Although it has repeatedly denied any widespread problem with scratching on its diminutive music player, reports appeared on the Web Friday that Apple has begun adding a protective sleeve to new iPod Nano shipments.

"The case we ship with the new 5th generation iPod has received great feedback from customers and we are including a similar case with the iPod nano," Apple spokesperson Steve Dowling told BetaNews.

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Feel like you're not getting a good deal on that moose head you just bought from eBay? The popular auction site unveiled a new feature Thursday that will assist both the buyer and seller in understanding what the going price is for items sold on the service over the past three months.

The premium offering, called Marketplace Research, will allow any user to see both in graphical and text form trends in listing, bidding and pricing of items. Analysts say the service will give prospective sellers an idea of the eBay value of their items, as well as giving buyers a hint at how much they should expect to pay for an item they may want.

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RealNetworks patched two significant vulnerabilities that affect most versions of its Real Player software. One flaw, marked as a "high risk," allows a skin file to be downloaded and applied to the player without the user's permission. The file could contain data that causes a heap overflow, according to eEye Digital Security.

The other more serious flaw involves specially formatted .rm movie files. An attacker could use the file to trigger a direct stack overwrite and thus open up a backdoor to execute malicious code. "RealNetworks has received no reports of machines compromised as a result of the now-remedied vulnerabilities," the company said in an advisory, but pointed out that it "takes all security vulnerabilities very seriously." The patches are available through Real Player's built-in update mechanism.

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Microsoft this week notified customers regarding vulnerabilities in Macromedia Flash, the first time the company has ever issued a security advisory for a third party product. Redmond officials say the step was taken because Flash ships with Windows XP SP1 and SP2, along with older Windows versions.

The advisory comes two days after Macromedia warned of the "critical" problem, which affects certain versions of Flash Player 7 and earlier. According to the company, the vulnerability could allow a hacker to inject code that the player would then execute, resulting in the compromising of a user's system.

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Microsoft has put to rest another legal problem. The company announced on Friday that it had reached a settlement with South Korean Internet portal Daum.

Daum had complained to the South Korean Fair Trade Commission in 2001, accusing Microsoft of breaking the law by tying its instant messaging software to Windows. A lawsuit on the same grounds was filed in 2004.

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Microsoft has sent out the first wave of Office 12 acceptance letters to those who applied for the beta program. The company says it expects to ship Beta 1 in the next few weeks, which, for the first time, will be available via download. In the past, Microsoft has only issued CDs for major Office betas.

"You will be provided with access to the Office "12" Beta software, documentation, and support within the next 2-3 weeks," Microsoft wrote in an e-mail. "But we wanted to let you know now that you have been accepted, so that you can make any preparations that you need."

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SnapStream on Thursday released the fourth major revision of its Beyond TV DVR product, as well as announcing partnerships with three HDTV tuner card manufacturers to both support the new software and jointly market the program to customers.

Beyond TV 4 will now support DivX recording, FM Radio and recording of over-the-air digital and HDTV content. The defeat of the FCC's broadcast flag requirement this summer by an appeals court is making the recording of HDTV content possible, SnapStream said.

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The big news Wednesday involved two memos from Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and chief technical officer Ray Ozzie. The missives detail what Gates calls "a sea change" and why Microsoft risks being left behind in the Web 2.0 movement. Read on to see what analysts and bloggers had to say about the news, and tell us what you think.

"This is a more disrupted Microsoft. And believe me (and many of them heard this from me) they needed to be disrupted. I hope Ray still has the chance to have one foot planted outside the company, as he roots the other inside, otherwise he isn't going to accomplish what he wants to accomplish. But I'm glad he's fighting for platform-building. It's true that Google is not doing what we need them to do, and while Yahoo is trying, he's right they do approach things as a media company (which is good!) but that doesn't mean we don't need tech companies here."
-- Dave Winer, Scripting News

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Travel site SideStep received a major boost on Thursday by securing a partnership with Amazon to become the e-retailer's search engine in its travel store, replacing competitor Hotwire.com. The deal gives SideStep access to Amazon's 52 million users.

Unlike other travel sites such as Travelocity and Orbitz, SideStep searches partner Web sites for the lowest fares and then directs users to that company's booking application. Although it has been around since 2000, SideStep has remained fairly unpublicized. But recently, a spate of travel search engines have cropped up, including America Online funded Kayak.com.

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A U.S. District Court judge granted a temporary injunction against Michigan's violent video games law Wednesday while it is examined for constitutionality. Governor Jennifer Granholm signed the bill into law in September, and it was slated to take effect December 1.

The law would have made the sale of violent video games to minors illegal, and imposed fines of up to $40,000 and three months jail time for those who sell the games, or pose as a parent or guardian to purchase a game for a minor.

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With the recent discovery of Sony's "rootkit" DRM shipping on over 20 CDs and the surrounding backlash from consumers online and off, antivirus vendors must now answer a delicate question: should Sony's software be considered malware and forcibly removed? Some say yes.

Technically, Sony's application, which was actually created by First 4 Internet, is not a virus and was not designed with malicious intent. However, the copy protection installs a low-level Windows driver that hides the DRM files and prevents their removal - a technique used by rookits.

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In an effort to create a unified front against Microsoft as well as spur Linux development, five companies joined forces on Thursday to create the Open Invention Network. The company is in the process of gathering patents surrounding the open source OS and will make them available to developers royalty-free.

Three electronics companies are involved: IBM, Philips and Sony, and two Linux software companies: Red Hat and Novell.

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What security experts have warned about Sony's DRM has come to pass, with a new trojan horse attempting to hide itself using techniques enabled by the company's anti-piracy software. Dubbed "Troj/Stinx-E" by Sophos, the application copies itself to a file called: $sys$drv.exe, which is hidden by Sony's copy protection.

F-Secure has named the malware "Breplibot.b," but says a code mistake will limit its damage. "Luckily, the bot has a design flaw. If the Sony DRM rootkit is active (hiding) in the system during infection, the bot will not run at all. Moreover, the bot cannot survive a reboot because of a programming error," explained F-Secure's Mika Pehkonen in a blog posting.

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Instant messaging continues to grow as a medium for online communication, according to details of a study released by America Online on Thursday. Instant messaging is up 19 percent, and 38 percent of all users say they now send more IMs than e-mails.

The survey also found that one-third of users connect to instant messaging networks through their mobile phones. This is nearly twice the number recorded last year, when only 19 percent said they used such services, and over three times as high as in 2003, when the number stood at 10 percent.

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Yahoo on Thursday acknowledged that CEO Terry Semel sat down with Time Warner Chairman Richard Parsons about orchestrating a deal with America Online, but said it walked away from the table once it learned of the terms. Google and Microsoft, however, are continuing their discussions.

Yahoo claims it didn't make an offer for AOL and "never looked back" after passing on the deal in October. Microsoft has been talking with AOL the longest, reportedly trying to convince AOL to drop Google and begin using MSN's search engine across its dial-up service and Web properties. Although AOL's subscriber business is slowly dying, it still holds a large chunk of the lucrative Internet advertising market.

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