OASIS, the international e-business standards consortium, announced on Monday that it has approved the Open Document Format for Office Applications Version 1.0 as a standard.

OpenDocument (Open Document Format for Office Applications) is the new default XML-based file format for the forthcoming open-source office suite OpenOffice.org 2.0.

Version 2.0 is not just meant to be another office-suite file format: It’s meant to be an open format that can be used by any office suite. In particular, it’s designed to not tie businesses’ data to a particular program or version of a program.

Source: eWeek

More than 100,000 customers of Wachovia Corp. and Bank of America Corp. have been notified that their financial records may have been stolen by bank employees and sold to collection agencies.

In all, nearly 700,000 customers of four banks may be affected, according to police in Hackensack, N.J., where the investigation was centered.

So far, Bank of America has alerted about 60,000 customers whose names were included on computer disks discovered by police, bank spokeswoman Alex Liftman said Monday.

Wachovia said it has identified 48,000 current and former account holders whose accounts may have been breached.

Source: AP

A tool provided by Microsoft could let people get around a check meant to prevent those with pirated copies of Windows from downloading additional software from the company, according to a security researcher.

Researcher Debasis Mohanty outlined what he said was a technique to trick Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage validation check in a posting to the Full Disclosure security mailing list on Monday.

Using a secondary Microsoft validation tool called “GenuineCheck.exe,” it may be possible for people to trick the checking mechanism, Mohanty said in the posting. They could then download and run supposedly restricted software from Microsoft’s Download Center on a PC running a pirated version of Windows, Mohanty wrote.

Microsoft confirmed that the technique could circumvent the piracy check, but a representative said Monday that the company is not worried.

Source: News.com

Kevin Rose, known to fans of the G4 video game television network as host of “The Screen Savers” and “Attack of the Show,” has announced that he will leave the network to build his own tech television enterprise. Friday, May 27, will mark his last day with the Los Angeles-based G4, nee G4TechTV, nee TechTV.

“I’m leaving G4 so that I can focus on what I love most, in-depth tech content,” Rose writes on his blog.

Rose’s new tech how-to show, “Systm,” will kick off tonight at 8 p.m. PST, preceded by a house party that will be available to technophiles the world over via webcam and IRC chat.

Source: C|Net

Microsoft sends news today that founder Bill Gates has announced a MSN Virtual Earth service is to debut in the summer. The service is promised to provide:

* Satellite images with 45-degree-angle views of buildings and neighborhoods

* Satellite images with street map overlays

* Ability to add local data layers, such as showing local businesses or restaurants

Virtual Erath Screenshot (source)

The service will allow users to choose from a number of different data types plus allow people to contribute their own information. The announcement came today at the D3 conference happening this week.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs demonstrated a new version of iTunes here Sunday that adds a Podcast directory and one-click subscription.

Speaking at the D: All Things Digital conference, Jobs showed off the new version of iTunes, which will include a searchable directory of Podcasts. Apple plans to make it easy to find and subscribe to Podcasts via iTunes—it will take just a single click to subscribe to a Podcast once it has been located.

Source: eWeek

Usenet newsgroups dedicated to piracy are seeing a resurgence in activity as file sharers seek less-policed areas of the internet to trade illegal data.

Some pirated movies are now even appearing in newsgroups before being released worldwide across popular P2P systems like BitTorrent. The alt.binaries newsgroups — which mostly carry pirated software, ripped movies and MP3s — have logged a steady and substantial rise in traffic over the last few years.

Posts to a key “warez” newsgroup, alt.binaries.multimedia, have quadrupled from 700,000 in 2001 to 2.8 million last year, according to Microsoft’s Netscan System, which logs all Usenet traffic.

Meanwhile, more than 60 GB of complete DVD rips are now being posted each day to a single Usenet forum, according to stats at NewsAdmin, which tracks Usenet usage.

Many pirates are being driven to Usenet by the threat of lawsuits or by fear that their ISPs will soon be slapped with subpoenas from the Recording Industry Association of America or the Motion Picture Association of America.

Newsgroups offer relative anonymity compared to Kazaa, eMule and BitTorrent, which are now heavily monitored by the RIAA and MPAA.

Source: Wired

Remote-controlled “zombie” networks operated by bottom-feeding spammers have become a serious problem that requires more industry action, the Federal Trade Commission is expected to announce on Tuesday.

The FTC and more than 30 of its counterparts abroad are planning to contact Internet service providers and urge them to pay more attention to what their customers are doing online. Among the requests: identifying customers with suspicious e-mailing patterns, quarantining those computers and offering help in cleaning the zombie code off the hapless PCs.

But government pressure–even well-intentioned–on Internet providers to monitor their users raises some important questions.

Will ISPs merely count the number of outbound e-mail messages, or actually peruse the content of e-mail correspondence? E-mail eavesdropping is limited by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in the United States, but what about other countries without such laws? If these steps don’t stop zombie-bots, will the government come back with formal requirements instead of mere suggestions the next time around?

Source: News.com