July, 2008 Issue

MSN Direct is a digital service which allows certain portable devices to receive information from MSN services. At CES 2008, Microsoft launched an MSN Direct feature called "Send to GPS" that lets Live Search Maps send information to a GPS device. Now the company has released a free application programming interface (API) that builds on this feature by allowing any website to offer visitors the ability to send addresses, business listings, or other locations directly from the site to GPS units. Microsoft claims that the new API for developers "is simple to integrate and uses standard Web programming techniques."

Nortel is to be the official network infrastructure supplier to the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games.

While the announcement that the Unreal 4 Engine is in development isn't anything new, Epic Games president Michael Capps' has revealed a rough release date for the technology. Speaking at Gamefest in Seattle, Capps talked about the engine's development and said that it won't come out until the next generation of consoles.

Could YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen become this generation's version of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the famed newspaper reporters who broke the Watergate scandal?

Not only is there is a flaw in the Domain Name System, there is also a flaw in the suggested ways to test whether your computer is vulnerable.

MySpace, the social network owned by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media, announced Wednesday that it has hired five new members for its executive team--three senior vice presidents and two vice president--in fields ranging from engineering to customer service. They're coming from a mixed background of media and tech.

It seems that Electronic Arts isn't content to just put out PC games anymore. Destructoid is reporting that, as of its appearance at Comic Con, the publisher is planning to start selling pre-built PCs that will not only be capable of playing higher-end games, but will also be branded to the theme of the upcoming Crysis Warhead.

One-third of China's carbon emissions come from manufacturing electronics and other goods that are then exported worldwide, according to a July report in the journal Energy Policy.

There's going to be an Elvis karaoke contest on MySpace. That is not a joke. I can't seem to figure out whether it's trying to market Elvis to a younger generation or MySpace to an older one--or if it's just for kicks.

BT has bought internet-telephony company Ribbit, in a move that will bring the communications giant up against competitors ranging from Skype to Google's Android platform.

While PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 owners will get a chance to play the retro-licious Street Fighter IV from the comfort of their own couches, Wii owners are left out in the cold. But, according to SFIV producer Yoshinori Ono, if Wii owners complain enough, they might just get it.

Facebook users in the U.S. and Canada can no longer access Scrabulous, the faux-Scrabble game that quickly became one of the most popular applications on its developer platform.

The Ghosbusters game has been receiving a fair amount of buzz, so it came as a bit of a surprise when rumors began to swirl that the upcoming game was being canceled. These rumors stemmed from a release schedule published by Activision/Blizzard where a few notable titles were absent, including Ghostbusters, 50 Cent: Blood in the Sand, World in Conflict, Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, and Brutal Legend.

New search engine Cuil has opened to the public, and with it, the requisite comparisons and challenges to Google, former employer of Cuil's engineering team. But the site is experiencing much downtime in its first day.

A group of academics will be among the first people outside Microsoft to see Sphere, a spherical surface computer developed by Microsoft Research.

During a visit to Australia this week, Flickr founder and former Yahoo staffer Stewart Butterfield criticised the search giant for its lack of an innovative culture compared to rival Google.

On Tuesday, Microsoft plans to post actual videos from its "Mojave Experiment" -- an effort to dispel negative stereotypes about Vista -- on a recently set up "teaser" Web site, BetaNews has learned.

Complex deal also provides Virgin Mobile with huge investment infusion

As many as 1 billion people this century could die from tobacco-caused illnesses. With the goal of combating the tobacco use epidemic, Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates have announced plans to collaborate to help governments in developing countries trying to implement proven tobacco-control policies. Bloomberg's Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use, which started in 2005 with a $125 million commitment, supports projects that educate and advocate for changing how tobacco is used and perceived. The Bloomberg Initiative will be extended with a $250 million four-year commitment, while the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will invest $125 million over the next five years.

"Spam King" Edward Davidson, who recently disappeared from the Colorado minimum security facility where he was serving 21 months for tax evasion and e-mail fraud, was found dead yesterday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

AT&T is looking to halt the proposed merger of Sprint Nextel's nationwide WiMax assets with those of Clearwire.

