An email supposedly from a private investigator concerned for your personal privacy actually hides a Trojan horse, according to security experts.

The email warns you that your telephone line is being tapped and your conversations are being listened to.

"I am working in a private detective agency. I can't say my name now. I want to warn you that I'm going to overhear your telephone line. Do you want to know who is the payer? Wait for my next message," emails intercepted by Sophos read.

An attachment on the email claims to be a recording of the telephone conversation, but is in fact a Trojan horse that will install further malware onto your PC that it downloads from a rogue website.

Read more at Web User

A fake First Hawaiian Bank Web site was taken down this morning after the bank's security personnel was alerted about a "phishing" e-mail that was targeting First Hawaiian customers.

The e-mail circulated this morning is purported to be from the bank and asks people to click on a link as part of security maintenance measures being taken by First Hawaiian. So-called phishing e-mails typically attempt to direct people to sites where they are asked for sensitive financial account information, allowing Web thieves to harvest the information and later use it for their own gain.

The fake e-mail begins "Dear First Hawaiian Bank Valued Member" and notes the bank has randomly selected the person to take part in security measures that require them to go through a series of identity verification pages.

"If we do not receive the appropriate account verification within 24 hours, then we will assume this account is fraudulent and will be suspended," the e-mail continues.

Read more at The Honolulu Advertiser

Having completed the first Release Candidate (RC) of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista, Microsoft has now released RC1 of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. Microsoft generally uses the term Release Candidate (RC) for full-featured trial versions which only need to be tested for flaws.

The combined package is about 340MBytes in size and can currently only be downloaded from Microsoft's connect website by registered beta testers. It updates all the 32-Bit versions of XP from Home to Professional. Apart from the English language version there is also a German and a Japanese version. In addition, the website offers a script which adds a string to the Registry and allows any version of XP to receive the respective RC1 update suitable for this XP via Windows Update (download size for XP Professional: about 91 MBytes). However, an initial trial installation this way proved unsuccessful.

As usual, SP3 will contain all the patches and updates released earlier, including those which were part of previous versions. According to Microsoft there is a total of more than 1000. In addition, it provides several add-ons which have been available separately, for example Background Intelligent Transfer Service (Bits) 2.5, Windows Installer 3.1, Management-Console (MMC) 3.0 and Core XML Services 6.0. New features include the integration of Network Access Protection (NAP), a feature which is already familiar from Vista and in a Server 2008 environment, for example, only allows access to the local network if the respective PC is running Windows at the current patch level.

Read more at Heise Online

AOL today announced the launch of a new video ad format that gets around the pre-roll model that many viewers call annoying and marketers find ineffective.

Video ticker ads work in tandem with streaming video, but do so without obstructing the content that the viewer is watching, suggesting a new solution to the problem that marketers face when trying to incorporate branded messages into online video without alienating their audience.

"Online video consumption is a fast growing consumer behavior and our new video ticker ads give advertisers a new and creative opportunity to reach consumers through this burgeoning medium," said Platform-A President Curt Viebranz in a statement. Platform-A is the entity AOL created in September to consolidate the activities of its growing spate of advertising businesses.

Ten seconds into the video, a ticker ad will appears as a graphic banner in the bottom of the screen, enticing the viewer to click to learn more about the advertiser. If the viewer doesn't click after 15 seconds, the ticker ad disappears. If the viewer clicks on the ticker, it launches a video ad or an interactive Flash ad in the video player window.

AOL partnered with rich-media technology provider PointRoll in developing the ticker ad system.

Ticker ads come as one potential answer to the growing consensus among digital advertising insiders that pre-roll ads, rather than an engaging use of online video content, are simply obnoxious.

Read more at internetnews

Microsoft Nov. 19 released to manufacturing its Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5.

The Redmond, Wash., software giant released the latest version of its development toolset on time, two years after delivering the previous version of the technology, Visual Studio 2005. The technology is available to MSDN subscribers.

Company officials said Visual Studio 2008, code-named Orcas, contains more than 250 new features and delivers significant enhancements in every edition, including Visual Studio Express and Visual Studio Team System, to enable developers of all levels—from hobbyists to enterprise development teams—to build applications. The new development platform provides a consistent solution for developing applications for the latest platforms, including the Web, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, the 2007 Office system and more, the company said.

In the Orcas release, Microsoft has made Web development easier with new support for Web server communication techniques for AJAX/JSON (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and JavaScript Object Notation) enabled Web sites. Also, new ASP.Net controls allow for better page management and templates, and WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) delivers native support for RSS and REST (Representational State Transfer).

Dino Chiesa, Microsoft's director of marketing for .Net, said Microsoft's push to improve Web development reflects the momentum around Web 2.0 and the company's investments in its infrastructure to support Web 2.0 applications.

.Net Framework 3.5 also delivers several new features, including capabilities for Web 2.0, SOA (service-oriented architecture) and software-plus-services-based applications, the company said.

A new programming model simplifies building workflow-enabled services by using Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation. This allows .Net Framework developers to build business logic for a service using Windows Workflow Foundation and expose messaging from that service using WCF.

Read more at eWeeK

Microsoft’s latest effort in digital music market is finally paying off. Guess what? On Monday, Zune media player was tramked as the No. 1 bestseller in Amazon’s list of top-selling MP3 players.

Zune, the 30 GB version is priced at $134 and it has outsold Apple’s 4GB iPod nano. On the third place came Apple's 80-gigabyte iPod Classic.

Launched one year ago in November Zune has a a 30GB hard drive, 3-inch QVGA LCD screen (320 x 240), Wi-Fi ‘Zune-to-Zune’ connectivity, FM radio, and access to Zune Marketplace.

Also Associated Press reported that the 80GB Zune media player launched Tuesday has sold out across the Web.

Read more at eFM

Speculation that Apple Inc.'s iPhone is itself "phoning home" to the Cupertino, Calif. company with personal information, including which stocks users are tracking, is probably off base, a German security Web site said today.

According to translations of an analysis posted by Heise Zeitschriften Verlag GmbH of Hannover, Germany, while the binaries of a pair of iPhone applications -- the weather and stock applets -- include strings that contain the characters "imei," it's unlikely that the phone's identifier is being sent to Apple.

Each mobile phone is tagged with a unique International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number that can be used by carriers to block handsets reported as stolen.

Talk of IMEIs -- and other data -- being transmitted to Apple stemmed from reports on a blog and the Hackint0sh message forum from researchers who said they had spotted strings in the iPhone's Stock and Weather widgets. The string most users focused on was a URL that included an Apple domain address:
http://iphone-wu.apple.com/dgw?imei=%@&apptype=finance.

Read more at CW

Nintendo's new Wii Zapper has hit stores today, bringing the precision and thrill of arcade-style targeting games right into the home. Made exclusively for the Nintendo Wii, the Wii Zapper houses a Wii Remote and Nunchuk to provide a better feel in games where pinpoint accuracy is key. The Wii Zapper also comes with Link's Crossbow Training, a series of targeting challenges in the style of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The entire package, game and all, sells for $19.99.

The Wii Zapper provides immersion for hardcore gamers by putting them literally hands-on with the shooting action. The Wii Zapper is just the first of several motion-sensitive peripherals on tap for Nintendo, though, as the company will release two more in 2008: the Wii Wheel for racing games and the Wii Balance Board for exercise (and skateboarding/snowboarding?) games.

Link's Crossbow Training puts players through a series of increasingly difficult targeting tests. In some challenges, hero Link uses his trusty crossbow to hit bull's-eyes. In others he is greeted by an army of approaching enemies and navigates the terrain using the control stick on the Nunchuk. Up to four players can compete one at a time as they try to best one another's scores.

Read more at Daily Game

T-Mobile, the German mobile unit of Deutsche Telekom, has been asked by a Hamburg court to change its marketing for Apple Inc.'s iPhone.

The device went on sale this month in Germany with Deutsche Telekom as its exclusive vendor.

Deutsche Telekom requires buyers to sign up to a two-year contract with its T-Mobile wireless network. As well, the iPhone contains a lock that prevents it from being used on any other network.

But the regional court in Hamburg on Tuesday temporarily prohibited T-Mobile from continuing to sell the iPhone only in combination with that two-year contract, and requested that the device be allowed to function with other networks.

A full hearing on the matter will reportedly take place in Hamburg in two weeks' time.

This could pose significant problems for T-Mobile, which fought hard to secure exclusive rights to sell the iPhone in Germany, just the way AT&T Inc. did in the U.S. and Telefonica's O2 did in Britain.

Vodafone Deutschland, a unit of Vodafone Group Plc, the world's largest mobile operator by revenue, kicked off the hostilities by filing a preliminary injunction regarding T-Mobile's marketing rights late Monday.

Read more at Market Watch

Amazon, the online retail giant, formally launched its long-awaited e-book reading device Kindle on Monday, which is hoped to revolutionize the future of reading.

"Today, we at Amazon are excited to announce Kindle, a wireless, portable reading device with instant access to more than 90,000 books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers," Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon, said in a statement posted online.

With a 399-dollar price tag, Kindle is lighter and thinner than a typical paperback, and weighs only 10.3 ounces (about 300 grams).

The revolutionary electronic-paper display used in Kindle can provide a sharp, high-resolution screen that "looks and reads like real paper," said Amazon.

Advanced wireless technology enables users to shop the Kindle Store directly from their Kindle. People can buy a book and it is auto-delivered wirelessly in less than one minute.

"We chose the same wireless technology used in advanced cell phones, so you never need to locate a Wi-Fi hotspot," said Bezos. "But unlike cell phones, there are no monthly wireless bills, no service or data plans, and no yearly contracts."

Read more at Xinhua

A pledge by China's regulators to let fixed-line phone operators enter the faster-growing mobile market could lead to much greater competition in the telecom industry, analysts said Monday

Vice Minister of Information Industry Xi Guohua used a forum in Beijing over the weekend to announce plans by the government to grant licences to fixed-line telecom operators soon, the Xinhua news agency reported.

"The rapid development of mobile telecom services had lured away subscribers of fixed-line services," Xinhua said, citing Xi. His ministry confirmed the remarks to AFP Monday.

Fixed-line operators welcomed the news, but said they still needed to know more before popping the champagne."We're still looking for a timetable," said Qin Shaojuan, a spokesman for China Netcom, one of the two large fixed-line operators in China. "But if they really are going to give a licence, that's extremely good news for us."

The vice minister's remark followed months of speculation that the government was considering ways to restructure an uneven telecom market, where mobile is as hot and vibrant as fixed-line is stagnant.

"Fixed-line operators are facing immense pressure," said Kang Zhiyi, a Beijing-based analyst with TX Consulting. "Whether you look at revenue or profit growth, the difference with the mobile segment is large."

China Telecom Corp., the nation's top fixed-line operator, said late last month its net profit for the first nine months was little changed from a year earlier amid continued competition from cellphone providers.

By contrast, China Mobile Ltd., Asia's biggest mobile phone company, said its net profit for the same period grew nearly 30 percent, buoyed by strong subscriber growth and a wider rural reach.

Read more at AFP

Seagate has announced availability of its 1 Terabyte (TB) hard drives for its next generation Maxtor Onetouch4 and Barracuda family.

Targeting mobile users, home users, and the corporate segment, the new range of products comprises Maxtor One Touch4 Plus, OneTouch4 Mini, and OneTouch4; and Barracuda 7200.11 and ES.2.

The entire Maxtor family incorporates Maxtor Safety Drill, a solution for disaster recovery, which is compatible with Windows XP, Vista, and the Mac operating system. It packs one-touch synchronization and password encryption.

Meanwhile, the 1TB Barracuda hard drives are the second generation desktop and perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) hard drives that promise to deliver a combination of capacity, performance, and reliability for a wide range of PC applications.

Read more at TechTree

Picture having an Olympian view of millions of photos the world's photographers and cameraphone users have produced over the last day.

That's what Flickr, Yahoo Inc's online photo-sharing site, said on Sunday the company plans to offer this week, by introducing a set of mapping features that makes it easier to find photos based on their location.

Starting on Monday, Flickr will unveil a way for Web users to browse photos from tens of millions of geographically located photos loaded up to its site, http://www.flickr.com.

The service, called "Places," identifies on a global map the latest hot-spots for photo contributions.

"It's a new way to browse what is happening in the world," said Kakul Srivastava, senior director of product management at Flickr.

Read more at Reuters

The latest videogame sales data released for Germany and Spain shows Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare making a strong debut.

In Germany, Activision's first-person shooter captured the top three spots, with the PC version at number one, followed by the Xbox 360 version and the PS3 version in at number three.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was slightly less popular in Spain, but still managed to capture three of the top ten spots. The PS3 version debuted at number three, followed by the Xbox 360 version at number four and the PC version at number eight.

Read more at gi

Facebook appears to have decided on acquisition as its preferred method of entering the booming Chinese market, after months of speculation about how the social networking website would tap the country’s rapid growth and avoid the pitfalls that have slowed earlier overseas venturers.

Facebook is reported to have offered $85 million (£41 million) to buy Zhanzuo.com, its largest Chinese counterpart, which has an estimated seven million active users and a popular base among students.

It would give Facebook a ready-made entry point to the largest internet market outside the United States.

A spokeswoman told The Times that Jack Zhang, Zhanzuo’s chief executive, and Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, were acquainted but this did not mean that they intended to reach a deal – for the moment.

She added, however, that “there could be more information by the end of the month”.

Facebook already boasts more than 100,000 users of its English-language network in China and rumours of its local-language entry were fuelled with the company’s recent registration in China of the domain facebook.cn.

Entering the Chinese market carries risks for foreign companies.

The publicity that surrounded Yahoo!’s decision to comply with Chinese police demands to provide details of the e-mails of Shi Tao, a journalist later sentenced to ten years in jail on charges of leaking state secrets, has served as a warning to outside players.

Read more at Times Online

A Trojan is introducing malware into thousands of computer systems worldwide, and the number is growing by the hour.

The malware is being introduced by MSN Messenger files posing as pictures, mostly seeming to come from known acquaintances.

The files are a new type of Trojan that has snared several thousand PCs for a bot network within hours of its launch earlier on Nov. 18 and is being used to discover virtual PCs as a means of increasing its growth vector.

