Danes charge pirates, BT to test 'Midband', broadband Q&A

A Danish anti-piracy organisation has started sending bills to people it says have illegally downloaded music, movies and games. According to the Associated Press, the AntiPiratGruppen, funded by Danish entertainment companies, has billed 150 individual, schools and businesses. Bills ranged from around ?83 to ?8,450 and so far half have been paid, despite concerns that billing process may have violated Danish anti-piracy law. ...more

Red Hat preps JBoss Windows alliance

Red Hat has joined the Interop Vendor Alliance in a bid to get its software working properly with Windows. Initial work on interoperability had already been begun by application server builder JBoss a year and a half ago, before it was bought up by Red Hat. So far, the interoperability work has focussed on Web Services standards such as WS-Security, WS-Transactions, and WS-Addressing. ...more

XP SP2 passes security experiment

Service Pack 2 really does prevent hackers breaking in to XP systems, according to USA Today. The news service performed an experiment to place a number of computers online to see how long it would take before they were hijacked. Unprotected 'vanilla' installations of Windows XP lasted less than four minutes before being compromised. ...more

RPC threat forces new Microsoft security bulletin

Microsoft has issued another security update for Windows users, Security Bulletin MS03-039 to be precise. Three new vulnerabilities have been identified, relating to the way Microsoft handles Remote Procedure Calls (RPC - an inter-process communication protocol, which has been the subject of another recent update). Specifically, an attacker could send malformed RPC messages to a vulnerable system, targeting the RPCSS Service. ...more

QuickTime update lets video iPodders create movies

Apple has released an update to QuickTime that provides support for both iTunes 6 and the new video-enabled iPods. Significantly, users who have upgraded to QuickTime Pro will be able to create video and audio files that can be played back on the iPods. The update also provides several bug fixes, primarily in the areas of streaming and H. ...more