Click on a penguin

Penguin continues to shows faith in e-books. To kick of the launch of its new site or "ebookstore", call it what you will, there are a number of new electronic titles available from Penguin, including the Whitbread prize-winner Matthew Kneale's English Passengers (?4.96), One-Hit Wonder a new novel from Lisa Jewell (?4. ...more

Sophos warns of black dog virus

Cidu-A and Randon-R are trying to spread to a network near you. Unlike the most recent batch of viruses these two new threats do not use email for spreading themselves. Instead, they rely on network shares, with peer-2-peer swapping environments such as KaZaA helping to do the work. ...more

Different XHTML horses for different courses

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - the body that looks after Web standards - has released "Modularization of XHTML as a W3C Recommendation". Basically, it's a means of specifying agreed subsets of XHTML such that content developers can more easily target platforms such as mobile phones or interactive televisions. It's a way, for example, to help manage the display of equivalent content across different devices: a menu on a cell phone will be managed differently from making a selection on a TV-based Web browser. ...more

Opera browser beta unifies platform support

Opera has released the first version of its eponymous Web browser to be consistent across all supported platforms - Windows, Mac, Linux, FreebSD and Solaris. Opera 7.5 beta 1 also extends the software's capability beyond browsing to include an email client and an IRC-compatible chat client. ...more

'World's smallest' music player

The Duex mp302 claims to be the world's smallest all-in-one MP3 and WMA player, voice recorder and portable data storage device; offering all this in a chewing gum sized package. The Duex will inevitably be compared with Creative's Nomad Muvo, which was unveiled earlier this year. However the Duex has several additional features that the MuVo does not: voice recording, and LCD screen and an equalizer. ...more