At a press conference in Washington, D.C., the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children and other participants including Microsoft presented a study on Thursday that reveals the woeful inadequacy of child pornography laws around the world.

The ICMEC’s global policy review of child pornography laws in 184 Interpol-member countries shows that more than half have no laws that specifically address child pornography and in many others the existing laws are insufficient.

Related: More than 1 million child porn websites on internet

Source: informationweek

The first official presentation of Vista, the latest version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system will take place in Israel. Microsoft senior VP and Windows development team head Steven Sinofsky will unveil the system at the company’s annual Tech-Ed Israel conference which will be held next month in Eilat.

Source: globes.co.il

Bipartisan legislation introduced Wednesday in the House of Representatives seeks to outlaw the use of caller ID spoofing techniques “with the intent to deceive the person to whom the call is made.”

The bill targets the mostly web-based spoofing services that allow users to make phone calls that appear to be coming from a phone number of the caller’s choice. Site operators emphasize that their services are used by private investigators and law enforcement agencies, but spoofing is also popular with fraud artists and pranksters.

Source: Wired

Vodafone has announced that it will split into three new business units in a restructuring plan aimed at keeping its position as the world’s leading mobile telecommunications group.

The move Thursday, which is aimed at cutting costs, comes amid shareholder unease at lower growth prospects at the group.

The three divisions will comprise Europe, New Businesses and Innovation, and Central Europe, Middle East, Asia Pacific and Affliaites, Vodafone said in an official statement to the London Stock Exchange.

Source: AFP

East Japan Railway Co. unveiled the latest prototype of the next-generation bullet train, code-named “Fastech 360Z,” to the press on Wednesday at its rolling stock laboratory center near Sendai in northern Japan.

The six-car Fastech will aim to log the world’s fastest speed for wheeled trains at 360 kilometers (224 miles) per hour during a normal journey.

The Fastech can run safely at more than 400 kilometers per hour but we do not have plans to test in the 500-kilometer range,” company spokesman Makoto Yasuhara said.

Source: physorg

Sponsored by Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab, the site will offer blogs and other content on the company’s efforts to support Linux and Unix and help them interoperate with Windows.

Port 25 — the site’s named after the server port used to listen for SMTP e-mail traffic — is an attempt to promote conversations about Microsoft, open source, and how the twain might meet.

Source: informationweek

A preview is due this summer, and final shipment is slated by year-end. It’s unclear how the new software differs from the current Microsoft SQL Server Database Express, which is the lightest existing database option from the company.

The software promises a “compact but rich subset” of SQL Server capabilities for use on the desktop or devices.

A preview of the offering is due this summer, and final shipment is slated by year’s end.

Source: informationweek

MSN’s search engine crashed on Thursday afternoon.

A message posted on the site read: “The service is currently unavailable. Our team is working to restore service as quickly as possible. Please try your request again later.”

The reason for the outage was not disclosed. Calls to Microsoft, the site’s parent company, were not immediately returned.

Source: News.com

Microsoft Corp. on Thursday said its in-house video game studio acquired Lionhead Studios, the British developer started by the famed game maker Peter Molyneux.

Most recently, Lionhead was responsible for “Fable.” Released on Microsoft’s Xbox platform, the game has sold more than 2 million units worldwide.

Molyneux is also known for innovative “God games” like “Black & White” that give players omnipotent power over a world.

Microsoft Game Studios said Lionhead would now develop exclusively for the Xbox 360 and Windows-based PCs.

Source: Reuters

IBM on Thursday is expected to release a near-ready version of its latest database server, code-named Viper, a product designed to snatch market share from rival Oracle and fend off open-source challengers.

The company plans to offer the DB2 Viper “test drive” as a free download to customers on Thursday. Also, at an event in Jaipur, India, Ambuj Goyal, IBM’s general manager of its information management business, is expected to provide more details on the database’s features.

Bob Picciano, vice president of data servers at IBM, said the latest release is the equivalent of a “release candidate,” the industry term for a product that’s close to being fully developed and tested. The generally available product is scheduled for completion in the early summer, he said.

The most significant feature to be added in the DB2 Viper version is the ability to store and index XML documents in a “native” format, according to IBM.

Source: News.com

Coming on the heels of Apple’s announcement of Boot Camp Assistant Beta, virtualization vendor Parallels said it will begin testing on April 6 a Mac OS X version of its Parallels Workstation 2.1 software.

The low-cost virtualization product will let Mac users run Windows XP or Linux together on the desktop of an Intel-based Mac.

According to Benjamin Rudolph, marketing manager, the software is based on the company’s virtualization engine.

The Mac OS X port of Parallels Workstation 2.1 will let users build secure, “self-contained virtual machines running any version of Windows—all the way back to 3.1—Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2 and DOS … directly on your OS X desktop,” he said.

Parallels Workstation 2.1 will require Mac OS X v10.4.4 and an Intel-based Mac, Rudolph said. The software will cost $49.99 when it’s released. The trial version can be downloaded from the company.

The general release of the software is expected by the end of April, the company said.

Source: eWeek

This new release of Google Toolbar 2 includes feed integration with the Google Personalized Homepage and a number of other feed readers. The toolbar now includes previous queries, spelling corrections, and suggestions for popular choices.

Gmail fans might appreciate having the mailto: links in Firefox open a compose window in Gmail -– no more copying and pasting email addresses. And to combat the ever-increasing threat of phishing, Google integrated the Safe Browsing extension into Toolbar to alert you when a page is trying to steal sensitive information.

Download Google Toolbar 2