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Sony’s PlayStation 3 outsold Nintendo’s Wii for the first time in Japan during the month of November, game magazine publisher Enterbrain said on Friday.

In the four weeks leading up to Nov. 25, Sony sold 183,217 PS3 systems in Japan. By comparison, Nintendo sold 159,193 Wii consoles. In previous months, the Wii has outsold the PS3 upwards of 6 to 1.

The news marks a first for Sony on its home turf also given rise to the prospect that Sony may return to it former dominance over the last 11 years.

One analyst remained skeptical, however, saying one month is hardly enough to forecast a turnaround. “Overseas, I don’t really see the PS3 doing that much at Christmas time primarily because it’s still more expensive than the other machines and has less software,” said Hiroshi Kamide.

“It’s nice to see the system selling much better than six months ago. But is it a sustainable trend? Is it going to really escalate from here? I’m not so sure.”

Source: PCWorld.com

Astronomers at the University of Illinois have found the first clear evidence for a cradle in space where planets and moons form. The cradle, revealed in photographs taken with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, consists of a flattened envelope of gas and dust surrounding a young protostar.

“We are seeing this object in the early stages of stellar birth,” said U. of I. astronomy professor Leslie Looney, the lead author of a paper accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters. “Eventually, the protostar will form into a star much like our sun, and the disk will form into planets and moons.”

Located about 800 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus, the object is obscured by dust and therefore invisible to the eye. However, the Spitzer Space Telescope’s sensitive infrared camera can penetrate the dust, and reveal the structures within.

The brightest structure consists of an enormous, almost linear flow of shocked molecular hydrogen gas erupting from the protostar’s two magnetic poles. These bipolar jets are so long, light would take about 1 1/2 years to travel from one end to the other.

In star-formation theory, a cloud of gas and dust collapses to form a star and its planets. As the cloud collapses, it begins to rotate faster and faster, like a pirouetting ice skater pulling in her arms. The force of the growing magnetic field ejects some of the gas and dust along the magnetic axis, forming the bipolar jets seen in the photograph.

“If material was not shed in this fashion, the protostar’s spin would speed up so fast it would break apart,” Looney said.

The planet-forming region is perpendicular to, and roughly centered on the polar jets. There, seen in silhouette against a bright background of galactic infrared emission, is the flattened disk of a circumstellar envelope.

Theorized, but never before seen, the flattened disk is an expected outcome for cloud-collapse theories that include magnetic fields or rotation.

“Some theories had predicted that envelopes flatten as they collapse onto their stars and surrounding planet-forming disks,” Looney said, “but we hadn’t seen any strong evidence of this until now.”

With Looney, co-authors of the paper are former undergraduate student John Tobin (now at the University of Michigan) and graduate student Woojin Kwon.

The Spitzer Space Telescope is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Funding was provided by NASA.

Adapted from materials provided by University of Illinois.

source: ScienceDaily 

Asustek Computer recently launched a new 2-liter desktop PC in Taiwan, the Nova P22, which adopts an Intel Core 2 Duo E6320 CPU.

Currently, the price of the PC is set at NT$32,900 (US$1,020) and Asustek will launch more related hardware expansion accessories for the PC in the future, according to market sources.

source: DigiTimes & Electronista

Scientists at Duke University have created the first map of imprinted genes throughout the human genome, and they say a modern-day Rosetta stone — a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning — was the key to their success. The study revealed four times as many imprinted genes as had been previously identified.

In classic genetics, children inherit two copies of a gene, one from each parent, and both actively shape how the child develops. But in imprinting, one of those copies is turned off by molecular instructions coming from either the mother or the father. This process of “imprinting” information on a gene is believed to happen during the formation of an egg or sperm, and it means that a child will inherit only one working copy of that gene. That’s why imprinted genes are so vulnerable to environmental pressures: If the only functioning copy is damaged or lost, there’s no backup to jump in and help out.

