Intel's lawyers are evaluating whether a new manufacturing business spun out of AMD could end a long-standing cross-licensing agreement between the firms.

On Tuesday, AMD announced plans to spin off its manufacturing operations into a separate company tentatively called The Foundry. The restructuring lets struggling AMD rid itself of the financial burden of running fabrication plants and provides a hefty influx of cash from its partner in the deal, Advanced Technology Investment Co. (ATIC).

[ See the related story on  AMD splitting up into two companies |  Intel may be worried because analysts think the split may help AMD make up market share quickly ]

Now, rival Intel is throwing a flag on the play.

"We certainly have to evaluate it," said Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy. "It certainly could be a change in the competitive landscape."

Mulloy explained that Intel and AMD have licensed each other's patents since 1976. Among other things, the latest pact signed in 2001 calls for AMD to pay royalties to Intel for the use of its x86 architecture.

"Intel has serious questions about the AMD move as it relates to that licensing agreement," said Mulloy, who would not divulge how much AMD pays in royalties for the X86 architecture. "We don't have enough information. We will be evaluating it. Intel has an obligation to shareholders to protect its intellectual property."

Drew Prairie, a spokesman for AMD, told Computerworld that executives paid close attention to the restrictions in the company's various licensing agreements when making plans for the spinoff.

"We looked at this," he said. "We structured this in a way that this takes into account all our licensing agreements to ensure The Foundry will be able to manufacture all of AMD's products."

Mulloy said AMD did not contact Intel about the licensing agreements during the planning stage for the spinoff. He added that Intel has not yet reached out to AMD about it either.

The new company will be co-owned by AMD and ATIC, which is owned by the government of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. ATIC will shell out $2.1 billion -- $1.4 billion going to the new company and the rest going straight to AMD, according to AMD.

The Foundry will assume about $1.2 billion of AMD's debt.

Industry analysts noted after Tuesday's announcement that by splitting off its manufacturing operations into a separate company, AMD could be on track to become the nimble, innovative company that once had Intel on the run.

"It's like the old AMD after a spa and rehab vacation," said Dan Olds, principal analyst with the Gabriel Consulting Group. "They've come back stronger financially and in better shape overall. They're still the same company and they still [partially] own their fab operations. It's like they got a rich uncle to help them out."

Word of the spin-off was welcome news to Wall Street Tuesday, which responded by lifting AMD's stock by 18% Tuesday morning during the same period that the Dow dropped by 200 points, noted John Lau, a senior semiconductor analyst and managing director at Jefferies & Co., who had predicted the spin-off early last month.

Lau said the spin-off of the fab operation is a necessary move for AMD. "This fab spin-out changes the equation on how to remain competitive," he said. "Now it's a design race."

Intel's lawyers are evaluating whether a new manufacturing business spun out of AMD could end a long-standing cross-licensing agreement between the firms.

On Tuesday, AMD announced plans to spin off its manufacturing operations into a separate company tentatively called The Foundry. The restructuring lets struggling AMD rid itself of the financial burden of running fabrication plants and provides a hefty influx of cash from its partner in the deal, Advanced Technology Investment Co. (ATIC).

[ See the related story on AMD splitting up into two companies | Intel may be worried because analysts think the split could help AMD make up market share quickly ]

Now, rival Intel is throwing a flag on the play.

"We certainly have to evaluate it," said Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy. "It certainly could be a change in the competitive landscape."

Mulloy explained that Intel and AMD have licensed each other's patents since 1976. Among other things, the latest pact signed in 2001 calls for AMD to pay royalties to Intel for the use of its x86 architecture.

"Intel has serious questions about the AMD move as it relates to that licensing agreement," said Mulloy, who would not divulge how much AMD pays in royalties for the X86 architecture. "We don't have enough information. We will be evaluating it. Intel has an obligation to shareholders to protect its intellectual property."

Drew Prairie, a spokesman for AMD, told Computerworld that executives paid close attention to the restrictions in the company's various licensing agreements when making plans for the spin-off.

"We looked at this," he said. "We structured this in a way that this takes into account all our licensing agreements to ensure The Foundry will be able to manufacture all of AMD's products."

Mulloy said AMD did not contact Intel about the licensing agreements during the planning stage for the spinoff. He added that Intel has not yet reached out to AMD about it either.