An American trillion, that is

Google has ended negotiations to buy social-news site Digg.com, according to TechCrunch.

This week, ISPs agreed to work with the BPI to reduce file-sharing in the UK. When someone gets ‘caught’ the ISPs will send out a warning, 100% based on music industry provided ‘evidence’. Not even the ISPs know if the claims of the BPI are true, so the evidence is totally unchallenged, a perfect position for the music industry.

ImageShack, one of the largest media hosting websites, has implemented some significant upgrades to their torrent download service. One of the most innovative new features is the “video preview”, which allows users to browse through stills of the video they are downloading, to get an impression of the quality of the file.

In about two weeks, Redmond has managed to turn a marketing idea into something that may just shock you. Microsoft blogger Ina Fried is reporting that Microsoft managed to trick XP users in San Francisco into loving Vista simply by telling them a small fib. The company told these users that they were using a new version of Windows, codenamed "Mojave." When asked about their experience with using Mojave, over 90 percent said they were impressed with what they saw. Then Microsoft told them they had been using Vista all along.

Microsoft blogger Mary Jo Foley has just broken the news on a deadline for the final version of Internet Explorer 8. Microsoft has remained very tight-lipped about this, but we now know there will be a new version of the world's most popular browser released this year:

About two weeks ago, we covered the release of a DNS security fix meant to patch a vulnerability in the system that matches domain names with IP addresses. The flaw had been discovered by security researcher Dan Kaminsky some months earlier but, at the time, details on the exploit were being kept secret. That information has since leaked thanks to an accidental blog post by someone at Matasano Security. Fast forward four days, and hackers, enterprising little children that they are, have released an exploit aimed squarely at the vulnerability.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday in the US that its on-again, off-again talks with Yahoo were firmly in the "off-again" phase.

Security researchers have taken a page out of Google's book in reinventing the blacklist, a tool for blocking internet attacks.

On August 24, 2001, Microsoft released to manufacturing the final version of Windows XP. 6 years and 11 months later, a new version of XP has gone gold, this time for the OLPC XO computer, also known as the "$100 laptop."

Even though the government places heavy restrictions on the Internet with censorship and routine crackdowns on cyber dissidents, China has finally surpassed the United States for the most online users in the world.

As part of a renewed embrace of open source, Microsoft will contribute $100,000 annually to join the Apache Software Foundation, as well as pledging new protocols to the Open Specfication Promise and contributing a patch for ADOdb.

One Internet spammer was sentenced this week to nearly four years in prison, while another fled a correctional facility and is currently on the run.

PC gaming wasn't a huge factor at this year's E3, but it seems that Microsoft was merely biding its time before making its big moves to try and perk up the waning PC gaming market. The company made a variety of positive announcements at the GameFest technology conference in Seattle this week, including the announcement of DirectX 11 and the removal, and in some cases refunding, of subscription fees for Games for Windows Live.

The executives in charge of online payment system E-gold have pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges, the US Department of Justice said on Tuesday.

Security researcher Aviv Raff said on Wednesday that the iPhone's Mail and Safari applications are prone to URL spoofing and could allow phishing attacks against users.

Google programmers are adding support for the Perl programming language to its App Engine service for hosting Web applications, but so far it's not really an official project.

REDMOND, Wash.--After months of searching for ways to defend its oft-maligned Windows operating system, Microsoft may just have found its best weapon: Vista's skeptics.

Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has unveiled Drizzle, a project to create a trimmed-down, faster version of the database system aimed at web-based applications and cloud components.

Do you block your phone number from appearing on Caller ID? If so, don't count on it. At The Last HOPE hacker conference, Kevin Mitnick, arguably the most famous hacker of all, demonstrated how call blocking can be hacked, and the hidden phone number exposed.

Google's Wikipedia competitor, Knol, was opened to the public on Wednesday morning.

The city of San Jose, Calif., will be the first to test electric-car charging stations from start-up Coulomb Technologies.