Many of the newly-identified imprinted genes lie within genomic regions linked to the development of major diseases like cancer, diabetes, autism, and obesity. Researchers say that if some of these genes are later shown to be active in these disorders, they may offer clues to better disease prevention or management.

“Imprinted genes have always been something of a mystery, partly because they don’t follow the conventional rules of inheritance,” says Dr. Randy Jirtle, a genetics researcher in the departments of radiation oncology and pathology at Duke and a senior author of the study. “We’re hoping this new roadmap will help us and others find more information about how these genes affect our health and well-being.”

The technical wizardry needed to find the genes fell to Dr. Alexander Hartemink, the other senior author of the study and an assistant professor in Duke’s department of computer science, and Philippe Luedi, the first author of the study. They fed sequence data from two types of genes — ones known to be imprinted and ones believed not to be imprinted — into a computer and asked it to discover the differences. This machine learning approach led to an algorithm, which was able — like the original Rosetta stone — to decode seemingly impenetrable data, in this case, specific DNA sequences that pointed to the presence of imprinted genes.

“We can’t say for certain that we identified all of them, but we think we found a large number,” says Hartemink.

Jirtle, who has studied imprinting for years, notes that imprinting is an epigenetic event, meaning it’s something that can change a gene’s function without altering the sequence of its DNA. “Imprinted genes are unusually vulnerable to pressures in our environment — even what we eat, drink, and breathe. On top of that, epigenetic changes can be inherited. I don’t think people realize that.”

Several years ago, Jirtle showed that Agouti mice — normally fat and yellow — when fed certain dietary supplements, would produce brown, normal weight babies. The babies’ Agouti genes, the ones responsible for color, were the same as the mother’s, yet they looked different. “That’s epigenetics in action,” says Jirtle.

It’s estimated that imprinted genes comprise about 1 percent of the human genome, and until now, only several dozen had been identified. Using their new “Rosetta stone”, however, Jirtle and Hartemink found 156 new likely imprinted genes, and validated two particularly interesting ones on chromosome 8, where none had been found before. One of them, KCNK9, is mostly active in the brain, is known to cause cancer, and may also be linked to bipolar disorder and epilepsy. The second, DLGAP2, is a possible bladder cancer tumor suppressor gene.

Hartemink says experiments to confirm that all 156 new genes are truly imprinted — and not just statistically likely candidates — will be difficult, mostly because gene expression varies from tissue to tissue and most genes turn on and off over time. “We’ve certainly narrowed the field, but we have a whole lot of work ahead of us.”

This research is published in the December 3 issue of Genome Research.

Grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy and the Alfred Sloan Foundation supported the research.

Duke colleagues who also contributed to the work include Fred Dietrich, from the department of molecular genetics and microbiology; Jennifer Weidman, from the department of radiation oncology and Jason Bosko, an undergraduate in the department of computer science.

Adapted from materials provided by Duke University Medical Center.

source: ScienceDaily 

Faced with its second mass protest by members in its short life span, Facebook, the enormously popular social networking Web site, is reining in some aspects of a controversial new advertising program.

Within the last 10 days, more than 50,000 Facebook members have signed a petition objecting to the new program, which sends messages to users’ friends about what they are buying on Web sites like Travelocity.com, TheKnot.com and Fandango. The members want to be able to opt out of the program completely with one click, but Facebook won’t let them.

Late Thursday the company made an important change, saying that it would not send messages about users’ Internet activities without getting explicit approval each time.

MoveOn.org Civic Action, the political group that set up the online petition, said the move was a positive one.

“Before, if you ignored their warning, they assumed they had your permission” to share information, said Adam Green, a spokesman for the group. “If Facebook were to implement a policy whereby no private purchases on other Web sites were displayed publicly on Facebook without a user’s explicit permission, that would be a step in the right direction.”

