The company has promised a 15 per cent discount to US users, who claim they were misled by advertising - but which WiFi outfit doesn’t mislead?

In the case of Netgear, its claim was that the RangeMax WiFi product - which uses a pre-N style of MIMO wireless, was capable of reaching 240 megabits - a claim it now modifies with “Actual performance may vary according to the operating environment.”

Netgear says that it accepts no liability for the misunderstanding (”liability” being a technical term in legalese) but it could well complain that it’s hardly unique.

Source: The Register

IBM plans to support early next year the OpenDocument standard in its desktop software, a product the company intends to market aggressively in developing countries.

At a press conference in Delhi, India, IBM executives plan to announce Monday that the company’s Workplace Managed Client will be able to read, write and save documents in the OpenDocument format. OpenDocument, or ODF, is a standard set of document formats for desktop productivity applications.

IBM has already publicly endorsed OpenDocument, which the company views as a way to loosen Microsoft’s dominance over desktop software. But the forthcoming Workplace products will be the first to support OpenDocument, a standard ratified in May of this year.

Source: News.com

When you look at Windows services in the control panel it is hard to distinguish between services that belongs to the operating system, and services that were installed by a third party application.

Fortunately there is an easy way to show the non Microsoft services.

• Go to Start->Run
• Type MSConfig
• Go to the services tab
• And check the Hide All Microsoft services check box.

Now you can see all the services that do not belong to Microsoft.

News Analysis: Possibly violating copyright laws, the GPL and even the U.S. Constitution, Sony BMG’s digital rights management blunder may lead the company into serious legal trouble.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment’s XCP digital rights management technology may have gotten the company into trouble in several ways.

First, XCP technology manipulates the Windows kernel to make its code almost undetectable on Windows systems.

This, in turn, makes it difficult to remove and makes it an ideal launch vehicle for malicious rootkit programs.

Next, as was expected, a rootkit Trojan—Backdoor.IRC.Snyd.A aka Backdoor.Ryknos—appeared.

Soon thereafter it was discovered that XCP may also violate the LGPL open-source license.

Not long after that, the lawsuits bagan. The first suit came from the EFF (Electronic Freedom Foundation), but it was soon followed by a suit from the state of Texas.

“On a very basic level of product liability law, if Sony is distributing a product that causes damage to consumers, then it may well be held liable,”.

Read more at source.

Source: eWeek

Islamist Website Design Contest: Winner Fires Missiles at U.S. Army Base in Iraq

Announcements posted on the Islamist Internet forums are usually connected to ongoing terrorist activities, such as claims of responsibility for attacks, recorded speeches by leaders, etc.

The information bureau of Jaish Al-Taifa Al-Mansura(”The Army of the Victorious Group”), a Sunni terrorist organization operating in Iraq, announced a contest for designing the organization’s website, and stated that the prize would be, in addition to reward from Allah, an opportunity to fire missiles via computer at a U.S. army base in Iraq.

The announcement was posted on a number of Islamic websites, primarily on the Al-Hesbah forum www.alhesbah.org [hosted in Airzona] , and can also be viewed as a Flash document at

http://heretic.maid.to/cgi-bin/stored/serio0835.swf

Source: memri.org

Hacker attacks on its premier Norton Antivirus software could hurt the company’s image. And rivals are eager to carve up its turf

What’s the newest security threat lurking on your PC? It’s not the spam sitting in your inbox luring you to fake Web sites. Or the keystroke-logging malware recording your passwords. It’s holes in the software designed to protect you from all that.

It’s true: Hackers, bored with attacking Microsoft , are going after Symantec whose Norton products are the first line of defense on 50 million PCs worldwide. Says Ralph Echemendia, an info-tech security instructor at Vigilar’s Intense School, a Fort Lauderdale security training institute: “They’ve become a new target.”

That’s bad news for a company trying to differentiate itself from rivals — including Microsoft, which rolled out two security products on Nov. 29 — by positioning itself as a premium brand that charges top dollar. “The danger is you turn off consumers,” says Andrew Jaquith of market researcher Yankee Group.

How big is the threat to Symantec and its customers? Already, hackers are bypassing or disabling Symantec software in their efforts to access personal information or spread viruses and worms. And there’s mounting evidence that hackers are trying to use Symantec software as an actual gateway into corporate servers and PCs. A Nov. 22 report by the SANS Institute, a computer-security watchdog, showed a tenfold increase in attempts to exploit a flaw in a Symantec data-protection program after it was disclosed in May.

Source: businessweek