For its 10th anniversary, Yahoo Mail is upping the ante to maintain its position as the leading free e-mail service in the world. It's bet: infinity.

"We will begin offering everyone unlimited e-mail storage starting in May 2007," said John Kremer, VP of Yahoo Mail, in a blog post on Tuesday.

When it launched in 1997, Yahoo Mail offered users 4 Mbytes of storage. Then came the information explosion. In 2004, storage capacity was raised to 100 Mbytes. A year later, it was 1 Gbyte.

Google's Gmail currently offers 2.8 Gbytes of storage to its users, an amount that has been creeping upward since the service debuted with 1 Gbyte. Google watchers speculate that some sort of competitive answer to Yahoo's announcement may come on April 1st, the third anniversary of Gmail.

Windows Live Mail offers 2 Gbytes of storage. MSN Hotmail offers 1 Gbyte for its free plan.

Yahoo Mail has long been the most popular free e-mail service worldwide. In February, it received some 243.4 million visitors, according to comScore Media Metrix. Microsoft's MSN Hotmail and Windows Live came in a close second, with 233.3 million visitors the same month. Google's Gmail remains a distant third, having served 62.4 million visitors last month.

However, of the three leading free e-mail services, Yahoo Mail has been growing the slowest. Between February 2006 and February 2007, worldwide traffic at Yahoo Mail grew 9%. Hotmail/Windows Live Mail grew 13% and Gmail grew 68% during the same period, according to comScore.

Unlimited storage, if unanswered by Microsoft and Google, may help Yahoo maintain its lead in the market.

"We hope we're setting a precedent for the future," said Kremer. "Someday, can you imagine a hard drive that you can never fill? Never having to empty your photo card on your camera to get space back? Enough storage to fit the world's music, and then some, on your iPod? Sounds like a future without limits."

It may sound like that, but limitless things often have limits, as is the case with Comcast's "All You Can Eat" broadband service. Kremer, in fact, acknowledged there will be some limits: "[L]ike any responsible Web mail service, we have anti-abuse limits in place to protect our users."

A Yahoo spokesperson declined to elaborate on limits to unlimited storage. "We do have controls in place to ensure that people benefit from the unlimited storage feature, but are not able to abuse the system," a Yahoo spokesperson said in an e-mail. "Our anti-abuse limits are there to monitor suspicious activity and to ensure our users have a safe, efficient and reliable Web mail experience. As always, we will require users to abide by the Yahoo Terms of Service. I do not have any other details to share with you at this time."

Boston-based legal firm Goodwin Procter has inked a deal to lease several floors in The New York Times’ new Manhattan high-rise headquarters.

The law firm will lease seven floors, totaling 216,000 square feet, in the 52-story Renzo Piano designed building, which is now nearing completion.

The move is part of a major expansion by Goodwin Procter of its New York office, which focuses on the city’s booming financial services sector. The firm expects to double its New York office in size from 150 to 300 over the next few years, a spokeswoman said.

The law firm, which has more than 800 lawyers, has opened a number of new offices recently in other cities around the country.

The new Times headquarters building is a joint venture between The New York Times Co. and Forest City Ratner Cos. The 1.6 million-square-foot New York Times Building, which will open in the fall, is now almost fully leased.

http://www.goodwinprocter.com

The US District Court for the District of Columbia Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit against former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for authorizing torture and abuse of detainees by US personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan. The suit asserted that Rumsfeld bears direct responsibility for detainee abuse and that his actions violated the US Constitution, federal statutes and international law. Chief Judge Thomas Hogan based the dismissal on the immunity of government officials from lawsuits and the premise that US constitutional rights do not apply overseas. While noting that the allegations of torture were "horrifying," Hogan concluded that policy considerations counsel against permitting government officials to be sued for political decisions.

The suit was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Human Rights First, which had previously sued Rumsfeld and other military officials in 2005 on behalf of eight former detainees. A war crimes action is also pending against Rumsfeld in Germany, where the German Federal Prosecutor is using Germany's universal jurisdiction law to investigate similar allegations.

Incorrectly worded Justice Department documents filed as part of the biggest tax prosecution ever will cause the federal government to miss out on $100 million.

Telecommunications entrepreneur Walter Anderson, who admitted hiding hundreds of millions of dollars from the IRS and District of Columbia tax collectors, was sentenced Tuesday to nine years in prison and ordered to repay about $23 million to the city.

But U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman said he couldn't order Anderson to repay the federal government $100 million to $175 million because the Justice Department's binding plea agreement with Anderson listed the wrong statute.

Friedman said he could have worked around that problem by ordering Anderson to repay the money as part of his probation. But prosecutors omitted any discussion of probation - a common element of plea deals - from Anderson's paperwork.

Channing Phillips, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office, which prosecuted the case in cooperation with Justice Department headquarters, said the government would bring civil charges against Anderson.