Facebook, which is run by Mark Zuckerberg, 23, who created it while an undergraduate at Harvard, has built a highly successful service that is free to its more than 50 million active members. But now the company is trying to figure out how to translate this popularity into profit. Like so many Internet ventures, it is counting heavily on advertising revenue.

The system Facebook introduced this month, called Beacon, is viewed as an important test of online tracking, a popular advertising tactic that usually takes place behind the scenes, where consumers do not notice it. Companies like Google, AOL and Microsoft routinely track where people are going online and send them ads based on the sites they have visited and the searches they have conducted.

But Facebook is taking a far more transparent and personal approach, sending news alerts to users’ friends about the goods and services they buy and view online.

Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, said she was surprised to find that her purchase of a table on Overstock.com was added to her News Feed, a Facebook feature that broadcasts users’ activities to their friends on the site. She says she did not see an opt-out box.

“Beacon crosses the line to being Big Brother,” she said, “It’s a very, very thin line.”

Facebook executives say the people who are complaining are a marginal minority. With time, Facebook says, users will accept Beacon, which Facebook views as an extension of the type of book and movie recommendations that members routinely volunteer on their profile pages. The Beacon notices are “based on getting into the conversations that are already happening between people,” Zuckerberg said when he introduced Beacon in New York on Nov. 6.

“Whenever we innovate and create great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with them,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at Facebook. “After a while, they fall in love with them.”

Palihapitiya was referring to Facebook’s controversial introduction of the News Feed feature last year. More than 700,000 people protested that feature, and Zuckerberg publicly apologized for aspects of it. However, Facebook did not remove the feature, and eventually users came to like it, Palihapitiya said. He said Facebook would not add a universal opt-out to Beacon, as many members have requested.

MoveOn.org started the anti-Beacon petition on Nov. 20, and as of last night more than 50,000 Facebook users had signed it. Other groups fighting Beacon have about 10,000 members in total. Facebook, they say, should not be following them around the Web, especially without their permission.

The complaints may seem paradoxical, given that the so-called Facebook generation is known for its willingness to divulge personal details on the Internet. But even some high school and college-age users of the site, who freely write about their love lives and drunken escapades, are protesting.

read the whole story at Herald Tribune

Seeking greater control of their content, leading news organizations and other publishers said Thursday they would push for a revision to technology that controls access to their content by search engines.Google, Yahoo and other top search companies now voluntarily respect a Web site’s wishes as declared in a text file known as robots.txt. The file allows a site to block indexing of individual Web pages, specific directories or the entire site.

The proposal, presented by a consortium of publishers at the headquarters of The Associated Press, would add to those commands, further restricting access.

The current system does not give sites “enough flexibility to express our terms and conditions on access and use of content,” said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council, one of the organizations behind the proposal. “That is not surprising. It was invented in the 1990s, and things move on.”

Robots.txt was developed in 1994 in part because of concerns that some crawlers were straining Web sites by visiting them repeatedly or rapidly. As search engines expanded to offer services for displaying news and scanning printed books, news organizations and book publishers began to complain.

The proposed extensions, known as Automated Content Access Protocol, partly grew out of those disputes. Leading the drive for the extensions were groups representing publishers of newspapers, magazines, online databases, books and journals.

News publishers complained that Google was posting their news summaries, headlines and photos without permission. Google asserted that “fair use” provisions of copyright laws applied, though it eventually settled a lawsuit with Agence France-Presse and agreed to pay The Associated Press without a lawsuit being filed. Financial terms have not been disclosed.

The new automated commands will use the same robots.txt file that search engines now recognize. Web sites could start using them Thursday alongside the existing commands.

Like the current robots.txt, the use of the new protocol would be voluntary, so search engines ultimately would have to agree to recognize the commands. Search engines could ignore them and leave it to courts to rule on any disputes over fair use.