Some artists, bands and labels claim that their lives are ruined by their material being available on P2P networks. BuckCherry are complaining that a track from their latest album has leaked to BitTorrent. How do they complain? Via an Atlantic Records press release. I smell a rather large free-publicity rat.

ICANN has unanimously approved a request by the Public Interest Registry (which handles .org domains) to become the first generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) to switch to the DNS security protocol DNSSEC. As part of the agreement, PIR will trailblaze DNSSEC, while simultaneously developing an education and adoption plan that can later be disseminated across the Internet's infrastructure, PIR's use of DNSSEC is a significant step forward, but a mixture of contentious political and technological issues have slowed the worldwide development and deployment process.

Yahoo's earnings for its second quarter came in one cent lower than expectations, with net income declining 19 percent and revenue also declining slightly.

The computer network hostage crisis in San Francisco is over, thanks to the city's mayor.

A division of cable provider Comcast has struck deals with three other rival cable operators to help them serve online video to their customers.

The cat is out of the bag before Black Hat. That isn't a passage from a Dr. Seuss children's book, but a description of what happened on Monday when a Web site accidentally posted details about a DNS flaw uncovered by security researcher Dan Kaminsky earlier this month.

Popular social networking site MySpace said Tuesday it will join the open source authentication platform OpenID, further bolstering the idea of a unified system to carry online identities between Web sites. But for now, MySpace's OpenID accounts cannot be used elsewhere.

With its first update to Windows Home Server, Microsoft has fixed a critical bug that threatened to undermine the product's main utility--securely and reliably backing up computer files.

3-D display technology has had an on-again/off-again relationship with the film industry for decades, but has never established itself on the small screen. Modern technology has made 3-D broadcasting a more realistic proposition, but there's currently no standardized method for how such content should be formatted, processed, and displayed. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers intends to tackle this problem, and has given the problem over to the newly formed 3-D Home Display Formats Task Force.

Brocade has announced plans to acquire Foundry Networks, in a deal valued at approximately $3bn (£1.5bn).

The website of the Georgian president was the subject of a distributed-denial-of-service attack over the weekend.

Microsoft may be the biggest winner in the proxy-fight settlement between Yahoo and activist investor Carl Icahn, whose peace accord was announced on Monday.

Apple has reported record Mac sales and one of its best third quarters ever, but delivered its usual conservative guidance for the next quarter.

AOL announced partnerships to bolster its AOL Health site with content from Caring.com, Health.com, and HealthCare.com, the Time Warner subsidiary said Monday.

NEW YORK--Kevin Mitnick knows that the weakest link in any security system is the person holding the information.

A dissident shareholder is pushing Yahoo to accept a mixed board of directors drawn from company nominees and those presented by billionaire investor Carl Icahn, according to a report by Reuters.

The country's largest wireless provider announced Friday that it will finally be making good on its promises of free nation-wide hotspots for iPhone owners, first announced back in April.

Researchers led by BT security expert Bruce Schneier have shown that deniable file systems — designed to hide data so effectively that there is no trace of its existence on a user's system — may not be so deniable after all, due to the interference of standard applications and of the operating system itself.

Sony Ericsson barely broke even in the second quarter of 2008, prompting fears among analysts over the company's prospects for the rest of the year.

A university can publish details of research detailing the cryptographic cracking of the Oyster travel smartcard, a Dutch court has ruled.

Just days after the QuebecTorrent BitTorrent tracker was taken down by an injunction in a blaze of publicity, a near identical clone of the 108,000+ member tracker has appeared out of nowhere. Allegedly the product of the old team, Torrent411.com is up and running with 109,000+ members - and counting.

NEW YORK--Using a laptop, cell phone headset, building access badge, credit cards, or even a passport can make you a walking target for data thieves and other criminals, a security expert warned at the Last HOPE hacker conference here late Friday.

One of the players in the burgeoning malware industry has apparently crafted itself a new "super" Trojan, and is offering it up for sale as a guaranteed detection evader—or your money back. At least, one assumes there's an "or your money back" clause in there somewhere, since black hats willing to pay $1,300 for an illegal software license are probably also willing to pay a desperate Russian peasant $1,300 to beat a malware author to death with a leftover bust of Lenin, before tossing his body in the Volga river.

