DoJ abandons call for Microsoft breakup

New administration favours rapid resolution. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has declared that it will no longer seek the breaking up of Microsoft, in the anti-trust case. It seems it is of more importance to the judicial arm of the government - now under the new Bush administration, of course - that the long-running case is resolved "as quickly as possible". ...more

Microsoft faces anti-trust set-back

The nine US states seeking the imposition of tougher anti-trust penalties against Microsoft received a boost yesterday when the case's presiding judge ruled that they could present a modular version of Windows to the court. The states are arguing that Microsoft should be forced to develop a modular version of Windows that will allow other developers to substitute their own applications in place of Microsoft 'middleware' such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. Microsoft has argued that such a sanction would prove difficult if not impossible to implement, would confuse customers and would not work the same way, or as well as, the current all-in versions of Windows. ...more

Virus targets SonyBMG rootkit DRM

Security researchers' worst fears have been realised as the first instance of a virus taking advantage of the rootkit DRM technology in some SonyBMG copy-protected CDs has been discovered. Sophos says that the Trojan known as Stinx-E uses the Sony DRM rootkit to make itself invisible through the file $sys$drv.exe. ...more

Pin sharp compression from LizardTech

There's a new file compression system for image files that doesn't affect their resolution. The compression technology known as DjVu, splits an image into two components, the background and the foreground and then uses these elements to compress the file. The system was bought from AT&T Labs, who developed the system to compress the thousands of documents in its libraries. ...more

InfoSec 2006: SMBs the poor relation for info security - DTI

Small businesses are the poor relation when it comes to information security, according to the latest DTI survey on breaches within UK PLC. Chris Potter, Information Security Assurance Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, which ran the survey, described it as 'a tale of two cities'. The figures show small businesses are investing less, suffering more incidences and are less aware than their large-scale counterparts. ...more