HTC to acquire webOS?

The operating system webOS seems on its way to becoming the foster child of the mobile world, wandering from one home to the next, says News Factor Network.

Initially developed by Palm as the successor to its Palm OS for personal data assistants and introduced in January 2009, the Linux-based webOS became part of the Hewlett-Packard family in April 2010, when the company took over struggling Palm.

Now, it could enter a new relationship with handset-maker HTC, which makes such Android-based devices as the Thunderbolt and Droid Incredible for Verizon and the coming Radar and Titan, running Microsoft's Windows Phone 7.

Dolby Laboratories says Research In Motion has agreed to license its audio technologies that were the subject of two recent lawsuits against the BlackBerry maker, writes the Associated Press.

As a result, Dolby Laboratories said yesterday it has dropped its patent infringement lawsuits against Research In Motion.

In a 15 June lawsuit, Dolby had claimed RIM's smartphones and Playbook tablet devices use its patented digital audio compression technology without a licence. This technology enables the playback of high-quality audio files using limited amounts of storage space.

A missing dot in an e-mail address might mean messages end up in the hands of cyber thieves, researchers have found, notes the BBC.

By creating Web domains that contained commonly mistyped names, the investigators received e-mails that would otherwise not be delivered.

Over six months, they grabbed 20GB of data made up of 120 000 wrongly sent messages. Some of the intercepted correspondence contained user names, passwords, and details of corporate networks.

SAP AG has agreed to pay $20 million to resolve a criminal probe into allegations that it downloaded millions of files from rival Oracle, according to a source familiar with the matter, reports The Economic Times.

The plea deal, scheduled to be formalised at a court hearing tomorrow, comes as Oracle seeks to appeal a recent ruling that slashed a $1.3 billion civil jury verdict against SAP over the same conduct.

US Department of Justice prosecutors last week charged SAP's defunct TomorrowNow unit with 12 criminal counts in connection with illegal downloads of Oracle software files, according to court documents.