EC receives new US complaint on Microsoft practices

A US group representing computer firms has filed a complaint with the EC about anti-competitive practices involving Windows XP. The Washington-based Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) filed its complaint with the European Commission (EC) today, alleging that Microsoft is continuing to abuse its monopolistic powers with Windows XP. 'Windows XP violates European competition law. ...more

PlusNet begins screening test for Internet traffic

The Internet service provider PlusNet has begun testing a system for providing real-time screening of Internet traffic for viruses, spyware, adware and inappropriate content. StreamShield's combined software and hardware platforms are designed to scan up to 250,000 Web page requests and 5,000 emails each second without diminishing network performance. Unlike firewalls and IDS/IPS products, which operate on packets, the StreamScan scanning engine analyses the entire content stream in real-time allowing it to detect more complex threats. ...more

IBM leads HP for server market share

IBM leads the way when it comes to making money out of servers, according to analysts. Both Gartner and IDC research groups place IBM at the top of the revenue pile for the third quarter of 2006. Both use slightly different metrics for measuring performance. ...more

Microsoft claims Mac Office success shows it does not rely on Windows' dominance

Microsoft did not need to rely on its dominance of the operating system market to deliver successful applications, a company attorney said yesterday as he continued his opening statement to the Iowa court hearing a private class-action lawsuit against the company. David Tulchin told jurors that it was the company's decision to 'bet on the graphical user interface (GUI)' when other software developers continued to develop character-based operating systems and applications, that has underpinned its success. Indeed, it was Microsoft's enthusiastic support of the GUI that led it to develop word processing, spreadsheet and other applications software for the Mac long before many other software developers, he said. ...more

Apple's OS X stung with five critical bugs

Five highly critical security vulnerabilities have been discovered in Mac OS X. The flaws could potentially be exploited to cause a denial of service (DoS) and compromise a user's system. Tom Ferris discovered the vulnerabilities, detailed as follows in Secunia Advisory 19686: an error in the "BOMStackPop()" function in the BOMArchiveHelper when decompressing malformed ZIP archives; errors in the "KWQListIteratorImpl()", "drawText()", and "objc_msgSend_rtp()" functions in Safari when processing malformed HTML tags; an error in the "ReadBMP()" function when processing malformed BMP images which can be exploited via, for example, Safari or the Preview application; an error in the "CFAllocatorAllocate()" function when processing malformed GIF images which can be exploited via, for example, Safari when a user visits a malicious website; and errors in the " _cg_TIFFSetField ()" and "PredictorVSetField()" functions when processing malformed TIFF images which can be exploited via, for example, the Preview, Finder, QuickTime, or Safari applications. ...more