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New U.S. President Barack Obama promised during his campaign to post all nonemergency legislation on WhiteHouse.gov before signing it as a way to allow the public to review and comment on it. On Jan. 20, Obama’s first day in office, a blog post on WhiteHouse.gov repeated that promise. On Thursday, Obama appeared to break that promise with the first piece of legislation he signed into law. Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, designed to make it easier for women to sue employers that pay them less than their male counterparts. The text of the legislation was apparently posted about the same time that Obama signed it. A White House spokeswoman said she couldn’t comment specifically on the Lilly Ledbetter legislation, but she said there have been some technical and other issues preventing White House staff from getting content up on the Web site as fast as they’d like.
Oracle has issued 102 subpoenas to 99 former customers of TomorrowNow, the now-shuttered SAP subsidiary at the heart of Oracle’s lawsuit against SAP, according to a court document filed this week. Forty-nine of the 99 customers have subsequently supplied some 77,012 documents, which SAP is reviewing in order to identify any confidential information they may contain. None of the customers in question were named in the filing. An Oracle spokeswoman declined comment Thursday. An SAP spokeswoman did not immediately return a call for comment. Oracle filed a lawsuit against SAP in March 2007, charging that workers at TomorrowNow, a provider of third-party support for Oracle’s PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel applications, illegally downloaded material from Oracle’s support systems and used it to court Oracle customers.
Nortel Networks has pulled out of a deal to resell WiMax equipment from Alvarion and help fund development of Alvarion’s WiMax base stations. The troubled networking vendor joined with Alvarion last June after cutting back its own WiMax efforts. After years of struggling to recover from a financial scandal and compete against bigger rivals, Nortel filed for bankruptcy earlier this month. Alvarion is a WiMax specialist based in Israel. The collapse of the deal will hurt its fourth-quarter financial results, due to be announced Feb. 4. The company won’t be able to recognize about US$2.4 million in revenue from sales of products to Nortel in the quarter.
Sandisk on Thursday armed itself with financial flexibility, announcing a deal to restructure its chip-manufacturing joint venture with Toshiba. Toshiba will inject cash into Sandisk and take on certain equipment-lease obligations owned by the joint venture as part of the restructured deal. The total value of the deal is about ¥80 billion (or US$895 million. Toshiba will provide one-third of that amount into Sandisk, with the rest of the total coming from restructuring of Sandisk’s equipment-lease obligations.
…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.