purposes,” explained Nicole Eagan, chief marketing officer for Autonomy. Her company creates server-based software that helps companies identify and hold information. The company's newest product, Autonomy Information Governance, takes the task of identifying data that could be relevant to litigation or compliance efforts to a new level by making “human-friendly” information understandable to computers.

Human-Friendly, Computer-Hostile

Eagan defined human-friendly data as “the type of information that people create and consume.” It can be contained in the e-mails or instant messages we send, conference calls we participate in, and the PowerPoint presentations we read. Computers have a hard time understanding that information, she told us, compared to structured data that “can be put in rows and columns [that] the computer can process and understand.” Most organizations have massive amounts of this unstructured data, since every employee has the tools to create it.

So when a company wants to ensure it's in compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley or other regulations, or is facing litigation, it's important that there be a way to locate and hold information in a way that is legally sound. That, Eagan said, is what Autonomy Information Governance does. “This system will automate that [process] for them because we allow the computer to in effect read e-mails, listen to voice mails, and find information that's relevant to any litigation case or to compliance.”

Disposing of Data

Compliance rules regulate the type of data that must be saved, as well as the term for which data should be conserved. Autonomy's product helps organizations to dispose of data that is no longer required to be stored, Eagan said.

“One of the big trends we're seeing is companies thinking twice about keeping information forever, so the idea is that when information is no longer needed for business or compliance purposes, delete it,” she said. “As much as 80 percent of e-mail should be deleted, and keeping it is just putting the company at an unnecessary risk.”

The server-based software runs on Windows, Linux and Unix servers. Extending search capabilities to remote devices such as BlackBerry handhelds requires installing a small software agent on those devices. For smaller enterprises, a hosted version of the service is available. The average price for the system is about $350,000, though that's scalable depending on the number of employees, the amount of data, and the types of media that need to be searched.

Quaero, a European consortium developing new search engine technologies, is ramping up recruitment of researchers.

Although some of the consortium's research activities have already begun, the starting signal for much of the work came on March 11, when the European Commission said it had no objections to the French government giving Quaero ,99 million (US$157 million) in state aid.

Until that contribution, representing about half the project's budget, received approval, some labs were unable to recruit needed staff, said Quaero project leader Pieter Van Der Linden.

“There was no certainty. The publicly funded research labs weren't allowed to take on anyone at all. Now, the different organizations and companies are building up their staff and preparing a big kick-off for the team at a meeting in mid-May,” he said.

Van Der Linden was speaking from Portugal, where he will present the Quaero project at a meeting for those involved in the Commission's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for funding European research. The meeting brings together researchers working in diverse fields, including audio-visual streaming, personalization of audio-visual content and multimedia search.

Quaero is often mischaracterized as a European attempt to build a search engine to rival Google, thanks to a speech in August 2005 by former French president Jacques Chirac. His talk of the need to use technology to fight Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism with a joint French-German research project prompted reports that he planned to build a “Google killer.”

The two countries quickly parted ways: Germany decided to fund its own research project, Theseus, to study semantic search tools.

Now Quaero's goals are less headline-grabbing– but perhaps more far reaching. The consortium's research activities are grouped into five application areas: developing tools to search within sound and video clips; improving access to multimedia through Internet portals; automating the personalization of video-on-demand services; simplifying the archival of video, for example for journalists, and automating the creation of relevant metadata when digitizing audio and video.

Some of those applications involve the creation of tools to automatically translate content, with the goal one day of enabling search engine users to discover documents, sound archives and video in one language using keywords in another.

Many companies and public institutions are involved in the research but the application areas are led by Exalead, France Tcom, the French National Audiovisual Institute (INA), Jouve and Thomson, with support from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and RWTH Aachen University in Germany.

Quaero is less about battling cultural imperialism and more about practical necessity: the European Union vaunts its “single market” for goods and services, but with 23 official languages spoken across 27 countries, there is no single market for search or content.

Even within the Quaero consortium, where most of the researchers are native speakers of French or German, “Our working language is English,” said Van Der Linden.

That also applies to the Quaero intranet being built to unite researchers scattered across 30 or more sites, he said. There are no plans yet to put the translation tools they are developing to use outside their own labs.

Engineer Neil Wallace peers into a huge vacuum chamber designed to replicate - as far as possible - the conditions of space.

Cryogenic pumps can be heard in the background, whistling away like tiny steam engines.

