Controversial Silicon Valley advertising startup NebuAd drops its plan to sell deep packet inspection technology to ISPs after Congress and public interest groups slam the privacy implications of deep packet inspection. NebuAd suffered through a summer of losing customers and congressional hearing before bailing on the plan that promised ISPs additional revenue sources through DPI.

The year began promisingly enough for NebuAd, a Silicon Valley advertising startup promising a new source of revenue for ISPs through the use of deep packet inspection. DPI allows ISPs to track the behavior of Internet users without their consent in order to more accurately target advertising. Charter Communications, the nation’s fourth-largest broadband provider, signed up for the service, as did several other ISPs.

View: The full story @ eWeek

Vista, thy name is bloat! The latest Windows packs a lot of code — more than any version of Windows ever — and some of it is just plain unnecessary. All of that excess code has a way of slowing down an operating system. You can regain some PC performance by removing unneeded features.

InfoWorld have identified a dozen Vista features that you can turn off right now. Some are shiny baubles that slow down graphics performance, while others are optional utilities that hog memory when they shouldn’t. A few can actually be quite useful, though they play a major role in bogging down your PC.

View: The full story @ InfoWorld

Computer-maker Dell is attempting to off-load its computer manufacturing plants around the world, The Wall Street Journal reported in its Friday edition. The company has approached contract manufacturers over the last few months offering to sell the plants, the newspaper reported quoting “people familiar with the matter.”

Contract manufacturers are companies that specialize in making electronics products to-order and are a vital part of the world’s electronics industry. A large percentage of the computer, networking and consumer electronics goods on sale from famous brand-names are made by such companies, many of which are based in Taiwan or China.

View: The full story @ PCWorld

The flash memory market is abuzz as Korean news sources, along with Reuters and Bloomberg, are reporting that Samsung Electronics is thinking about buying SanDisk. A Samsung spokespersn, James Chung, said: “We are considering various opportunities regarding SanDisk but nothing has been decided.”

Korea-based Samsung is the world’s largest NAND Flash memory maker and it pays KRW400bn ($351m) each year in royalties to SanDisk. The Asus Eee PC and the Apple iPhone, for example, use Samsung flash chips. SanDisk owns Flash memory patents and makes Flash-based MP3 players, memory cards and solid-state drives (SSDs). It posted poor results at the end of July, with an unexpected Q2 loss of $68m compared to a $28m profit in the year-ago quarter.

View: The full story @ The Reg

Intel Corp. has decided to postpone the release of its central processing units (CPUs) with built-in graphics core to 2010 because of the “customer feedback”, according to a slide from a roadmap of the chipmaker published by a web-site. “Intel remains committed to delivering stable, high quality, industry leading platforms on a predictable cadence. Based on 2008 client platform learnings and customer feedback, we have realigned our features and schedules for 2009 mainstream Nehalem chips,” a statement published on a slide that resembles a slide from Intel’s roadmap, reads. The slide was revealed by HKEPC web-site.

Originally planned to be released in 2009, code-named Auburndale processor for mobile computers and Havendale chip for desktop PCs (both based on Nehalem micro-architecture) are now scheduled to be launched in early 2010, based on the information from the slide. The delay is hardly critical for Intel in terms of revenue, but since those chips greatly simplify the company’s production process, it is strange that Intel decided to delay such products.

View: The full story @ Xbit-Labs

Royal Pingdom has posted the results of a short study that looked at the availability of the software update services for three popular operating systems: Windows, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu.
Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service performed a test once every five minutes and if downtime was found, it was confirmed from two different locations and was counted for however long it lasted. The results were then tabulated in a graph:

Microsoft won with 100 percent availability (0 minutes of downtime), Apple came in second with 99.9 percent availability (2 hours and 34 minutes of downtime), and Ubuntu came in last with 98.64 percent availability (1 day, 5 hours and 45 minutes of downtime). Microsoft doesn’t have much to be proud of, as it’s the biggest of the three, and it’s no surprise it took first place. Apple’s 99.9 percent is also quite respectable.

Not many of you would know that you could actually run Microsoft Origami Experience 2.0 on your regular Windows Vista machine. Origami offers touch features and is basically designed for Windows Ultra-Mobile PCs also known as UMPC’s which are running Windows Vista.

You would be wondering what’s the use of running a software optimized for touch screens of UMPC’s on a regular machine? Well for those of you running Windows Vista Business which does not have the privilege of Windows Media Center could use Origami to have some sort of similar experience to Windows Media Center. Ofcoarse Windows Media Center is much superior to Origami and is completely meant for entertainment purposes of living rooms but since Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate editions comes pre-installed in most notebooks and they already have VMC so many of us already use it just to listen music or watch videos using the beautiful interface without having to use its TV features. But what about those who have Vista Business edition? Well there is a good news for them. If you are a Vista Business user who want to have a similar kind of cool looking interface to run your Music, Videos or see your pictures then Origami is not a bad alternate to VMC.

Link: Redmond Pie

Chipmaker Intel reported a 25% increase in quarterly profit today, helped by strong sales of microprocessors used in notebook computers, and gave a revenue forecast that topped expectations. However, its second-quarter gross margin disappointed some analysts as the company said higher demand for cheaper laptops led to a lower-than-expected average microprocessor selling price. “The concern on the Street was that demand may be falling off the cliff. We’ve seen that in the handset market. So at least as Intel’s results and outlook goes, we’re not seeing similar weakness in the PC market,” said CRT Capital Group analyst Ashok Kumar.

Intel’s second-quarter net income rose to $1.60 billion, or 28 cents per share, from $1.28 billion, or 22 cents per share, a year ago. That beat the average Wall Street estimate for a profit of 26 cents per share, according to Reuters Estimates. Revenue rose to $9.47 billion from $8.68 billion, whereas analysts had expected $9.32 billion on average.

View: Full Story at Reuters

You may remember Apple’s promise six months ago to lower the iTunes UK pricing, so it both equalled that of the rest of Europe and avoided any EU action. Well now Apple has decided to forget the whole idea. Why? Well Apple says exchange rates have done the job for them.

At the time of the original announcement, a European iTunes track cost €0.99 (74p) and a UK track cost 79p, but now Apple says the current exchange rate means a 79p UK Track actually equals €0.99, making any price “no longer necessary”.

Of course if the Euro continues to rise against the Pound, iTunes may end up raising the prices for UK consumers above 79p, though the spokesperson would not confirm this, they did say they wanted pricing to remain “standardised” across all of the EU.

European iTunes customers still pay far more than their U.S. counterparts, who pay just 43p or €0.62 per track.

Source: BBC News

PayPal, the San Jose company that revolutionized the way payments are made online, marks its 10th anniversary this year.

It has officially launched a site PayPal-10 which features a number of interviews with PayPal founders and key decision makers.

Link: PayPal-10