Mass virus outbreaks return

Over the last two months, Virus attacks have increased twenty-fold, according to new research. Email security firm Postini is the company behind the study. It found that two worldwide email virus attacks that occurred over the New Year and again a couple of weeks later were so big that they increased the level of viruses circulating the Internet by a factor of 20 over normal activity. ...more

Microsoft warns of five critical patches

Microsoft has announced that April's security update will contain five patches, including a fix for the 'CreateTextRange' vulnerability. Stephen Toulouse, of the Microsoft Security Response Center, writes in the team blog that four of the patches will address problems in Windows, while a fifth will target flaws affecting Windows and Office. The Windows patches will rank as Critical and include a cumulative fix for IE which will address the 'CreateTextRange' vulnerability. ...more

Microsoft makes midnight dash to meet EU antitrust deadline

Microsoft waited until close to midnight last night before submitting its final proposal for conforming with European Commissions penalties imposed in March 2004 for antitrust violations. The Commission will begin to assess the submission, before deciding whether to implement daily fines for non-compliance of five per cent of its daily turnover, which amounts to around $5mn per day.. ...more

RIAA issues 750 more writs to University users

The US music industry pressure group the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) has fired off over 750 lawsuits against students and others who have been downloading music for free from P2P networks. The suits accuse 757 individuals of engaging in copyright infringement, including computer network users at 17 different colleges throughout the US. RIAA says that the people concerned not only used P2P networks such as Grokster, Kazaa and eDonkey but also used the student run i2hub p2p network to distribute music. ...more

Roxio bundles photo and video apps in latest authoring suite

Roxio brings its all its multimedia burning and authoring applications - covering photos, videos and music - together into the Roxio Creator 7 suite. The Easy CD & DVD Creator software is packaged together with PhotoSuite 7 Platinum and VideoWave 7 Pro. It will also have integrated links to the Roxio-owned Napster when it finally emerges again in Europe. ...more