Two convicted developers of a worm designed last year to infect Windows 2000-based systems were sentenced today to one and two years in prison, Maghreb Arabe Presse is reporting this afternoon.

Farid Essebar, age 19, was sentenced to two years imprisonment by a court in his native Morocco for his part in producing the W2K worm, dubbed Zotob, which utilized a mass-mail attachment to copy itself into the Windows SYSTEM32 directory. From there, it would launch a process intended to preclude users from accessing certain Web sites, mainly from anti-virus vendors.

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Having just integrated Macromedia's Flash Player into its technology portfolio, Adobe today issued a "critical" warning, advising Flash Player users to apply an update to prevent a possible denial of service attack.

The exploit affects what's called Flash remoting - essentially the provision of server-based application services via Flash, as opposed to via HTML, Active Server Pages or some other wrapper. Though an exploit itself has not yet been discovered, Adobe engineers found that a certain form of Flash remoting command sent to ColdFusion servers (another acquired Macromedia technology) triggers an infinite loop process that will not stop itself.

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In an era that was supposed to have been defined by high-definition content -- at least, according to plan -- it is low-definition deals that are at the center of attention this day.

Not to be outdone by Apple and Disney agreeing to make Disney studios' movies available through iTunes, Warner Bros. today announced an agreement with mobile phone producer Nokia to make Warner and affiliated studios' content available through Nokia handsets' built-in portal, called Content Discoverer.

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In the Internet search space, Google has set a clear precedent: When you create a service, first you go with what you've got. Then when the bugs seem to have died down, you drop the word "beta" and you call it a launch. Late yesterday, Microsoft dropped the "beta" from Windows Live Search, the culmination of its original Live.com project the company "launched" last November.

In many ways, it's not the same service. Live.com tried a number of various approaches to the basic theme of Internet search, including an AJAX-driven application with customizable content boxes, similar to what Excite.com tried years earlier.

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On this particular day, you might say information isn't so much the proverbial king any more, as is content. While the press was focused on Apple's impending announcement regarding Disney movie downloads over the iTunes network, in a quiet corner of Manhattan, News Corp. -- the parent of the Fox entertainment empire -- announced it is acquiring a majority stake in mobile content provider Jamba from VeriSign.

Jamba currently runs Jamster, a download service for such valuable commodities as ringtones and wallpapers, which have in just two years' time become hundred-million-dollar industries. It's not only more difficult but more expensive for content providers to develop applications and services for the information era, than it is to sublicense pretty pictures and scratchy song excerpts from their publishers.

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Continuing the company's massive reorganization program, part of which involves the transition of employees to other companies, Intel announced on Monday it has sold its optical networking components division to privately held San Jose-based Cortina Systems for an undisclosed amount.

Up to this point, Cortina's claim to fame has been a collaborative venture with Cisco Systems to develop the Interlaken protocol, a royalty-free interconnect technology for 10 gigabyte-per-second (Gbps) optical networks. If your front-line business just happens to be the production of a royalty-free product, you'd better be prepared to back that up with a technology that makes full use of it.

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On the basis of last week's stunning announcement from Sony that it will delay the launch of its PlayStation 3 game console in Europe from November to May, and trim the expected availability in North America and Japan come November to a mere 500,000 units, two leading market analysts told BetaNews they will soon be issuing revised downward estimates for overall sales of the PS3.

In-Stat senior analyst for converging markets and technologies, Brian O'Rourke, and iSuppli senior analyst for consumer electronics, Chris Crotty, both told BetaNews they are lowering estimates. O'Rourke cited the high price of the Sony console, in addition to the Europe launch delay.

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A new, potentially less expensive substitute for flash memory may have taken a step closer to becoming reality today, as Samsung announced it had completed a prototype for a promising new, potentially more efficient non-volatile memory scheme.

Called phase-change random-access memory (PRAM), the patents for this concept date as far back as 1968. While the idea is conceptually simple, the problem for the last four decades has been finding the right balance of chemical materials that will behave as predicted on paper.

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Working to make up some lost ground after last week's news of the first evidence of blue laser diode shortages, HD DVD's principal steward Toshiba announced this morning it will be jointly proposing with disc manufacturer Memory-Tech the first triple-layer DVD.

According to Toshiba, the new specification will include one layer devoted to HD DVD, a second to DVD, and a third layer which can be apportioned to either format, enabling dual-layer HD DVD (30 GB) or dual-layer DVD-9 (8.5 GB).

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In what could be yet another chance at life for one of the most storied brands in the history of electronics, California investor Lap Shun Hui is about to complete the purchase of Packard Bell from Japanese manufacturer NEC, The New York Times has learned.

It started out as a radio manufacturer, and still today, some of the most handsome radio sets of the 1930s, in the display cases of antiques collectors, bear the gleaming silver name "Packard Bell" that inspired a generation of artists to try similar designs on cars of the 1950s. During the '50s, the brand became a part of Teledyne, known more in the US as a defense electronics contractor than a consumer brands leader.

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A group of US religious and ethical organizations, including Morality in Media, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, and Faith 2 Action, has issued an open letter to the Senate Commerce Committee, expressing support for the current language of a key communications reform bill that has emerged from conference, and is soon to be introduced for debate on the Senate floor.

It is the bill around which the current debate on "net neutrality" -- whether to prohibit broadband service providers from being able to offer premium carriage services to larger content providers -- is centered.

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In an extraordinary public statement of regret and despair over having to postpone his company's PlayStation 3 debut in Europe and Australia until March, and to limit availability elsewhere to only 500,000 units come November, Sony Computer Entertainment President Ken Kutaragi is quoted by Reuters as having told reporters, "If you asked me if Sony's strength in hardware was in decline, right now I guess I would have to say that might be true."

Kutaragi's comments come as his company struggles to reassure customers in North America and Japan that there's still something to look forward to before the holidays. Sony senior corporate communications director Dave Karraker reassured BetaNews this week that November 17 continues to be the PS3's North American launch date, although only an estimated 400,000 units will have shipped to retailers here by that date.

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Sprint said on Tuesday it has entered into a distribution agreement with Disney subsidiary Buena Vista, Lionsgate, Sony Pictures, and Universal to distribute a select group of generally family-friendly movies through a subscription-based on-demand service, for viewing over Sprint cell phones.

What Tuesday's announcement hasn't yet made clear, however, is whether Sprint's gamble will pay off and customers will bite. As the company's entertainment product marketing director, Alana Muller, put it, "Sprint Movies allows our customers to be entertained on the one device that they always carry with them."

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For the past three consecutive years, a computer IBM built for the US Department of Energy called BlueGene/L, powered by over 131,000 massively parallel PowerPC processors, has reigned supreme over the Top 500 Supercomputers list, now published twice annually by the University of Mannheim.

While Intel processors have dominated the rest of the list, with as many as one-third of the systems running parallel Xeons, Itaniums or Itanium 2s, Intel's dream to topple the aging PowerPC architecture may be crushed by an alliance between its two arch-rivals, IBM and AMD.

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As has been anticipated since last April, Intel today launched its effort to create a Centrino-like integrated technology platform around business desktop systems. The idea behind Intel's new vPro logo program is to encourage vendors to produce Core 2 Duo CPU-based desktop computers with motherboards utilizing the company's new Q965 Express chipset.

The Centrino program is generally seen as a sweeping success, not only provoking OEMs to produce notebook systems based on the Pentium M and its successors, but giving customers one name to remember when asking for a portable computer. Intel hopes to translate that success over to the desktop world, even though vendors and analysts alike report desktop systems constituting a lesser share of overall production as so-called "desktop replacement" notebooks take over.

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