The eSafe CSRT (Content Security Response Team) at Aladdin—a security company—detected the new threat propagating around noon EST on Nov. 18. At 18:00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), eSafe had detected 1 operator and more than 500 on-command bots in the network. Less than three hours later, or by 2:30 EST, when eWEEK spoke with Roei Lichtman, eSafe director of product management, the number had soared to several thousand PCs and was growing by several hundred systems per hour. eSafe is monitoring the IRC channel used to control the botnet. The only inhabitants of the network besides the operator are in fact infected PCs.

The Trojan is an IRC bot that's spreading through MSN Messenger by sending itself in a .zip file with two names. One of the names includes the word "pics" as a double extension executable—a name generally used by scanners and digital cameras: for example, DSC00432.jpg.exe. The Trojan is also contained in a .zip file with the name "images" as a .pif executable—for example, IMG34814.pif.

The files are infiltrating new systems by using either known contacts from which the Trojan has harvested instant messaging names, as well as from the systems of unknown users.

The infection vector—an IM program—isn't new. But the Trojan is the first that eSafe has tracked that has tried to scan for VNC (Virtual Network Computing) instances, likely in order to multiply the botnet's number of connections.

Read more at eWeeK

The world’s first ever boot camp for teenagers addicted to the internet may be the shape of things to come, according to experts.

The Jump Up Internet Rescue School in Mokcheon, South Korea, is similar to programmes around the world for troubled youths, providing a mix of military style, physical exercise and rehabilitation.

Inmates are pushed over assault courses and learn to ride horses, as well as being given therapy workshops on more creative pursuits such as pottery and drumming.

But the aim is not to wean them off drugs, alcohol or crime, but on their obsessive use of computers in a country with almost universal Internet access.

Concern over compulsive internet use is growing in South Korea, where 90 per cent of homes have high-speed broadband connections and some online gameplayers have died from exhaustion after playing for days on end.

The Korean government has set up 140 internet addiction counselling centres, treatment programs in nearly 100 hospitals, and now the rescue camp. Psychiatrists estimate that up to 30 per cent of South Koreans under 18 are at risk of internet addiction.

They spend at least two hours a day online, usually playing games or chatting, though some being treated at the camp say they were on the internet for as much as 17 hours a day. A minority suffer withdrawal symptoms, including anger, when prevented from going on the internet.

Read more at Telegraph

Sony halved the fees it charges for a software development kit for the PlayStation 3 video game machine Monday to encourage outside designers to make more games for the struggling console.

Sony's gaming unit, Sony Computer Entertainment, said prices for the development package for the PlayStation 3 will be reduced to $10,250 in North America, 950,000 yen ($8,600; euro5,900) in Japan and euro7,500 ($11,250) in Europe.

The move follows the price cuts on the PS3 around the world that the company announced last month in an attempt to woo buyers.

Tokyo-based Sony will also strengthen backup support for making new games for the PS3 in an effort to make the machine more popular, it said in a statement.

Although its predecessor the PlayStation 2 dominated the gaming market, the PS3 has struggled against the hit Wii console, the rival offering from Nintendo, which makes Pokemon and Super Mario games.

Boosting PS3 sales is crucial for Sony's overall business strategy because it also supports the Blu-ray disc next-generation video, which is vying with the rival HD-DVD format.

The Wii has succeeded in drawing people not usually accustomed to playing electronic games, including the elderly, by offering easier-to-play games that use a wandlike handheld device for the remote controller.

Sony has said that sales have improved since the price cuts on the machine in the U.S., Japan and Europe. The 80-gigabyte version PS3 now sells for about $499, down from $599.

There have been no price cuts on the Wii, which sells for about $249.99 in North America, euro249.00 ($370) in Europe and 25,000 yen ($230; euro160) in Japan.

Read more at USA Today

Advanced Micro Devices is ready to launch its quad-core chips into the desktop market.

On Nov. 19, the chip maker will launch its new "Spider" platform for gaming and high-end desktop PCs. The platform will include AMD's quad-core Phenom microprocessors, the new 790 chip set and the ATI Radeon HD 3800 graphics chips, which were initially released Nov. 15.

While the new platform does not specifically target the enterprise, or even the mainstream consumers, the platform does mark the first time AMD is bringing quad-core processors to desktops. The first platform for commercial desktops, called "Peruses"—it will also use a combination of Phenom processors, ATI graphics and a new chip set—is slated for release in 2008.

In September, the company delivered the first of its quad-core Opteron models for servers, but the company has been hampered by delays and wasn't expected to ramp up products for these processors until this quarter.

AMD executives have said the release of this platform now will allow the company to capitalize on the upcoming Christmas holiday. John Spooner, an analyst with Technology Business Research, said the timing around the release of Phenom also reflects the company's delays in getting the Opteron models to the market earlier this year.

On the positive side, AMD is starting to deliver more of its own platforms—chip set, processor, and graphics—to PC vendors, which should allow the company to offer a more competitive price to OEMs compared to Intel. The Spider platform is also sign that the ATI acquisition, which has been a drag on the company's bottom line, may have started to pay off, Spooner said.

Read more at eWeek

Sega of America Inc. this week announced that The House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return will blast Nintendo Co.'s Wii home video game system in spring 2008.

The new compilation utilizes the standard Wii Remote or the new Wii Zapper gun peripheral.

"The House of the Dead franchise has been revitalized for today’s gamer looking for non-stop shooting action on the Wii," said Rick Naylor, Director of Marketing, SEGA of America, Inc.

Read more at Punch Jump

Google could be heading for a showdown with Sun over the way Android, Google's new mobile phone software platform, handles Java.

Instead of using the standards-based Java Micro Edition (JME) as an engine to run Java applications, Google wrote its own virtual machine for Android, calling it Dalvik. There are technical advantages and disadvantages to using Dalvik, developers say, but technology may not have been the driver for Google.

Google most likely built Dalvik as a way to get around licensing issues with Sun that would have come with using JME, said Stefano Mazzocchi, a developer and board member at Apache Labs.

Phone makers that incorporate JME into their phones must license the technology from Sun if they intend to make any modifications to it, Mazzocchi said. A phone maker could freely use JME under an open source license if it shares innovations to the software with the community, but most large handset makers are reluctant to do that, he said.

Rather than require phone makers to license JME as part of Android, Mazzocchi said, Google built its own virtual machine. Dalvik converts Java bytecodes into Dalvik bytecodes.

Read More-Via[PCW]

A U.N.-sponsored Internet conference ended Thursday with little to show in closing the issue of U.S. control over how people around the world access e-mail and Web sites.

With no concrete recommendations for action, the only certainty going forward is that any resentment about the American influence will only grow as more users from the developing world come online, changing the face of the global network.

"I think that there are many Third World countries and developing countries and people from Asia and so on who are pressuring for changes," said Augusto Gadelha Viera, coordinator of the Brazilian Internet steering committee and chairman of a closing session on emerging issues at the four-day Internet Governance Forum.

As the conference drew to a close, Russian representative Konstantin Novoderejhkin called on the United Nations secretary-general to create a working group to develop "practical steps" for moving Internet governance "under the control of the international community."

At issue is control over Internet domain names, the monikers after the "dot" like "com" and "org" that are crucial for computers to find Web sites and route e-mail.

The domain name system is now controlled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a Marina del Rey, Calif.-based nonprofit over which the U.S. government retains veto power. By controlling the core systems, the United States indirectly influences the way much of the world uses the Internet.

The Internet Governance Forum, the result of a compromise world leaders reached two years ago to try to resolve the issue of U.S. control, has no decision-making powers. At most those seeking change can use the conference to pressure the United States to cede control.

The United States insists that the existing arrangements ensure the Internet's stability and prevent a country from trying to, say, censor Web sites by pulling entries out of the domain name directories.

Supporters of the current system denounced the Russian proposal.

"The Russian proposal seeks to exponentially increase government interference in the ICANN process, introducing a dangerous and destabilizing force into a global Internet addressing system that has been a paragon of stability under the current oversight structure," said Steve DelBianco, executive director of NetChoice, a coalition of high-tech leaders like Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, eBay Inc. and Yahoo Inc.

Brazilian officials, however, called for an independent ICANN and sought more concrete recommendations out of the forum — if not this year, then by the time the last one is held in 2010.

Read more at AP

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz unveiled the company's virtualization product line, xVM, at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco last week.

XVM consists of two components: xVM Server, a hypervisor with support for Linux, Solaris and Windows guest operating systems; and xVM Ops Center, a management console. The Ops Center project will be released under the open source GPLv3 license, and Sun has set up a community site at www.openxVM.org.

"Our engagement with the community is not something we take lightly," Schwartz said. "It is in every way the foundation of our company."

The news comes just days after Oracle unveiled its own virtualization product, Oracle VM, which like xVM Server, is based on the open source Xen hypervisor project. Both companies join a crowded market dominated by leader VMWare.

Sun said it intends to put $2 billion behind its vXM push. Ops Center, which is expected to be available next month, has already been validated to run on 1,000 system configurations, according to Sun.

Read More-Via[PC World]

Tired of irritating smudges, dust and fingerprints on laptop computer screens? LG Philips LCD is doing something about it. LG Philips LCD, the world's second-largest manufacturer of liquid crystal displays, on Thursday said it has developed a dirt-resistant easy-to-clean panel for notebook computers.

“Our new panel employs a principle similar to that used on non-stick frying pans,” Ahn Byung-chul, who leads development of advanced technology at the company, said in a company statement. “Dirt and oil can easily be wiped away.”

The South Korean company said the panel, which even facilitates the removal of ink, would go into production in the first half of 2008.

LG.Philips said that the technology would be first applied to its 15.4-inch widescreen panels for notebook computers and later for notebook panels of all sizes by the end of next year.

Read More-Via[ET]

Singapore has lifted a ban on an Xbox video game featuring an intimate scene between two female characters, a newspaper reported. The game Mass Effect would now be sold with an M18 label, meaning it cannot be legally purchased by anyone under 18, the Straits Times said, citing the city-state's media watchdog, the Media Development Authority (MDA).

The futuristic space adventure video console game made by Microsoft was banned on Thursday because it contained what the Board of Film Censors described as a "a scene of lesbian intimacy".

It is not known when the ban was imposed but it was reported in local media on Thursday.

Under local guidelines, video games sold in Singapore cannot feature exploitative or gratuitous sex and violence, or denigrate any race or religion.

This also marks the first time Singapore has given a rating to a video game, ahead of a video games classification system due to be implemented next January, the report said.

Read more at NEWS.com.au

Seagate has announced the availability in India of its 1 Terabyte (TB) hard drives that deliver a combination of capacity, performance and reliability for a wide range of enterprise and desktop PC applications.

The Barracuda 7200.11 and Barracuda ES.2, Seagate's second-generation desktop and enterprise perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) hard drives, deliver 1 TB of capacity, 7,200-rpm spin speeds, average seek times of 8.5 ms and caches up to 32 MB. The new drives, which come with Seagate's five-year limited warranty, pack 1 TB of data on four disks to provide cool operating temperatures and low power consumption, which help extend drive life.

Seagate's flagship Barracuda ES.2 is a newly designed product optimized for demanding business-critical and nearline enterprise storage environments including: networked and tiered storage solutions, reference/compliance storage, disk-to-disk backup and restore, archiving solutions, rich media content storage and collaboration.

The Barracuda ES.2 hard drive's new features stand out in performance, reliability, capacity and energy efficiency. The new RVFF (Rotational Vibration Feed Forward) system is designed to sustain performance in densely-packed multi-drive systems. The Barracuda ES.2 also boosts reliability with an unrecoverable error rate that is 10 times better than desktop class drives and a 1.2 million hour Mean Time Between Failure at full 24 x 7 data availability.

Read More-Via[itnewsonline]

A Dutch teenager has been detained for allegedly stealing virtual furniture from ‘rooms’ in a 3D social networking website.

The 17-year-old is accused of stealing virtual furniture worth 2,840 pounds, bought with real money from social networking website the Habbo hotel.

Police, who were contacted by the website’s owners, has also questioned five 15-year-olds.

A spokesman for Sulake, the company that operates Habbo Hotel, said that the accused lured victims into handing over their Habbo passwords by creating fake Habbo websites.

"The accused lured victims into handing over their Habbo passwords by creating fake Habbo websites,” the BBC quoted Sulake, as saying.

Read more at HT Tabloid

The Goa government was in for an online shock yesterday when its Information and Publicity Department’s web site was hacked allegedly by a Turkish group that posted anti-America slogans on it.

The web site, which was designed to display information on the details of the Goa administration and government schemes was flooded with graphic images of executions and arms seizure.

State Information Secretary in-charge J. P. Singh was quoted as saying by PTI that the matter was a serious one and will be looked into.

The alleged hacker, Huseyingazi who claims to be a Turkish national, has connected the website to ww.turkmilliyetcileri.net which flashes anti-America slogans, police said.

The hacker's posting on the website reads "United States of America which is feeding on and strengthening behind close doors the universal terrorists is the greatest terrorist country."

"This is a very common thing and not unique to Goa," Deputy Inspector General of Police Ujjwal Mishra said, adding there is no need to panic.

Read more at TOI, Khaleej Times

Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) is mailing letters to 32 individuals informing them that their Social Security numbers were present on a computer that had malware installed by an unknown intruder.

Nearly all of the individuals affected appear to be either current or past international students. An internal audit of a former staff member's on-campus computer revealed the presence of malware, including an e-mail stealing "Trojan horse" that was installed through an e-mail attachment. Malware is software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owner's knowledge.

The workstation has been removed from the network, and the malware has been disabled.

Anyone who does not receive a letter but wants to see if he or she may have been affected may contact IPFW toll-free at 866-597-0010 to inquire. More information about the incident also is available online at www.purdue.edu/news/ipfw0711.html. At the site, there are links to the Federal Trade Commission, where a complaint about fraud or identity theft can be filed, as well as links to apply for a credit report.Under university policy, Social Security numbers are no longer used except where required by law. Information about all students, alumni, faculty and staff, and others whose records are kept for business reasons, are assigned a Purdue identification number.