Yahoo has added a button on its main Web site linking to a page that lobbies shareholders to vote against Carl Icahn's plans for the company, stepping up its rhetoric in the days leading up to its annual meeting.

Nokia beat sales expectations on its mobile handset business on Thursday when it announced its earnings for the second quarter of 2008.

Microsoft plans to continue its investment in online services.

Government departments have been asked to take 18 steps to reduce the carbon emissions generated by ICT.

BitDefender researchers are reporting that new spam messages are using fake events ostensibly involving actor Angelina Jolie and claiming the MSN Featured Offers program. Users that fall for them will be tricked into infecting their PCs with Trojan.Agent.AGGZ. The e-mail typically attempts to lure users into downloading a binary file entitled video-nude-anjelina.avi.exe. As usual, the spam message itself is written using poor grammar and uses multiple obfuscations to trick spam filters.

UK courts and police forces could save tens of millions of pounds thanks to technology to aimed at streamlining the criminal justice system.

The UK's privacy watchdog could get new powers to raid organisations under government proposals to "sharpen its teeth".

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has labeled makers of the OpenBSD operating system a "bunch of masturbating monkeys," as part of a wider critique of what he said was self-centered behavior in the IT security industry.

Microsoft is ready to start expanding its AdCenter engine to allow at least some publishers to include contextual advertising from Microsoft on their site.

Microsoft is in discussions with Time Warner over how to combine Microsoft and AOL's online groups, The Wall Street Journal has claimed.

Fresh from a failed attempt at online video, Amazon is giving it another go.

Nickelodeon's AddictingGames, one of the largest gaming sites for teens in the United States, is turning itself into a social hangout for generation Y and their younger brothers and sisters.

The game development platform du jour might be the iPhone 2.0 software, but News Corp.'s MySpace hopes to make a splash with a new contest in its Asian market: TheGame08, which pits developers against one another in an attempt to create a hit social game that runs on MySpace's platform. It all leads up to the legendary Tokyo Game Show this October.

Microsoft issued two critical security bulletin revisions on Wednesday related to vulnerabilities in Microsoft DirectX.

eBay has said that its profits jumped 22 percent from last year. The boost came from an increase in item listings and sales growth at the company's PayPal division.

It's time that Opera Mobile got its due. Long overshadowed by Opera Mini--the light, server-fed browser for Java phones--Opera Mobile is a robust browser built on Web standards (and written with C and C++) that's known for delivering a full Web experience to Windows Mobile and Symbian phones.

Intel is expected to face new antitrust charges from European regulators that focus on the chip giant's marketing and sales practices, according to a report Tuesday night on The Wall Street Journal's Web site, citing unidentified people familiar with matter.

Enough information to fill multiple CDs every second is flowing across the world on a network 1,000 times faster than home broadband.

Yahoo defended its planned advertising deal with Google at a U.S. Senate hearing on Tuesday, while Microsoft assailed it as anticompetitive and perhaps even "illegal."

Google's steadily increasing search share neared 70 percent in June in the US, according to new figures released on Tuesday by Hitwise.

A network administrator for the city of San Francisco has been arrested on charges of taking control of the city's computer network and locking administrators out, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Internet service providers are to be invited to tender for a government scheme to monitor all internet communications and telecommunications.

Broader collaboration between Symbian and Google at either the application or operating system level is possible in the future, Symbian's CEO said Wednesday.

An employee of 1-800-Flowers.com has been fired after an e-mailed death threat was linked to her account.

Blogging is increasingly popular, both for individuals and businesses alike. That's because blogging software is one of the easiest ways to publicize information about your company. The best packages offer near-infinite customizability while still making it easy for new users to get up and running with a bare minimum of installation and configuration.

Seeking to bolster Flash and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) application development, Adobe is working on "Gumbo," the next version of the Flex platform.

Multimedia software maker CyberLink sees a lot of opportunities in the fast-growing netbook segment of the computer market, from online access to files stored on home PCs to multimedia software made for Linux OSs.

