Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced that the source code for Solaris 10 - the most advanced operating system in the industry - will be made available under the OSI (Open Source Initiative) approved Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). The company has established a community Web site at opensolaris.org. Buildable source code for Solaris will be available at this site in the second quarter of 2005.

As part of this release Sun will grant open source projects access to over 1,600 patents, the largest single release of I.P. ever. Sun CEO Scott McNealy said “Today represents a huge milestone for Sun, for the community, for developers and for customers.”

In a statement today, Sun said that they were allowing access to increase innovation and to level the playing field to software developers. They also commented that the move was in reaction to their growing concern at broad patents over software code, and an over-worked international patent system. The company appeared to be agreeing with a growing view that the system needs serious reform to continue working effectively and in the manner they were originally intended. Sun hope that this move will also reduce customer concerns about potential liability from using Open Source software.

Stacey Quandt, a Senior Business Analyst at The Robert Frances Group said “By gaining access to these Solaris OS patents, participants in the open-source community now have a tremendous opportunity to build unique and innovative technologies for a wide range of markets. An IP contribution of this magnitude has the potential to deliver exceptional value to developers and strengthens the overall open source community.”

Microsoft Corp. plans to severely curtail the ways in which people running pirated copies of its dominant Windows operating system can receive software updates, including security fixes.

The new authentication system, announced Tuesday and due to arrive by midyear, will still allow people with pirated copies of Windows to obtain security fixes, but their options will be limited. The move allows Microsoft to use one of its sharpest weapons — access to security patches that can prevent viruses, worms and other crippling attacks — to thwart a costly and meddlesome piracy problem.

But some security experts said the crackdown also could increase Internet security problems in general, if there is a spike in unsecured computers open to attack, which then could be used to attack others.

Over the next few months, the software behemoth will begin to more broadly adopt the program, called Windows Genuine Advantage, that urges users to provide proof their Windows copy is authentic before receiving some software updates.

By mid-2005, the program will become mandatory for Windows users to get virtually all updates, including security fixes available through the company’s Windows Update Web site. But users who have pirated copies of Windows will be able to continue to get security fixes if they sign up to automatically receive security updates.

Microsoft said the company has no current plans to require users running automatic updates to provide proof that their copies of Windows are genuine.

Customers who visit the manual Windows Update site will be asked to prove that their copies of Windows are legitimate by allowing Microsoft’s system to automatically run a check, or by providing a product identification number. Users who have lost that number will be asked three basic questions, and if they are deemed to be acting in good faith they will be given a free replacement key.

Source: AP

Google announced yesterday that the company is currently testing a prototype serviced used to search TV programming.

The engine dubbed “Google Video” allows users to search across text from TV shows like Fox News and ABC News. Google started indexing TV shows in late December aiming to compete with various other TV search providers.

“Now users can search the content of thousands of TV programs, find the shows that have the information they’re looking for, and learn when they can watch them,” Google co-founder Larry Page said in a statement.

Currently, providers of TV search like Yahoo and Blinkx TV are said to be stepping up their technology after the Google announcement.

Source: Neowin

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving $750m to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization which protects children in the developing world from preventable diseases.

The government of Norway is putting $290m in the pot and Gates is calling on other donors to meet the funding gap. The World Health Organisation estimates $8bn to $12bn is needed between 2005 and 2015 to immunise 27m children in the world’s poorest countries. GAVI has raised $2.3bn towards this goal.

Gates said: “Today, a child’s access to life-saving vaccines too often depends on where he or she lives in the world, and that’s unacceptable….This is a solvable problem - it’s time for donors, both public and private, to dramatically step up their efforts to close the immunization gap.” WHO estimates that of the 10m children who die before their fifth birthday 1.4m die of a disease for which there is a vaccine and another 1.1m die of a disease for which there will soon be a vaccine.

Source: The Register

Google is considering offering Voice over Internet Protocol phone calls according to the The Times.

Evidence for Google’s alleged move comes from comments from Ovum analyst Julian Hewitt and the text of a job advert on Google’s site. The ad is for an strategic negotiator to join the search engine’s “technical infrastructure negotiation team”.

The job will include responsiblity for IP transit services in North America, Europe, Asia, negotiating for collaction deals and sorting out contracts for dark fiber services. The Times says: “the logical use of such a network would be to help to support a new telephone service.”

VoIP providers use software to route voice calls over the internet network at a lower cost than a call using the traditional phone network. Skype is one the best-known providers and claims 13m users across the world.

The technology is also gaining ground with corporate users: Lloyds-TSB recently signed a £500m deal with IBM to provide VoIP services.

Source: The Register

The US Supreme Court will begin hearing spoken testimonies from the movie industry and the world of peer-to-peer networking on 29 March in order to help it decide whether P2P software providers are responsible for the actions of their users.

The hearings will mark the latest step in the music and movie industries’ attempts to have P2P software nobbled in order to prevent massive-scale copyright infringement, and to have P2P companies make good the revenue the business claims to have lost to that infringement.

But action brought against P2P software companies Grokster and Streamcast failed to deliver that result at either the District Court or the appeal court level.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the case by July.

Source: The Register

Multiple remote vulnerabilities reportedly affect KaZaA’s Sig2Dat protocol functionality. These issues are due to a failure of the application to properly sanitize user-supplied input prior to using it in critical actions.

An attacker may leverage these issues to cause the affected application to crash, denying service to legitimate users, and to create files in arbitrary directories that are readable to the affected application.