"For decades it was accepted practice to gather and keep on file Social Security numbers because that was the standard means of keeping records on individuals," said Scott Ksander, chief information officer in the Office of Information Technology at Purdue. "With the need to rely on computers for keeping records of all kinds and the presence of criminals intent on finding ways to access data, we have aggressively moved away from earlier practices in order to safeguard records and identities.

"In addition, Purdue also has a large-scale program called SecurePurdue - www.purdue.edu/securePurdue - underway to improve security. Information security staff throughout the Purdue system share best practices and steps for remediation in the event of a break-in. To head off this threat, faculty and staff are instructed to install the latest security programs and to enable automatic updates of security utilities.

A number of steps have been taken to prevent security breaches in recent years. Last fall, work began on a system to better detect and prevent intrusion into campus computer networks. The initiative includes expanded availability of anti-spyware software and intensive training for campus systems administrators.

Read more at Inside Indiana

McAfee has forecast that nine security threats will increase in 2008, while it expects ad-serving software known as adware to decrease.

The forecasts are based on the development of attacks seen in the firm's own lab. Greg Day, McAfee security analyst, said that Web 2.0 sites would increasingly be used by cyber criminals to distribute malware or steal volumes of data. Web 2.0 sites offering everything from consumer social networking to business relationship management could prove an easy form of attack, being “the internet version of a shopping mall or crowded city,” Day said.

The Storm Worm, also known as Nuwar, set a precedent in how botnets are likely to develop, said McAfee. Storm Worm’s creators “released thousands of variants and changed coding techniques, infection methods and social engineering schemes far more than any other threat in history” and “created the largest peer-to-peer botnet ever” said the report.

“In the old days bots were made to be indiscoverable and we worked to discover them, but now the trend is having more generals to command the trend,” Day added.

Attackers are also likely to focus on instant messaging, according to the security vendor. A threat spreads fast through instant messaging because attackers have a pre-existing list of targets in the address book and can automate the “flash” worm so a carrier does not know it is infected, said Day. In 2007 there have been 10 high-severity instant messaging risks, compared to none in 2006, according to McAfee.

Online gaming will be another common target for attacks as virtual objects in games gain in value, the firm predicts. “The number of password-stealing Trojans that targeted online games in 2007 grew faster than the number of Trojans that target banks,” reported the firm.

Read more at Vnunet

The UK Information Commissioner has told public figures such as doctors that they face fines if they lose personal data belonging to people in their care. And that includes if their laptop is pinched and they are found to have been negligent.

According to the Times newspaper, Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, thinks a "blatant breach of fundamental observation" should attract a financial penalty and be recorded as a criminal offence. An example he gave was a hospital employee leaving a laptop in a car which was then stolen.

Although the plan would surely meet with widespread opposition, Thomas does make the very good point that anybody storing sensitive personal data should use encryption to protect it. That's surely common sense security.

Thomas made his remarks in a House of Lords Committee as he suggested that "knowingly or recklessly" transgressing data protection laws should be rewarded with a £5,000 fine in a magistrates' court.

Read more at Tech.co.uk

A Computer developed during the Second World War to decrypt Nazi coded transmissions yesterday lost to modern technology in a race to decipher a new message sent from the continent.

An amateur cryptographer from Germany who built his own computer programme for the challenge beat the rebuilt Colossus machine to unravel the message, which was sent via Second World War technology.

The exercise was to mark the launch of the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, where Colossus was created in the 1940s.

Colossus, the world's first programmable digital computer, was pitched against more up-to-date rivals to see who could decipher the message, transmitted from Germany on Thursday.

At the same time as the machine, which is the size of a small lorry, was cranking up, amateur code breakers using modern computer equipment also started trying to crack the encrypted text.

Read more at Scotsman

Nintendo has responded to Pacific Crest Securities analyst Evan Wilson reports that it has completed work on a new version of its DS Lite handheld, stating that it is “rumour and speculation and we are not commenting further.”

Yesterday, another gaming site reported him as saying that the new Nintendo DS Lite model was “thinner, has on-board storage, and larger screens,” and that it would lose the GBA port to accommodate these new model changes. He also made the comment that the new version of the handheld would not be available any time soon, as Nintendo would wait until “sales begin to tail off in all three major geographies.

Despite the rebuffing, Wilson could still turn out to be right. Hardware companies often deny comments about changes they're not yet ready to announce. But even by Wilson's own reckoning it could still be a while until a new DS arrives.

"We do not expect a revamped Wii or DS until sales begin to tail off in all three major geographies," he wrote. And there's no sign of that.

By the end of September, Nintendo had sold more than 53 million DSs, 13 million of those coming in the six months leading up to September.

Read more at FileFront, Kikizo

Taiwanese phone maker E-Ten Information Systems introduced its Glofiish M800 smartphone, which has many of the same features as HTC's latest devices, several U.K.-based publications reported on Friday. E-Ten reportedly showcased the Glofiish M800 at a launch event held in the U.K. on Thursday.

The smartphone packs a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, Wi-Fi, 3.5G -- an upgrade to the 3G mobile telephony protocol that increases network capacity -- and a VGA screen for high-quality resolution. It also supports quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE and triband UMTS/HSDPA cellular technologies. Other features include Bluetooth, a 2-megapixel camera, and a built-in GPS receiver. The Glofiish M800 doesn't offer a lot of storage space, only 64 Mbytes of RAM. But it does feature a microSD memory card slot, so memory can be expanded. The Glofiish M800 runs Microsoft's most recent mobile operating system, Windows Mobile 6, which comes with "direct push" technology for automatic delivery of e-mail from Exchange Servers and a full Microsoft Office suite for viewing, editing, and creating documents on the go.

Read More-Via[IW]

Although Apple has been championing the all-in-one design with its iMac line for almost a decade now, there's been a recent resurgence in teh form factor lately, first with the Gateway One. Lately, Dell has been wading into the arena, not-so-secretly teasing and showing off its upcoming XPS One all-in-one-system, in which the entire computer s basically tucked into a 20-inch widescreen display with speakers on the sides, a smoked glass base, and an media-friendly wireless keyboard. Although Dell isn't expected to formally announced the XPS One until November 19, it has already posted pricing information for four XPS One configurations, and the news has some folks excited: configurations will start at $1,499, and move up to $2,499 for a system with a Blu-ray writer.

The base configuration—dubbed "The Essential One"—sports an Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 processor, 2 GB of RAM, a 250 GB hard drive, Intel GMA grapphics, and a 16× double layer DVD burner, along with what will be the XPS One standard complement of USB and FireWire ports, an 8-in-1 media card reader. At the high end ("The Entertainment One"), Dell offers a 500 GB hard drive, an Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 CPU, an ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro graphics controller, and a slot-loading Blu-ray burner. Interim configurations ("The Music One" and "The Performance One") sport price tags of $17.48 and $1,999, respectively.

Read More-Via[DT]

Sony Ericsson India has made announcement of the launching of its latest slim slider mobile phone 'W910i' in the Indian market. It weighs just 86 gms, and has dimensions of 99.5 x 50 x 12.5 mm.

The two new features added to the phone include ‘Shake Control’ and ‘SenseMe’. The new Shake Control system permits users to adjust music tracks by waving the phone in the air. Additionally, the phone also has with an auto-rotating display for the media section.

On the other hand, the SenseMe aspect lets users to arrange their music path according to their mood rather than record album or artists.


Features at Glance :

• Camera - 2-megapixel
• Digital zoom - 2.5x
• Picture blogging
• Video record
• Bluetooth™ stereo (A2DP)

Read More-Via[SE][TopNews]

Slacker, a Web-based radio service, said on Friday it has started to take orders for its portable player which features free music channels personalized to the user's tastes.

The San Diego-based start-up is going up against well-established companies including Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp, XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio when the Slacker Portable Player debuts in stores in early 2008.

Although Slacker players will be able to play back music downloads like other devices, the emphasis will be on its radio-style service. Depending on the model, each player will have the capacity for 15, 25, or 40 channels of music that can be personalized online by the user.

The channels, are pre-programmed online by Slacker, and can then be stored on the device and each one can feature several hundred songs, according to Jonathan Sasse, vice president of marketing at Slacker.

The company has started taking pre-orders for the new device via its Web site and consumers will start to receive them in early December. They have a suggested retail price from $200 for the 2GB/15-station model to $300 for the 8GB/40-station model.

Read More-Via[Reuters]

Photography enthusiasts have quite a few options when it comes to working with RAW files, but Adobe is betting a new SDK will make Photoshop Lightroom a favorite once third party developers start building plug-ins.

The Lightroom Export SDK is available as a technology preview and is included with Lightroom version 1.3, which was released Friday. The SDK utilizes the open source Lua language and ships with example plug-ins for Flickr and FTP uploads. The idea of the development kit is to extend the Export dialog box with additional functionality.

"Once we get feedback from the developer community we will evaluate how to expand the SDK to other aspects of workflow outside of image export," explained Tom Hogarty, product manager for Photoshop Lightroom. "The end result will allow photographers to further customize and streamline their workflows. This technology preview will give developers an opportunity to provide feedback and shape the way Lightroom's architecture will be utilized."

Read More-Via[BetaNews]

Microsoft is delaying by six months its annual conference for hardware engineers, where it reveals its upcoming software plans to PC makers and other system builders.

The Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) is usually held in March or April, but Microsoft said next year's show will take place in the fall, or around October. The company didn't say why it was making the change, attributing it only to "industry feedback."

It was also vague about the location, saying it would be somewhere on the West coast of the U.S.

Microsoft used this year's WinHEC to announce the official name for Windows Server 2008, which had been known by its code name Longhorn server. The year before it offered one of the first glimpses of what would become Windows Vista.

Read More-Via[PC World]

Over half of UK internet users have admitted using other people's Wi-Fi networks to piggyback onto the internet.

A recent survey by security firm Sophos found that 54 per cent of respondents had used someone else's wireless internet access without permission.

Many internet-enabled homes fail properly to secure their wireless connection with passwords and encryption, allowing passers-by and neighbours to 'steal' their internet access.

Although most businesses have security measures in place to protect their Wi-Fi networks, Sophos warned that remote users working from home could prove a weak link in corporate defences.

"Stealing Wi-Fi internet access may feel like a victimless crime, but it deprives ISPs of revenue," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "If you've hopped onto your next door neighbour's wireless broadband connection to illegally download movies and music from the web, chances are you are also slowing down their internet access and impacting on their download limit.

Read more at VnuNet

Microsoft on Thursday released version 2.0 of their Windows Live OneCare security and PC performance suite, enhancing a number of current features and adding a few brand-new twists.

Current OneCare subscribers will receive the update effortlessly through the product's normal automatic updates feature, Microsoft said. Microsoft's OneCare is priced at $49.95/year for three licenses; a 90-day trial is available at the OneCare Web site.

OneCare offers protection against viruses and spyware for PCs running XP or Vista. Its two-way firewall blocks hack attacks from outside and limits Internet access to authorized programs. The suite also includes a backup system to protect essential files and a set of performance tuning tools. Version 2.0 of OneCare enhances most of these.

However, the OneCare software has also had a troubled past, being accused of eating email and finishing last in an A/V test in March 2007.

Microsoft pioneered the idea of offering multiple licenses per subscription, to match the modern multi-computer household. According to Microsoft's estimates, one-third of all U.S. households own more than one computer. What OneCare 2.0 offers is the ability to monitor security status and fix problems with other OneCare-equipped computers. Users can even connect to the networked "OneCare Circle" from a OneCare-equipped laptop when traveling.

Read more at PC Magazine

A Canadian publisher and philanthropist has launched a new social networking site for artists, underlining the growing influence of the Internet in showcasing and selling art.

Louise Mac Bain said the site, www.myartinfo.com,could be compared to popular networking site www.facebook.com, and allowed artists to showcase their work, chat with each other online and blog.

"The idea is that it becomes a global platform for people to go and show their art," said MacBain, a wealthy businesswoman who has invested heavily in the arts in Britain in recent years.

"With myartinfo people can post for free their art — not only visual art, but performing arts, film, poetry, sculpture, fashion, architecture and design."

MacBain's company LTB Media has also re-launched www.artinfo.com, an online guide to art and culture, and a new Art Sales Index allowing users to access auction prices and other records for more than 200,000 artists.

Robert Romiti, who designed www.myartinfo.com, said it bore similarities to major networking Web sites like YouTube and MySpace, but there were also differences.

Read More-Via[Ibnlive]

Motorola, Inc. has launched MOTO Q 8, the GSM version of the CDMA-based MOTO Q, and MOTO Q 9h, the lightning-fast global quad-band 3G QWERTY. MOTO Q 9h, based on the Windows Mobile 6 operating system, couples a new sleek form factor with a dual-processor HSDPA/UMTS engine, enabling broadband-like over-the-air downloads at up to 3.6Mbps. Consumers will be able to download their favourite music tracks directly onto Q 9h in approx. 30 seconds without having to touch a computer.

Lloyd Mathias, director, marketing, mobile devices, Motorola, India and South West Asia, said on the launch, "Motorola is expanding its range in the enterprise segment in India with the launch of MOTO Q 8 and MOTO Q 9h. MOTO Q 9h was developed as a multi-purpose communication device that offers state-of-the art voice quality technology, messaging, speed, processing power, keyboard and display packaged within a sleek design for the modern consumer; a complete productivity and entertainment-on-the-go device.”

MOTO Q 8 GSM is available at Rs 17,359 (best buy price of Rs 16,499) and MOTO Q 9h at Rs 20,720 (best buy price Rs 19,499).

Read More-Via[BPOTimes]

The people behind such industry definers as DOOM and Quake are putting their money on mobile gaming. Today, id Software announced the launch of id Mobile, an entirely new division created by both id Software and Fountainhead Entertainment. id Mobile will be overseen by Katherine Anna Kang, founder of Fountainhead and former Director of Business Development at id Software.

