Walter's suit to the wall

HP Compaq merger on the home straight. A suit brought against HP management over the way it conducted its campaign to persuade shareholders to vote for the merger with Compaq has been thrown out by a Delaware court. Mr Hewlett has said in a statement that he would not appeal the Supreme Court's decision and that he would now back the merger and persuade any remaining opposition to do the same. ...more

Google joins badware battle

Google is joining the battle against sites that host spyware or adware. It will warn users, via a popup, when they are about to follow a search result to a site that will download such malware. The search giant is working as part of a 'badware' initiative, along with Sun and Lenovo, to flag websites that have previously been reported to StopBadware. ...more

Italian email virus seeks to destroy your documents

Valuable photos, movies and documents could be chomped through by a new mass-mailing virus. Cata-A spreads via email and network shares. Emails arrive with Visual Basic Script attachment, Manutenzione. ...more

UPDATED: Playfair cracks iTunes DRM protection

The digital rights management technology that Apple uses to restrict the copying of songs bought from its iTunes Music Store has been cracked. An anonymous programmer has released software called Playfair that takes one of the iTMS AAC files, decodes it using a key obtained from an iPod or Microsoft Windows system and then writes the new, decoded version to disk as a regular AAC Audio File. It can also, if required, copy the metadata tags that describe the song, including the cover art, to the new file. ...more

IBM in race for voice controlled cars

'Where am I? and 'How do I get out of here?' could be two of the questions understood by a new in-car, voice recognition system to be produced by IBM and Honda. The two companies have signed an agreement to provide an in-car navigation system that will process voiced commands as well as prompts through a small touch screen. As well having links to temperature controls within the car, the system will provide directions to or from any specified location. ...more