Red Hat and Novell, the two top Linux sellers, have only just begun building Xen virtualisation software into their products. But they’re already planning to add a higher-level option
Microsoft on Tuesday launched a new offensive against cybersquatters who allegedly gain illegal profits from thousands of Web sites, such as WindowsLiveTutorial.com and HaloChamp.com, that include the company’s trademarked names
Microsoft has issued an open invitation to the Mozilla to bring both its Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail application into the Windows fold
Just a fortnight after Telstra dumped plans for a national fibre-to-the-node rollout, the Tasmanian Government is pitching its own state-wide fibre network as an alternative to the telco giant
YouTube, the popular California Web site that offers video clips, announced a plan to post every music video ever made for free download. The plan threatens iTunes, which charges for videos
Flash memory company SanDisk fired its latest salvo at Apple, taking the wraps off of its Sansa e280, a $250 flash-based MP3 player with 8GB of storage, or enough memory to hold some 2,000 songs
Google has launched their beta version of Writely.com. Writely is their word processor and answer to Microsoft Word. In addition to the usual editing features it includes many collaboration features, as well as the ability to save documents as PDFs and RSS feeds
A simple tweak to the way common silicon transistors are made could allow faster, cheaper mobile phones and digital cameras. Devices with the modification have already set a new world record for the fastest transistor of its type. To achieve the speed gain, researchers at the University of Southampton added fluorine to the silicon devices
Television screens and computer displays capable of producing a wider range of visible colours could someday be built incorporating tiny sections of electrically-activated polymer. This polymer contracts and relaxes, like a muscle, in response to a current
The US Federal Communications Commission has begun an investigation of the use of video news releases, sometimes called fake news
, at US television stations. Video news releases are packaged stories paid for by businesses or interest groups. They use actors to portray reporters and use the same format as television news stories
Users of unreleased Windows update urged to fix critical security flaws. Microsoft has released two patches for its Vista operating system, saying that it too is affected by flaws that were disclosed during the company’s 8 August security updates
The warrantless Internet and telephone surveillance program authorised by the Bush administration violates the US Constitution and must cease immediately. The landmark decision makes US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency’s once-secret program. The American Civil Liberties Union had filed suit against the government, claiming the program ran roughshod
over the constitutional rights of millions of Americans and ran afoul of federal wiretapping law
Macrovision’s best-known form of copy protection inserts noise into analogue video signals to make it difficult to get a good copy of the DVD or VHS recording. A company named Sima has products that eliminate this noise when digitising such video, as any good digitiser would do. Macrovision argues that this is a violation of the DMCA, and a court sided with them in June. Now the injunction is being reviewed, and several organisations are siding with Sima and Fair Use, including the American Library Association, the Consumer Electronics Association, the Home Recording Rights Coalition, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If it isn’t overturned, this decision could make it illegal to develop products for making copies of commercial analogue recordings
In recent years, software companies have hammered out rules with researchers on disclosure, which cover how and when vulnerabilities are made public. Now flaw finders want something in return: more information from software providers on what they are doing to tackle the holes the researchers have reported
Google is about to give its hometown a wonderful gift: a municipal wireless network covering the entire city of Mountain View, with free Internet access for both residents and visitors. Google’s grand gesture is incomplete in one crucial way — the company will not provide live human tech support, which is often crucial for first-time users
The state of Washington has sued the owners of the Movieland.com, alleging that the company used spyware to strong-arm users into signing up for its paid movie download service
This past weekend, the OSU Linux Users Group descended on a field in Oregon to create a 45,000+ square foot crop circle of Firefox. The photos and write-up are worth checking out — via Slashdot
The Swedish Pirate Party has launched a commercial, high-capacity darknet, on an unprecedented scale and bandwidth. This service lets anybody send and receive files anonymously without being tracked or traced. There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet,
says Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of the Pirate Party. If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check
AMD announced its new Rev F
generation of Opteron server processors on Tuesday in the US, the next volley in a competition with Intel’s newly competitive Xeon models. The Rev F Opterons, all dual-core models, add new virtualisation abilities and faster memory, run at the same 2.6GHz top speed as preceding mainstream models, and plug into AMD’s new Socket F
. Although that new socket disrupts server designers’ easy upgrade path from one Opteron to the next, it also lays the foundation for quad-core chips in 2007 and for server designs through the end of the decade
RealNetworks will release open-source software this year that will let Linux computers play Windows Media files
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