A federal judge has sided with the maker of World of Warcraft in its attempt to shut down a third-party application that allows players to advance more quickly in the game than they normally could.

A large number of Google Docs users couldn't use their online word processor or presentations for about an hour last Tuesday. The glitch illustrated not just the trouble with cloud computing, but also the gradual progress so far in making the concept palatable.

YouTube will be allowed to mask important user information from records it must turn over to Viacom, Google said in a blog post on Monday.

BT is to roll out fibre connectivity to millions of UK homes, the communications and IT giant announced on Tuesday.

A company that measures internet service reliability has given Microsoft the top score in a test of operating system update services.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer remains the most popular browser in the world. This despite report after report calling the program less secure than Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and other free competitors.

The video game industry's best-known event, E3, kicks off this week in Los Angeles, but most observers are expecting a lack of the kind of knock-your-socks-off news the show has been famous for in years past.

Viacom wants to know which videos YouTube employees have watched and uploaded to the site, and Google is refusing to provide that information, CNET News has learned.

Following comments which suggested that the closure of QuebecTorrent was “a major victory” for the recording industry, we have a statement from the owner of the site to balance things up. The smaller battle against this site is over, the larger one against Canadian BitTorrent sites in general appears unaffected.

Rambus is suing Nvidia, accusing the company of violating 17 Rambus-held patents on memory controllers. The suit was filed on Thursday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The headlines this evening report yet another Yahoo rejection of an offer to sell its search business to Microsoft. But the wording of the latest chapter in the epistolary negotiations between these companies drops intriguing hints about a possible denouement.

VMware shareholders received a double-whammy of bad news earlier this week. A combination of reduced growth forecasts for 2008 and the surprise announcement that CEO and cofounder Diane Greene was being ousted saw VMW lose 24 percent of its value on Tuesday. VMware still expects revenues to grow healthily—"modestly below the previous guidance of 50 percent growth"—but it's clear that EMC wants more control of the company it purchased in 2003. Greene will be replaced by Paul Maritz, formerly of Microsoft. Maritz has been at EMC since it purchased his startup Pi Corporation earlier this year. Prior to being made VMware CEO, he ran EMC's cloud computing unit.

Getting poor Skype sound and want to cut down on international call costs? Truphone's new iPhone app might be worth checking out.

The next time you lose your cell phone, you might hear it scream something like "I'm stolen!" or "I'm lost - take me home," through new location-based technology now under development by a company called Yougetitback.com.

I've certainly given them a hard time about it, so it's only fair to point out that as of Friday morning, Microsoft's Vista Compatibility Center Web site is now live.

Top legal counsel for Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft will address a Congressional hearing Tuesday, as lawmakers examine the Yahoo-Google search advertising agreement and its potential anticompetitive effects on the future of Internet advertising.

Seagate on Thursday unveiled 1.5TB desktop and half-terabyte notebook hard drives, claiming industry firsts for both.

It can be hard to find a needle in YouTube's vast video haystack, despite the fact that the site is owned by search expert Google.

Google has released as open source a web application assessment tool, Ratproxy, that was designed to root out potential security flaws.

An appeals court in Germany has ruled that the owners of a network are not responsible for the copyright infringement of their users. The decision overturns a previous judgment that held an open WiFi network owner liable for damages, even if the infringer is a stranger making use of the network. Although the latest ruling may affect others across Europe, it's not likely to carry much weight in the US.

The Symbian Foundation has announced a slew of new members, including the mobile operator 3.

Yahoo today made good on a promise of opening up its search platform for third parties—including search startups—to build their own services and search engines. Dubbed "BOSS" for Build Your Own Search Service, Yahoo's offering is a major step for search innovation, but also a quiet statement that Yahoo isn't planning on taking the lead.

Last.fm, the UK-based streaming music service that recently offered up free streams for millions of tracks, has just launched its "Artist Royalty Program." It's a way for artists and indie labels to get paid directly by Last.fm, taking a cut of the ad revenue that they generate for the site. Artists getting paid? Sounds great. But "virtual fifth major" Merlin warned its members yesterday that the move didn't address "past illegal use of repertoire" by Last.fm and should be scrutinized carefully.