The announcement is timed with the release of Orcs & Elves II on mobile, a sequel to Fountainhead's bestselling original, as well as Orcs & Elves for the Nintendo DS. Orcs & Elves for the DS is an upgrade of the mobile original with additional content. id Mobile is also announcing a mobile edition of its popular Wolfenstein series, as well as a sequel to DOOM RPG, the first mobile game worked on by id Software founder John Carmack.

id Mobile is dedicated not only to cellphone gaming, but also forays into DS and PlayStation portable development, although no additional game announcements for those platforms have been released at this time.

Speaking to IGN about the announcement, Carmack espoused the validity of the mobile business and contrasted it to the development of large-scale PC games. A lesser fear of risk and the affordability to create new intellectual properties (IP) are major bonuses of mobile development.

"We're stuck in this four-year development cycle for our high-end games. Huge projects that takes tens of millions of dollars," said Carmack. "We've lost something we used to have in the early days. 'Oh, let's try out these five ideas and see what happens.'"

Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id Software, commented further on the ability to foster new ideas in the mobile arena by offering a contrast between the development of a mobile game, like Orcs & Elves, with id Software's current project, Rage. He said that with Rage, the developer "started big" and when making games of that magnitude, the team spends time with so many macro-level details. "We're putting a lot into what the logo looks like," mused Hollenshead.

"We make a big bet on if that game is going to be a mega-hit. It's going to be the fruit of the company for the next three years" said Hollenshead. "If it doesn't work, we have effectively sunk a third of the company into a project."

Read more at IGN

Microsoft Corp.'s biggest worry over Windows Vista shouldn't be rival operating systems from Apple Inc. or Red Hat Inc., but remains competition from its own Windows XP, an analyst said Wednesday.

"The big story isn't that 32% of the companies we surveyed said that they would start Vista deployments by the end of next year," said Benjamin Gray, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. "It's that companies have been hugely successful in standardizing on Windows XP."

According to a survey of nearly 600 U.S. and European companies that have more than 1,000 employees, 84% of all their PCs now run Windows XP, up from 67% the year before. While XP may have peaked, Gray warned not to bet against the 6-year-old operating system. "There are plenty of companies looking forward to XP SP3," he said. That next hot-fix and patch rollup is to ship sometime in the first quarter of 2008, Microsoft has said, and it will reportedly be XP's last service pack.

"Vista's biggest competition isn't Apple or Novell or Red Hat; it's Microsoft itself, it's XP," Gray said. So enamored of XP are businesses that Microsoft may feel obligated to extend the operating system's mainstream support past its current April 2009 expiration date. "I wouldn't be surprised," Gray said, although it might require some additional pressure on the company by its largest customers.

Read More-Via[PC World]

Microsoft India today launched the next-generation of Windows Live that enables online and offline environments to blend seamlessly to give consumers an enhanced experience when it comes to connecting, communicating and online sharing.

Windows Live is designed to enhance the online and Windows on the PC experiences with a set of tools that bring the power of the Web right to the user’s PC or mobile device. The Windows Live set of services comprises several free PC applications connected to services delivered over the Internet. Windows Live is available with a simpler download experience that enables consumers to choose any or all of Windows Live applications they want, and keep their software and services up-to-date.

Read More-Via[TheHindu]

While there are no plans for a third Ghostbusters film, fans can look forward to video game version that reunites the main cast members, Variety reports.

Vivendi Games and Sony Pictures are teaming up to bring the popular franchise to a console near you for 2008, in what both companies hope will be the first in a series of Ghostbusters games.

The four main actors - Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Bill Murray and Harold Ramis - are on board, as well as some secondary cast members.

Aykroyd and Ramis, the films' original screenwriters, will write the story for the game. It is believed to take place after Ghostbusters II in the early 1990s and will revolve around another paranormal invasion of New York City.

Both companies are hoping to follow on the success of other classic films adaptations, such as EA's The Godfather and Vivendi's Scarface: The World is Yours.

Read more at Canada.com

The low broadband penetration in the country could hamper the growth of triple play services -- internet protocol TV and its subscriber base is unlikely to cross one million in the next four years, a study reported.

"Internet Protocol television (IPTV) will face a raft of problems, mainly the low base of broadband connections in the country, which will hold it back for atleast five years," the study by IT research firm Gartner said.

Despite being a more advanced technology capable of additional functionality, IPTV is not well placed in India when compared against other digital broadcast distribution channels like direct-to-home(DTH) satellite and digital cable.

Read More-Via[ET]

Google has indicated it is likely to press ahead with a multi-billion-dollar bid for a slice of the US airwaves in order to launch a nationwide wireless broadband network.

In July, Google pledged to meet the $4.6 billion reserve price for part of America's 700MHz spectrum in an auction process run by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as long as four “open access” conditions were met.

Today a spokesman told Times Online that the group was taking "all necessary preparations to become an applicant in the auction".

The company has until December 3 to reveal its plans to the FCC. "We fully intend to do so," the spokesman added.

"Our goal is to make sure that American consumers have more choices in an open and competitive wireless world".

Earlier this year, the FCC approved two of Google's "open access" terms, which will allow customers to use whatever device and software they want on the spectrum to be auctioned.

Two more controversial provisions put forward by Google, which would require the eventual licensee to sell access to its network on a wholesale basis to rivals and allow other parties physical access to infrastructure at realistic points, were not included.

The internet giant’s plans hold implications for Britain, where Ofcom, the communications regulator, is preparing to auction three key pieces of the UK airwaves that will be left vacant after television's digital switchover.

At least two of those could be used to roll out a nationwide wireless broadband network that would boast speeds similar to conventional broadband connections.

Spectrum around 700MHz, being auctioned off in both the UK and US, can travel long distances and penetrate walls easily – the same characteristics that made it attractive to broadcasters, who are vacating it to make way for all-digital television.

Read More-Via[TimesOnline]

Amazon.com Inc. plans to introduce its highly anticipated electronic book device at a New York event Monday, according to two people familiar with the company's plans.

Amazon, which generates three-fifths of its revenue from the sale of books, music and movies, has been trying to broaden that business. It has already started selling digital music and movies through its online store. By developing and selling a device for reading books in digital form, Amazon hopes to stimulate the sale of books, the first product the online retailer sold.

Calls to Amazon spokesmen weren't immediately returned. The news was reported earlier by CNET's Web site.

Read More-Via[WSJ]

Nintendo's Wii regained the top spot among video game consoles sold in October, while games from Activision Inc. dominated U.S. retail software sales during the month, according to data from market researcher NPD group.

Total video game sales jumped 73 percent to hit $1.1 billion, up from $643.3 million last October. At $469.7 million, hardware sales more than doubled from last year's $207.1 million.

The September launch of Microsoft Corp.'s "Halo 3" re-energized sales of the Xbox 360, making it that month's best-selling console and ousting the Wii from the first place. In October, however, the Wii sold 519,000 units, followed by the Nintendo DS with 458,000 and the Xbox 360 with 366,000.

At 26 percent, the Wii's market share was the highest it has achieved since its launch last November, noted Deutsche Bank analyst Jeetil Patel.

It's been just about a year since the launch of the Wii and Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3, which, along with the Xbox 360 make up the latest generation of video game consoles. But with just 121,000 units sold in October, the PS3 is still "nowhere in the next-gen platform race," Patel said. Sony recently cut the price of the PS3 and launched a cheaper model, which the company said has boosted sales of the console in the past few weeks.

Software sales grew 39 percent to $513.9 million from $369.3 million, below Wall Street's expectation for growth of about 50 percent, Patel said. Nonetheless, he said the first full year of the latest video game cycle "continues to shape up well."

Read more at Houston Chronicle

Microsoft Wednesday released Windows Vista SP1 RC Preview to 15,000 testers as part of its private beta program.

On Tuesday, the company released three patches that will be part of SP1 when it ships in the early part of next year.

Microsoft hopes to align SP1’s availability with Windows Server 2008, which Microsoft plans to ship on or before its Feb. 27, 2008 launch event in Los Angeles.

Microsoft officials said the Vista SP1 RC Preview incorporates feedback from users that have been part of the beta program
that began in September. The new features include changes to streamline setup and installation.

Microsoft said a broader group of testers would soon get the RC Preview, but it did not announce a specific date.

Read more at Network World

Webroot Software, Inc., a leading provider of security software for the consumer, enterprise and SME markets, today announced the most common forms of malicious security threats in the UK during the month of October.

“Spyware has become increasingly complex and sophisticated. The technology behind spyware has become so far advanced, and is moving so quickly, that manual detection methods utilised by many security companies and freeware providers can’t keep up with it,” said Peter Watkins, CEO of Webroot Software, Inc.

He continued, “Webroot’s dedicated Threat Research Center has proactively identified five million sites that host malicious spyware utilising the PhileasTM spyware research system. It utilises a patent-pending technology to scour the entire Web to discover spyware faster and more efficiently than any other detection method available. As a result, this automated, high-speed system keeps consumers and businesses safer with better blocking, detection and removal rates.”

During the month of October, one of the most widespread infections in the UK was Comet Cursor, a piece of adware. Adware is capable of tracking a user’s online habits and transmitting this information to a third party. Additionally, adware delivers pop-up ads which can cause overall system performance issues and dramatically slow your browser.

Read more at Sourcewire

The router is conceptualized and designed out of Bangalore and manufactured out of Chennai for the fast changing market requirements of emerging economies.

“EN 3500 is the culmination of efforts by BA Systems to enable the tremendous growth in the enterprise sector in India. The EN3500 provides enterprises an alternative to high-cost non-local products, by combining state-of-the-art technology, future-proofed architecture, yet cost effective. Combined with local support, BA Systems is well primed to provide both Capex and Opex savings to the enterprise,” said P J Singh, founder and CEO, BA Systems.

Read More-Via[ZDnet]

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited on Tuesday announced the launch of ‘TV on Mobile’ for its subscribers, powered by Apalya Technologies and with 12 television channels as content providers.

Launching the service, Chief General Manager S. Ramalingam watched a demonstration of how a Telugu television channel could be viewed through a high-end Nokia GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) mobile phone. Right now, only about two dozen each of Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones could support it, he said.

Mr. Ramalingam said there were three subscription plans at present. They include a ‘one channel per day’ plan Rs. 10, ‘one channel for one month’ plan for Rs. 50 and all 12 channels for Rs. 150 per month. The first month of services after registration was free as a launch offer, he said.

Read More-Via[Hindu]

IBM plans to help corporate data centers operate more like the Internet in a new series of offerings called "Blue Cloud," which will allow computers to work across large pools of systems rather than on local machines or remote server farms.

The technology is called cloud computing, and IBM said it is working with corporations, government agencies universities and Internet-based businesses on projects based on it.

Read More-Via[BW]

Dell (Dell) and Sun Microsystems, rivals in the computer hardware market, unveiled on Wednesday a co-opetition agreement in which Dell would sell servers preinstalled with Sun's latest Solaris operating system and then funnel customers to Sun for support and services.

The multi-year distribution agreement launched at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco is the latest example of how the computer industry is being driven by corporate demand for openness among technology vendors. Dell agreed to sell PowerEdge servers pre-installed with Solaris 10 after seeing an increasing customer demand for the OS on its servers. For Sun, the deal gets Solaris in Dell's high-volume sales channel, which could become a significant source of revenue.

Under the agreement, Dell would keep all revenue from server sales and resell Sun services and support packages. Revenue from the latter would be shared between the parties. Dell customers, of course, could go directly to Sun to buy multiyear support subscriptions, which include patches and upgrades.

Read More-Via[IW]

Two new video games from Sony and Nintendo have players exploring jungle islands for lost treasure or skipping across the galaxy to save a kidnapped princess.

On the face of it, Sony's "Uncharted" and Nintendo's "Super Mario Galaxy" can't be more different.

"Uncharted" harnesses the PlayStation 3's graphical muscle to produce a movie-like adventure, while "Super Mario Galaxy" for the Wii uses cartoonish graphics and simple controls to breathe new life into an aging franchise.

The games also answer challenges facing Sony and Nintendo.

Although Nintendo has been selling as may machines as it can make, players have started to grumble about the lack of must-have titles that offer a more rewarding experience than short mini-games.

That's where "Super Mario Galaxy" comes in.

A product of Nintendo's legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, "Super Mario Galaxy" is being hailed as the most innovative and fun Mario adventure in more than a decade.

The portly Italian plumber once again has to save Princess Peach from the clutches of the evil Bowser, and this time his path hops across an amazing variety of planetoids.

Read more at Reuters

With US internet service megaladon Comcast facing intense scrutiny over limiting speeds of customers using peer-to-peer technology such as BitTorrent, it was a question of when - not if - someone from the state of California would sue

Showing unprecedented litigious restraint, it took until last Tuesday for such a lawsuit to make its way to the hallowed halls of the California Superior Court.

Resident Jon Hart has stepped to the plate alleging Comcast's secret use of bandwidth throttling technology violates federal computer fraud laws, user contracts, and anti-fraud advertising statues.

He also seeks to certify the lawsuit as a class action, and to force Comcast to pay damages to himself and all Comcast internet subscribers in California.

The complaint begins that Comcast has forsaken its advertised affirmations of "lightning fast" and "mind-blowing" speeds, as well as "unfettered access to all the internet has to offer".

A PDF of the lawsuit can be downloaded here

Read more at Register

Apple released a major update to Mac OS X 10.4 on Wednesday that delivers several improvements, fixes some bugs, and patches several security holes identified in recent months. Mac OS X 10.4.11 is immediately available through Software Update, or it can be downloaded from Apple's Web site.

Listing every feature contained in the new update would probably set a record for wordiness in this blog, so I'm not going to do that, and instead will point you here to an informational document on Apple's site. A couple of highlights that I will call out are RAW image support for some Panasonic, Olympus, Leica, and Canon cameras as well as reliability improvements for Intel-based Macs running VMware's Fusion virtualization software. Other Mac users might be interested to know that 10.4.11 improves the reliability of mounting external hard drives and a Mac's compatibility with third-party wireless networking equipment, which has been a perennial issue for me and my Linksys router.

Dozens of security updates were delivered along with the 10.4.11 release, some of which could theoretically lead to remote code execution. All of those patches are included as part of the update--you won't need to download them separately--and Ryan Naraine at ZDNet has more details on what has been fixed. A separate batch of security patches is also available for Panther users (Mac OS X 10.3) that corrects the issues contained in the Tiger security updates that are also relevant to Panther users.

