My Weekly Reader

I'm on vacation and I've ignored the tech news up to now, but here's a summary of the week's top stories so far.

1. Tuesday there were 531 more lawsuits from the Recording Industry Association of America, bringing the 2004 totals to over 1000. The EFF says the RIAA is cutting corners in this latest round. Meanwhile one of the victims is suing back claiming racketeering and extortion.
2. They've been talking about it for months, now finally Yahoo has dropped Google as its primary search tool in favor of a homegrown product. Yahoo has been buying up search technologies from Inktomi, Overture, AltaVista and FAST. The Yahoo Slurp crawler started spidering the web on Monday, Google was gone by Tuesday. Big differentiator: Yahoo search will include paid placement, Google does not.
3. Cingular became the largest cell phone company in the country with the acquisition of AT&T Wireless on Tuesday. 30% of all cell phones will be on the new joined network.
4. According to pundit Paul Thurrott the Microsoft Windows source code leak came from an Israeli developer, Mainsoft, who was given the code several years ago to investigate porting parts of Windows to Linux.
5. Our Worm of the Week: Netsky.B spreads via email then infects the entire network via shared folders. Symantec rates it a 4 out of 5 on the threat-o-meter.
6. According to SlashDot, Apple is now debt free with $4.8 billion cash in the bank.
7. Will the biggest threat to Microsoft's monopoly come from China? Chinese developer Evermore Software released the English language version of its EIOffice suite at Demo this week. The company will start leasing the Java-based software for $99/year this May.
8. At the Intel Developers Forum this week, Intel announced that several notebook manufacturers will begin to incorporate Internet telephony in their computers this year using Intel's Extended Mobile Access (EMA) technology.
9. Earthlink is going after the Alabama Gang, a group the company calls "the most professional and technologically sophisticated group of e-mail spammers" it has ever encountered. Earthlink is naming names and says the US DOJ has contacted it about criminal complaints, too.
10. Slashdot has a story about a new automatic guitar tuner for musicians who are too stoned to tune their own. Jimmy Page and Graham Nash are endorsing it.
11. Can you believe there's no Morse code for the @-sign? Now there is. The first change to Morse since WWII. da-dit-da-dit-dah-dit
12. My buddy Rick Yaeger at MacMerc says he's found a way to get free iTunes from Pepsi bottles every time.