Asus has released the final specifications and UK pricing for its two new Eee PC models, the 904 and the 1000.

Steve Ballmer is at least willing to talk with the open-source crowd now, as his comments at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2008 demonstrate. He's just not willing to actually engage in open source as an appreciable part of his company's business. Fair enough.

Earlier this month Microsoft confirmed that some computers with Microsoft Office 2003 installed were having trouble grabbing updates from servers running either Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) 3.0 or WSUS 3.0 SP1. Although there was no specific security vulnerability associated with the problem, Microsoft released a security advisory since the inability to install security updates in itself warranted some sort of notification. In just over a week, the company has found a solution to the problem:

A German court has ruled that Internet users operating a WiFi router are not responsible if others use their equipment to infringe copyright on P2P networks. The news is likely to be seen as yet another blow for lawyers Davenport Lyons who have been insisting that German law decisions would be mirrored in the UK.

Yahoo Games announced on Thursday that it will expand into ad-supported online games by the end of the year, a move not without its controversy.

Google has open sourced an internal development tool called 'Protocol Buffers', a data description language that forms a basic part of the operation of the company's vast computing cluster.

In the wake of ISO's controversial decision to grant fast-track approval to Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, the national bodies of several participating countries attempted to appeal the vote. The formal complaints submitted to ISO by these countries will now be reviewed by a Technical Management Board (TMB), which has until August to decide whether further action should be taken.

Google on Tuesday said it is now using an email-authentication technology to keep phishers from luring Gmail users to fake eBay and PayPal web pages in order to steal usernames and passwords.

Microsoft has warned of a potential vulnerability in Word that has reportedly been the subject of targeted attacks.

The spread of WiMax networks across the UK is continuing, with two providers announcing extensions of their business-oriented networks in the past week.

The city government television station of Des Moines, Iowa, Channel DMTV7, is using a portable production studio to produce and air daily press conferences and updates on the flood emergency. Station personnel moved from DMTV7's production studio in city hall on June 11th after the floods hit the city. DMTV7 is currently producing from the Des Moines Central Library. The production staff has moved operations twice since then.

Every once in a while, an article gets posted somewhere in the blogosphere about how Microsoft needs to release a complete Windows rewrite, something along the lines of what Apple did with Mac OS X. Most people realize that Microsoft is in no position to pull a stunt like that at the moment; it's hard to see Microsoft phasing out support for a billion-Windows-PC-strong user base, but that day may one day come, perhaps thanks to robust virtualization technology.

The Information Commissioner's Office has said it has concerns about Google's Street View and thinks the company could be breaching data-protection law.

China's government warned Internet sites and mobile content providers to steer clear of broadcasting any video of Olympic events without permission, including the torch relay and opening ceremony, saying that anyone who infringes the rights of the state-owned broadcaster to these events will face severe penalties.

The Department for Work and Pensions has been accused of failing to measure benefit fraud properly because of its tardiness in improving IT systems.

Chip company NXP Semiconductors is to sue Radboud University in an attempt to halt the publication of a paper detailing the cryptographic cracking of the Oyster smartcard, used widely on the London transport network.

Activision shareholders will today vote on a $18.9 billion deal establishing Activision Blizzard as a market leader.

A team from Indonesia took home a US$10,000 prize in the Rural Innovation segment of Microsoft's Imagine Cup this year by developing a way for people to report environmental problems with their mobile phones.

A security researcher has responsibly disclosed a fundamental flaw within the Domain Name System, or DNS, the addressing scheme behind the common names used on the internet.

Microsoft is to make bigger efforts pushing its 'software plus services' model, based on the belief that customers still want on-site applications, according to a top company executive.

Intel has upstaged Advanced Micro Devices at DreamWorks Animation. The movie studio has decided to drop AMD and go with processors from Intel, citing better performance and a more promising roadmap.

BuzzFeed, a start-up trend-tracking site, has received $3.5 million in its first round of funding, the company said Tuesday.

