Ed Oswald

While Microsoft has become a favorite target of critics who say the company has dramatically scaled back expectations for Windows Vista, Mozilla's Firefox Web browser is about to join that crowd.

Mozilla has decided to strip out a major new feature from Firefox 2.0 in order to ensure that the update meets a Q3 2006 release target, a post in the browser's developer forum indicated earlier this week. "Places," a complete rewrite of the browser's bookmarking system, will no longer be included in the release.

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Sony Music could be the target of a class action lawsuit from its artists, if a suit filed in a New York Federal Court is successful. Musicians The Allman Brothers and Cheap Trick say the company is not giving its artists a fair share, which under contract was half of the licensing revenue.

"Sony Music is presently engaged in a widespread attempt to underpay its recording artists; with the technological advancements in the music industry, it is essential that artists receive the royalty income to which they are entitled," Attorney Brian Caplan said in a statement.

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The Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have sent letters to the presidents of 40 universities in 25 states, alerting them that students are engaged in illegal file swapping over their internal networks.

According to the groups' claims, students are opting to swap through internal college LANs in order to avoid sharing over the Internet, which carries a greater threat of being caught. Programs such as DC++, along with several other applications, make the seemingly covert file sharing possible.

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Yahoo has again been cited as the source of information that put a Chinese Internet writer behind bars for 10 years in 2003 for subversion. According to the New York-based Human Rights In China, Wang Xiaoning was convicted after Yahoo's China arm provided information on his e-mail account and the Yahoo Group that he ran.

However, from the ruling it was unclear if the company had provided Wang's identity to Chinese authorities. Neither the Chinese government nor Yahoo was commenting on the matter.

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Microsoft said Thursday it will sacrifice some of its profit margins to continue ramping up shipments of the Xbox 360. The company hopes to get a head start over competing next-generation consoles, especially Sony's PlayStation 3.

However, short-term issues with profitability may end up paying off in the long term. As the company sells more units, it will in turn sell more accessories and games, for which It receives a small licensing fee.

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Yahoo on Thursday introduced Babel Fish, using the same technologies that have been used by the version hosted on Alta Vista for almost a decade. The page, which looks much like Alta Vista's version, has been updated with some additional features to tie it in with other Yahoo services.

The original Babel Fish premiered on Alta Vista in 1997, making it the first translation service on the Internet. At that time, Babel Fish could translate words, sentences, and Web sites to and from English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Russian.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that proposed legislation now making its way through the Senate might put an end to music webcasts that use MP3 or other non-protected streaming formats. Services like Live365, Shoutcast, and smaller radio stations would be affected, and may be forced to use DRM technogy.

It would also mean an end to the streaming radio stations in iTunes as well. The iTunes stations also use DRM-less formats, the EFF said.

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A new trojan is making its rounds on the Internet, freezing up victims' computers and then demanding a ransom be paid through Western Union. Called "ransomware," the viruses have been around in Russia for several months, but the first English variants appeared in March.

Sophos discovered the trojan and has named it "Troj/Ransom-A." According to the security firm, these types of viruses are fairly new. The company said it does not know at this time how the trojan is being spread, but it is investigating.

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Operators of the Internet2 consortium said they will be able to boost the speed of the ultra-fast research network by as much as 80 times by the fall of next year. To accomplish this, the fiber optic lines will send data using different colors of light.

The Internet2 is a network separate from the Internet that connects some 200 colleges and universities, as well as various corporations and researchers. It currently uses fiber optic cables provided by Qwest, however the new network would have cables all to itself.

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XM Satellite Radio's quarterly loss continues to widen even in the face of rapidly increasing revenues, the company reported Thursday. Additionally, XM is the focus of two separate inquiries by the FCC and Federal Trade Commission.

First quarter losses for XM widened to $149.2 million from $119.9 million a year earlier. However, revenue jumped to $208 million, more than double the $102.6 million in the first quarter of last year. XM added 568,900 subscribers, bringing its total count to 6.5 million.

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A group of Canadian musicians began speaking out Wednesday, saying record labels are not acting in the artists' best interests by suing fans and using digital rights management. The group, called the Canadian Music Creators Coalition, hopes to counter the influence of lobbyists for the labels in the creation of copyright law.

Some of the musicians involved would be recognizable to American music fans: the Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, Sarah MacLachlan, Sum 41, and Our Lady Peace among others.

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Microsoft squared off with the European Commission in court Wednesday, saying an EU order to force the Redmond company to hand over trade secrets was unfair. Microsoft's rivals countered that the company was trying to avoid the central issue that it had abused its monopoly powers.

The order was the focus of the third day of Microsoft's appeal in the European Union Court of First Instance. Microsoft lawyer Ian Forrester accused the European Union of attempting to permanently handicap the company, and would damage the rights of patent holders in the future.

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A new vulnerability has been discovered within Internet Explorer's handling of the OBJECT tag that could cause the browser to crash. At first glance, the bug appears to be not much more than a nuisance, although an attack vector could not be ruled out by security experts.

Existence of the flaw has been confirmed on a fully patched version of Internet Explorer 6 running on Windows XP Service Pack 2, according to an advisory on the issue.

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Microsoft is set acquire Massive, a start-up that places ads in video games, next week in a deal estimated at $200 to $400 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. Massive's advertising clients include Coca-Cola and Honda among others, and it has deals with game publishers Ubisoft, Take-Two Interactive, and THQ.

With publishers regularly connecting their games to the Internet, dynamic ads within those games are now possible. Previously, ads were sold in static form, but they quickly would become stale as they could not be changed based on new promotions.

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Seagate on Wednesday introduced its Barracuda 7200.10, the first computer desktop hard disk to reach the 750-gigabyte storage mark. The drive, with a retail price of $559 USD, is 50 percent larger than the previous 500-gigabyte marker leader.

Initially, the drive will be released to PC makers for inclusion in new computer systems. Starting next week, it will be introduced to the general public, Seagate said.

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