Using helium gas as a coolant, they can bring the temperature in the vacuum chamber down to an incredibly chilly 20 Kelvin (-253C). The pressure, meanwhile, can drop to a millionth of an atmosphere.

This laboratory in a leafy part of Hampshire is where defence and security firm Qinetiq develops and tests its ion engines - a technology that will take spacecraft to the planets, powered by the Sun.

Ion engines are an “electric propulsion system”. They make use of the fact that a current flowing across a magnetic field creates an electric field directed sideways to the current.

This is used to accelerate a beam of ions (charged atoms) of xenon away from the spacecraft, thereby providing thrust.

Neil Wallace, technical lead of the electrical propulsion team at Qinetiq, winds open the door of the testing chamber.

He points to some large metal blocks at the bottom of the chamber.

“These are the xenon pumps and these are cooled down by the helium compressors to approximately 20 degrees Kelvin,” he explains.

“So any gas atoms that strike those panels, they freeze. After you’ve been running the engines for a number of hours you can see a frost - it looks like snow - which is actually frozen air and xenon.”

During testing, the engine fires ions towards the opposite end of the chamber, which has a protective coating of graphite.

“The ions are travelling very fast, at approximately 50km a second,” he says.

“When they strike the other end of the chamber, they actually knock atoms off the surfaces they strike; it’s analogous to sand-blasting on an atomic level.”

Cruise control

The ion engine developed by Qinetiq, the T5, will be flown for the first time on the European Space Agency’s Goce spacecraft. The mission will fly just 200-300km above the Earth, mapping the tiny variations in its gravity field.

A replica of the T5 engine sits in the test facility at Qinetiq. It is tiny - weighing 3kg, and looks rather like the oil filter of a car.

Yet despite this humble appearance, it took 20 to 30 years to develop, at a cost of tens of millions of pounds.

In space, ion engines will draw electric power from solar panels, generating a thrust equivalent to the weight of a postcard.

This incredibly gentle thrust could, in theory, take a spacecraft beyond our Solar System, if sustained for long enough.

Goce is staying very close to Earth, flying in an ultra-low orbit, where it will encounter wisps of air.

The benefit of an ion engine on this mission is to provide drag compensation, or cruise control.

“This spacecraft is [travelling] at a speed of about eight and a half kilometres per second,” says Neil Wallace.

“As it travels around the Earth, it’s going through the upper atmosphere and it experiences a buffeting.

“They need to compensate that buffeting very accurately and that’s what we’re doing, so we’re actually providing cruise control for that spacecraft.”

Real flight

Various types of ion engine have been used before on only a handful of space missions, including Smart-1, the European mission to the Moon, and Nasa’s Deep Space 1, which flew by a comet.

Future Esa missions such as BepiColombo, bound for the innermost planet, Mercury, will also use the technology.

Qinetiq gets to test its T5 engine for real this summer, when Goce is launched from the Russian space port of Plesetsk. It will go up on the same type of rocket that failed three years ago, destroying Europe’s Cryosat ice mission.

Neil Wallace says the nature of the space business makes watching any launch a dramatic event.

“You spend 10 years working on a mission, treating the components and equipment like a newborn baby. You never take it out of the clean room, and then you put in on the top of 100 tonnes of high explosive and set light to it,” he says, laughing nervously.

“But no, the most exciting time for us will be when that spacecraft comes over the horizon and the ground station picks it up, and you can see the engines are doing what we’ve always said they will do.”

Hear more about Goce and its ion engines in Science In Action on the BBC World Service this Friday, 18 April, at 0930 GMT. (Check World Service schedules for alternative broadcast times)

San Francisco - NetSuite is set to announce NetSuite OneWorld on Thursday. It says the add-on module for its hosted ERP (enterprise resource planning) software can help multinational businesses manage and reconcile their financial activities in real time.

The software can “roll up” financial transactions to the regional and worldwide level, while employing the appropriate currency rates in a given region, according to NetSuite.

For example, a sales employee in Germany would work with and enter figures in euro, but a regional manager based in the U.K. could see that transaction reflected in pounds, the company said. Currency rates get updated automatically, according to NetSuite.

Similar scenarios can be applied to e-commerce Web sites. Multiple company subsidiaries could have their own site, employing various pricing, localized tax and currency factors, through a single OneWorld account, NetSuite said.

NetSuite is also promoting the module's ability to provide real-time analytics into business operations. Data can be viewed and explored through a series of dashboards tailored for specific jobs, such as financial officers or salespeople.

