Ed Oswald

Citing complaints from Mac users, as well as fears of legal action, Apple accessory manufacturer DVForge cancelled its virus-writing contest for Mac OS X. The company planned to award $25,000 to the first person who could successfully infect two of the company's G5 computers connected to the Internet running OS X 10.3 without antivirus or firewall protection.

Jack Campbell, CEO of DVForge, said he organized the contest after last week's comments by Symantec saying the Mac platform, with its increasing popularity, would soon be the target of virus and spyware authors.

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The owner of the itunes.co.uk domain said Monday he plans to appeal a ruling that forced him to hand over the rights to his domain name to Apple Computer last week. Benjamin Cohen, the former owner of the domain and CEO of CyberBritain, called the ruling "unfair" and "biased," and will appeal it to Britain's High Court.

The decision was handed down by Nominet, the organization that handles the United Kingdom's domain registrations. Nominet said in its ruling that "the domain name, in the hands of the respondent, is an abusive registration on the grounds of its use in a manner taking unfair advantage of, and being unfairly detrimental to, the rights of the complainant," which was Apple.

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Sony said Monday that a court has upheld an earlier ruling by a California jury and ordered the company to halt sales of its PlayStation videogame console.

The intellectual property lawsuit brought by Immersion Corp. covers technology used to make a controller to vibrate during game play, which Immersion claims Sony copied without permission.

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BetaNews has learned that Adobe is planning to announce a major upgrade to its popular Photoshop image editing suite next Monday. Details slipped out in an accidental early posting of a press release, which has since been removed.

Dubbed Adobe Photoshop CS2, the new release promises better tools to fix common image problems such as red eye and blemishes, as well as updated support for raw, or uncompressed, images. The software is expected to start shipping in May.

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Struggling to keep pace with market leader iTunes, Microsoft on Wednesday announced it had struck a partnership with soft drink maker Coca-Cola to promote its Sprite brand through MSN Music and MSN Messenger. Also announced was an "exclusive" single from former pop icon Mariah Carey.

MSN and Sprite have also come together to premiere The Scenario, a Web site that will showcase popular hip-hop club DJs, as well as offer users a chance to download tracks heard in the mixes.

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A downloadable copy of Magneto, the code-name for the next version of Windows Mobile, again leaked onto the Internet Wednesday, two months after pictures of Microsoft's new operating system were first reported. Details and screenshots of the new leak have already begun to circle.

Microsoft made waves across the blogging world the last time Magneto details were leaked by sending cease-and-desist letters to several Windows enthusiast sites. "We hereby give notice of these activities to you and request that you take expeditious action to remove or disable access to the material described above," the letter read.

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While it is unclear whether the record industry's battle against unauthorized file sharing may have had any effect, domestic shipments of music actually increased for the first time in five years in 2004. According to a report made public by the Record Industry Association of America, 814 million units were shipped, an increase of 2 percent.

Total revenue for music shipments in 2004 reached $12 billion, an increase of 2.5 percent. The RIAA's report follows an earlier study by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry who said that at least worldwide sales remained flat year over year.

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Closing arguments began Wednesday in the trial between Sharman Networks, parent company of Kazaa, and the record industry, which could decide the fate of the company as well as peer-to-peer file sharing worldwide.

Sharman maintains that it cannot be held responsible for the actions of its users as it can not control what they do, while the record industry says that the company is willfully helping them to break the law.

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IBM upped the ante in its fight against spam by releasing FairUCE Tuesday, a technology the company claims fights junk mail better by analyzing the "domain identity" of an e-mail. If an e-mail is deemed to be spam, it is redirected back to the real sender, essentially spamming the spammer.

According to IBM, a computer would be able to differentiate an e-mail that is spoofed, such as the numerous PayPal scams circulating the Internet, from a true e-mail coming from a legitimate source.

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Microsoft has once again drawn the ire of the European Union. The EU on Friday said that tests showed that its system for allowing access to the source code of Windows' server software does not comply with the Commission's ruling. In fact, Jonathon Todd, spokesman for the Commission said, "it doesn't seem to be working at all."

The ruling originally came out of the record 497 million euro judgment against Microsoft made one year ago. The Commission found that Microsoft had abused its market position to push competitors out of the market. The penalty included allowing competitors access to server source code in order to allow better interoperability between different platforms.

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A Japanese newspaper reported on Monday that TiVo has plans to enter the Japanese market as soon as 2006. According to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, TiVo CEO Michael Ramsay recently told it that the company is looking for a partner in the country, whether it be a cable or Internet provider.

Entering the market could be tough for the American-based company, as several electronics manufacturers in Japan already have DVD recorders that perform many of the same functions that TiVo does. TiVo has also found that consumers are less receptive to its standalone boxes rather than its bundled services with provider DirecTV. This could have been the impetus in pursuing the deal with Comcast, which was announced last week.

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InterActiveCorp announced Monday that it would be purchasing the search engine company Ask Jeeves in a $1.85 billion transaction. Barry Diller, CEO of InterActiveCorp, said that growth in the search engine industry was a contributing factor to the company's decision.

The Ask Jeeves buyout is IAC's biggest move since it spun off Expedia in late December, citing that it was viewed as a travel company rather than a Web commerce company.

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Agence France Presse announced Friday that it was suing Google in order to stop it from using AFP material on its Google News site, and is asking for damages of $17.5 million. AFP maintains that Google never got permission from the wire service to link or display its stories or pictures.

"Without AFP's authorization, defendant is continuously and willfully reproducing and publicly displaying AFP's photographs, headlines and story leads on its Google News Web pages," the lawsuit read.

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Yahoo took a step back Friday and told ZDNet Australia a pledge by a representative in its Australian division for full support of Firefox was "factually inaccurate." According to a representative from the American arm of the company, there are "so many different products" on its network that it is likely there are some products which would not work with the open source browser.

Yahoo was the first of the major services to officially announce a plugin for the browser, releasing the Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox last month. However, users of the toolbar had to switch to Internet Explorer to use some of the services that the toolbar provides. Yahoo however did say a Firefox-compatible version of its Avatar Customization Service for its messaging client is on the way, although no launch date has been set.

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With the recent high-profile news reports of ways to circumvent Napster To Go's digital rights management (DRM) software, it was only a matter of time before someone targeted iTunes.

Hacker Jon Lech Johansen has done just that. Most known for his software that breaks the copy protection of DVDs, Johansen with the help of two counterparts has released PyMusique, what they bill as "a fair interface to the iTunes Music Store."

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