That will require a new round of litigation in a court that does not wield the threat of more jail time. Prosecutors have said Anderson has money stashed away in accounts around the world, a claim Anderson denied in court.

He appeared humbled but not overly apologetic Tuesday. He took responsibility for his actions but said he never intended to defraud the government.

Anderson told the judge that his millions in unpaid taxes weren't funding an opulent lifestyle. He often used jets but for business or charity, he said, and usually he flew business class, not first class, and sometimes even coach.

Anderson launched a long-distance telecommunications business in the 1980s as the industry was undergoing deregulation. When his first company, Mid-Atlantic Telecom, merged with another company in 1992, Anderson formed corporations in the British Virgin Islands to hide the income, prosecutors said.

Authorities said Anderson used other offshore corporations to disguise his ownership in other telecommunications companies that earned more than $450 million between 1995 and 1999. He allegedly did not file federal income tax returns from 1987 to 1993.

With credit for the two years he has been jailed, he will have to serve seven years in prison and will be eligible for release in less than six years.

Among the taxes allegedly owed to the District of Columbia are use taxes, equivalent to sales taxes, on art, jewelry and wine. The indictment alleges that Anderson bought a painting by Salvador Dali and several paintings by Rene Magritte, an 18-karat gold bracelet and more than $47,000 in fine wines, then had them shipped to a Virginia address to avoid Washington taxes.

Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker, started Wednesday construction of a chipset assembly and test facility with total investment of 1 billion U.S. dollars in southern Ho Chi Minh City, the first of its kind in Vietnam, according to local media on Thursday.

When completed (scheduled in mid-2009), the facility will be the seventh assembly site of Intel's global network, and is projected to eventually employ some 4,000 local people, and generate annual revenues of 5 billion dollars, said Youth newspaper.

Assembly and test facilities package chips that come from semiconductor fabrication plants. The assembly and test process can be broken down into three stages: packaging, testing and shipping.

Vietnam is fostering high technologies, including information technology, in a move to realize the target of basically becoming an industrial country by 2020.

Vietnam plans to have 38 million phone subscribers by the end of this year, or 43 units per 100 residents, up from 27.5 million subscribers by the end of last year. It also eyes 6 million Internet subscribers, by late 2007, up from over 4 million by late2006.

Vietnam earned nearly 1.8 billion dollars from exporting electronics goods, including computers, mainly to Japan and Southeast Asian countries, in 2006, up 24 percent against 2005, according to the country's General Statistics Office.

"This kind of memory has never been seen before. Manufacturers of such items as cellular phones and consumer electronics will welcome it the most," Samsung President Hwang Chang-gyu said.

"With our Flex-OneNand, for example, they will be able to come up with cheaper and slimmer products while offering more applications," said Hwang who leads the firm’s semiconductor unit.

Flex-OneNand combines two memories and product manufacturers can adjust their capacity through dedicated software. Previously chip memories were either embedded or external.

This is expected to sharply increase data throughput speeds and reduce the prices of handsets, portable game consoles and media players.

"We are poised to roll out the Flex-OneNand in the second quarter of this year. Already big-name companies are ready to incorporate the item into their products," Hwang said.

"Down the road, more advanced features will debut on the back of fusion memories including Flex-OneNand," the researcher-turned-chief executive said.

Alongside the chips, Samsung also unveiled gigabyte solid-state disks and 8.4-million pixel CMOS image sensors at the forum.

Hwang projected that fusion memories will become a mainstream component for portable consumer gadgets.

"With the advent of the convergence era that blurs boundaries among conventional industries, we face the need to produce fusion chips encompassing as many applications as possible," Hwang said.

"In the end, mobile handsets will be composed of just three parts: a display, battery and chip that includes memory, flash card and logic functions," he said.

Hwang said Samsung aims to chalk up $10 billion in sales over the next five years from fusion chips alone, which he said are ready for prime time.

Asked about the impact of the fusion chips, Hwang refused to make specific comments because Samsung’s customers are now developing customized products.

“We don’t anticipate any changes or interruptions in phone service as a result of this litigation, so we advise customers to continue using their service as they always have,” said John Yocca, Vonage public relations manager, in a written response to a query from Stars and Stripes. “There are many options available to us and we are prepared to implement them as necessary.”

Rates for the Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, technologies that allow consumers to make calls over the Internet aren’t expected to change, either, he added.

Last week, a federal judge said he would issue an injunction barring Vonage Holdings Corp. from using Internet phone call technology patented by Verizon Communications Inc., but delayed signing the order for two weeks.

Vonage currently offers service in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom, but Yocca said customers can take their Vonage devices anywhere in the world where VoIP is legal and a high-speed cable connection is available.

Servicemembers arriving in South Korea before June 1 can continue using Vonage and other U.S. VoIP companies to make international phone calls. Those arriving in country after June 1 will be required to use a South Korean VoIP provider.