Archive for January, 2008
Just when Microsoft 
thought it was safe to do business in the European Union, the government has opened a second complaint against the software giant.EC regulators on Monday said they have initiated two formal antitrust investigations against Microsoft. The investigations fall under two separate categories of alleged infringements of European Commission Treaty rules. The first case deals with interoperability. The second relates to tying separate software products together. Specifically, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office have fallen under scrutiny.
“We will cooperate fully with the commission’s investigation and provide any and all information necessary,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We are committed to ensuring that Microsoft is in full compliance with European law and our obligations as established by the European Court of First Instance in its September 2007 ruling.”
Click here to read the rest of this story on NewsFactor.
January 15th, 2008
Fans of Apple and all things Mac are holding their breath as industry observers and pundits around the world make predictions about what’s going to be launched at Macworld next week.Macworld, the largest Mac event of its kind, will include over 400 exhibitors and is expected to draw more than 50,000 attendees. Macworld’s five-day conference program features 191 sessions with content designed for Mac users of all levels and backgrounds.
Will Bill Gates show up to introduce Office 2008 for the Mac? Will a new iPhone be introduced? Are the rumors about an on-demand rental service for iTunes true?
Analysts are saying that nobody really knows what surprises Apple CEO Steve Jobs might pull out of his turtleneck, well, nobody outside Apple. But plenty are willing to take a guess.
Click here to read the rest of this story on NewsFactor.
January 14th, 2008
Microsoft users are facing good news and bad news. The bad news: Microsoft had issues with its update process again as it prepared to launch the final version of its first Service Pack for the Windows Vista operating system. The good news: After addressing the glitch, Microsoft turned on a dime and made SP1 available to the public on Friday.The drama began early last week when Microsoft accidentally sent a patch to some users running the Windows operating system. Specifically, Microsoft issued a Vista update to prepare PCs for a future release of Vista Service Pack 1.
The update marked one of three prerequisites for SP1 and was intended for delivery only to Vista Enterprise and Vista Ultimate machines. The update targeted BitLocker, a full-drive encryptiontechnology Microsoft bundles with premium editions of its latest operating system. However, the update was also delivered to PCs running Vista Home Basic and Home Premium.
Click here to read the rest of this story on NewsFactor.
January 14th, 2008
Amazon.com on Thursday announced a new deal with Sony BMG to sell its digital music without copy protection. Sony is the last of the major record labels to jump on the Digital Rights Management-free bandwagon.Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 digital music store will now feature music from all four major labels — Sony, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and EMI — as well as more than 33,000 independent labels. The MP3 songs are playable on virtually any digital music-capable device, including PCs, Macs, iPods, Zunes, Zens, iPhones, RAZRs and BlackBerrys. Sony’s music will debut on Amazon.com later this month.
“We are excited to be working with Amazon as they continue to build new markets for digital music,” Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG Music Entertainment’s Global Digital Business & U.S. Sales, said in a statement. “We are constantly exploring new ways of making our music available to consumers in the physical space, over the Internet and through mobile phones, and this initiative is the newest element of our ongoing campaign to bring our music to fans wherever they happen to be.”
Click here to read the rest of this story on NewsFactor.
January 14th, 2008
Under a contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Stanford University and Coverity are working to identify and fix potential security defects in open-source software projects. As part of the collaborative effort, Coverity announced this week a list of 11 open-source projects that it has now certified as secure and defect-free.The list includes widely used applications, such as Perl, PHP, Samba, and Postfix, along with Amanda, NTP, OpenPAM, OpenVPN, Overdose, Python and TCL. All of the projects involved eliminating multiple classes of potential security vulnerabilities and quality defects from their code through the Coverity Scan site.
Coverity is a privately-held, San Francisco-based company that develops source-code analysis tools, and the Coverity Scan site was developed with support from Homeland Security as part of the federal government’s “Open Source Hardening Project.”
The site divides open source projects into different “rungs” based on the progress each project makes in resolving its defects. Projects at higher rungs receive access to additional analysis capabilities using the Coverity Prevent system.
Click here to read the rest of this story on Newsfactor.
January 11th, 2008
Ask.com is shaking up its executive suite. Parent company IAC announced several top management changes on Thursday as it takes additional steps toward organizing its assets into five publicly traded companies. IAC will spin off HSN, Ticketmaster, Interval International and LendingTree.The shake-up includes a new CEO at Google rival Ask.com. The departing CEO, Jim Lanzone, quit after six years at the helm, and will hand the reins to Jim Safka, who will oversee Ask.com’s global operations and continue on as CEO of Primal Ventures, a new-venture entity that identifies, seeds and incubates business opportunities for IAC.
“Jim Lanzone was the principal executive responsible for Ask.com’s turnaround over the last two years. His passion for innovation and his everyday dedication to the business and its people have been everything anyone could ask for,” Barry Diller, chairman and CEO of IAC, said in a statement. “He is a superb executive and leader and I’m hopeful we can be associated in the future.”
Click here to read the rest of this story on Newsfactor.
January 11th, 2008
Music fans in the UK have reason to celebrate. Apple announced it will lower the prices it charges for music on its UK iTunes Store within six months. The decision marks the end of a European Commission antitrust probe into Apple’s pricing practices.The prices will match the standardized pricing on iTunes across Europe. Consumers in the UK have been paying about 10 percent more for digital music downloads than consumers in other European nations.
Apple said it must pay some record labels more to distribute their music in the UK than it pays them to distribute the same music elsewhere in Europe. The company said it will reconsider its continuing relationship in the UK with any record label that does not lower its wholesale prices in the UK to the pan-European level within six months.
“This is an important step towards a pan-European marketplace for music,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. “We hope every major record label will take a pan-European view of pricing.”
Click here to read the rest of this story on NewsFactor.
January 10th, 2008
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