Read more at CNeT

U.S. sales of the PlayStation 3 more than doubled in the weeks after the company slashed the video game console's price $100 and launched a low-end model, Sony Corp. CEO Howard Stringer told The Associated Press Wednesday.

Sony said it sold more than 100,000 consoles of all types in the week ending Nov. 11.

The price cut and new model make the PS3 more competitive against Nintendo Co.'s Wii and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 as the holiday season opens, Stringer said.

"It's the breakthrough we've been anticipating," Stringer said. "We've been holding our breath."

Sony said it had been selling between 30,000 and 40,000 consoles per week before the Oct. 18 price cut from $599 to $499 of the 80 GB model. of the 80 GB model.

Sales rose to 75,000 in the week of Oct. 29, reflecting both the lower price of the high-end model and the introduction of a 40-gigabyte model for $399 on Nov. 2, the company said. And it was the following week that sales hit 100,000, according to Sony.

Lagging sales of the PlayStation 3, compared to sales of the Wii and XBox 360, prompted Sony to cut the price in the U.S. as it had in Japan and Europe.

"Obviously, we've taken so much heat over the year on PS3," Stringer said from his office in Tokyo. "Finally, the turning point has been passed."

Stringer said Sony is poised to benefit from the difficulty Nintendo has had producing Wii consoles fast enough to keep up with demand.

"It's a little fortuitous that the Wii is running out of hardware," Stringer said.

Read more at Yahoo News

This is something that the country’s 209 million mobile users will definitely cheer — and it’s not yet another complicated ‘scheme’ that gets hyped up but which no one understands. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT)’s announcement that the four metros, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai will have mobile number portability (MNP) by December 2008 is something that was long overdue. What it means is that you, as a cellphone user, can keep your number if you change cellular companies or even cities.

This is a welcome move in today’s scenario where large numbers of consumers may be unhappy with their service providers but still feel compelled to stay with their existing operator only because switching would mean a change of their number and all the attendant hassles, such as informing all their contacts of the change and so on. Once MNP is implemented, consumers can switch to a more efficient operator without all this inconvenience.

This would mean that cell phone operators will now have to work harder to prevent consumers from defecting. And with the impending entry of CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) operators into the GSM (Global System for Mobile communication) market, competition will only intensify; we can only hope that this will result in better quality of service at lower cost for the consumer.

Read More-Via[DNA]

IBM Tuesday released the second beta of its Symphony rival suite to Microsoft Office, claiming that 88 percent of its users are Microsoft customers.

Symphony is now in a beta 2 release, with improved performance, access and ease of use, the company said. IBM also released some statistics about people who are downloading and theoretically using the software, which is a document-creation and editing suite based on OpenOffice.org.

Symphony is currently only available in English, but IBM said more than 50 percent of Symphony users are outside of the U.S., including what it said is a "sizable" group of users in Brazil and France. The top 10 nations in terms of download are the U.S., France, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, India and Italy. About 12 percent of Symphony users are deploying it on Linux, the company said.

IBM also said Tuesday it is promoting Symphony via demonstration videos on the popular YouTube video-sharing site.

IBM released Symphony in September as a free rival to Office and the company now claims that there are more than 250,000 users. The software is comprised of Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations, a suite already included as part of Lotus Notes 8.

Read more at PC World

Global software giant Microsoft on Wednesday launched its Microsoft Office Professional 2007 Prepaid Edition in India, bringing the power of its office productivity suite to home users and small businesses.

The prepaid edition would be available at a 6-month subscription of Rs 1,499. At the end of six month, customers can renew their subscription through a 3-month Prepaid Renewal Card which costs of Rs 1,299.

The simple subscription plan gives customers the flexibility to pay as they go and renew when they choose, therefore reducing upfront capital investment for small businesses and consumers.

Read More-Via[ET]

As Yahoo Inc expands its mobile Internet services in Asia, one challenge the firm faces is harnessing the massive amounts of local information needed to make its advertising and search results relevant to users, executives said on Wednesday.

Silicon Valley-based Yahoo said on Tuesday it had struck new deals to offer mobile phone Web services through nine network operators across Asia, bolstering its increasing lead in the fastest growing regional market for mobile services by users.

Targeting the large but fragmented local advertising sectors in Asia is a vital part of ensuring Yahoo's mobile services are locally focused, Steve Boom, senior Vice President for mobile and broadband, said on the sidelines of the Mobile Asia Congress in the Chinese gambling enclave of Macau.

"It's a huge market but it's a more difficult market to penetrate, because you're dealing with much smaller advertisers, with smaller spend," Boom said.

Read More-Via[Reuters]

The mildest patch update from Microsoft since it skipped one in March 2007 took place this week, and LANDesk launched its Gateway Appliance for managing patches and other updates for remote devices.

If you were looking for a Macrovision patch from Microsoft as the Critical issue being repaired on Tuesday, keep looking.

They did fix the problem with URI handling in Windows. We reported on the URI handling problem in July, where the issue with Internet Explorer's failure to validate input posed a threat when a URI handler passed it along.

"Microsoft has only identified ways to exploit this vulnerability on systems using Internet Explorer 7," Microsoft said in the update. "However, the vulnerability exists in a Windows file, Shell32.dll, which is included in all supported editions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003."

A second issue corrected by Microsoft fixed a vulnerability in DNS that could have enabled a successful spoofing attack. That would have allowed traffic to be redirected from a legitimate site to a different destination, without the individual realizing what had happened.

Read more at Security Pro News

Check Point Software Technologies, the company that makes the popular ZoneAlarm suite of security products, is giving away its ZoneAlarm Anti-Spyware product today. The software includes the firewall and free anti-spyware updates for a year.

If you're interested, check the offer out here.

Read More-Via[WPost]

There are some known issues with Xbox Originals. With all game titles, publisher logos at the start of a game can be choppy on first play when caching. Also, any additional content within a game (such as a demo or trailer) is not supported by Xbox Originals titles and selecting those options may result in crashing the game (requiring a restart of the console).

There are also some issues unique to specific game titles, as follows:

• Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge: There is some minor flickering at the top of the screen that happens very rarely. The “Press A to Continue” message is missing when the host player leaves a multiplayer game. Additional content within the game (such as demos & trailers) are not supported and selecting those options may result in crashing the game (requiring a restart of the console)
• Fable: There are some random bursts of audio static and some minor texture issues and a short hang up when removing tattoos. Additional content within the game (such as demos & trailers) are not supported and selecting those options may result in crashing the game (requiring a restart of the console)
• Fuzion Frenzy: There are some minor frame rate issues. Additional content within the game (such as demos & trailers) are not supported and selecting those options may result in crashing the game (requiring a restart of the console)
• Halo: There are some very mild frame rate drops.
• Psychonauts: HDMI 720p is not supported for PAL users. Running the game in 720p over HDMI will result in the game locking up for PAL users. If you are using HDMI output, set the resolution to 1080i or 1080p (anything but 720p)

Source- Xbox.com

Boasting many of the same specs as the company's popular N95, Nokia brought forth its latest multimedia computer: The N82 (queue heavenly beams of light and angelic chorus). Its feature set is endless, but at $662 will American buyers bite?

Nokia's N Series phones are not cheap. When the N95 first debuted this Spring, it cost a whopping $750. You can find it online for under $700 now, but even that is still a hefty price. The N82 carries the expensive lineup to the next level by incorporating as many features as possible.

Here's the run down:

You want radios? The N82's got 'em. It has quad-band GSM/EDGE connectivity (which means it can roam in the U.S.), but the European variant of 3G, WCDMA 2100 MHz. If you feel like surfing the net at speeds faster than EDGE, no problem. The N82 has 802.11b/g Wi-Fi on board. Need to transfer files? You got it. Bluetooth 2.0, check. Lastly, it also crams in an FM radio and support for stereo Bluetooth. That's four radios on board, ladies and gentleman.

Read More-Via[IW]

Comic book giant Marvel has made 2,500 of its back issues available online in an attempt to introduce its characters to a younger, computer-savvy audience.

One tenth, 250 in all, will be able to read free of charge for a limited time.

Subscribers to the service will have access to the first issues of titles including The Amazing Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk.

New issues, however, will not go online until at least six months after they first appear in print.

Customers will not be able to download the comics either, which can only be viewed in a web browser window.

Read more at BBC

Yahoo Inc. on Tuesday settled a lawsuit filed by Chinese dissidents and their family members who accused the Internet company of complicity in their jailing, following a humiliating episode on Capitol Hill.

Yahoo had been sued earlier this year in California by Wang Xiaoning, Shi Tao and Yu Ling for allegedly providing Chinese authorities with personal information that led to Shi and Wang's imprisonment and torture.

In a joint stipulation of dismissal filed in U.S. District Court in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, Yahoo and the plaintiffs say they have reached a "private settlement understanding," though they disclosed no details. Yahoo agreed to bear the dissidents' legal costs, according to the filing.

In a prepared statement, Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang said that Yahoo will now provide "financial, humanitarian and legal support" to the jailed dissidents' families. Separately, Yang said Yahoo is also now establishing a fund "to provide support to other political dissidents and their families."

Morton Sklar, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The settlement follows a dramatic appearance by Yang before a House committee earlier this month. Yang had been called to testify about his company's responsibility for the jailing of Shi, a journalist who had used Yahoo services to post messages to a pro-democracy Web site.

In previous testimony in 2006, Yahoo general counsel Michael Callahan had said Yahoo had no understanding of why Chinese authorities were interested in Shi, when the company was asked to provide information about him.

Evidence later published by the San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation, however, indicated that Yahoo was aware that the authorities were investigating Shi's part in the sharing of "state secrets."

Read more at Market Watch

Adobe has confirmed it will make a beta version of its online Photoshop Express software available before the end of the year, committing to make a full version available in 2008.

Photoshop Express will be an online version of Adobe's industry-standard image-editing software, Photoshop. Using a standard web browser, users will be able to perform basic image adjustments, such as red-eye removal, cropping, color adjustment and image retouching.

Read More-Via[PC World]

India has surprisingly broken into the Top Ten in a much-fancied twice-yearly list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, marking a giant leap in its push towards becoming a global IT power.

A cluster platform at Pune's Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a Tata subsidiary, has been ranked fourth in the widely anticipated TOP500 list released at an international conference on high performance computing in Reno, Nevada.

It is the first time that India has figured in the Top100 let alone Top Ten of the supercomputing list.
The list, which is usually dominated by the United States, is also notable this time because it has five new entrants in the Top Ten, with supercomputers in Germany and Sweden up there with the one in India.

The fourth-ranking Tata supercomputer, named EKA after the Sanskrit term for one, is a Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system. CRL has integrated this system with its own innovative routing technology and to achieve a 117.9 Teraflop or trillions of calculations per second.

The No. 1 position was again claimed by the BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and the US Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Although BlueGene/L has occupied the No. 1 position since November 2004, the current system is much faster at 478.2 TFop/s compared to 280.6 TFlop/s six months ago before its upgrade.

At No 2 is a BlueGene/P system installed in Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) and it achieved performance of 167.3 TFlop/s. The No. 3 system at the New Mexico Computing Applications Center (NMCAC) in Rio Rancho, N.M posted a speed of 126.9 TFlop/s.

Ashwin Nanda, who heads the CRL, told the conference that its supercomputer had been built with HP servers using Intel chips with a total of 14,240 processor cores. The system went operational last month and achieved a performance of 117.9 teraflops.

Read More-Via[TOI]

Microsoft is set to release three Windows Vista updates that offer performance improvements for Redmond's newest operating system. The fixes are coming through Windows Update.

The first update is designed to improve the compatibility, reliability, and stability of Vista. Specifically, it is designed to extend battery life for mobile devices, improve the stability of portable computers and desktop computers that use an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), and improve stability of wireless network services and Windows Power Shell.

The update also is designed to shorten Vista's startup time and recovery time after a period of inactivity, and when users exit the photos screen saver.

Additionally, this update is designed to resolve an issue that affects some third-party antivirus software applications and an issue that occurs when a Vista-based computer uses certain network driver configurations.

Read More-Via[NewsFactor]

Is full wireless syncing support appropriate for a flash-based player? Microsoft's $199 8GB Zune certainly ships with a raft of features, but unless you need a light player with wireless functions, you'll probably be able to find better values elsewhere.

The 8GB Zune is a little thicker than one of the last-generation iPod Nanos. That puts it on the large side for flash-based MP3 players these days. Its audio quality sounded a little better to my ears than that of the latest iPod Nano, on a par with Creative's Zen V. One tiny annoyance, though: The player's 20-step digital volume control doesn't provide much granularity. Occasionally, I'd reach points where one step was too low and the next too high.

The Zune supports MP3, WMA, WMA lossless, PlaysForSure DRM-ed audio, and its own DRM format for Zune Pass subscriptions. If you'd rather listen to radio, the Zune includes a built-in FM tuner. It also plays back video and displays photos on its 1.8-inch 320-by-240-pixel screen, and &160; the Zune &160; now supports h.264 and MPEG-4 encoding in addition to WMV.

Video playback looked okay on the Zune's screen, though I wouldn't want to watch anything more than short clips on a screen that small.

All of the new Zunes center on a   rounded touch-sensitive control that also doubles as a clickable D-pad-style controller, much like the Click Wheel on Apple's iPods. Flick your thumb up or down the pad repeatedly, and you begin to build up momentum while scrolling through long lists. At any time, you can tap to stop the scrolling, though it will eventually come to a halt naturally. In my experience, it's a very fun way to navigate through a music collection, even in a long view of artists on the 80GB player.

Read More-Via[WPost]

Microsoft Monday tweaked its virtualization strategy by unveiling a stand-alone virtualization server that won't require users to run the Windows Server 2008 operating system.

The announcement came at the company's annual TechEd IT Forum conference in Barcelona, Spain, where Microsoft also outlined pricing, packaging and licensing for Windows Server 2008 and the availability of management tools that address needs of virtualized environments.

