IBM sues Amazon for patent infringement!!

Claiming it had come to an impasse in negotiations with the Web retailer, IBM said Monday it had filed two patent infringement suits against Amazon.com for unspecified damages. The company said it had attempted to reach a settlement with Amazon for the past four years.

"We filed this case for a very simple reason. IBM's property is being knowingly and unfairly exploited," IBM intellectual property chief Dr. John Kelly said. The suits were filed in two Texas district courts.

Amazon is accused of infringing on five patents: one involving the presentation of applications in an interactive service; the storage of data in an interactive network; the presentation of advertising in an interactive service; the adjustment of links with weighted user goals and activities; and the ordering of items using an electronic catalogue.

"When someone takes our property, without our permission through a license, we have no option but to protect it through every means available to us," Kelly said. IBM claims it has notified Amazon "numerous" times since it first alerted them to possible infringement in 2002.

IBM says it holds more than 40,000 patents worldwide. It says it has a long history of licensing its e-commerce patents with a variety of companies on fair terms. The five patents Amazon is accused of infringing upon have already been licensed to other large retailers.

A request for comment from Amazon was outstanding as of now..

Firefox browser 2.0 gets launched finally !!

The Mozilla Corporation on Monday posted to its download site the final release of Firefox 2.0, the second-generation release of the popular alternative Web browser. An official announcement is expected Tuesday.

New features in Firefox 2.0 include enhancements in security, tabbed browsing, performance, and extensions. The browser update also includes a built-in spell checking and an anti-phishing feature, much like Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7, which launched last week.

JavaScript 1.7 and improved subscribing of RSS feeds are also among the additions. The update to Firefox's JavaScript interpreter is an important change, especially as more Web sites take advantage of the new benefits of Asynchronous JavaScript -- especially as they embed objects or functionality from Google and Microsoft Windows Live.

As Mozilla vice president for engineering Mike Schroepfer told, JavaScript 1.7 is an interim build - a "check point" on the way to finally implementing JavaScript 2.0, which is based on (actually a superset of) the ECMAscript 4.0 proposal that Netscape made to the ECMA standards body in 2003, and which incorporates Macromedia's (now Adobe's) ActionScript 2.0.

Firefox 2.0 has been in testing since March and was originally slated to launch in August. However, a number of last minute bugs and security issues pushed back the release to October, and Mozilla said it would not rush FIrefox's first major upgrade.

Firefox 2.0 is now available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Will post the download link as soon as its officially announced.. Keep reading..

Download it here