Microsoft outlines objections to EC ruling

As it prepares its appeal against the EC's recent antitrust ruling, Microsoft has published a paper outlining its objections. It describes the decision, which fined the company ?333mn and imposed tough rules on shipping Media Player with Windows and licensing its server protocols, as 'a troubling departure from international legal rules designed to encourage innovation through well-established intellectual property rights'. It says the EC has: invented 'new law in an effort to justify unprecedented regulatory intervention', in arriving at its decision; included measures rejected by the DoJ in the US antitrust process; and ignored international obligations set out by the WTO. ...more

HP iPAQs - spot the difference

PC Pro reader Andrew Kennard wrote in with an interesting question, and we thought we'd share the answer rather than keeping it to ourselves. Andrew had been searching for a new iPAQ, and noticed that some hx2110 iPAQs had the model number FA296A, some FA296T. Likewise, the hx2410 was available with model numbers FA298A and FA298T. ...more

TCP flaw opens Internet to threat of shutdown

A security flaw has been found in one of the basic elements of the Internet, the UK government has revealed. The flaw in the transmission control protocol (TCP) could allow a hacker to severely disrupt or even stop Internet traffic. TCP is the Internet protocoal that enables two hosts to establish a connection and exchange streams of data. ...more

Anti piracy organisation wound up

One of the shadowy companies that engaged in the war against the illegal p2p networks has closed down. LoudEye Corporation has announced that it has closed down the Overpeer 'content protection' subsidiary in order to 'to focus its business and reduce its cost structure'. It has been well known for years that both the MPAA and the RIAA employed companies which engaged in 'dirty tricks' on peer to peer web sites such as flooding them with worthless MP3s or even, it has been rumoured, funnelling adware onto the networks. ...more

Google index tops six billion

Google's index of the Web now includes more than six billion items, the world's largest collection of online information, the company announced last night. Having grown largely by word of mouth from nothing to account for around a third of all Internet searches, Google has now indexed 4.28 billion Web pages, 880 million images, 845 million Usenet messages plus a growing collection of book-related information pages. ...more