Finnish court frowns on Finreactor BitTorrent

A Finnish court has convicted 21 operators of the Finreactor BitTorrent of copyright offences. The operators, who were in charge of the technical operation of the system as well as the user control, were ordered to pay compensation, damages and expenses of €566,000 to rights holders. The court convicted the defendants on grounds that they were aware that nearly all the material made available by the service was infringing copyright and that they had acted wilfully. ...more

Comment: Microsoft's vision of the future: A Newton

Since he abandoned the Microsoft CEO job in favour of a role as chief software architect, Bill Gates has obviously been thinking hard about the future, and what people will expect from the PC over the next few decades. And he thinks he's found the answer. A truly personal computer Gates used his influential keynote speech at Comdex in Las Vegas yesterday to demonstrate a prototype of the Tablet PC, a machine, running the next version of Windows, that's about the size of an A4 pad, and that forsakes a keyboard in favour of doing everything through pen and voice recognition. ...more

Home Office launches safe computing site

The UK government has launched a website warning of the latest IT security threats and offering advice for safe computing. The IT Security Awareness for Everyone (ITsafe) website was set up by the Home Office using information provided by the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre (NISCC) - the Government's centre for electronic defence. The website offers an alert service for new threats that can be delivered either via email or text. ...more

Nokia launches 3G phones

6650 world's first 3GPP-approved handset. The Nokia 6650 is the first WCDMA/GSM protocol supporting phone. It will work throughout Asia and Europe across wCDMA networks, such as that used by NTT DoCoMo's FOMA 3G service, and will be in shops from the middle of next year. ...more

Infosec 2004: Microsoft tackled on its plans for third-party antivirus support

Microsoft bought Romanian antivirus outfit GeCAD in June last year, but to date the company has kept schtum about its plans for it. However, at Infosec 2004, Jonathan Perera, Senior Director at Microsoft's Security Business and Technology Unit admitted that there were still no announcements for Microsoft's 'productisation strategies' nearly a year on. Since then, GeCAD's Linux developers have departed for Kaspersky, and GeCAD itself continues in Romania, but operates more as a channel partner to Trend Micro - selling its antivirus products. ...more