Overall, the module “really extends this from being an accounting tool to a management tool,” said C. Sean Rollings, vice president of product and industries marketing at NetSuite.

The release also seems to be a battle cry for NetSuite — which

San Francisco - After tricking several thousand executives into downloading malicious software earlier this week, online scammers started up their subpoena phishing scam again Wednesday, but on a much smaller scale.

First reported Monday, the phishers send a small number of e-mail messages to senior executives within companies, often CEOs, telling them that they've been subpoenaed for a federal court case. The e-mails direct the victim to a Web site that is very similar to a legitimate California federal court page, but ending in “…-uscourts.com,” rather than the “….uscourts.gov” Web domain actually used by federal courts.

Although they end with the same letters, the domains used in this scam are actually different from and not connected with the uscourts.com Web site, which offers access to court records in some jurisdictions.

The e-mail sent to executives is specially crafted to appear legitimate, a tactic called “spear-phishing.” The emails include the executive's name, company's name and even the correct phone number.

Executives who click on the link in the e-mail are then told that they need to download a plug-in in order to read the subpoena. That plug-in is actually malicious software.

Although the U.S. federal court system uses email to communicate information about cases, subpoenas for new cases are not served via e-mail.

Verisign, which estimates that about 2,000 people were tricked by the scam on Monday, believes that Wednesday's attack was on a much smaller scale. Late Wednesday the company's iDefense group had tracked only about 100 infections, said Matt Richard, director of iDefense's Rapid Response Team.

Security experts have been fighting the phishers. By Tuesday they'd managed to get the first phishing Web site taken down, only to have the second one pop up on Wednesday.

Because the attack targets such a small number of victims, anti-spam companies have had a hard time filtering the e-mails and antivirus companies have been similarly pressed to block the malicious software that the attackers are using.

Late Wednesday, antivirus companies were not blocking this latest version of the malware, said John Bambenek, a security researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and volunteer at the SANS Internet Storm Center.

San Francisco - A security problem with MySpace has the potential to botch up law-enforcement efforts to track bad actors on the social-networking site.

An increasing number of MySpace profiles contain a few lines of code that automatically subscribe people to the profile's video channel, said Chris Boyd, security research manager for FaceTime Communications.

After the visitor has been added, the person running the profile can see the subscribers. For people who don't abuse MySpace, the problem may not appear to be a huge deal, Boyd said.

But hackers often are running dozens of “puppet” MySpace accounts, which are used for a variety of malicious acts such as spamming or trying to vandalize other profiles, not for social networking, Boyd said.

So when a visitor is added, it's a tip-off that someone could be tracking their movements in order to expose them for abusing MySpace, Boyd said.

Hackers “are using every trick in the book they can to know who is watching them,” said Boyd, who has posted more details on his blog.

That's particularly bad for law enforcement, which may invest weeks in “digital stakeouts” observing certain profiles as part of pedophilia investigations, Boyd said.

Hackers have been inserting the code on their pages since at least October 2007. MySpace was notified of the problem in late March but has yet to fix it, although Boyd said the company sent him a personal e-mail labeling the problem a “system error.”

The code doesn't tell the person running the profile how many times a particular visitor comes to their site or when, Boyd said. But in combination with an IP (Internet protocol) address “tracker,” a profile owner could compile a more complete picture of visitors.

MySpace prohibits tools such as IP trackers, which can narrow down to certain geographic areas where visitors are based. Many of the trackers advertised on dodgy forums simply don't work, Boyd said. Nonetheless, hackers keep finding ways to game MySpace.

There are a couple defenses against this latest problem. If you're automatically added to someone's video channel, you can simply unsubscribe and avoid going back to the profile until MySpace has fixed it.

Another defense is adding the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) “vids.myspace.com” to the “hosts” file, an internal PC file that matches domain names with Web sites. The file can be configured to block any domains a user specifies.

San Francisco - Red Hat has no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market, but will continue to place its bets on a desktop for commercial markets.

“We are focused on infrastructure software for the enterprise market, and to that market we are offering the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop,” said Michael Chen, vice president of corporate marketing at Red Hat.

“You need a different support ecosystem and applications for the consumer desktop,” Chen added.

Among the company's desktop goals for 2008 and 2009 is to ensure that its desktop products complement its server and middleware products, Red Hat said in a company blog post Wednesday.

Red Hat's strategy is