IT Buoy

A deaf woman who claims she hasn’t been able to sell items on eBay Inc.’s ecommerce Web site has filed a lawsuit saying the Internet giant violates federal and California state laws that protect disabled people against discrimination. Getty Images A sign outside of the eBay headquarters in San Jose, Calif. The federal lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri, centers around eBay’s sellers registration system, in which the company places an automated phone call to would-be sellers and requires them to verify themselves over the phone. The plaintiff, Melissa Earll of Nevada, Mo., alleges that she cannot communicate vocally by telephone and hasn’t been able to verify her identity with eBay. She has tried to register on eBay numerous times since 2008 so she could sell dozens of rare books she has collected in local auctions and sales, said attorney Michael Aschenbrener of Edelson McGuire LLC. The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, also alleges the San Jose, Calif.-based company has steadfastly refused to offer her an alternative means to verify her identity despite repeated attempts. The lawsuit says eBay “has gone out of its way” to design a system that deaf and hard-of-hearing people cannot use.

From Tech Trader Daily : Apple plans to offer a “full-on solution” for multitasking in version 4.0 of the iPhone OS, according to AppleInsider . Associated Press A customer displays an iPhone at an Apple store in Palo Alto, Calif. An inability to run more than one application at a time is one of the most frequent criticisms of the iPhone OS – and the ability to multitask is often touted as a point of differentiation by rival handset makers. The new version of the iPhone OS is expected to launch this summer. The story is attributed to “people with a proven track record in predicting Apple’s technological advances.” The piece notes that there has never been a technical issue preventing the phone from running multiple third-party apps at the same time; the issue is that the phone’s security model takes that approach to prevent apps from running in the background without the user knowing it, eliminating potential spyware, adware and viruses. AAPL today is down 46 cents, or 0.2%, to 224.38.

This is a report from our premium subscription research service The Internet Analyst.

From Fortune: Two thirds of the way through a 3,000-word essay on This Apple-HTC Patent Thing, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber quotes a tweet by John Siracusa that gets to the heart of the matter: “To me, the Apple patent suit smells like nothing more than a manifestation of Jobs’s own sense of injustice.” Read the rest of this story

From CNET: The good news for Microsoft is that all the PCs powering the Olympics are running Windows. The bad news: it’s the older Windows XP operating system. Continue reading at CNET