Microsoft asks for antitrust delay

Microsoft has asked for more time and longer hearings from the US Court of Appeals in its antitrust case. The software firm has requested 60 days and 56,000 words in which to make its case, with the US government getting the same. In addition, Microsoft has said it will need 90 minutes for oral arguments each. ...more

Wanted: dead or alive

A website is offering a $25,000 (?17,000) bounty on a malicious hacker who shutdown its website for two days. Online auction website BidBay is putting up the bounty for information leading to the conviction of the hacker who caused the damage. The company believes that it was not the target of the attack as the intruders did an aggressive port-scan that rendered the service unavailable. ...more

Blogging guidelines issued to dissidents

Today dissidents and whistle blowers around the world are increasingly using the internet to get their messages out to a wider audience. Nowadays this means using a blog to provide information about political movements or news that your government really does not want made public. The Chinese government in particular is notorious for cracking down on information transmitted through electronic means while at the same time encouraging the same technologies to fuel its economic expansion. ...more

Security firm beats Microsoft to patch VML hole

A group of security researchers known as the Zeroday Emergency Response Team (ZERT) has issued a patch for the Vector Markup Language (VML) flaw in Internet Explorer. The patch is unsupported, and ZERT warns that although the patch is tested, it is provided 'as-is with no guarantee as to fitness for your particular environment. Use them at your own risk or wait for a vendor-supported patch'. ...more

QuickTime 6 released

Apple has released QuickTime 6, the first multimedia player to support the new MPEG-4 standard. MPEG-4 allows content providers to stream video and audio across the Internet at a higher quality than before but without a corresponding rise in bandwidth usage. In addition QuickTime 6 includes the new AAC Audio standard developed by Dolby for enhanced sound quality and support for Flash 5 content and - in Mac OS X only - JPEG2000 still images, as well as skip protection to designed ensure smooth streaming. ...more