German duo gaoled over trojan dialler

Two men jailed for their part in infecting 100,000 computers with trojan that dialled premium rate numbers Two German men who infected more than 100,000 computers with a trojan that generated profits exceeding €12 million have been jailed. A court in Osnabr?ck, north-eastern Germany, sentenced one of the men to four years in jail, and the other to a 39 month sentence, for their part in a criminal scheme that installed innocent users' PCs with a trojan that dialled premium rate 0190 phone numbers to contact an adult website. The men, aged 31 and 35 years old, amassed their substantial illegal profits from the premium rate phone calls made via the modems of infected PCs between July 2002 and September 2003. ...more

AOL releases AIM beta for OS X

AOL has released a beta version of its Instant Messenger software - AIM 4.5 - for OS X. AOL are keen to retain their Mac user base, as AIM has recently been usurped by Microsoft's MSN Messenger as the leading messaging service. ...more

Sonic burns Nero with multimedia patent dispute

Sonic solutions, maker of DVD authoring software including the Roxio brand, has filed a patent suit against rival Nero. The suit, filed in the United States district court in Marshall, Texas, claims Nero has infringed one of Sonic's patents covering the creation of multimedia compositions. Sonic seeks an injunction against Nero from continuing to sell its Nero 7 Ultra Edition Enhanced, and earlier versions. ...more

iPod chip builder teams for wireless and 3G capabilities

PortalPlayer, the company best known for making processors for iPods, has announced two new technology partnerships. The first will enable PortalPlayer to integrate its PP5022 applications processor family with CSR's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips to provide wireless networking support for downloading and synchronising content between portable devices and computers and to provide support for Bluetooth devices such as headsets. 'CSR's UniFi was designed for this type of application,' said Simon Finch, vice president of strategic marketing at CSR. ...more

PC Pro Labs Correction - 3.5in SATA hard disks

In the Upgrade to Vista Labs in Issue 149 (March 2007, p110), we incorrectly printed that the Western Digital Caviar SE16 was available from www.sandisk.com. ...more