Sony said Monday it is bringing out a cheaper player for Blu-ray discs early this summer, a crucial step in its battle to make the high-definition format the replacement for DVDs. The BDP-S300 will cost $599, yet will have the same capabilities as the $999 BDP-S1 Sony is currently selling, said Randy Waynick, senior vice […]

A variant of the Trojan horse attacks known as Storm Worm emerged Monday (February 26, 2007), targeting people who post blogs and notices to bulletin boards. “The new Storm Worm variant attacks the users’ machines when they open an e-mail attachment, click on a malicious e-mail link or visit a malicious site,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, […]

The Vereshagino district court decided to stop the criminal case against school Principal Alexander Ponosov. However, the court didn’t find him guilty. The case was closed due to the insignificant degree of the damage Mr. Ponosov inflicted on Microsoft. But the accused himself intends to appeal the decision. The court said there is evidence of […]

Microsoft’s MSN Soapbox video-sharing site is unlikely to knock Google’s YouTube off its pedestal anytime soon. Soapbox, which officially launched for public testing this month, has several interesting features and big brand backing. But it lacks what lured people to YouTube in the first place: originality. And, when it comes to online video, originality is […]

Cuba’s communist government is trying to shake off the yoke of at least one capitalist empire — Microsoft Corp. — by joining with socialist Venezuela in converting its computers to open-source software. Both governments say they are trying to wean state agencies from Microsoft’s proprietary Windows to the open-source Linux operating system, which is developed […]

In a move that is probably of greater benefit to Apple, Cisco have agreed to drop their iPhone trademark lawsuit, allowing both companies to use the name for their intended purposes. Both companies agree to drop any pending actions over the trademark, and the joint statement issued also alludes to ‘exploring opportunities for interoperability’, whatever […]

Steve Jobs may want to scrap digital rights management (DRM) for digital music - or so he says - but the British government doesn’t agree. Blogger Neil Holmes created a petition at the government’s e-petitions website asking Tony Blair to ban the use of DRM technologies for digital content, and gathered 1,414 signatures (admittedly, not […]

Abdel Kareem Soliman, aka Kareen Amer, has been sentenced to four years’ prison for insulting various things bloggers are prone to insult. (Bite me, Tony Blair!) Soliman had some choice words about Islam, the president of Egypt, and called his alma mater al-Azhar “the university of terrorism”. He was expelled last year and his school […]

Resembling a gigantic LED alarm clock grafted onto an undergrad-era coffee table, the Time Table is nonetheless sneakily cool. The digits are glowing electroluminescent film that comes in at only 6cm thick. Unsurprisingly, it does include an alarm feature (but probably not a snooze button)

From the maker of the Optimus keyboard comes an equally quirky clock - the Art Lebedev Verbarius clock. The diffference? It doesn’t go for numbers, it goes for words. For example, “forty-five minutes past four”, “fifteen minutes to ten”, “six forty-five” or “midnight”. And yes, you can already see the problem - I would say […]

Reports are stating that Japanese company Nichia have developed a blue-violet semiconductor laser diode with a high enough power to burn Blu-ray and HD DVD optical discs at up to ten times speed.

“We will be looking very carefully at the iPhone,” is the warning to Apple from Southampton-based touch sensor specialist Quantum Research, which already has one lawsuit proceeding against Apple for patent infringement, and is prepared to bring another. “The description of the iPhone suggests it uses a rear-surface touch screen, and has proximity sensing which […]

The software behemoth is giving away 50 Zune media players as part of a “Make MSN Your Homepage” promotion. Read the rules, though, and you’ll see you don’t actually have to make MSN your homepage to enter. You do have to agree to “hold harmless Microsoft Corporation” and its affiliates “from any and all liability […]

Enter eNECESSITIES, a company that will brand your slogan or message to their line of products so you can hand them out as company Christmas gifts to the employees or tech swag to clients that visit your firm’s convention booth. eNECESSITIES’ latest novelty is the USB Sound Flash Drive, a little innovation that could drive […]

The boss at Yahoo Music, Dave Goldberg, thinks Apple CEO Steve Jobs got it right when he suggested that record labels should drop digital rights management (DRM) in downloaded songs. When Yahoo experimented with DRM-free songs, music sales went up, according to Silicon Valley Watcher. Goldberg commented: “I’ve long advocated removing DRM on music because […]