Content owners pursue DRM despite Sony climbdown

Despite mounting consumer gripes about DRM, music fans and film buffs can expect to see more restrictive digital rights technologies attached to the songs and movies they buy, technology industry observers said at a conference here dedicated to the future of digital media. The controversy around DRM hit a crescendo late last year after it emerged major music label Sony BMG copy-protected millions of CDs of its top artists with a technology that left consumers vulnerable to hackers if they played the disc on their computers. Sony admitted it sold 2. ...more

EU launches another probe into Microsoft monopoly

The European Commission has announced that it is to investigate the recent purchase by Microsoft and Time Warner of ContentGuard, a specialist in digital rights management. Europe has undertaken a preliminary investigation into the acquisition and is concerned that Microsoft may be building a monopoly in DRM which is set to become a key technology in the coming years. ContentGuard's principle product is XrML 2. ...more

BT plugs talking SMS into landlines

Owners of standard landlines can now receive SMS messages via a new BT service. SMS messages are converted to automated speech using a mechanical-sounding female voice. Likewise speech can be converted to text. ...more

Solaris 9 x86 finally released by Sun

After months of waiting Sun Microsystems has finally released its Unix-based Solaris 9 x86 Platform Edition operating system for PC based servers. With the release of this product, Sun is hoping to capture part of the entry-level Unix based server market and take some of the wind out of the April launch of Microsoft's Windows Server 2003. Included with the product are SunScreen 3. ...more

New vulnerability in IE uncovered

A security researcher has discovered a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6. Specially crafted HTML tags built into a web page can cause IE to crash. In a security notification, Michal Zalewski writes 'This might not come as a surprise, but there appears to be a *very* interesting and apparently very much exploitable overflow in Microsoft Internet Explorer'. ...more