Microsoft's virtualization announcement, however, is just a placeholder since the technology likely won't be available until August 2008. Microsoft's Hyper-V technology, formerly code-named Viridian and Windows Server Virtualization, will ship no more than 180 days following the release of Windows Server 2008, which is now slated between Jan. 1 and March 31, 2008.

Microsoft's stand-alone hypervisor technology is called Hyper-V Server. It is hypervisor virtualization technology that is installed on the "bare metal" of a hardware platform without the need for a Windows operating system.

In fact, the Hyper-V Server could be the only piece of Microsoft technology running on the hardware given that Hyper-V supports virtual machines running operating system other than Windows, including Linux.

Microsoft rival VMWare has an enterprise-focused virtualization product it currently ships called ESX that also installs on bare metal.

Microsoft has been marketing virtualization as a feature of the operating system, but critics say the company is bending to the reality that OEMs will likely include a hypervisor virtualization layer as part of their hardware.

Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Lenovo, NEC and Unisys have all signed up to include Microsoft's Hyper-V server on their platforms.

Microsoft, however, also plans to sell Hyper-V directly to corporate users who could wipe a server clean and install Hyper-V Server, which is priced at $28 and allows an unlimited number of virtual machines on a single box.

Read More-Via[PC World]

The Web site of IndiaTimes, the online news site of the Times Group, one of India's large news and entertainment groups, exposed visitors to malware, according to an advisory Friday by ScanSafe Inc.

In her blog, Mary Landesman, a researcher at San Mateo, Calif.-based ScanSafe, said that the company had contacted IndiaTimes by email and by phone on Thursday.

"Unfortunately, the person we spoke with indicated that it was a holiday in India and they would be unlikely to fix the problem until Monday," she said.

Most of India was on holiday from Thursday because of the Diwali festival. The IndiaTimes site was however updated through the week. It is not clear at this point whether the site still contains malware.

IndiaTimes, a part of Times Internet Ltd. in Gurgaon, was not available for comment Monday.

Read more at ComputerWorld

VMware, Inc., the virtualization software leader, today unveiled VMware Server 2, the next generation of the company's easy-to-use, free-of-charge virtualization product. Based on VMware's proven and reliable technology, VMware Server 2 enables organizations to quickly provision new server capacity by partitioning a physical server into multiple virtual machines, resulting in better utilization of IT assets and simplified IT management. VMware Server 2 is available as a public beta download at http://www.vmware.com/go/server2_beta.

VMware Server 2 provides customers with a simple yet powerful introductory experience to virtualization, introduces a new intuitive Web-based management interface to provide a consistent management experience for Linux and Windows users, and supports a broad range of hardware and more than 30 flavors of guest operating systems including various Linux distributions, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 (beta) and Windows Vista.

VMware Server 2 beta is feature-packed with the following new capabilities:

• Intuitive web-based management interface: VMware Server 2 provides a simple, flexible, intuitive and productive management experience. Features include an embedded virtual machine console, full management functionality and the ability to create customized remote console URLs for virtual machine users.
• Expanded operating system support: VMware Server 2 now supports more than 30 types of guest operating systems, including Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 (beta), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Ubuntu 7.10.
• Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) support: VMware Server 2 includes support for transparent paravirtualization through VMI, enabling enhanced communication between virtualized operating systems and the virtualization layer.
• Support for high-speed USB 2.0 devices: The USB 2.0 support provided by VMware Server 2 allows for increased flexibility for customers using peripheral devices in virtualized environments.
• Enhanced memory and processor support: VMware Server 2 now supports up to 8 GB of RAM per virtual machine and up to 2 Virtual SMP processors. The product also features support for 64-bit guest operating systems on 64-bit compatible processors for improved performance and scalability.

Read more at Earthtimes

Following close on the heels of the long-awaited iPhone 1.1.2 firmware update, Apple yesterday released the iPod touch 1.1.2 firmware update.

Like the iPhone update, the iPod touch update is available through iTunes and should appear once the iPod touch has been connected to the computer (otherwise, hit the "Check for Update" button).

The update, a 157 megabyte download, briefly cites "bug fixes" as the firmware update's purpose, although more specific fixes include a new battery icon next to the iPod touch's listing in iTunes' Source menu as well as a display of the current charge level.

Perhaps the most notable change is the iPod touch's new ability to directly edit and enter iCal events on the device. When Apple initially released the iPod touch, it was met with favorable reviews, albeit the lack of this feature was seen as a disappointment to many users.

Read more at O'Grady's PowerPage

Internet and software firm Microsoft is planning to purchase mobile music service provider Musiwave in a move that would see it competing with other mobile music services such as Apple's iPhone.

According to TechTree.com, the deal would bring together Microsoft's Connected Entertainment technologies and services, such as MSN and Windows Mobile, with Musiwave's relationships with music labels, device makers and mobile operators.

Based in Paris, Musiwave provides 2.5 and 3G mobile music services, such as full-length and protected digital music downloads, real music ringtones, mobile video and digital music recognition.

Some of the world's biggest phone operators are among its customers, including Orange, O2, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile.

Read more at Big Mouth Media

Google Inc. is offering $10 million in prizes for people who build the best software to enhance the company's upcoming cell phone operating system.

The Mountain View-based company is developing a free cell phone software package that it says will make it easier to surf the Web over mobile devices. It also will give Google more opportunities to sell ads and services.

The operating system will be based on computer code that can be openly distributed among programmers, which Google hopes will encourage developers to create new software and improvements that could spawn new uses for smart phones.

Winning offerings could encompass simple aesthetic improvements like personalized home screens or more complicated social-networking programs that merge data from the Web — such as maps or personal Web pages — with data from users' phones — like contact information or the phones' geographic locations.

As part of the Android Developer Challenge, a panel of judges will pick 50 winners from entries received from Jan. 2 through March 3, 2008. In the first phase of the competition, those winners will each get $25,000 and be eligible for ten awards of $100,000 and another ten $275,000 awards.

The second phase of the competition will feature another $5 million in prize money.

Read more at AP

Google took another step toward the creation of its fabled gPhone Monday with the release of the Android SDK for developers.

The release is the first for Google's Open Handset Alliance, an open source mobile platform partnership between the search engine giant and at least 34 participants, including T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm and Motorola.

The Linux-based application, dubbed Android, utilizes the Apache v2 license and is expected to yield products from HTC and T-Mobile in the second half of 2008.

Monday's release includes development and debugging tools, libraries, a device emulator, documentation, sample projects, tutorials, FAQs and more, according to Google. An Eclipse plug-in is also available.

Developers will need an x86-based computer with Windows XP or Vista, a Mac OS 10.4.8 or later, or Linux Ubuntu Dapper Drake or later, Google said. They will also need: Eclipse 3.2 or later, with Java Development Tools and the Android SDK's plug-in, or Java and Javac 1.5 or 1.6; Apache Ant; an integrated development environment; and Python 2.2 or later.

"This preview of the SDK will allow you to develop Android applications that you can run, test, profile, and debug using the emulator and the other included tools," according to an Android blog post. "Note that the look and feel of the user interface in the emulator is a placeholder for a final version that is under development."

Read More-Via[PC Magazine]

The unveiling of Apple’s new all-in-one iMac comes on the back of several other notable product releases including a new slimline aluminum keyboard design – available in wired and wireless versions – and a Bluetooth wireless “Mighty Mouse” that boasts enhanced laser tracking, four independently programmable buttons and a new scroll ball that lets users scroll in any direction.

Encased in an aluminum and glass enclosure, the new iMac is available in 20- and 24-inch widescreen displays and features the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors, a new, ultra-thin aluminum Apple Keyboard and a built-in video camera for conferencing.

Redefining Apple’s signature all-in-one design, the new iMac integrates the entire computer system into a sleek, professional aluminum enclosure for a striking, clutter-free desktop. An elegant glass cover joins precisely to the aluminum frame creating a virtually seamless front surface.

The new iMac includes the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors running up to 2.8 GHz with 4MB of shared L2 cache and up to 4GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory. The iMac line features ATI’s next generation of graphics with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB of GDDR3 memory and the ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT with 128MB of GDDR3 memory. The iMac now offers up to a huge 1TB of internal storage to accommodate a user’s growing library of digital photos, movies and music.

Read More-Via[Gizmag]

GETAC's water-proof, shock-proof and drop-proof V100 features a 10.4-inch XGA LCD screen that rotates by 180-degrees, transforming the ruggedized notebook into a Tablet PC designed to withstand harsh use in industrial and field environments.

GETAC Inc., are showcasing their ruggedized notebook and tablet PCs at the 2007 FireRescue Conference and Expo which started today at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The models on display are the V100, M230, P470 and W130, all made to withstand harsh use in environments that may be dirty, dusty, wet, in-motion, vibrating, hot, cold, or generally hostile.

The tablet-convertible 4.9-pound V100 features an ultra-quiet fanless design, made possible thanks to the low power consumption of the V100’s Intel Yonah U2500 Core Duo ULV 1.2GHz processor and 512 MB expandable to 2 GB of DRAM. The 120 GB shock-mounted hard-drive is removable, and the V100 offers integrated Bluetooth, reversible waterproof camera, and a full menu of wireless networking capabilities. The unit is housed in a water resistant rugged magnesium alloy case that has been tested in compliance with MIL-STD 810F and is sealed to IP54 standards, shielding the computer from unexpected spills and sprays.

Read More-Via[Gizmag]

Motorola’s easy-to-use, thin W180 delivers all the tools to help users stay connected. It is an affordable, easy-to use, attractive and high-quality mobile phone, with the added benefit of crystal clear communications and music with a built-in FM radio (optional headphones required in order to listen to the radio).

The easy-to-use form factor gives you access to all of the tools you need – phone, data, music – in an intuitive user interface. The friendly FM radio and SMS interfaces, combined with a large display and sleek keypad, deliver an enjoyable navigation and viewing experience. No longer will you have to shout into a handset or turn up the volume to hear the person on the other end. Motorola’s CrystalTalkTM technology makes it possible to have natural phone conversations as well as enhanced ringtones, even in noisy environments. Simply compose texts with one key access and save up to 750 of them! Have fun and stay connected!

Read More-Via[Motorola]

Though the old 30GB Zune didn't go over too well, Microsoft's kept at it and managed to produce an impressive pair of players in its second generation Zunes. The $250 80GB hard drive model I tested would make a capable alternative to an 80GB iPod Classic, if wireless syncing, or built-in radio interest you.

The 80GB Zune is just about the same size as Apple's 160GB iPod Classic, which makes it a bit thicker than the 80GB model it's competing with. In our objective audio tests and my listening tests, the Zune performed well, producing clean sound with little distortion. One tiny annoyance, though: The player's 20-step digital volume control doesn't provide much granularity. Occasionally, I'd reach points where one step was too low and the next too high.

The 80GB Zune comes with premium in-ear headphones that are easily better than the standard earbuds you'll find with most players. While most included headphones I test get tossed after a brief listen, this model would actually be worth keeping--a nice addition.

Read More-Via[PC World]

The One Laptop per Child Foundation's (OLPC) low-cost laptop has gone on sale to the Western world - for delivery to Americans and Canadians only.

From today until 26 November, the XO laptop - once dubbed the $100 (£48) laptop, but now costing twice that - will be available to residents of those countries as part of the Give One Get One programme. For $399 (£190), donors will receive one of the green and white devices, while another is sent to a child in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti or Rwanda.

Donors will also receive a $200 (£95) tax deduction and a year of free wireless HotSpot access in the US through T-Mobile, for use with any device. The OLPC site said that alone was worth $350.

"Since announcing the Give One Get One program eight weeks ago, we've experienced a tremendous outpouring of public support," said Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the programme, in a statement. "OLPC is about learning not laptops. It is wonderful to see how many people deeply care about empowering children, who in turn are the world's most important natural resource."

Read more at ITPro

Take-Two Interactive chairman Strauss Zelnick has confirmed that there is to be no second delay for the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto IV, after Internet sources misinterpreted recent comments made by him at a business meeting.

Speaking at the 2007 BMO Capital Markets Interactive Entertainment Summit, Zelnick was asked to give a specific new release date for Grand Theft Auto IV. In a high profile move the game was previously delayed from its autumn 2007 release date of October 16th, to the company’s second fiscal quarter in early 2008.

Zelnick refused to give a new date but instead ruminated on the potential benefits of launching in 2008, saying: “The hardware penetration is going to grow over Christmas, and this is gonna be a must-have title, it's probably OK you're not selling it during the Christmas season.”

Read more at Gamasutra

Federal antitrust authorities raised the ante Friday in a dispute with state attorneys general over whether court oversight of Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) should continue.

In an unusually strongly worded filing to the U.S. District Court that has been monitoring the software giant for the last five years, the Department of Justice called the arguments put forward by the states "inadequate and mutually inconsistent."

The DOJ is opposed to an attempt by two groups of state antitrust authorities to extend a consent decree reached with Microsoft five years ago.

The majority of aspects of the antitrust agreement were set to expire in November, but were extended to January to give Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly time to consider the motion to extend it further.

Last month, several states expressed concern about the level of competition in the personal computer software market if the oversight of Microsoft's activities was lifted by the court.

In Friday's filing, the DOJ said that in asking the court to extend the consent decree, the states reversed positions they until only recently held.

One group of states, which over the years of the long-running antitrust suit has become known as the California Group, has always maintained that the oversight wasn't comprehensive enough. In addition to California, that group includes the state attorneys general of Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

But, according to the DOJ, "the California movants have now shifted ground and present two different arguments for extending the final judgments."

Read more at CNN Money

Microsoft will release eight versions of Windows Server 2008 when it ships in late February 2008, three of which will include its hypervisor technology, Hyper-V.

The Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter versions of Windows Server 2008 will be offered with and without Hyper-V, both in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, Brad Anderson, general manager for the Windows and Enterprise management division, said at a press conference at the TechEd IT Forum event here Nov. 12.

Anderson's comments came ahead of the conference's opening keynote address by Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of infrastructure server marketing. The Windows Server 2008 Standard product with Hyper-V will cost $999 and include five CALs (Client Access Licenses) and $971 without Hyper-V.

