Rash of Bagle variants launched across Internet

In the wake of the Sober virus epidemic, a rash of 12 fresh variants of the Bagle virus have been launched out onto the Internet. On Wednesday afternoon, Moscow-based Kaspersky Labs said it was aware that those running botnets of computers infected with the Bagle virus were updating their systems; namely, by issuing new variants. The botnets are controlled remotely through backdoors implanted into the infected systems and are made available for hire to spammers, extortionists and anyone else that will pay to hire them. ...more

UK buys 450,000 iTunes

Apple sold 800,000 songs in the first week since the iTunes Music Store's launch in Europe. The UK accounted for 450,000. Apple claimed that UK sales are 16 times greater than those of iTMS's closest competitor OD2. ...more

INTERVIEW: Richard Stallman on 20 years of GNU

Last week saw the 20th anniversary of Richard Stallman's decision to quit the MIT and start the GNU Project in 1984, with a goal to creating a platform using 'free' software that a user can run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve: the GNU operating system which used widely today in its GNU/Linux form. A year later he founded the Free Software Foundation, a body that seeks to further the development and use of free software. He is also the author of the GNU General Public Licence, the licence under which free software can be distributed. ...more

Microsoft shows off Vista's multimedia features

Microsoft has been giving a sneak peek of the much trumpeted multimedia features of the new Windows Vista operating system. The company is saying that it has built the multimedia capabilities of the Vista operating system 'from the ground up'. Many of the improvements in Windows Vista have been promised for a long time but now Microsoft is actually beginning to demonstrate some of the features. ...more

Nokia leads list of Palm suitors

Palm, the PDA and Treo smartphone maker, has hired Morgan Stanley to investigate the possibility of selling the company, according to a number of reports. Two most-likely suitors have been mentioned for the company, whose one-time dominance of the PDA market has slowly been eroded by competitors' Windows Mobile devices and RIM's BlackBerry handheld. One is an unnamed private equity group, the other a major competitor in the smartphone sector, Nokia. ...more