At a three day press event in Bordeaux Sony this week announced it is going to add Blu-ray and DSD (Direct Stream Digital) to its Vaio series of PCs and notebooks.

DSD is the core HD audio technology that is found at the heart of the Super Audio CD platform that Sony developed with Philips. Supported by over 250 record companies worldwide, SACD is seen as the next generation Compact Disc, although so far it has only carved a niche in the market.

Despite the support for DSD, SACDs can’t be played on future Vaios. Sony will not build SACD disc drives into its notebooks or PCs, as Super Audio CD requires the use of high-end receivers and loudspeakers. However, home studio and home audio enthusiasts and creators can achieve the same high definition and surround sound on their PC without affecting background CPU performance, Sony claims.

Sony will also build Blu-ray into its Vaio PCs. A single-layer Blu-ray disc can hold 25GB, which can be used to record over two hours of HDTV or more than 13 hours of standard definition TV. There are also dual-layer versions of the discs that can hold 50GB.

Source: The Register

In the process of making PyMusique work with Napster, the group have broken the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system that the company uses. Unlike Apple’s iTunes, the DRM is applied ’server-side’, making the decryption process a lot more complicated. The team have formulated a method for removing the DRM on WMA files allowing them to play on non-Windows systems.

Amazingly, Brocious says the DRM crack could be applied to other stores (MSN Music, Napster, Wall mart) using the WMA file format; “we would have to figure out how to get their license keys, which is a relatively trivial process”.

Source: Neowin

AMD will brand its dual-core Athlon 64 chips ‘X2′ when they go on sale later this year.

So suggest sources close to the company, cited by Hexus. According to the site, three CPUs are due to be launched, all branded X2 and stamped with 4400+, 4600+ and 4800+ model numbers, respectively.

The top-end part will be clocked at 2.4GHz, apparently.

Hexus’ source also claims AMD has no plans to introduce Athlon FX-branded dual-core processors.

That certainly chimes with AMD’s public roadmap, which has its first desktop dualie, codenamed ‘Toledo’ and due to ship in H2 2005, sitting on its own above its updates to both the single-core Athlon 64 and FX line-ups - ‘Venice’ and ‘San Diego’, respectively.

Source: The Register

Microsoft’s worm-cleansing tool has been updated to detect and remove Hacker Defender, a notorious rootkit program used by malicious virus writers.

It is the first time Redmond has added rootkit detection capabilities to the free Malicious Software Removal Tool, a move that underscores the increased prevalence of stealth rootkits on Windows machines.

According to definitions posted by Computer Associates, Hacker Defender is a Trojan creation tool that can also be used to wrap existing Trojans to make them harder to detect.

It can also hide proxy services and back-door functionality and conceal use of TCP and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) ports for receiving commands from attackers.

Source: eWeek

Google Video lets you search a growing archive of televised content — everything from sports events to dinosaur documentaries to news programs. In addition to televised content, Google now accepting video from anyone who wants to upload content to them. Uploaded content will not be immediately available to users searching Google Video as this is just the submission stage of the program.

The upload program which has been launched last night, lets you submit videos electronically to Google Video, as long as you own the necessary rights (including copyrights, trademarks, rights of publicity, and any other relevant rights for your content). Just sign up for an account and use the upload tool to send your videos to Google.

Google accept any type of video content, with these restrictions: You must own all necessary rights to the content, including copyrights toboth the video and the audio. You must be able to upload the video to us electronically. The video must not contain pornographic or obscene material.

When Google Video enters the next phase, users will be able to search, preview, purchase, and play your video – depending on your preferences. In order to promote your video to users, every video on Google Video will allow users to see a quick preview.