Latest Technology News

The Business Software Alliance, a leading software industry organization, has announced a new approach to fighting piracy in the workplace: up to $1 million in cash to those whistle-blowers who rat out their employers. But the reward is only paid out if the BSA receives a cash settlement from the company.

Previously, the maximum reward offered through the two-year-old program was only $200,000. The carrot-and-stick approach worked, but only secured $22 million in settlements from companies with unlicensed or pirated copies of software installed on computers.

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More details are now available on the hacking of the Microsoft UK Web site, with experts saying that the attackers got in through a SQL injection exploiting a vulnerability in the Web server software.

The attack, which occurred last Wednesday, defaced the front page of the Web site and inserted the image of a child waving the flag of Saudi Arabia. According to Zone-H.org, a hacking news Web site, the attacker used the SQL flaw to inject his own HTML code.

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After a decade and a half of negotiations, waiting, and litigation - with the emphasis toward the latter - the DVD Copy Control Association, which administers the CSS copy protection scheme, formally announced yesterday that it will soon become legal for businesses to burn DVDs on demand whose copy protection includes CSS.

The announcement comes at what may finally be the resolution of a debate among different infighting groups of movie studios and CE manufacturers, over how - or whether - to implement a way for licensed companies to sell DVDs through a replication service. One such service, CinemaNow, has been in business since July 2006, offering licensed download-to-own movies via the Internet.

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The records of nearly 2.3 million consumers have been exposed including credit card, bank account, and other personal information after an employee of a Fidelity National Information Services subsidiary stole the information and then proceeded to sell it to a data broker. From there, it was sold to several direct marketing companies, although the data was not used for ID theft or fraudulent activity.

Of the records, 2.2 million contained bank account information and the remainder credit card numbers. To protect those affected, the company, Certegy Check Services Incorporated, asked a court to force the employee to return the information and order that the companies who bought the data stop using it. It has also begun the process of notifying those affected. The employee who stole the data has since been fired, Fidelity said.

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Just days after Apple released its iPhone, digital touch technology company Immersion said Monday that Nokia had licensed technology for future devices.

Of course, neither company is saying the move is in response to the release of Apple's iPhone, which makes heavy use of touchscreen technology. However, with the iPhone potentially 'changing the game' in mobile devices, it could be seen as a defensive measure.

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Google acquired voice communications management company GrandCentral on Monday, a move that it hopes will strengthen its service offerings.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, although some have pegged the purchase price at somewhere around $50 million. It is thought that GrandCentral's technology could eventually make its way into Google Talk.

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Whether it amounts to "corporate espionage" or not (most likely not), the case of Oracle v. SAP may have significant ramifications on how the world's leading information providers guard their information systems. In his company's defense this morning, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann admitted to reporters that, while an SAP division did download some material from Oracle inappropriately, the material was for the division's customers and not for SAP customers or SAP.

The problem is one of boundaries: When a division of one company is licensed to provide customer support for the division of another company, how should those companies keep their distance from one another? TomorrowNow is a leased customer support firm for PeopleSoft, J. D. Edwards, and Siebel business software. It's owned by SAP, and PeopleSoft is owned by Oracle. One of TomorrowNow's services is downloading updates for the software it supports, on behalf of the customers of that software's manufacturers.

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The iPhone's exclusive hold on YouTube on the mobile phone will be short-lived. LG said Tuesday that it had come to an agreement with the social video site to bring videos to its line of phones later in the year. Unlike the Apple arrangement, LG plans to offer its customers an option that allows a user to shoot video on the handset and then upload it to the site.

YouTube had already launched a version of its site formatted for use on mobile devices. However, the agreements such as the ones with Apple and LG tie the site more closely with the phone. LG had previously worked with Google to put applications such as search, maps and Gmail on the company's phones in the past.

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AT&T data customers across the country were reporting issues in accessing the EDGE network on Monday, although the company was able to restore service by 7pm Eastern. Technicians continue to work on the problem. The exact reason and origin of the outage was not known, but the carrier was quick to point out it was not due to the iPhone. While voice and text messaging remained unaffected, both EDGE and 3G services were down for several hours.

Blackberry users were unaffected as their services pass over a separate network, however subscribers with iPhones and other data-enabled devices reported problems. Within minutes of the outage, threads appeared across the Internet on various Mac enthusiast sites reporting issues. According to those threads, service was out in Dallas, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Hawaii, and Cincinnati among other cities.

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In response to a BetaNews inquiry over whether last Friday's announcement of new Barcelona server-class processors at frequencies up to 2.0 GHz for August release was as fast as we would see for 2007, an AMD spokesperson told us faster models would be made available later in the year.

"AMD expects that its native quad-core processors will scale to higher frequencies in Q407 in both standard and SE (Special Edition) versions," the spokesperson told BetaNews, reiterating from a statement made earlier. "Designed to operate within the same thermal envelopes as current generation AMD Opteron processors, AMD estimates that the new processors can provide a performance increase up to 70% on certain database applications and up to 40% on certain floating point applications, with subsequent higher frequency processors expected to significantly add to this performance advantage."

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After public complaints amassed over what seemed to be reluctance on the part of SWsoft's Parallels division to turn over to open source developers modifications it made to their code, Parallels told BetaNews this afternoon it has done just that.

The caretakers of the Wine library for running Windows applications on Mac OS X now have copies of modified forms of their source code, as the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) mandated that modifiers make available, according to Parallels.

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Google is being criticized for attempting to monetize health care industry backlash to the Michael Moore movie Sicko, after a post by a Google employee invited the industry to use its ad network to spread its own message.

Google Health account planner Lauren Turner initially made the suggestion that health care providers could use the company's advertising network to fight back against Moore's move and the likely fallout that would result.

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AOL pushed updates to several of its products for the Macintosh platform on Monday, including added functionality that would help its applications work more smoothly with native Mac OS X programs. The enhancements come as part of a recommitment to the Mac platform, including a new AOL Instant Messenger for the Mac platform coming in the next several months.

An update to the AOL Radio client allows users to listen to over 200 channels including XM stations, as well as providing an iChat song title indicator, and integrated screensaver that uses the cover art of currently playing songs. AOL Pictures has received an iPhoto plug-in that enables importing of photos into AOL Pictures, and an improved Service Assistant that configures various native applications to work with AOL services.

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In what could be Microsoft's most symbolic victory to date in the battle to legitimize the principal formats used by its Office applications, the State of Massachusetts officially declared Office Open XML -- the new standard format set in Office 2007 -- "another standardized XML-based file format specification suitable for office applications."

The declaration, which came as part of a review draft of version 4.0 of the state IT division's Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM), states that the standard document format it refers to by its standards agency designation ECMA-376 is one adequate candidate for use as an open, XML-based format, as well as OpenDocument Format.

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With a rather lackluster list of the so-called "Ultimate Extras," Microsoft took the step of assuring its user base that it still remained committed to the idea on Monday.

Since Vista's launch in January 2007, only four extras have been released, including Windows Hold'Em, 16 language packs for the Windows multi-language UI, Secure Online Key Backuip, and Windows BitLocker Drive Preparation Tool - not exactly exciting additions to Vista.

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