The Enterprise version with Hyper-V will cost $3,999 and comes with 25 CALs and retail for $3,971 without the hypervisor, while the Datacenter edition will cost $2,999 per processor including Hyper-V and $2,971 without, Anderson said.

Windows Web Server 2008, designed as a single purpose Web server, will cost $469, and Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based systems, which is optimized for large databases and line-of-business and custom applications, will cost $2,999 a processor.

Read more at eWeeK

Intel will increase the pressure on rival Advanced Micro Devices Monday with the release of processors that make use of smaller transistors and advanced materials.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant will roll out Penryn processors for desktop and servers under its Core 2 and Xeon brands that will pack more transistors into each processor by shrinking their size to 45 nanometers from 64 nanometers.

Intel promises these changes will up Penryn's performance without increasing the new processors' consumption of power. The shift to smaller transistors is a manufacturing trick that AMD isn't on track to master until next year.

Penryn fits neatly into Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini's "tick-tock" strategy for keeping the pressure on AMD. It seems to be working: AMD's shares have fallen nearly 40% this year, thanks to a withering assault led by Intel's Core microprocessor design, which the company launched last year. As a result, Intel has regained its footing, with its shares up nearly 25% since January.

Read more at Forbes

With its Graphic Splash Eco Edition notebooks, announced this morning, Sony straddled two bandwagons, combining eco-friendly hardware with customizable design.

These limited-edition notebooks are available in four color combinations (surprisingly, none of them are green): Caribbean Water (blues), Clay Earth (brown), Bloom (pinks), and Spotted Life (leopard print). Sony will donate one percent of the purchase of each machine to 1% For the Planet (www.onepercentfortheplanet.org), a consortium of eco-friendly businesses.

The 5.9-pound notebooks are designed to have a reduced impact on the environment; they're made of recyclable components and don't include any hazardous materials, such as lead.

Read More-Via[LaptopMag]

Northeastern University and a start-up company cofounded by an associate professor have filed a patent-infringement suit against Google Inc., claiming that database technology patented in 1997 was misappropriated by the world's most popular Internet search service.

"This particular patent has to do with the fundamental database architecture, which they use to serve up every single result they serve to you," said Michael Belanger, president of Jarg Corp. in Waltham. Jarg is a privately funded developer of advanced search technology. The company was cofounded by Northeastern associate professor Kenneth P. Baclawski and holds an exclusive license to the patent, which is owned by Northeastern.

The patent covers a method for chopping up database queries into multiple portions and having each part processed by a different computer. This allows for much faster searching of huge databases, like Google's vast index of Web pages on the Internet.

Though Google was incorporated in 1998, Belanger said he and Baclawski had no idea the company might be infringing the patent, until about 2 1/2 years ago. That's when a representative of a Boston-area law firm, which Belanger declined to name, told him of seeing a presentation by Google that described the company's Web search technology. The database search technique described in the presentation resembled Northeastern's patented technology, the law firm told Belanger.

Read more at Boston Globe

Vodafone has rolled out Pebble - the nickname by which it's latest HSDPA modem is known. Officially the USB Modem 7.2, the Pebble provides 'super 3G' connectivity for PCs and Macs at up to 7.2Mb/s.

That's the maximum download speed - uploads are expected to run to 384Kb/s. Vodafone said it has already started upgrading its 3G network to the 7.2Mb/s.Vodafone wants £49 for the Pebble if you're willing to sign up for an 18-month £25- or £95-a-month contract.

Read More-Via[TrustedNews]

The shadowy hacker and malware hosting network that only recently fled Russia to set up operations in China has now pulled the plug there and vanished yet again, researchers said late Friday.

The latest disappearing act of the Russian Business Network (RBN) has left researchers scratching their heads. "Where have they gone, that's the question," said an analyst with VeriSign's iDefense Labs, who wanted to remain anonymous, leery of retribution from the gang. "What's really interesting is how fast they shut everything down."

iDefense had tracked RBN's migration earlier in the week from servers based in Russia to ones running in China. On Tuesday, RBN's Russian servers went dark as the group relinquished control of its assigned IP addresses, effectively severing its connection to the Internet. By Wednesday, however, RBN had relocated to China and Taiwan after obtaining at least seven net blocks of Chinese IP addresses, said iDefense. According to the Sterling, Va.-based security intelligence firm, as of Wednesday RBN controlled 5,120 IP addresses assigned to Chinese service providers; known RBN clients were even seen using those addresses that day.

But with its China move putting media and security community spotlights on the organization, RBN suddenly went offline on Thursday, said the analyst. "They severed connections to six of the seven net blocks on November 8."

Read more at CW

If Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista were graded for its first year, the report card would read "not meeting expectations," analysts said Friday, a year and a day after the operating system code went gold and was sent off for duplication.

On Nov. 8, 2006, Jim Allchin, then the head of Vista development, announced that Vista had gone RTM (release to manufacturing) -- the first step toward its release later in the month to businesses, and in late January 2007 to consumers. "This is a good day. I am super happy," Allchin told reporters in a conference call.

While Vista might be a sales blockbuster -- Microsoft's last quarter broke eight-year-old records, in large part behind Vista -- it hasn't made the kind of progress anticipated in the enterprise world. And if Allchin, who retired as soon as Vista shipped in January, was still with Microsoft, he might not be super happy now.

"The uptake is much lower than expected," said Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner Inc. "Organizations really seem to be way behind where they said they would be last year." Silver compared the results of a Gartner survey last month on Vista adoption plans with an identical survey taken in October 2006, and concluded that enterprises are 9-12 months behind their original expectations.

Read More-Via[PC World]

Microsoft Corp. will strip a "click to activate" warning from Internet Explorer 7 starting next month, a company product manager said Thursday, a side benefit of the settlement that Microsoft struck with Eolas Technologies Inc. in August.

Next month, Microsoft will preview the modified Internet Explorer (IE) that eliminates the warning that's been popping up on screens when users select multimedia content, such as clicking on a link to a Flash file or a PDF document. That notice first appeared in IE in April 2006, when Microsoft began requiring users to approve ActiveX controls the first time they were run from the browser.

The settlement with Eolas -- it followed a $521 million judgment in 2003 against Microsoft in a patent infringement dispute between the two companies -- paved the way for Microsoft to license Eolas' technologies, which in turn meant that IE could ditch "click to activate."

The Internet Explorer Automatic Component Activation Preview will appear in the Microsoft Download Center next month, said Pete LePage, senior product manager, in a posting on the IE team's blog. The tweaked IE will also be rolled into the next betas of Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3, LePage added. Finally, the changes will be pushed to all IE 7 users in April 2008 as part of that month's scheduled updates. Users, however, can decline the update.

Read more at PC World

Online photo sharing site Photobucket has introduced a new photo tagging feature that offers users the ability to share tagged and linked photos across social networks and the Web. This new feature enables users to tag up to 20 names and links within a single photo, before sharing them online on personal profile pages, blogs and other sites.

Further, when tagged photos are displayed on Photobucket, embedded onto other sites, or shared by email, viewers will be able to see the tags, click on links and also find more images with the same tags on Photobucket.

Now, if one were to embed tagged photos on other Web sites, the tagged link travels with the photo, making it dynamic. Yet another unique aspect of Photobucket’s new photo tagging feature is the ability to create an instant photo sharing community by importing email contacts from the user’s own account. Moreover, if friends are tagged in a photo, they will immediately receive an email from the Photobucket user in concern, notifying them that they have been tagged in a photo.

Read More-Via[Techshout]

Mark Zuckerberg promised no less than a revolution with his idea that ads you see on Facebook will be attached to the names and photos of your friends who like the products being advertised.

There is at least one problem with this idea: It may be illegal under a 100-year-old New York privacy law. The statute says that “any person whose name, portrait, picture, or voice is used within this state for advertising purposes or for the purposes of trade without the written consent first obtained” can sue for damages. Moreover, such a use is also a criminal misdemeanor.

According to William McGeveran, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who wrote about these laws in a blog post today, the law would apply to Facebook users anywhere if the ad were displayed in New York. Arguably, it could apply if the ad was displayed on a computer screen within the state. Yet “where the ad actually is in cyberspace is a whole other can of worms,” he said.

More broadly, Mr. McGeveran said people can sue advertisers who use their names and images without permission under a common law principle. He quotes from the law:

One who appropriates to his own use or benefit the name or likeness of another is subject to liability to the other for an invasion of his privacy.

Such a lawsuit, however, then would turn on the actual damages that a Facebook user incurred as a result of the advertisement. There have been a series of cases by celebrities who can claim that the use of their likenesses damaged their reputations and deprived them of their usual endorsement fees.

Read more at NYT

Microsoft on Thursday said that it planned to issue two security fixes next week with the arrival of "Patch Tuesday," the company's regularly scheduled repair day.

That's considerably fewer than the seven bulletins issued in October, the nine issued in August, or the 12 issued in February. Given the lighter load, IT managers may want spend part of the day catching up on some much needed sleep. A survey published and funded by Cisco Systems this week found federal IT decision makers are more concerned about security than in previous years, even after spending more time attending to security than in the past. So much so that many are losing sleep over protecting their networks.

Microsoft did not specify the nature of the fixes, as is customary with its advanced notifications. One addresses a "critical" issue and one addresses a flaw rated "important."

Rwad More-Via[IW]

MySpace has been breached by an attacker who's planted malware and a fake codec on a number of musicians' sites, most notably, that of Alicia Keys, a popular singer whose site was booby-trapped, cleaned up for a few hours and promptly rehacked.

Exploit Prevention Labs' Roger Thompson said in a Nov. 8 posting that MySpace fixed Keys' page, which had been rigged with an HREF image reference to the co8vd.cn/s/ fake codec, within hours of EPL's having posted a videotape of the exploit.

Hours after getting cleaned up, the site was once again crawling with malware that would snare anybody with an unpatched system who even came close to clicking on anything on the page. That's because of a new twist that an EPL spokesman said hasn't been seen before: The HTML in the page contains some sort of very large image map that spans 8,000-by-1,000 pixels.

"A click that slightly misses a control or link on the page ends up going to the exploit site," Thompson said in his posting about the initial site compromise.

The malware is being hosted in China and is installing rootkits and probably DNS (Domain Name System) changers, he said. DNS changers are the same thing being installed by a well-known family of Windows Trojans, the controllers of which have recently started targeting Macs as well.

Read more at eWeeK

The New York Daily News is the latest paper to join the Yahoo partnership.

The paper plans to draw upon Yahoo's Web technologies for targeting display advertising, content distribution, and its job board, HotJobs.

"The Daily News is excited to be the latest and largest newspaper to join the newspaper consortium," Marc Kramer, CEO of the Daily News, said in a statement. "Our partnership with Yahoo will allow us to provide additional opportunities to our advertisers, to job seekers, and to all of our users."

The partnership now includes 21 newspaper companies representing about 400 daily newspapers.

Read more at Editor and Publisher

Fan sites dedicated to Prince say they have been served legal notice to remove all images of the singer, his lyrics and "anything linked to Prince's likeness," and have vowed to fight what they said was censorship.

The move was a shock to many of his followers and came two months after Prince threatened to sue YouTube and other major Internet sites for unauthorized use of his music and image.

But by targeting fan sites directly, Prince risks a backlash, and the sites have vowed to unite under the banner "Prince Fans United" and take the matter to court if necessary.

"We strongly believe that such actions are in violation of ... freedom of speech and should not be allowed," said a statement from the three sites -- www.housequake.com, www.princefams.com and www.prince.org.

A company helping Prince control his image and music on the Internet said the fan sites had spun the story so that it was "incorrect and misleading."

"At no time is Prince suing his fans and this is not about freedom of speech," said John Giacobbi, managing director of Internet policing specialist Web Sheriff."The current issue is one between Prince's record label and three unofficial Web sites and relates to the use of Prince trademarks and photographs, many of which are Prince's copyright," he told Reuters.

Read more at Reuters

Sony has launched the PS3 firmware update version 2.0 which will add many new features to the Sony PS3 next-gen console.

The new features include new PS3 software such as the ability to add themes, a news feed, progressive video downloading, PRP Remote Start, web filters, custom playlists, and more.

The version 2.0 launch comes one year after the launch of the Sony PS3 last November, and PS3 owners could not be happier to hear the news.

The version 2.0 firmware update is going to do a lot of things for the PS3. The new XMB will have far more customization than anyone has seen before. Those with a PSP will also now be able to turn on their PS3 right from the handheld.

Read more at dBTechno

Children in developing nations who receive the XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation can exercise their imaginations and build their own cities with the original "SimCity" video game.

Electronic Arts (EA) announced Thursday that it has donated the game, originally released in 1989, to the OLPC Foundation for the organization to include on its laptops, which sell for around US$200 each.

The non-profit's mission is to design, build, manufacture and distribute inexpensive laptops to children in developing nations. Providing these children with laptops, the OLPC believes, will help give them the opportunity to receive a "modern education."

Including "SimCity" on the XO laptop will help young users become familiar with their new computer while at the same time giving them a creative outlet that can help them develop their decision-making skills, according to EA.

"'SimCity' is entertainment that's unintentionally educational. Players learn to use limited resources to build and customize their cities. There are choices and consequences, but in the end, it's a creativity tool that's only limited by the player's imagination," said Steve Seabolt, vice president of global brand development for the Sims label.

"The game should prove to be an incredibly effective way of making the laptop relevant, engaging and fun, particularly for first-time players. We are thrilled to be making this contribution to OLPC to help meet their goal of educating the children of the world."

Read more at Tech News World

A computer security consultant accused of installing malicious software to create an army of up to 250,000 "zombie" computers so he could steal identities and money will plead guilty to four federal charges.

John Schiefer, 26, of Los Angeles, agreed Friday to plead guilty to accessing protected computers to conduct fraud; disclosing illegally intercepted electronic communications; wire fraud and bank fraud, the U.S. Attorney's office said.

Schiefer, who was expected to enter the plea next month, could face up to 60 years in federal prison and a $l.75 million fine.

Schiefer, who used the Internet name "acidstorm," is the first person charged under federal wiretapping law with operating a "botnet," or network of compromised computers, Assistant U.S. Atty. Mark Krause said.

