News about what is happening in technology today!

Google plans to fight for its use of VoIP technology
A firm that holds patents for technology used in Internet voice calling is suing search giant Google (Profile, Products, Articles) Inc. for US$5 billion over its Google Talk instant-messaging client, according to court papers.

Rates Technology Inc. (RTI), a small, New York company that holds patents to telecommunications technologies but does not sell products, filed suit in October against Google, claiming the Mountain View, California, company is using two technologies RTI has patented but has not licensed them.

The case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York in October, but surfaced first in published reports this week.

Google uses the two technologies, which are for minimizing the cost of long-distance telephone calls, in the VOIP service of its Google Talk VOIP client, according to court papers.

“Google’s wrongful acts have damaged and will continue to damage RTI irreparably, and RTI has no adequate remedy at law for those wrongs and injuries,” the company said in court papers.

Google has been notified of its patent infringement and given a chance to remedy the situation by licensing technology from RTI, “but has refused to do so,” the company said in its court filing.

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The imminent 10Gb 1-inch hard drives we’ve been hearing about have been well covered but the maker, Cornice, reckons its product could end up in over 70 million cellphones by 2009. Kevin Magenis, one of the company founders, isn’t shy about pointing out that this is 30 million units more than predicted DAP sales.

At this week’s CES, Samsung Electronics is showing off a 3.6Mbps cellular phone. The device uses High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) to acheive such speeds.

Researchers have found several security holes in Blackberry handheld devices and the servers that power them, according to a story at Washingtonpost.com. The research points out serious flaws in the BlackBerry server, which could be exploited by convincing Blackberry handheld users to click on an image file attachment. From the article: ‘Lindner’s slides from his presentation — which he agreed not to release until RIM has fully fixed this problem — show that the Blackberry server which manages all of the encryption keys needed to unscramble e-mail traffic to and from all Blackberry devices registered on the network stores them on a Microsoft SQL database server in plain, unencrypted text. Lindner found that by convincing a Blackberry user to click on a special image attachment, that handheld device could be made to pass on malicious code to the Blackberry server, which could then be taken over and used to intercept e-mails or as a staging point for other attacks within the network.’

Motorola is introducing iRadio in its 2nd edition of the ROKR cell phone. An article in Reuters says that iRadio will be a subscription music service that will go on sale this year. This will put Motorola in competition with other such services like XM Satellite Radio Holdings and Sirius Satellite Radio.” From the article: “The iRadio service will cost about $7 (4 pounds) a month but the price may vary depending on which wireless phone service the subscriber uses, according to Motorola. U.S. service providers including Cingular Wireless and Verizon Wireless are planning mobile music download services for this year. Sprint Nextel has already launched music download and streaming services. Motorola did not reveal any service provider partnerships but said it hopes to sell the service in conjunction with wireless operators, which could sell subscribers a wireless download of a song that they discovered through iRadio.