A Google spokeswoman, Jessica Powell, said the company supported all efforts to bring Web sites and search engines together but needed to evaluate the new protocol to ensure it could meet the needs of millions of Web sites, not just those of a single community.

“Before you go and take something entirely on board, you need to make sure it works for everyone,” Powell said.

Organizers of the new protocol tested their system with the French search engine Exalead but had only informal discussions with others. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft sent representatives to the announcement, and O’Reilly said their “lack of public endorsement has not meant any lack of involvement by them.”

Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of the industry Web site Search Engine Land, said robots.txt “certainly is long overdue for some improvements.” But he questioned whether the new protocol would do much to prevent legal battles.

And being an initiative of news publishers, he said, it might lack attributes that blogs, online retailers and other Web sites might need in an updated robots.txt.

source: Herlad Tribune

Fujitsu has announced the development of the MHZ2 BH series of 2.5-inch hard disk drives with a maximum capacity of 320GB.

Sales of the new series will begin in February of 2008, according to the company.

The MHZ2 BH series delivers transfer speeds of up to 300MB per second. The series is designed primarily for use in compact desktop PCs, notebook PCs and consumer electronics products, such as HDD recorders, noted the company.

source: DigiTimes

A group of researchers headed by Dr. Benny Pinkas from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Haifa succeeded in finding a security vulnerability in Microsoft’s “Windows 2000″ operating system. The significance of the loophole: emails, passwords, credit card numbers, if they were typed into the computer, and actually all correspondence that emanated from a computer using “Windows 2000″ is susceptible to tracking. “This is not a theoretical discovery. Anyone who exploits this security loophole can definitely access this information on other computers,” remarked Dr. Pinkas.

Various security vulnerabilities in different computer operating systems have been discovered over the years. Previous security breaches have enabled hackers to follow correspondence from a computer from the time of the breach onwards. This newly discovered loophole, exposed by a team of researchers which included, along with Dr. Pinkas, Hebrew University graduate students Zvi Gutterman and Leo Dorrendorf, enables hackers to access information that was sent from the computer prior to the security breach and even information that is no longer stored on the computer.

The researchers found the security loophole in the random number generator of Windows. This is a program which is, among other things, a critical building block for file and email encryption, and for the SSL encryption protocol which is used by all Internet browsers.

For example: in correspondence with a bank or any other website that requires typing in a password, or a credit card number, the random number generator creates a random encryption key, which is used to encrypt the communication so that only the relevant website can read the correspondence. The research team found a way to decipher how the random number generator works and thereby compute previous and future encryption keys used by the computer, and eavesdrop on private communication.

“There is no doubt that hacking into a computer using our method requires advanced planning. On the other hand, simpler security breaches also require planning, and I believe that there is room for concern at large companies, or for people who manage sensitive information using their computers, who should understand that the privacy of their data is at risk,” explained Dr. Pinkas.

According to the researchers, who have already notified the Microsoft security response team about their discovery, although they only checked “Windows 2000″ (which is currently the third most popular operating system in use) they assume that newer versions of “Windows”, XP and Vista, use similar random number generators and may also be vulnerable.

Their conclusion is that Microsoft needs to improve the way it encodes information. They recommend that Microsoft publish the code of their random number generators as well as of other elements of the “Windows” security system to enable computer security experts outside Microsoft to evaluate their effectiveness.

The results of the research are described in a scientific paper entitled “Cryptanalysis of the Windows Random Number Generator”, which was presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security which took place in Alexandria, Virginia on October 29 - November 2, 2007.

Adapted from materials provided by University of Haifa.

source: ScienceDaily 

Using an SMS password as an added security measure for internet banking is no guarantee your money is safe, according to a new Queensland University of Technology study which reveals online customers are not protecting their accounts.

Mohammed AlZomai, from QUT’s Information Security Institute, said one in five online transactions was vulnerable to obvious attacks despite added security methods such as SMS passwords being adopted.