Video surveillance firm VideoIQ is set to announce on Wednesday morning a $10 million Series B funding round.

The largest bank in the United States has officially ignored the second most popular Web browser--until recently.

Investor activist Carl Icahn needed a sign, a tangible sign, that Microsoft was still interested in buying Yahoo, or at a minimum, its search business, if he were to increase his chances of winning his proxy fight to unseat the company's entire board of directors.

Arizona teenagers are getting a hand with learning how to break into the video game industry, thanks to a new program at Arizona State University called "Camp Game." The program is now in its second year, and it lets fifteen students from local high schools spend six weeks under the instruction of Ashish Amresh, a lecturer in the School of Computing and Informatics, and two other industry veterans. During this time, the students work on a number of amateur games and then put their final projects on display on the last day of the program.

Virgin Media, plagued by a recent flurry of bad publicity thanks to its policy of working with the music industry to warn file-sharers, has announced today that there is “absolutely no possibility” that it will disconnect its users from the Internet or hand over their details to the music industry.

Although Nokia has now made a financial concession to Bochum, Germany worth well over $30 million USD, the city will still be left without its main source of income, after Nokia pulls up stakes and moves its factory to Romania.

Online scammers are expected to exploit the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, opening in a month's time, according to a Symantec security report.

Microsoft has said it would be willing to reopen talks to buy all or part of Yahoo, but only if a new Yahoo board is elected. The announcement is a major boost for investor Carl Icahn's board slate.

BitTorrent’s popularity is growing every day. Despite the lawsuits that some of the larger torrent sites are involved in, they continue to grow traffic wise. Let’s take a look at how Google ranks the top torrent sites.

The agency responsible for classifying movies in the UK wants more power to review and pass judgment on video games intended for younger audiences, and is answering critics who claim it would create a monumental bureaucracy.

"This is where we think the future of the Internet is going -- you can start to see these applications breaking out of the confines of the browser space, and try to move onto the desktop," a key Mozilla engineer told BetaNews.

Microsoft issued a security advisory on Monday warning about targeted attacks being launched that exploit a hole in the ActiveX control for the Snapshot Viewer in the Microsoft Access database management system.

Demand for biofuels in Europe and the United States has forced up food prices 75 percent around the world, according to a World Bank report that was leaked and published in The Guardian newspaper on Friday.

Microsoft on Monday released a letter in support of activist investor Carl Icahn's efforts to unseat Yahoo's board, as well as confirming its interest to explore a bid to buy the entire company--or just its search assets, with a new board.

Video may have killed the radio star, but it doesn't have to kill the Internet.

Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista has been in development since even before the RTM of Vista. Soon after the operating system's release, Yahoo showed off the first application that would run only on Windows XP's successor. On December 5, 2007, Yahoo! offered the first preview for download, which sported new features such as transparent windows, tabbed chatting, the ability to transfer files of up to 2GB, and a matching Windows Sidebar gadget. The first beta was released two months ago and brought voice features, SMS, and Mail alerts to the new IM client.

Royal Dutch Shell subsidiary Showa Shell Sekiyu, Japan's fifth-largest oil refiner, plans to invest 100 billion yen, or about $938 million, in a solar-panel megaplant, according to AFP.

Check out this cool display and interface with Google Earth:

London's datacentre sector has suffered a downturn, with no corporates taking up space in the capital this year.

Centercode is seeking beta testers in the New York City metropolitan area to try out a new device that serves as a portable Web browser. It works via cellular network, but comes already activated and won't require you to switch from your current phone to participate.

Google is making its Google Talk instant-messaging application available for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch, however these new applications come in light of new security scares.

Google apparently decided to keep it clean, in more ways than one.

The latest beta update to Flash Player 10 has been made available, adding performance enhancements and many community-suggested features.

If you want to make sure you have exactly the same e-mail messages--including all your saved and sent mail-on two or more Macs, there's an easy way and a hard way to do so.