The new company will be co-owned by AMD and ATIC, which is owned by the government of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. ATIC will shell out $2.1 billion -- $1.4 billion going to the new company and the rest going straight to AMD, according to AMD.

The Foundry will assume about $1.2 billion of AMD's debt.

Industry analysts noted after Tuesday's announcement that by splitting off its manufacturing operations into a separate company, AMD could be on track to become the nimble, innovative company that once had Intel on the run.

"It's like the old AMD after a spa and rehab vacation," said Dan Olds, principal analyst with the Gabriel Consulting Group. "They've come back stronger financially and in better shape overall. They're still the same company and they still [partially] own their fab operations. It's like they got a rich uncle to help them out."

Word of the spin-off was welcome news to Wall Street Tuesday, which responded by lifting AMD's stock by 18 percent Tuesday morning during the same period that the Dow dropped by 200 points, noted John Lau, a senior semiconductor analyst and managing director at Jefferies & Co., who had predicted the spin-off early last month.

Lau said the spin-off of the fab operation is a necessary move for AMD. "This fab spin-out changes the equation on how to remain competitive," he said. "Now it's a design race."

Mozilla has released an add-on to Firefox that enables the browser to automatically pinpoint a user's location by communicating with Wi-Fi signals so that Web sites can provide customized content to users.

The add-on is now available through the Geode project from Mozilla Labs, according to a blog posting about the technology.

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Geode is based on a W3C specification called Geolocation API, which provides "a set of verbs and commands that a Web site can use and a browser can understand" to exchange geographic information, said Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox development at Mozilla.

Once Geode is installed, users will be asked to provide location information when they browse to a site that can communicate with the Geolocation API. They can choose to provide an exact location, a neighborhood, a city, or no location at all, depending on their preference, Beltzner said.

A Web site can then use that information to provide customized local content, such as a list of local restaurants or other relevant businesses. Eventually, Mozilla hopes to expand this capability to allow, for example, an RSS feed to determine whether a person is at home or at the office so that it can deliver the appropriate feed.

Geode is an early version of support for the Geolocation API that Mozilla plans to support natively in Firefox 3.1, Beltzner said. The company will preview Firefox 3.1 in a beta that will be available next week. The final version of Firefox 3.1 is scheduled to be available in early 2009.

There will be some differences between how Geode works and how the implementation of the geo-tagging technology in Firefox 3.1 will work, he said.

For one, Geode uses location information only from a company called Skyhook Wireless. Skyhook provides a location system that allows any mobile device with Wi-Fi, GPS, or a cellular radio (GSM/CDMA) to determine its position.

In the case of Geode, Firefox communications via Wi-Fi signals with Skyhook, which then determines a user's position. This means people must be using a Wi-Fi network from a wireless device or notebook computer for the position to be located by the service.

Firefox 3.1 will receive location information from a variety of sources that may or may not include Skyhook and GPS signals, Beltzner said. "We're trying to figure out what the default set of location providers should be" by putting the technology out ahead of time for users to experiment with, he said.

In the Firefox 3.1 beta, Mozilla will direct users to a Web page that offers different location providers that have yet to be determined, and they can choose whether they want to use them or if they want to set their default location themselves, Beltzner said.

Adoption of Sprint Nextel's Xohm WiMax service has been better than expected since it launched in Baltimore on Sept. 29, and the carrier is confident it will be able to fund the rest of its national network rollout despite the current economic crisis, Sprint executives said Wednesday.

"This is the dawn of 4G," said Barry West, president of Sprint's Xohm Business Unit, during an event Wednesday morning to celebrate the first market launch of the service, which was also webcast. Sprint plans to complete a national rollout of the long-delayed wireless broadband network over the next few years through a joint venture with Clearwire. WiMax is a wide-area wireless data technology that Sprint said typically delivers between 2Mbps and 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps to 2Mbps upstream.

[ Learn more about how the financial crisis is affecting IT and the high-tech industry, plus what IT can do to help, in InfoWorld's special report. ]

The company is confident that its partnership with Clearwire will be approved as forecast by the end of this year, said Sprint CEO Dan Hesse. He is also confident that despite a tight credit market and falling stock markets, the venture will be fully funded with $3.2 billion promised by partners including Google, Comcast, and Intel.