Mr AlZomai said the study had found that the security threat had more to do with the usability of the SMS system and human error, rather than any technical security problem.

“In response to the growing threat to online banking security, most banks have implemented special methods for authenticating a transaction,” he said.

“A typical method is sending a one-time-password via SMS to the customer’s mobile phone for each transaction.

“This means the customer must manually copy the password from their phone in order to confirm the online transaction.”

But Mr AlZomai said customers were failing to notice when the bank account number in the SMS message was not the same as the intended account number. He said if this occurred it was a clear sign hackers had infiltrated the system.

As part of the study, QUT developed a simulated online bank and asked participants to play the role of customers and undertake a number of financial transactions using an SMS authorisation code.

Mr AlZomai said he then simulated two types of attacks - an obvious attack which was where five or more digits in the account number were altered, and a stealthy attack which was where only one digit was changed.

“It is worrisome that obvious attacks were successful in 21 per cent of cases,” he said.

“And when transactions faced a stealthy attack, 61 per cent of attacks were successful.”

He said this study showed that a significant number of users were unable to identify the attack. “This is a strong indication that the SMS transaction authorisation method is vulnerable,” he said.

“According to our study only 79 per cent of users would be able to avoid realistic attacks, which represents an inadequate level of security for online banking.”

Mr AlZomai said while this study highlighted the importance for customers to be vigilant when they were banking online, banks also had a responsibility to their customers. “We hope this research will allow online banks and other online service providers to be better prepared for these emerging risks.”

Adapted from materials provided by Queensland University of Technology.

source: ScienceDaily 

Transcend Technologies recently introduced an 8GB version of its tiny USB flash drive, the JetFlash V30.

The V30 has a curved, ultra-compact body (60×16.5×8.1mm) and weighs only 7g. The JetFlash V30 supports Windows 98 SE/2000/Me/XP/Vista, Mac OS 9.0/OS X and Linux Kernel 2.4.2 or later, according to the company.

The 8GB version of the V30 is available now at an pre-tax price of US$88.40.

source: DigiTimes

BenQ has added another new member to its Joybook product line, the Joybook R43,

the features are:

-14.1-inch UltraVivid widescreen display

-the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processor

-Windows Vista

-Wi-Fi connectivity

-brand new lid design.

The Joybook R43 is designed to capture the spirit of a great metropolis, said BenQ. The Joybook R43 features a deep black lid accented by a unique ornamental band. The unique ornamental band was imprinted with Laminar Film technology to outline the skyline of a great metropolis in pop art style.

source: DigiTimes

The open-source software company’s president for the Asia-Pacific region, Gery Messer, says attracting top talent is vital to growth

In a role created for him in February this year, Red Hat’s president for the Asia-Pacific region is vocal about the power of “talent attracting talent” which, he believes, is vital to growing the business.

“Since I joined the company earlier this year, we’ve brought in some executives who are veterans. We want this leadership to attract high-profile executives, to inspire, set the direction and to talk with key clients,” Messer said.

An industry veteran with more than 20 years of management consulting and sales experience, Messer has held several senior executive positions at EMC, SAP and Deloitte Consulting.

ZDNet Asia sat down with Messer recently to discuss the rate of Linux adoption and his vision for Red Hat in Asia.

How is the adoption of Linux in the region’s server space from your perspective?

If you look at the major organizations, more and more are running mission-critical applications on a Linux platform, because its reliability is not disputed anymore. With open source, we’ve gone through the emotional phase, about innovation and building a strong community. Then the next phase benchmarked its performance to show it was proven and scalable–and safe. Now we’re leveraging that. CIOs are telling us that open source is becoming mainstream and isn’t deemed risky anymore. There’s so much more technology available from when we started, like virtualization and data storage management–now all integrated into the operating system.

