Burst.com filed a patent counterclaims lawsuit in the Federal District Court in San Francisco on Monday accusing Apple of infringing on four of its patents. Burst claims that Apple’s iTunes Music Store, iTunes software, the iPod devices and Apple’s QuickTime Streaming products are all affected by the patents.

Burst filed the suit in response to an Apple filing earlier this year asking the courts to rule that Burst’s patents were invalid and as such Apple did not infringe on them. In its counterclaim Burst is asking that Apple pay a reasonable royalty for its infringing products and services — Burst is also seeks an injunction against further infringement.

Source: Yahoo

High-end database company Solid Information Technology will create an open-source storage “engine” for the MySQL database.

The storage engine for MySQL, a popular open-source database, will be designed for transactional applications, said Paola Lubet, vice president of marketing and business development at Solid.

Called the SolidDB Storage Engine, a prototype of the software will be available April 24, the week of MySQL’s customer conference.

Source: News.com

The U.S. Public Broadcasting System is considering making its television shows available on the Internet or portable devices like MP3 players, its new president and chief executive officer said on Monday.

PBS is also weighing whether to partner with technology companies, in the same way that Walt Disney Co. has teamed up with Apple Computer Inc. to sell episodes of some of its ABC television network series on iTunes for downloading to iPods, CEO Paula Kerger said.

Source: Reuters

Researchers at Georgia Tech have come up with a new way to power medical implants, using the motion of the body to generate electricity. By implanting fibers called nanowires, which are just 20-40 billionths of a meter in diameter, the researchers believe they can produce enough energy to drive implantable devices or even smart apparel.

Source: playfuls

Is Google building a travel portal? That’s the conclusion of a ZDNet story. The article suggests that online travel site Orbitz, which is based in Chicago, could be the online travel agency partner for Google.

Source: News.com

PeerBox is a peer-to-peer file sharing application for the next generation mobile devices.

PeerBox allows searching for files in open P2P networks, downloading the files onto the phone and sharing the files with other users. It also allows downloading premium content from Nareos servers.

In order to play nicely with the RIAA PeerBox is integrated with 3rd party Robust Audio Hashing(fingerprinting) technology to recognize copyrighted content and collect payments for it.

A nice feature of PeerBox is The Identify feature. This feature allows you to hold the phone to any source of music anywhere, anytime, and have the music recognised for you. For example, you are at a noisy bar, and you suddely hear that song that you heard before and really love but have no idea about who is singing and what the song name is. Grab your phone, open PeerBox, push the Identify icon and then Record. Hold the phone to the music for 15 seconds, and then select Identify from the menu. In just few seconds, the song information will appear on the screen. Now you can purchase the song and enjoy it on your mobile.

The DVD+RW Alliance, the organisation behind the unofficial rewriteable DVD standard, has approved a dual-layer version of the DVD+RW disc specification. Like existing DVD+R two-layer media, the rewriteable form sports a capacity of 8.5GB.

Source: The Register

CNET Networks on Monday said it will launch “CNET TV”, a new video on demand network over cable, on digital video recorders made by TiVo and on the Internet as it broadens its reach to viewers.

Source: Reuters

A small group of us at Google, in cooperation with Sony Pictures, have managed to create 12,358 original puzzles for The Da Vinci Code Quest on Google.

They’ll be released over the next 24 days, in the form of six different challenges at four difficulty levels, with enough variety that everyone will be able to find something they like and play it over and over

The winner will get a pretty nice prize package.

Microsoft plans to jazz up its music player in Windows Vista, the company’s next operating system. But at least some of the new features will debut much sooner.

The software, which will be built into Vista, is designed to offer better synching with portable devices, make it easier to scroll through long libraries of music, and be tightly integrated with Urge, a new subscription and download music service co-developed by Microsoft and MTV Networks.

But while most people won’t be able to get their hands on Vista until next year, consumers will be able to get some of the media enhancements sooner. Microsoft is on track to release a Windows XP version of Windows Media Player 11 before the end of June.

Source: News.com

Findings Suggest Online Collaboration Sites and Blogs Contribute to the Increased Proliferation and Complexity of Rootkits

McAfee, Inc. , today announced research study (.PDF) results from McAfee AVERT Labs that demonstrate that the use of stealth technologies to conceal both malware and commercially viable Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) is on the rise. In the last three years alone, the incident rate of stealth technology has increased by more than 600 percent. McAfee considers malicious programs using stealth technology to be rootkits, distinct from commercial applications that use stealth technology.

McAfee believes the sudden rise of stealth technologies may be attributable to online collaborative research efforts using Web sites that contain hundreds of lines of rootkit code, available for recompiling, adapting, and improving, along with rootkit binary executables. With the availability of rootkit code and stealth creation kits, malware authors can more easily hide processes, files, and registry keys, without detailed knowledge of the target operating system. The power and versatility of stealth technologies have driven their spread into nearly every known form of malware. Their popularity has grown beyond malware into mainstream commercial software, with some security software vendors and consumer electronics firms recently being ‘outed’ for using stealth technologies in their products.

Key research findings include:

• The number of rootkits submitted to McAfee AVERT Labs in the first quarter of 2006 compared to the first quarter of 2005 increased by nearly 700%.
• The number of Windows-based stealth components dominate the landscape, with an increase of 2300% from 2001 to 2005.
• The “open-source” environment, along with online collaboration sites and blogs, are largely to blame for the increased proliferation and complexity of rootkits.

“Clearly we are seeing that stealth technologies, and rootkits specifically, are increasing at an alarming rate,” said Stuart McClure, senior vice president, global threats at McAfee. “This trend in malware evolution is creating hardier and ever more virulent strains of malware that will continue to threaten businesses and consumers alike.”

The McAfee AVERT Labs research also highlights several factors behind the increase in both rootkit adoption and diversity, motivations driving rootkit writers, and technological trends that will shape the future of rootkits.

Professional video gaming is set to debut on cable television later this year, potentially paving the way for the kings and queens of game controllers to become as familiar to American households as the faces of Johnny Chan or Annie Duke in televised poker.

Major League Gaming, the world’s largest organized video gaming league, on Monday will announce a programming deal in which USA Network will air seven one-hour episodes in the fall, featuring the pro circuit and its players.

Source: AP