"Capital's a good thing to have these days," Hesse said.

Hesse estimated the full national rollout will cost about $5 billion, which will require the joint venture raising another $2 billion at some point in the future. Sprint hopes the credit markets will be more open then, but Hesse said the deep pockets of Sprint and the partner companies would ensure the further financing.

The economic crisis has hit Sprint's existing cellular business, cutting subscriptions among financial industry employees for one thing, but the impact has not been "dramatic," Hesse said. He expects continued fallout, with some consumers opting for less expensive phones and service plans, but said surveys show they are more willing to cut back on spending for TV and wired Internet access.

"We believe we are more insulated," Hesse said.

Consumer response to the Baltimore WiMax rollout has exceeded Sprint's expectations so far, West said. Sprint has deployed 180 WiMax base stations around the city, out of a planned total of 300. Maps on the Xohm Web site indicate coverage in the Baltimore area will continue to grow through next year. The company expects to commercially launch Xohm in nearby Washington, D.C., and in Chicago by year's end.

West acknowledged the reach of the network in Baltimore doesn't match cellular yet.

"We're not trying to go head-to-head with a cellular service today," he said.

Also at the Wednesday event, Sprint announced there are eight models of laptops available now that will work on the network, along with other devices. PC makers that will offer laptops with WiMax include Acer, Asus, Lenovo, and Toshiba. Sprint is letting consumer electronics manufacturers take the lead on devices for Xohm instead of relying on its own branded devices from Sprint stores. WiMax devices are now being sold at six Best Buy stores in the Baltimore area, as well as other retailers. Customers can activate the service on their own after buying the devices. There will be no term contracts.

By year's end, customers will be able to buy a laptop add-on card that supports WiMax and Sprint's 3G data network, West said. Other dual-mode devices will follow. He would not specify pricing for a data plan that includes both networks, only pointing out that greater coverage generally costs more.

A 20-year-old Tennessee man has been indicted for hacking into an e-mail account of U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, according to court records.

David C. Kernell was indicted Tuesday on a single charge of accessing a protected computer by a grand jury in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee in Knoxville. The indictment, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, was unsealed Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

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Kernell, from Knoxville, turned himself into law enforcement authorities on Wednesday and was released the same day after pleading not guilty at his arraignment. His trial is set for Dec. 16, according to a statement from his attorney, Wade Davies.

David Kernell is the son of Mike Kernell, a Democratic state representative from Memphis.

The three-page indictment alleges that Kernell gained access to a Yahoo e-mail account used by Palin, the Republican governor of Alaska, on about Sept. 16. Palin was named Senator John McCain's vice-presidential running mate in August.

The next day, Wikileaks.org published several screen shots of Yahoo e-mail messages, e-mail addresses of Palin family members and associates, and other data that hackers claimed to have obtained from Palin's private account.

A hacking group known as Anonymous claimed to have gained access to Palin's gov.palin@yahoo.com account and sent the information to Wikileaks, which acts as an anonymous clearinghouse for leaked documents.

"Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private e-mail accounts to conduct government business and in the process avoid transparency laws," Wikileaks wrote in a note accompanying the material. "The list of correspondence, together with the account name, appears to re-enforce the criticism."

Bloggers had fingered Kernell as a suspect after linking him to the online name "rubico," used by the hacker who claimed to have accessed Palin's Yahoo account. Rubico claimed to have accessed the account by using Yahoo's password reset feature and answering security questions with publicly available information, and the indictment supports that claim. He guessed correctly that Palin had met her husband at Wasilla High.

The indictment alleges that Kernell posted screenshots of Palin's e-mail messages, e-mail addresses of her family members, pictures of her family and at least one mobile phone number to the 4chan.org Web site. It's unclear in the indictment how the information came to Wikileaks from 4chan.org, an image-based bulletin board.

Another person also reset the account's password and was able to access Palin's e-mail account, the indictment said.

According to a report in the Knoxville News Sentinel, Kernell was released on the condition that he stay away from computers. He is also barred from leaving east Tennessee without the permission of his parole officer.

When U.S. Magistrate Judge C. Clifford Shirley told him not to discuss the case with any potential witnesses, Kernell asked if that included his girlfriend too.

This story was updated on October 8, 2008