Time Warner may shed AOL

Time Warner's new CEO confirmed Wednesday that the media company is separating its struggling AOL access business from the division's growing online advertising business, a move that could lead to the sale of the traditional dial-up unit, reports CNN Money.

Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner's CEO, said the company also may move to sell all or some of Time Warner Cable, which has seen its separate stock slide by about 40% since the company put a 16% stake up for sale to the public a year ago.

Bewkes said the company is looking to cut costs in its corporate offices by 15%, which should produce $50 million in annual savings. There have been reports that the company plans to eliminate 100 positions from corporate management.

Apple has released a security fix for its QuickTime media player software, fixing a critical bug that had been worrying security experts for nearly a month, says Washington Post.

The update, released Wednesday, fixes a vulnerability in the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) used by QuickTime to handle streaming media. It also fixes a previously reported incompatibility between QuickTime 7.4 and Adobe Premiere and After Effects, according to an Apple spokesman.

On 10 January, researcher Luigi Auriemma disclosed the flaw by posting proof-of-concept attack code that could be used to run unauthorised software on a victim's computer. For the attack to work, the criminal would have to first trick the user into viewing a maliciously encoded QuickTime media file.

Music companies have started a new fight with China's Internet industry over piracy, filing lawsuits accusing popular Web sites Baidu.com and Sohu.com of aiding illicit online copying, an industry group said Wednesday, reports Google.

The suits, filed Monday, ask a Beijing court to order Baidu and Sohu to remove from their search engines links to thousands of sites that carry unlicensed copies of music, the International Federation of Phonographic Industries said.

Music companies lost an earlier lawsuit against Baidu. But China later changed its piracy standards, and companies won a similar case last year against Yahoo's China arm.

Sony won the fierce competition in the US for TV sales during the holiday season as it beat out rivals offering lower-priced products and shipped the highest number of LCD TVs, which are becoming the dominant model, says WSJ.com.

The Japanese electronics company had a slow start this year because it was late in offering a line-up of fully-digital LCD TVs, but it jumped four spots from the previous quarter to take a 12.8% share in the key October-December period, according to the latest data by Texas-based research firm DisplaySearch. This was the first time Sony took top share in North American LCD TV shipments.

The results, however, also showed the continued volatility in US market share in the face of unrelenting competition.