Gartner recently predicted that 80 percent of all commercial software will include open source standards and solutions by 2011. It was a US$18 billion market in 2005, and we’re looking at US$41 billion by 2010. With the CIOs today, it’s not a question of whether they’ll use Linux or open-source solutions, but more of how quickly they will adapt, and what percentage of their overall IT structure will be on open-source platforms.

How do you see Linux on the desktop shaping up?

Internally, we’re running operations on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, of course, and personally, coming from a background working with a popular proprietary operating system, I can tell you that the experience is almost the same. People don’t seem to have problems adapting to its look and feel.

The trend we’re seeing is toward having different desktops for different users. Linux’s flexibility means that we see it on a variety of devices like thin clients or the OLPC, for example. I’m expecting widespread deployment of Linux on the desktop fairly soon.

Red Hat recently hired several members of its top management in the region. Are you looking to grow your staff further?

Absolutely. We’re focusing our efforts on building a strong management and support team, to attract talent in the region. We have a strong presence here, in nine different countries. And since I joined the company earlier this year, we’ve brought in some executives who are veterans. We want this leadership to attract high-profile executives, to inspire, set the direction and to talk with key clients. Eventually, we hope these people can go out and be thought leaders in the community.

I really believe in hiring people to grow and retain them. It’s a great passion of mine.

What are your plans for Red Hat’s business here?

For our growth strategy and plans, we’re looking to expand our partner ecosystem: channel partners and those with middleware skills, too. We want to pose a value proposition not just to customers but also our partners, so that they can build a sustainable business model around our partnership, providing extra work and support.

Companies spend 60 percent of their budgets on support and maintenance. This is where we can come in and offer a price comparison.

Globally, Red Hat is seeing 40 percent of revenues coming from outside of the United States. In two years, we’re looking at raising that to 50 percent, with the aim of eventually hitting 60 percent. The Asia-Pacific region is a significant contributor to our international revenue stream, and it’s just a matter of time before we go into more markets in the region.

Provided by ZDNet Asia—Where Technology Means Business

source: BusinessWeek 

With Hewlett-Packard (HP) planning to showcase some touch screen-based PCs at the Taiwan’s IT Month show in December, Dennis Chen, personal systems group general manager at HP Taiwan noted that touch screen-based products, including PDAs, handsets and notebooks will become mainstream in 2008, while home used desktop PCs will also start to adopt the technology.

source: DigiTimes 

The search firm has said it will spend hundreds of millions developing green technologies such as solar and wind power

Google announced today that it would spend “hundreds of millions” of dollars developing a range of green technologies including solar and wind power as part of a push into the renewable energy market.

The software firm said it would spend “tens of millions” of dollars on the new initiative in 2008 alone, adding that it was optimistic a green technology that produced electricity more cheaply than coal could be produced “within years, not decades”.

The company said it would hire new staff to do research and development at a renewable energy unit, called RE

"If large-scale renewable deployments are cheaper than coal, the world will have the option to meet a substantial portion of electricity needs from renewable sources and significantly reduce carbon emissions," Larry Page, one of Google's co-founders, said. "We expect this would be a good business for us as well."

Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, has in the past sponsored green energy initatives, including a project in September to invest $10 million in hybrid electric car technologies, but this is the first time the company itself has made a long term, financial commitment to renewable energy.

A spokesman declined to specify the exact value of the investment or how the money would be spent, saying only that Google would work with a range of organisations including companies, R&D laboratories, and universities.

An existing partner of Google.org, Makani Power, develops technology that harnesses wind energy at high altitudes, which can be as much as 10 times more powerful than the energy generated from terrestrial wind farms.

Google is currently advertising a number of positions, including Director of Green Business Strategy and Head of Renewable Energy Engineering.

source: Times Online

For years, eBay has defined itself simply as an online marketplace that links buyers and sellers.

But in a weeklong bench trial in U.S. District Court in New York, lawyers for Tiffany argued that the online auction house was far more than that: it is a distribution network that allows the trading of counterfeit Tiffany items.

