A Romanian native unhappy with eBay Inc.’s business practices was sentenced to five months in prison for making e-mailed threats against two of the company’s top officers.

Horicianu pleaded guilty in May 2005 to two counts of transmitting threatening interstate communications for sending e-mails to eBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman and Pierre Omidyar, the company’s founder and chairman. Among the statements included in the e-mails was “I will haunt and hurt you and your family,” according to court documents.

Source: AP

A zero-day vulnerability in a fully-patched and most-current version of Mozilla Corp.’s Firefox could be exploited to crash the browser at the least, and at the worst, possibly introduce malicious code, a security company warned Tuesday.

The bug, which first appeared on Mozilla’s Bugzilla listing a week ago on April 18, could be used by an attacker to crash Firefox by feeding it malformed JavaScript code.

Proof of concept code has been made public that crashes Firefox 1.5.0.2, the open-source browser’s newest edition.

Although Danish vulnerability tracker Secunia ranked the threat as “low,” its weakest warning, U.S.-based security vendor Symantec said the danger may be more dire.

Source: InformationWeek

TiVo Inc. (TIVO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Tuesday it will start to sell digital video recorders with dual tuners that allow users to record two television programs simultaneously.

The new feature can help TiVo boxes compete against generic recorders provided by cable and satellite television operators, which are often distributed for free with a cable TV subscription and have dual tuners.

TiVo said its new digital video recorder will be available starting May 1 and priced at $99.99 for 80 hours of recorded programs, after rebate and service activation.

Source: Reuters

Skype, eBay Inc.’s Internet telephone subsidiary, announced a deal Tuesday with music publishers that will make audio clips from artists like Madonna, Green Day and Red Hot Chili Peppers available to its users as ringtones.

Clips from Madonna songs - including “Like A Virgin” and “Vogue” - will be available Wednesday for $1.50 each, with other artists to follow, Skype said.

Source: AP

Microsoft ended a rival’s reign as the leading PC media-player maker by bundling its own program with Windows - and could do the same to others if its appeal of a landmark antitrust ruling is granted, the European Commission said Tuesday.

Microsoft brushed off the claims, saying that it continuously added functions to its operating systems to meet likely demand from consumers - part of the technology sector’s natural evolution.

“This case is of vital importance for innovation,” Per Hellstrom, a Commission lawyer told the 13 judges. “Microsoft cannot be allowed to decide who can innovate and who cannot.”

However, Hellstrom said that Microsoft Corp., because of its clout and near-monopoly size, can alter innovation by other companies simply by incorporating its own program or protocol.

The company, he said, has a “chilling effect on innovation in any area where Microsoft may take an interest.”

Source: AP

As promised, Microsoft Tuesday released an updated edition of its April 11 MS06-016 security bulletin to eliminate a host of bad behaviors that the original fix caused on systems running older Hewlett-Packard software or NVIDIA graphics drivers. The 2.0 patch, which is still dubbed MS06-015, will be offered to users only if it detects the conflicting HP or NVIDIA software, Microsoft has said.

Source: InformationWeek

MySQL announced that it is opening up its pluggable database storage engine API and encouraging third-party companies and the open-source community to develop engines for its open-source database.

Solid Information Technology was the first database company to jump on the invitation, throwing its OLTP (online transaction processing) storage engine out for download and community testing on April 24.

The source code will be available as a beta release in July. It will be generally available in the fourth quarter of this year.

Source: eWeek

A Saudi-German plan to launch a dedicated Arabic language search engine for the World Wide Web could revolutionize the moribund Arabic Internet market, a senior official in the project said.

“Sawafi”, planned for the last quarter of 2006, could also set a tough challenge for international search giants such as Google, MSN and Yahoo, which offer a basic Arabic search facility at present.

Source: Reuters

Sony Computer Entertainment will begin offering a software update for the PlayStation Portable (PSP) that adds several features, including support for Flash content and the ability to save audio podcasts.

Source: PCWorld

Fox announced Monday that it will produce a series of two-minute mobisodes–teeny TV episodes for mobile phones–that complement the plot of the hit save-my-brother-or-bust drama Prison Break.

Proof of Innocence will be available for free exclusively to Sprint customers for viewing on SprintTV’s Fox station starting this week. In two weeks they will be available on Toyota.com.

Source: Yahoo

Internet users around the world send an estimated 60 billion emails every day and many of these are spam or scam attempts, business leaders said on Tuesday.

Deutsche Telekom Chief Executive Kai-Uwe Ricke said cyber criminals were growing more active and sophisticated, and the vast email traffic meant industry, government and Internet users had to be vigilant and work together.

“This figure was new for me as well — worldwide there are around 60 billion emails sent every day,” Telekom Chief Executive Kai-Uwe Ricke told an Internet security conference.

“A large percent of it is spam,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer added.

Source: Reuters

In the past few days Google Maps added steet maps for many countries in Europe. So if you are driving the streets of Paris or Milano you can now use Google Maps to find your way