Popular file-sharing site WinMX.com ceased operating and the New York office of another, eDonkey.com, appeared to be closed, in the continuing legal fallout among underworld peer-to-peer music services, industry sources and users said on Wednesday.

RIAA last week sent out “cease-and-desist” letters to seven file-sharing groups. A spokeswoman for the RIAA declined to name the targets.

Popular file-sharing sites BearShare, eDonkey and WinMX were reportedly among the targets.

The decentralized nature of most peer-to-peer file-sharing software makes it uncontrollable once it is released over the Internet. However, shutting off sites where users first download the software may strangle the flow of new users.

Source: Reuters

An appeals court in Arizona this week ruled that a federal law that bans autodialing to call mobile phones also covers unsolicited text messages—even though text-messaging technology did not exist when the legislation was crafted.

The case, Rodney L. Joffe v. Acacia Mortgage Corp., was brought before a three-judge appeals court panel. The lower court found that Acacia had “violated” the TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) of 1991 by “delivering unsolicited advertisements, in the form of text messages, to Joffe’s cellular phone,” and the appeals court affirmed the decision.

Source: eWeek

Many fans of digital video recorders made by TiVo Inc. are beginning to fear that Hollywood studios will one day reach into their set-top boxes to restrict the way they record and store movies and programs.

Among the functions included in TiVo’s latest software upgrade is the ability to allow broadcasters to erase material recorded by TiVo’s 3.6 million users after a certain date. That ability was demonstrated recently when some TiVo customers complained on TiVo community sites that episodes of “The Simpsons” and “King of the Hill” they recorded were “red-flagged” for deletion by the copyright holder.

Some users also were upset that they were prevented from transferring these red-flagged shows to a PC via the TiVoToGo service.

Elliot Sloan, a TiVo spokesman, called the red-flag incident a “glitch” and said it affected only a handful of customers. “It’s a non-story,” Sloan said.

Nonetheless, skeptics among TiVo users questioned why TiVo would own such a technology unless the company planned to one day use it.

Source: AP

Microsoft’s chief security executive on Tuesday claimed that the company was keeping pace with faster-on-their-feet attackers as threats continue to shift toward hacking for profit rather than notoriety.

“Attackers are getting more efficient,” said Mike Nash, vice president for Microsoft’s security business unit. “Where once there were 17 days between the disclosure of a vulnerability and the release of an exploit, with Zotob, it was just three-and-a-half days.

“But Microsoft is also getting faster,” said Nash. “We had Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool updated for Zotob in just hours.”

Source: InformationWeek

For the second time in three months, police carried out a series of raids in six European countries as part of a coordinated investigation into Internet paedophilia being carried out by the European police agency Europol.

Codenamed “Operation Icebreaker II,” the raids took place on some 80 locations in France, Denmark, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and Britain, and led to several arrests and the seizure of large numbers of computers.

In a first “Operation Icebreaker” in June police searched 140 premises and detained 130 people in 13 EU member states. The operation was launched following a tip-off to the Italian police, who have since been responsible for leading the investigation.

Europol, which is based in The Hague, said the aim of the operation was to identify victims, abusers and those who produce pornographic images of paedophilia.

Related article: More than 1 million child porn websites on internet

Source: AFP

The team of outlook express has been reassembled a year ago to enhance the email client that will ship as part of the expected operating system Windows Vista.

The old outlook express is going to be named Windows Mail. Windows Mail will feature new UI, advanced spam filter, better search capabilities with search as you type feature.

Windows Mail will use a new database to index (JET) emails, and it’ll use the standard file system to store the actual email, this way you can search and work with email messages directly from the shell, without even open the mail client.

The contacts system in Windows Vista went an overhaul and now contacts are simply XML files on the file system which are seamlessly integrated with the shell and Windows Mail.

In the newsgroups section of Windows Mail, Microsoft added a rating system which users can mark posts as questions, answers and rate posts.

Mozilla released a security update for the popular browser.
This version includes several security and stability fixes, including a fix for a reported buffer overflow vulnerability and a fix for a Linux shell command vulnerability.

Specific changes in Firefox 1.0.7

• Fix for a potential buffer overflow vulnerability when loading a hostname with all soft-hyphens
• Fix to prevent URLs passed from external programs from being parsed by the shell (Linux only)
• Fix to prevent a crash when loading a Proxy Auto-Config (PAC) script that uses an “eval” statement
• Fix to restore InstallTrigger.getVersion() for Extension authors

Download: Firefox 1.0.7

America Online users will start receiving new anti-spyware tools on Wednesday, the Internet service provider said in a statement. AOL is swapping out the current technology provided by Aluria Software with software from Computer Associates, a company representative said. The change comes after AOL rival EarthLink said it had agreed to acquire Aluria, though AOL had decided to change before the takeover, the representative said.

Source: News.com