If Tiffany wins its case, not only could other lawsuits follow, but eBay’s business model could be threatened because it would be difficult and extremely expensive for the company, based in San Jose, California, to police a site that now has 248 million registered users worldwide and approximately 102 million items for sale at any one time.

Tiffany has requested injunctive relief that would require eBay to alter its procedures to eliminate counterfeit silver Tiffany merchandise from its auctions. Judge Richard Sullivan instructed both sides to file post-trial briefs by Dec. 7.

“I will hopefully turn this around quite quickly after that,” he told the lawyers. Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman, said eBay was not responsible for determining whether each product sold on the site was fake.

“As a marketplace, we never take possession of any of the goods sold on the site, so it would be impossible for us to solely determine the authenticity of an item,” Durzy said. “And we go above and beyond what the law requires us to do to keep counterfeits off the site.”

But in his closing argument a week ago Tuesday, James Swire, the lawyer for Tiffany, told Sullivan that eBay directly advertised the sale of Tiffany jewelry on its home page, and “because eBay profits from the sales generated by these and other actions,” Tiffany considers eBay’s actions as direct copyright infringement. Swire added that “there’s certainly much in the record to show that eBay is liable for contributory infringement.”

Bruce Rich, eBay’s lawyer, told the court the company had fulfilled its obligation to prevent the sale of counterfeit goods. In his closing argument, he said the law placed the primary policing responsibility on the trademark owner, Tiffany, because Tiffany has the necessary expertise to identify counterfeits products.

Of course, fakes are sold everywhere, but the anonymity and reach of the Internet makes it perfect for selling knockoffs. And as the biggest online marketplace, eBay is the center of a new universe of counterfeit products.

“The fact that eBay has chosen to set up its business in a manner that makes it extremely difficult for it to monitor the merchandise that is sold at its auctions is not a defense,” said Geoffrey Potter, chairman of the anti-counterfeiting practice at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel, a New York law firm.

Potter said if the judge found that eBay had the same duty as flea markets and traditional retail stores to not sell counterfeit products, eBay would likely have to either stop auctioning famous luxury products or radically alter the way it did business so that it could precertify the authenticity of those products.

“One way that eBay could do this would be to require proof that Tiffany had been paid for the items, before eBay permits an auction of multiple, identical alleged Tiffany products,” Potter said.

Potter said eBay did manage to keep other illegal items - human organs, firearms and child pornography - off the site. “The truth of the matter is that if eBay wanted to keep counterfeit Tiffany goods off, it probably could,” he said.

When Tiffany filed its suit against eBay in 2004, it said Tiffany employees had trolled eBay to find fake Tiffany silver jewelry and concluded that 73 percent of 186 pieces they purchased on eBay were counterfeit.

In its original complaint, Tiffany maintained that anyone selling five or more pieces of purported Tiffany’s jewelry at a discount “is almost certainly selling counterfeit Tiffany goods.” Other makers of luxury goods have complained that sales of counterfeit items are hurting their businesses.

In his opening statement last week, Swire, Tiffany’s lawyer, said that in 2003 Tiffany put eBay on notice about the counterfeit items and requested that the company investigate. Yet “eBay simply turned a blind eye,” Swire said.

Judge Sullivan questioned Michael Kowalski, Tiffany’s chairman and chief executive, about the measures Tiffany has taken to track down and prosecute the counterfeiters.

Kowalski said it had been difficult - and often fruitless - to pursue sellers who list counterfeits on eBay, as they frequently change identity.

“We simply felt that we were chasing ourselves,” he said, and “chasing phantom sites that would be taken down one day and pop up another day, and so we were in a vicious circle.”

In the end, Kowalski said, “The heart of the issue was the distribution network,” referring to eBay.

Durzy said eBay had put in place additional anti-counterfeiting measures since Tiffany filed its suit.

“We’re very pleased with the way the trial went,” Durzy said.

source: Herald Tribune