Deal ends legal war over Skype's future

In today's podcast: Deal ends legal war over Skype's future; jailbroken iPhones hit by worm; and gigabyte BIOS update fixes iPhone sync problem in Win7.

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The legal war over Skype has ended. Skype's cofounders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, have agreed to transfer ownership of the remaining Skype technology that eBay didn't own, paving the way for eBay to complete its sale of a majority stake in Skype to an investor consortium. In exchange, Friis and Zennstrom will join the investor consortium and obtain a 14 percent stake in Skype. The other consortium partners, led by Silver Lake, will own a 56 percent stake in Skype, and eBay will hold on to 30 percent, eBay said Friday. The agreement also calls for the consortium to shed one of its original partners, Index Ventures, against which Friis and Zennstrom had additional legal claims.

The first worm written for Apple's iPhone has been unleashed and is infecting phones in Australia. However, the worm, known as Ikee, is only a threat to users who have jailbroken their phones to let them run unauthorized software, security experts say. In fact, Ikee doesn't do anything particularly bad -- it changes the victim's wallpaper to a photograph of 80s singer Rick Astley and then seeks out other phones to infect -- but it could be modified to do something more dangerous such as stealing sensitive information from the iPhone. The worm does not affect most iPhone users; only those with jailbroken iPhones that are running a Unix utility called SSH with the iPhone's default password, "alpine," still in use.

Gigabyte Technology issued a BIOS update on Friday that fixes a problem for some Windows 7 users who have been unable to sync their iPhones. Earlier this week, Intel, Microsoft and Apple said they were investigating the issue, which people are complaining about on an Apple forum. The problem seems to be mainly affecting Windows 7 64-bit users with Intel P55 chipsets, and it prevents them from synching their iPhones with their computers. On Friday, a few people posted on the forum that they'd downloaded the new BIOS from Gigabyte, a motherboard maker, and it solved the problem.

Two investment consulting companies laid out objections to Cisco's US$3 billion offer for Norwegian videoconferencing vendor Tandberg on Friday, saying in an open letter to Cisco and a press interview that the bid undervalues Tandberg. Cisco and Tandberg announced the deal on Oct. 1, but it still needs to be approved by Tandberg's shareholders. The agreement requires owners of 90 percent of the company's shares to sign off on the acquisition by Nov. 9. According to recent media reports, holders of 24 percent of Tandberg stock don't plan to accept the deal. Cisco suggested on Monday that it might drop its offer rather than raise it.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.