Affected versions:
KaZaA KaZaA Media Desktop 2.0
KaZaA KaZaA Media Desktop 2.0.2
KaZaA KaZaA Media Desktop 2.6.4
KaZaA KaZaA Media Desktop 3.0
KaZaA Lite KaZaA Lite 1.7.2
KaZaA Lite KaZaA Lite 2.0
KaZaA Lite KaZaA Lite 2.0.2

Workaround:
The following workaround reportedly disables the affected protocol handler. This will reduce the likelihood of exploitation, however it will also disable any functions that rely on this protocol being handled. It should be noted that this workaround has not been verified by Symantec. Assign the following value to the following registry key:

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\sig2dat\shell\open\command]
@=""


Tri Synergy, a leading publisher of utility, entertainment, and reference software, has entered into a strategic partnership with Lavasoft , the industry leader in the field of anti-spyware solutions. Tri Synergy will publish Ad-Aware Plus program and will be available at retail outlets across North America.

Ad-Aware software has dominated the anti-spyware market via the Internet, where more than 100 million copies of Ad-Aware versions have been utilized by home and corporate users worldwide in the past six months.

Ad-Aware Plus will be available at all major retailers in 1st Quarter 2005.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of Microsoft® Office Outlook® Live, a new subscription offering that brings together the power of Microsoft Office Outlook with MSN® Hotmail® in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada (English and French).

Outlook Live connects MSN Hotmail with Microsoft Office Outlook.

This is the first Microsoft Office product to be made available as a downloadable subscription service. With Outlook Live, customers can now view and manage all their personal information — e-mail accounts, contacts and calendars — in one convenient place, from virtually anywhere. With an Outlook Live subscription customers will receive the latest version of Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 for Subscription Services, plus 2 GB of online storage, the ability to send 20MB attachments, and advanced spam and virus protection — all for an introductory price of $44.951 until April 19, 2005 (regularly priced at $59.95 per year).

Apple and Pepsi have teamed up to offer a new iTunes promotion, the second in as many years for the companies. The promotion, offering a one-in-three chance of winning, runs from January 31, 2005 to April 30, 2005 and will include free iTunes songs and a sweepstakes for approximately 1,700 iPod minis.

The new promotion will double the amount of iTunes songs offered by the companies to 200 million. Each redeemed song will automatically get you one entry for the special iPod mini (silver-colored case with the Pepsi logo). One Apple iPod mini will be awarded for each hour in the previous day for a total of 24 winners selected in each daily drawing.

Game pieces will be printed underneath bottle caps on specially-marked “iTunes” 20 oz. and 1 liter bottles of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Pepsi Wild Cherry, Mountain Dew, Diet Mountain Dew, Mountain Dew Code Red and Sierra Mist and under the rim of specially-marked 32 oz. and 44 oz. fountain cups available at participating locations.

Source: Yahoo

A man who claims he has been receiving unsolicited emails from a US company for two years is now being sued by them, for branding them spammers and reporting their actions to ISPs.

Jay Stuler is now on the receiving end of a lawsuit from New Hampshire firm Atriks, which alleges Stuler caused financial harm to the firm and caused it to lose contracts. The suit also states that Stuler had been making defamatory statements, including calling CEO Brian Haberstroh a “criminal” and the company “a notorious spam gang”, which the suit denies.

Stuler, however, says on his website the case is a “frivolous lawsuit designed to harass and intimidate” and claims the reason he’s been sued by Atriks is because, after complaining to his ISP about the alleged spam, the company saw its accounts closed down by the service providers.

“They apparently are angry that spamming has become difficult for them and blame me,” he said. “If I can be sued simply for complaining about spammers, then anyone can be.”

In the court filing, Atriks states that: “The activities of Atriks, in providing internet hosting, and DMC, [a company registered at the same address as Atriks] in sending commercial email, meet the requirements of the CAN-spam Act.”

Anti-spam foundation SpamHaus has listed Atriks on its register of known spam operations (ROKSO), which states the company has violated the act by using misleading subject lines.

SpamHaus also says it has had complaints that software is being installed by Atriks on users’ computers without their permission - which is a felony.

“Spamhaus has received numerous reports of the VirtualMDA software discovered running on people’s computers without their permission, they have no idea what it’s doing or how it got installed there, and they are certainly not getting paid for the use of their computer [as Atriks/Sendmail claims to do],” the ROKSO says.

Stuler is appealing for help from the public in fighting the suit and has set up a PayPal account to pay for his legal fees and is asking for donations.

“If and when my legal bills are paid in full, any donations received will be passed on to others being harassed by frivolous lawsuits from spammers,” he adds.

Source: Silicon.com

Serving a rapidly expanding base of customers for mass storage, Western Digital Corp. announced today that the company will enter the market for miniature hard drives with a family of 1-inch drives that enable a variety of handheld consumer devices, which are experiencing explosive demand.

An increasing number of current applications, such as MP3 players, PDAs, digital still cameras and digital video cameras, rely on 1-inch hard drives. Newly available and future products enabled by innovations in rotating magnetic storage, such as 1-inch drives, have driven demand in the quickly developing market segment that includes combination digital video/still cameras and cell phones.

WD 1″ Drive (Source)

WD’s miniature drive entry is expected to ship in the second calendar quarter of 2005. The 1-inch hard drive will spin at 3,600 RPM and will be available in capacities up to 6 GB. This new hard drive will be offered with the standard CF II interface and form factor, which enables it to fit into the millions of currently available devices accepting CF II cards, as well as easily integrate into future products. It will feature WD’s anti-skip
technology that supports uninterrupted audio and video playback. The drive also will incorporate WD’s patent-pending advanced power management techniques to enable the longest possible battery life.