"People hired him to fix their computers, to make sure they're safe," Krause said.

Instead, prosecutors contend that Schiefer and his associates installed malicious computer code, called malware, that gave them remote access to the computers without the owners' knowledge. The "zombie" computers then eavesdropped on the users' electronic communications.

Read more at San Jose Mercury News

Bringing his claims to Capitol Hill for the first time, former AT&T network technician Mark Klein appeared yesterday at a press conference to reiterate his astonishing claim: AT&T operated a 24 x 48-foot room in one of its network operations centers in San Francisco, where Klein discovered his employer was cooperating with the National Security Agency in the monitoring of all Internet traffic over a major backbone line.

"I have first-hand knowledge of the clandestine collaboration between one giant telecommunications company, AT&T, and the National Security Agency to facilitate the most comprehensive illegal domestic spying program in history," Klein remarked in his press conference yesterday.

Klein's allegations have been part of an ongoing class-action suit against AT&T since January 2006, funded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. While he was not able to witness everyday goings-on in the "Secure Room," as an engineer, Klein was privy to how the room was wired. In a June 8 sworn deposition entered into evidence in this case, he described what he saw.

In January 2003, Klein was invited to tour the Folsom Street Facility of what was then known as SBC Communications. There he saw for the first time Room 641A, categorized as the "SG3 Secure Room." That fall, when he was hired to work at the facility, he noted that an NSA agent was interviewing field support specialists for clearance to be able to work in the Secure Room.

Read more at BetaNews

YouTube announced yesterday that it had increased the size limit for videos to 1 GB, and also introduced new software that allows users to simultaneously upload multiple videos.Users may still opt to upload their videos to the site through the browser form if they do not wish to put a piece of YouTube software on their hard drives, or in the case of Mac users, if the software isn't supported at all.

If you've ever watched a feature film on YouTube, you know that files are broken up into increments and compressed severely. The new multi-upload application seems ideally suited for the purpose of putting such longer-form media on the site. By also increasing the potential file size, it will likely means that compression will be less of a detriment to picture quality.

Read More-Via[BetaNews]

In addition to restricting the type of games played, Xbox 360 will soon be able to limit the total number of hours played by younger gamers.

"As the customer base broadens, the demand for these kinds of capabilities does increase," said Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division.

Read More-Via[PC World]

Dell is already selling some machines with Ubuntu preinstalled on them in the United States.

The company has now announced a deal with Novell and they would now begin selling Dell OptiPlex 330 and 755 desktops preloaded with Novell’s SLED 10 in Chinese market.Lenovo is another PC manufacturer which has announced plans to pre-load some models of ThinkPads with SLED 10.

Read More-Via[TechWhack]

Microsoft on Friday expanded its refurbishing rules to benefit companies who want to refurbish and re-sell their old PCs to new customers.

The Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher (MAR) program is an offshoot of its current Community MAR, which is designed for charities, educational institutions and nonprofits.

"Companies don't know what to do with their old PCs, so they collect dust in the company cafeteria or stack up in the hallways," Hani Shakeel, senior product manager of the Genuine Windows Product Marketing team said in a statement. "This is a very common fate for PCs these days, especially with the increased environmental regulations around the disposal of computers."

Microsoft said it is offering a new license for refurbishers that is only available through the MAR program. Windows XP Home for Refurbished PCs and Windows XP Professional for Refurbished PCs are the two operating systems available and the PCs that are being refurbished need to have a Certificate of Authenticity.

Read More-Via[IW]

During the third calendar quarter of 2007, Cyveillance saw a significant shift in the nature of online attacks that target personally identifiable information (PII). The most recent data indicates that online fraud schemes continue to expand globally, with attacks targeting consumers in Europe and Asia growing substantially faster than attacks targeting United States Internet users.

The growth of online fraud schemes is largely driven by Webbased malware attacks. Phishing attacks, while still highly pervasive, are not growing at the rates seen over the last three years. Continuing a trend noted in the second quarter of 2007, phishers are no longer aggressively expanding their attacks to new companies and industries. Instead, phishers continue to heavily focus on the financial services sector, targeting banks and credit unions in nine out of 10 attacks.

Malware-based attacks via the Web grew by more than 30% over Q2, or to more than 3 million unique attacks, volumes that far exceed the total number of phishing attacks. Like much of the Internet’s development over the years, threats and security risks that were initially United States–centric have rapidly spread around the globe.

The growth of malware in Q3 was led by significant increases in attacks emanating from Japan and Germany. While the United States still accounts for more malware-based attacks than any other country, its overall percentage has declined tremendously from the first calendar quarter of 2007.

Download Full Report from Cyveillance

An ex-AMD worker is seeking exemplary damages for her son's birth defects, claiming that the chip maker failed to tell her that the noxious chemicals she was working with were, err, noxious.

Chimpzilla stands accused of being responsible for Ryan Ruiz's missing lower right arm and brain damage. The mother of the 16 year old, Maria Ruiz, worked in AMD's Austin, Texas, Fab 14 clean room from 1988 to 2002 and lawyers claim she 'worked with hazardous chemicals that caused her son's devastating birth defects.'

The lawsuit alleges Ruiz was 'wrongfully exposed to birth defect-causing hazardous chemicals during her pregnancy' and that AMD 'knowingly failed to protect its workers from hazardous chemicals,' including ethylene glycol monoethyl ether acetate and 2-ethoxyethyl acetate. The woman also claims that, on two occasions, she needed medical attention due to inhaling chemical fumes.

Read more at Inquirer

Bringing families and friends together is the marketing hook behind Microsoft's Xbox, as well as promotions from rival Nintendo for its Wii game system. The tech titans want to reach beyond teens and adult technophiles and ring up more business from casual gamers.

"We're growing our consumer base," says Jeff Bell, a Microsoft corporate vice president, about the company's new ad campaign and the recent launch of the family-oriented Xbox 360 Arcade console. "We want to broaden our appeal."

Microsoft's maneuvers:

• A fresh ad campaign. TV and cinema ads show ordinary folks at spots such as a shopping mall parking lot. Their day-to-day activities are disrupted when a group of people crashes the scene through unusual means such as hot-air balloons. The outsiders set up a mock living room, complete with a couch, TV and an Xbox. Bystanders then crowd in to check out Xbox.
• Family-friendly video games. Rough-and-tumble "Gears of War" and "Halo 3" are among the more well-known games that Microsoft publishes. But the company is also promoting less-violent fare, such as "Scene It? Lights, Camera, Action." The $59.99 game has a range of puzzles that use movie trivia.
• Less-expensive console. The $279.99 Xbox 360 Arcade comes with five free family-friendly games such as "Uno" and "Pac-Man." Microsoft still offers the regular Xbox 360 for $349.99 and the Xbox 360 Elite - targeted at hard-core gamers - for $449.99.

Read more at The Indianapolis Star

The MySpace pages of several musicians, including the personal page of R&B songstress Alicia Keys, were targeted this week by hackers as part of a scheme to spread socially engineered attacks and render the computers of visitors to these pages vulnerable to future invasions, according to The New York Times.

While it was unclear at press time how the pages were compromised, experts warn that they're now very dangerous places to visit online. Among the attacks being served by Keys' page (and those of French funk band Greements of Fortune and Scottish rock band the Dykeenies) are Trojan horses disguised as new video codecs.

When someone tries to access one of the hacked sites, an exploit first attempts to install malware (malicious software) on the visitor's computer. If that doesn't work, the user is next asked to install a fake codec to view a video posted on the page, according to the Times. When installed, these malicious programs actually change the computer's Domain Name System settings to redirect future searches to unauthorized sites — including porn Web sites and URLs selling bogus security software — thus allowing hackers to take over what users see on their browsers and what they download onto their computers.

Clicking almost anywhere on these infected MySpace pages directs the visitors to co8vd.cn/s, which the Times claims is a Chinese malware site. The affected pages were flagged by users of Exploit Prevention Labs' LinkScanner software, which blocks pages containing malicious code. According to Roger Thompson, chief technology officer of LinkScanner.com, users who've taken precautions to avoid such attacks may still be vulnerable, as unpatched PCs vulnerable to existing exploits can also be infected.

Read more at MTV

When the top general of one army says the war has been fought to a draw, can serious peace negotiations be far behind? That question was raised Thursday when Sony CEO Howard Stringer said that the war between the Blu-ray and HD DVD formats is now "a stalemate."

In comments to the Associated Press, Stringer described the struggle as "a difficult fight" that was primarily a matter of prestige for the winner.

That fight was made more difficult for the Blu-ray camp in August, when Paramount switched exclusively to the HD side. Stringer indicated that the switch had a major impact on Blu-ray's momentum. "We were trying to win on the merits, which we were doing for a while," he told AP, "until Paramount switched sides."

Read more at Sci-Tech Today

Hewlett-Packard has announced that it will shift the focus of its digital camera business, jumping out of manufacturing, distribution and design, in order to concentrate more on its home photo printing and online photo services.

While the no. 1 PC maker plans to continue selling cameras under its brand, it is looking for a manufacturer to license the design, build the devices and distribute them, the company said in a statement.

HP will continue selling its cameras through the end of the year and intends to have the partnership arrangement in place in the first half of 2008.

Read More-Via[TOI]

Germans lined up to buy Apple Inc.'s iPhone as it made its European debut Friday, with the company hoping to replicate the success the combination phone, music player and mobile Web browser has seen in the United States.

Apple hopes to sell 10 million iPhones in 2008, helped by the launch of the iPhone in Europe, then in Asia next year. It goes on sale in Britain later Friday. The company has already sold more than 1.39 million since it debuted in the United States on June 29.

In Germany, the phone went on sale at more than 700 T-Mobile shops. One store in Cologne opened just after midnight to some 350 would-be buyers already lined up.

Johannes Krause, 32, waited for nearly four hours to get inside, but said it was worth the wait. He said he had wanted to his get his hands on an iPhone since it was announced by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in January.

Why? "Because it's the first mobile Internet device that makes it easy to surf the Web," he said.

Others were drawn by the intense media coverage in the U.S.

"I just want to be the first to touch it, play with it and try it," said Reinhold Steinwasser, 54, likening the event to the first time color televisions went on sale in Germany in the 1960s and people would stand in front of department store windows marveling at the pictures in color.

But the price tag drew some complaints. In Germany the phone costs 399 euros (about $587), and contracts through T-Mobile start at 49 euros ($72) a month, along with a 25 euro ($37) activation fee.

Read More-Via[AP]

Reliance Communications and Microsoft have announced a strategic partnership designed to bring Internet protocol Television (IPTV) services to India. The Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group revealed that the move will cost at least $1 billion in terms of software licenses as well as infrastructure.

Reliance Communications plans to launch the service in Mumbai and Delhi initially and then expand to almost 30 cities in the country. Microsoft and R Com have been testing this service in 20,000 households over the last four years.

Reliance IPTV services will run on Microsoft’s media room platform. These services are being touted as a new experience for India consumers. R Com Chairman Anil Ambani said the Indian viewer was sophisticated enough these days and was ready for IPTV.

Read More-Via[NewsLocale]

The National Governors Association announced a new partnership with the Climate Savers Computing Initiative that aims to bring ever more energy-efficient computers to state offices and agencies.

The partnership joins the NGA's Securing a Clean Energy Future initiative with the green computing group, which was founded by Google and Intel in June 2007 and now includes dozens of the world's largest computer and technology companies.

This new program has set as a preliminary goal a 50 percent reduction of the energy used by state-owned computers in the next four years through three steps:

• Pledging to buy Energy Star-certified, highly energy efficient computer equipment for state offices;
• Maximizing the energy efficiency of machines still in use by educating users about computer power management tools like sleep and hibernation modes; and
• Committing their states to buy energy efficient computers in coming years.

The commitment was first signed by Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, the chairs of the NGA's Clean Energy Initiative.

Read More-Via[GreenBiz]

Approximately 165,000 Web sites have been offline since Saturday, thanks to a failed data center migration involving Andover, Mass.-based Web hosting company NaviSite Inc.

The problems started Saturday when NaviSite attempted to migrate and replace hundreds of servers operated by Baltimore-based Alabanza Corp., a Web hosting company acquired by NaviSite in August.

According to NaviSite spokesman Rathin Sinha, NaviSite decided to physically move 200 of the 850 servers operated by Alabanza to NaviSite's data center in Andover and then virtually migrate the data from the rest of the older servers to new boxes, also in Andover.

NaviSite let its customers know that their sites would be down for a while on Saturday, with the migration expected to be finished that day, Sinha said. But when NaviSite attempted to transfer the data from the 650 servers still in Baltimore it ran into a number of synchronization failures that kept multiplying.

As Saturday progressed, NaviSite realized it would probably miss its completion deadline; as a result, company officials decided to physically transfer another 200 servers from Baltimore to Andover to help reduce the scope of the virtual migration and speed up the data transfer.

Read More-Via[PC World]

The Russian Business Network (RBN), a notorious hacker and malware hosting organization that operates out of St. Petersburg, Russia, has gone off the air, security researchers said today.

According to a pair of Trend Micro Inc. researchers, RBN went dark around 10 p.m. EST Tuesday.

"The routing information for their IP addresses has been withdrawn," said Paul Ferguson, a network architect at Trend Micro. "That's significant because while RBN has had connectivity issues in the past, then the routing [to its IP addresses] was still being advertised. This time, they've been voluntarily withdrawn.

"This is not the result of someone, such as their ISP, blackholing their traffic," Ferguson continued. "This was done voluntarily." Another report, however, on The Washington Post's Web site, claimed that while RBN has severed links to the Internet, its upstream connectivity providers had begun to refuse to route RBN traffic as early as mid-October.

By relinquishing control of the IP blocks it had been allocated, RBN essentially cut ties to the Internet and made it impossible for its domains -- which number in the thousands -- to access the Web or for users to reach those domains.

"Where once there might have been 22 feasible paths for data to take to their IP blocks, now there are none," Ferguson said. He speculated that RBN is simply shifting to new digs, diversifying its considerable back-end infrastructure, trying to lay low or all of the above. "No one knows why they've done this, but I think they're down, not out," he said.

Read more at ComputerWorld