Microsoft to watch over itself

Microsoft has proposed that one of its ex-employees be appointed to the three-man team with the task of ensuring the software giant upholds the mandates of the antitrust settlement. Recommendations from both Microsoft and the Justice Department were made yesterday with Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly. Fite was working at Microsoft as recently as 2000, where he headed up the development of the Windows CE platform. ...more

Wizcom updates Pen-based scanning range

Wizcom's updated Pen-based scanning range - the Infoscan, SuperPen and SuperPen Professional - is now being distributed in the UK by Widget Ltd. Aimed at anyone who works with text, you simply drag the nib over the lines you want to store, much like using a highlighter pen. Using a serial or USB connection you can then transfer the data back to a PC or laptop. ...more

Record industry renews assault on filesharers

The US record industry has launched yet another attack in its offensive against serial file shares. The Recording Industry Association has begun another 765 John Doe lawsuits in an attempt to further reduce the number of files available on peer-to-peer networks. The John Doe suits are the first step in the legal process and enable RIAA lawyers to subpoena ISPs for the names and addresses of individual file sharers, based on their IP addresses and dates and times online. ...more

One million iTunes for Windows

iTunes for Windows has been downloaded over a milion times since its launch on Thursday, Apple announced today. And in the same period over one million songs have been sold on the iTunes Music Store, double the rate of sales achieved when the service first launched at the end of April. This brings the total sold to 14 million, an average of more than half a million each week. ...more

Lawsuits loaded for memory chip price fixing

Thirty-four US states are primed to file lawsuits against seven companies alleging a conspiracy to fix the price of memory chips, in violation of antitrust laws. Attorney General Bill Lockyer will file the complaint in California later today, claiming that between 1998 and 2002 Infineon, Hynix Semiconductor, Micron Technology, Mosel Vitelic, Nanya Technology, Elpida Memory and NEC Electronics and their subsidiaries fixed DRAM chip prices, artificially restrained supply, allocated the production of DRAM chips and markets for the chips among themselves and rigged bids for DRAM chip contracts. The lawsuit will cite reports that have calculated that the US market was overcharged hundreds of millions of dollars. ...more