Windows Update infrastructure updates occur usually about once a year. Starting at the end of July, and continuing over the next few months, Microsoft will be rolling out this year's infrastructure update to Windows Update. Like all updates to Windows Update, this one consists of two parts: the back-end infrastructure that supports the service and the client-side code. This year's update will improve how quickly Windows Update scans for updates and how quickly the user receives signature updates. Microsoft claims that on certain computers scan times will decrease by almost 20 percent.

On Thursday, Opera released version 9.51. The new version fixes a few security vulnerabilities and resolves some stability issues. One of the fixes addresses an arbitrary code execution vulnerability that was not previously made public.

Firefox is now officially in the record books for receiving the most downloads from a website with a 24-hour period.

Leaseweb, the former ISP of BitTorrent trackers such as Demonoid, What.cd and Waffles.fm lost the appeal against the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The Amsterdam court concluded that Leaseweb has to permanently shut down the BitTorrent tracker everlasting.nu, and hand over the admin’s personal information.

In its monthly advance notice the weekend before the second Tuesday of the month, Microsoft said it will only be addressing four security issues this time around, two dealing with Windows. But a surprisingly big Vista bug fix is under way.

What do terrorists and telco execs have in common? They hate us for our freedoms, naturally. And they especially hate our freedom to roam the verdant grasslands of the Internet as freely as the majestic bison once wandered the fruited plains of the West. A group of mostly-indie rockers from the Future of Music Coalition agree, and they're releasing a benefit CD later this month to help fund the Coalition's campaign for a neutral 'Net.

The German baby taken from his parents after they put him up for sale on eBay for a euro--apparently as a joke--is back home, according to the Associated Press.

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced new security features in the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2.

Adobe's popular Portable Document Format, or PDF, became the latest International Organization for Standardization standard as of Wednesday morning.

Viacom is getting its hands on some of YouTube's sensitive user data as a result of the copyright-infringement lawsuit the conglomerate filed a year ago.

A paper will be published later this year with far-ranging recommendations for reducing cybercrime in Europe, including a statutory scale of damages against ISPs that do not respond promptly to requests to shut out compromised machines.

Linspire, the Linux company started by Michael Robertson, is ready to fully assume its place as a footnote in operating system history.

Adobe released on Tuesday the first Reader application to bake movies and animation into the Portable Document Format.

R.J. Pittman, Google's director of product management for Consumer Search Properties, shared some details of future versions of image search. In the interview with Beet.tv's Andy Plesser, Pittman said that Google is developing visual crawling software that can be used for facial recognition and scene analysis. In addition images can be matched with display ads and utilize geotagging information for various applications.

In the ever-rotating, but never stopping merry-go-round that is Microhoogle, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night that Microsoft has been looking for partners in recent days that would help it make a new bid for Yahoo's search business.

Barclays Bank is to offer its two million online customers free security software.

Microsoft said on Monday that it is offering a new licensing option, dubbed 'Select Plus' and targeted largely at medium-sized firms.

Taking a cue from Morgan Spurlock who lived on fast food for 30 days in the Super Size Me documentary, McAfee gathered volunteers from around the world who would, for one hour a day, surf the Internet, signing up for various newsletters, filling in various forms. As they did so, the participants were asked to blog about their experiences.

The Castlevania franchise has recently seen quite the resurgence of popularity thanks to a strong line of DS titles and downloadable classics. Following the success of the handheld games, Konami has announced that Castlevania Judgment will be making its way to the Wii, but in an unexpected way: as a fighting game.

When the Byron Report came out in the UK a few months ago, a large portion of the video game industry breathed a sigh of relief when they read its conclusions. Instead of reading a report condemning video games and touting censorship, the report made a point of emphasizing parental involvement and education. The report didn't make everyone happy, though, as the British press seemed less-than-pleased with its conclusions.

The makers of World of Warcraft are offering players of the online role-playing game an optional layer of security in the form of an electronic token device called Blizzard Authenticator designed to prevent unauthorized access to an account.

There are signs Picasa Web Albums could be renamed Google Photos.

Adobe is helping Google and Yahoo to uncover web content that was previously "invisible" to web searches.

Google and mapping company Tele Atlas have tied up a five-year deal to share mapping data across more than 200 countries.